Streams and Beams

Some of the time, you have to wonder.
Photos from the past are purposefully taken to remind you of the mood on the day.
Photos for when we grow old we can bemoan to our children and grandchildren about how it was back in the day. Remembering how you were so fit and young and as active as they are.


And as if as yesterday, you are back climbing the very same site again in your mind. All the actions, the twitching of the camera around your waist, the early mornings and heat in the day. The fact you'd driven all the way out to the site and taken a leisurely stroll with a bunch of de-ionised water bottles for sample collections. Purposefully carried in a white carrier bag and yet hopefully hidden not a make the passerby wonder what you're doing. How strange it is to see someone doing work in a place so leisurely.

As you climb the hill reduces but you know there's further up to the right to go. This a short cut the map tells you. the River Sett wanders it's way through. The farmer each week readjusting which gates he'll leave open so the cows can chase you away, or just stare at you.


But you recall the fact you've walked up the easy side to KinderScout, because you needed the stream and a reference point. I remember a classmate who climbed up Jacobs Ladder, - well if they put a ladder in it might be easier to climb the other side- and that's the point of photos.
They spark images, places and people, activites you and others have done.
This was one of the most beautiful of sites I found in my travels across the Peaks, for as the path clears up ahead it opens out into brilliant views and the colours are all speckled just enough to make you smile.

You get to remember the times between these travels and what everyone was doing. You get to remember those conversations on the balconies, in the labs and in the study rooms for planning groups, whilst you sit quietly away realising that it was all so long ago. And in these photos there was no one but you and the land you see, the noise of the stream as it churcns and makes pools and riffles beyond the rocks and drops over shallow weirs and round the meanders. Before it disappears, where the source you think you found is just a trickle amongst some overgrown grasses.

The tumbling water, those people, the other people, those random stranger you met on the way and the animals who came and went and bleeted like a nightmare.

It's all a patch work, what you think you remember and what was reality is far from it. After some time, it may not be there at all.