Living upside down

This week's blog was written for you by Marcia.

Living amongst the treetops is a new and wonderful experience. Two ash trees grow just beyond the high stone wall outside the kitchen window; their leaves glimmer green and gold in the early morning sunshine, shivering in the breeze. A group of long-tailed tits swing and flutter amongst the branches a few feet from the kitchen table. The sitting-room balcony is hung about with honeysuckle, which holds late flowers and scarlet berries; the slender trunk of a crab-apple tree pushes its way between the wrought-iron railings and its rosy ripening fruit arches above our heads.

...ash trees grow just beyond the high stone wall outside the kitchen window .

...honeysuckle, which holds late flowers and scarlet berries.

...crab apple...its rosy ripening fruit...

 A feeder containing nuts hangs near one of its sturdy twigs and, at last, birds are beginning to investigate: a few blue tits, two great tits and a solitary coal tit. 

...a few blue tits...

A robin hops in to snatch some crumbs and a pair of blackbirds are becoming braver. Jackdaws abound here. 

They peer inquisitively into chimneys and strut stiff-legged along the gutters, discussing life between themselves in harsh voices. One balances anxiously on a roof-ridge, silhouetted against the sky, like a stand-up comic who has forgotten his lines.

Leaf-shadows tremble across the balcony and the Virginia creeper, whose tendrils twine from the west wall across the balustrade, is beginning to burst into flames of bright colour. 

From each room we look across the village roof-scape to the high shoulders of the moor – much closer here – and see early sunlight slipping down the steep eastern slopes and a new moon setting in the west. Rain polishes grey slate roofs with a soft sheen, mist drifts and gathers on the hills until they vanish in thick fleecy clouds. Then the west wind races in, shredding and ripping the clouds apart, and sun slants in through the many windows: roof-lights, dormer windows, the big sliding windows to the balcony, so that the house is full of light.

Living upside down. I love it.