Ain’t nothing shakin’ but the leaves on the trees
They wouldn’t shake if it wasn’t for the breeze
There ain’t nothing happenin’ but the birds and the bees
There ain’t nothin’ shakin’ but the leaves

TAKING the same road every day might seem a highway to boredom but it gives you the chance to look at tiny things in detail – the seasons change before you subtly altering differences in colour and texture that passing by just once in a while would go unnoticed – it’s as though there’s an on-off button which you can press each time you see something familiar yet strange – for instance, I can think of one particular little triangle of woodland that lies on a corner that makes you concentrate on the road long enough just to be able to give it a passing glance, hardly more – you drive around and yet you can still see just a few details, over time building up a picture of the whole layer by layer – it’s like a landscape jigsaw only you are taking it to pieces, putting it together in reverse as it were – this time of year you notice the colours – only the other day when there was a hard frost after all that rain it was packed down like a dirty tarpaulin, slumped against the trees as a bubbling wave of silvery bronze – today it is back to being a copper tundra between the trees, light reflecting on the dappled shadows – at first it looks like bracken but then commonsense takes hold and you realise if it was bracken then nothing else would be growing as bracken kills everything near it – it’s actually loop after loop of bramble, coiled in giant lengths across the grass and rolling up to the hedgerow and the trees – the colour’s the same but after a few glances you can identify that it is bramble – in summer it should be a lovely sea of green with tiny white ships rolling over it when the blossoms come out – this colour seems to be everywhere in this particular location – leaves have fallen from the hedgegrow and not been blown away, just decayed into a golden carpet – and further towards Formby one of my favourite birds takes on this copperandbronze look – in the field opposite Sutton’s Farm a kestrel glides down on to the ground, walking among the rows of winter corn – its feathers are caught in what little sunlight there is and they show off its golden brown tones – a pleasant alternative to the sight of pale underparts when you spot one hovering or perched on a high lookout

Music on the moss: it should have been Ain’t no shaking by Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen with its catchy chorus about leaves but it wasn’t. The Airmen may have been put back into orbit but the old guy is still going strong with the Commander Cody Band. I’d guess he didn’t write the song from which the lyrics at the head of this blog come from. Who did? Any guesses out there?

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