Walking to the station
Walking to the station, by the riverside. The sky is a beautiful winter blue, with only a few (very pretty) clouds. The river is angry though: the level is high and the current is fast. Just by Reading Bridge (one of the two bridges across the Thames in Reading) there's an Environment Agency monitoring station, with a very big LCD read out of the amount of water flowing past. The display has been obscured by graffiti recently, so I haven't been able to tell what the flow rate actually was. It wasn't even graffiti really, just some kid colouring in the display so it looked like the first digit was an '8', which seemed unlikely, because in the summer the rate is 9 or 10-point-something, and an eight at the front would make the flow eighty-something. Someone had cleaned the display this morning. The flow was 86-point-something. Like I said, the river is angry.
Riverside commute
One of the aspects of living where we do that I really appreciate is our proximity to the river. In order to get to the train station (or into town at all) I have to walk along the river bank for about half a mile. This particular bit of river is, for half of its length, a channel off the main river, which has a weir and a lock at the point the channel forks away. A really very big weir, as it happens, but anyway, I digress. The other bank of the spur has a path which crosses over the top of the weir towards the lock, and there's a bridge across the channel at the near end of the spur (furthest away from the main channel). Just by the bridge, on the edge of the water, on my side of the channel, a pair of swans have nested, the female has been on her nest for a long time now, and we'll call her Swan 1. On the other side of the channel, most of the way along, nearly to the main channel, another pair of swans have nested. The female's nest is protected from the people and dogs on the path by plywood boards on three sides (the clear side is the river side, unsurprisngly). We'll call her Swan 2, and she has to put up with well-intentioned people dumping bags filled with stale chunks of bread on her head.