There are one or two places on my route to work which always fascinate, not so much for their beauty or grandeur but because they are so well hidden.
If we were using the locomotion of years ago [horses or shank's pony] this would not be the case.
But the motor car has the annoying habit of speeding you past those interesting places.
All you have time to do is to have a brief look as you past, your overall picture of it being built up over weeks if not months.
As the seasons change there is so much more to take in.
I thought that this morning when I was able to have a good look at the site [when three tractors are stopped in front of you waiting to join a major road you fortunately have no option but to stop and look around].
The place I refer to is a little triangular copse. In winter it is a bare, deserted place. Light is dappled through the taller trees and it always seems deserted of birdlife.
As spring turns into summer to becomes a completely different place. While leaves of weeds and saplings push up in the middle, the outer boundary becomes a wall as the trees burst into leaf.
But when I was stopped in the queue I could see that the interior was a carpet of nettles around the edges, with other smaller plants in the centre. Ivy was growing up the trees, one plant making use of another.
But then the tractor convoy was on the move, I was, too, and I had to leave the scene until my next pass.
Perhaps I'll have the chance to stop again when autumn is painting it in a different fashion.
Music on the Moss: There is nothing like a happy noise, and they don't come much happier than Jefferson Airplane's 1969 live album, Bless its pointed little head.
It is one of my favourite albums and just oozes energy and good times. The blending of Grace Slick's voice with that of Marty Balin is nearly ethereal - in a heavy way. Their voices rise and fall against each other's on Somebody to Love and Balin's composition Plastic Fantastic Lover.
Spencer Dryden's drumming is energetic and drives the band along, while Jorma Kaukonen's guitar screams and whips along wicked lead lines. Jack Casidy is one of my favourite bass players and he thunders away, moving the basslines into and out of the limelight with ease, oiled with the eprfection that only practice brings. Paul Kantner's writing and rhythm guitar helps them to storm along on a selection of songs that give new life to Fred Neil's folk classic Other side of this life and Donovan's song Fat Angel.
www.jeffersonairplane.com

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