10 4 10-10-10

Well the idea was to go and take some autumnal photographs but nature had its own ideas.

With poppies still in bloom, it was a struggle to find any golden brown leaves at all.

  
Oak leaves are so stunning, especially against a cloudless sky.

The t-shirt and shorts 19 Celsius demanded a longer than usual walk past the green lane which goes up to St.Mary's ...

... down towards South Pickenham and the road section of Peddars Way ...

... towards the traditional Norfolk road sign with the updated Houghton on the Hill direction board.

After startling what may, or may not, have been an escaped fir farm mink, the hedgerows show signs of last year's tree cull from our unusually long winter.

Only the silver birches show any sign of being really ready to shed their leaves.

One sure sign of autumn in East Anglia is the sweet smell of sugar beet harvesting, but the machinery here is still dormant ...

... unlike the local kids on their bikes enjoying the sunshine denied them during the school holidays.

.All photos © J Reed

The world isn't flat, nor is Norfolk

It's a fallacy that everybody pre Columbus thought the world was flat, 6th century BC Grecians already believed heavenly bodies were spherical. Just so the myth that all of Norfolk is flat. This part of Breckland may be no Lake District but there remains a pleasant undulation in the tilth. True the Lincolnshire/Cambridge borders can be a little sparse and The Broads are rightly not called The Heights but, as any cyclist or walker will tell you, the Peddars Way passing through this region certainly isn't puff free.

© J Reed

Another urban myth persists that my journey up the A11 was to relieve my worsening vertigo. Fear of heights is acrophobia whereas my affliction is a random dizziness. This can range from a light headed 'couple of beers' sensation to the necessity to sit down, even if you are half way up a viewing tower at the National Trust's Sherringham Park. Strangely flying isn't a problem but is part of the problem. Some of the condition for me is the feeling that you want to jump, a sensation I've had since walking over the canal footbridge from Shelton to Stoke in my polytechnic days. I am presently in remission, but a picture in todays Telegraph of a balancing artiste in Norway had my head wobbling like a nodding dog in the back of a 1970's Cortina.