norleywood by katharine eastman

okay it is all getting a bit silly at the moment but I'm getting back into reading so I'm hoping this excessive output will dribble to nothing soon - maybe right now. But look at that cover - that's the watersplash at Norleywood - normally in autumn I'd have to use the footbridge, but yesterday I splashed through the water, such as it is. What a year it's been - I've loved it - whole months that could be planned ahead, outside every day. This far into October and still everywhere the ground so hard and dry. My main memory of that beautiful warm bright day is all the hornets - hundreds of them, flying around the glades, I saw more yesterday than in all of the days for the past few years - no exaggeration. No idea what is going on, and don't want to know. When friends chat to me about my walking (I never raise the subject, I'm too shy and the subject itself is too boring when just spoken about) they say shit about how I should track my steps on a smartphone, dear god, oh no oh no oh no - isn't that sort of shit the reason why/how everyone is so miserable - everything is reduced to what appears on one of those awful little screens, you can't even walk through hornet-filled glades or barely scrape the surface of shallow watersplashes without someone telling you to reduce the planet to just graphs and charts and ones and zeroes, they're too stupid to see it, to feel it, to feel anything, barely anyone around who is at all alive.