The Two-Wheeled Journo!

My walk begins in the drizzle of a wet, gloomy February day, along a canal bank that has held its ground for nearly two hundred years. A low, arched bridge looms ahead, its ancient brickwork wearing a fresh skin of graffiti. Above it, the city’s pulse is rhythmic and below is the dampness of the canal. I stop to ponder the plopping of my boots in heavy puddles and the insistent drizzle forming thousands of delicate ringlets on the canal’s surface. This is a landscape of transition, where wine bottles and duck feathers drift together downstream. Yet, even here, in the grey margins, life asserts itself. Near a willowy reed bank, I find a nesting pair of swans; the female is tucked safely away on the nest while the male stands on guard, watching my every move with a territorial eye. It is a fragile domesticity carved out of a watery corridor of tarmac and brick, a reminder that the search for nature in our post-industrial landscape requires only that we look closer at the grey. 1. Nature ...