It was cold and frosty in the Parks this morning. I walked the long way round to work, through Parson's Pleasure and along the arm of the Cherwell that runs behind St Catherine's; in Parson's Pleasure, I startled the heron that perches near the rollers. It flapped across the river and settled in a fallen tree on the other side where it sat looking cold and grumpy.



I think this is probably one of my favourite photos I've ever taken.

This picture, taken on my walk at lunchtime, is not a particularly good photo, but on the other hand, it is a photo of OTTERS which makes up for a lot.



I was walking along the riverside path when I spotted them splashing on the far side. There are two in the photo, though I thought there might actually have been three of them. I was standing there with my camera (having for once remembered that switching it to continuous would be the sensible thing) when an elderly man who was sitting on Tolkien's memorial bench with a small white dog asked if it had a zoom, because there was some kind of mammal on the other side of the river. I said I thought it was an otter, and we both watched them for a few minutes while lots of other lunchtime walkers passed us, entirely uncurious as to what we might be looking at, and totally unaware that they, too, could have been watching otters.

Autumn seems to have been late in coming this year; the weather has been mild, so I've barely needed a jacket, and the trees have been slow to turn. I even saw a peacock butterfly flapping around our garden this afternoon.

Still, the last few days have been cooler and when I look out of my window now there is definitely as much yellow on the trees as green. And when I went for a lunchtime walk a few days ago Parsons' Pleasure was looking very autumnal.

I like taking pictures of herons, because they stand very still and are therefore easy to photograph without having the thousands of pounds' worth of camera kit you need to photograph faster birds (a zoom lens helps a lot, though). This week, I have taken three lots of heron pictures: in the pond in the Parks on my way to work on Monday morning; in the pond in the Parks on my lunchtime walk on Wednesday (probably the same heron as Monday's); by the river when I was swimming today.

My favourite was this picture of Wednesday's heron, where the backdrop of weedy pond and reflected foliage has ended up looking like Monet's garden.

Last autumn, I bought a cheap GoPro-style camera with a waterproof housing to take pictures while I was swimming. It was fun, but I found out fairly quickly that its photographic possibilities were very limited; it had a fixed extremely wide-angled lens with a slight fish-eye effect which basically limited it to broad waterscapes and didn't pick up any foreground detail (eg birds), and had a tendency to wash out the sky. It was probably fairly inevitable, then, that I was going to buy a better waterproof camera sooner or later.



My new camera is a Fujifilm XP140; it's one of the cheapest waterproof cameras that is an actual camera, rather than a budget action cam, but it's clearly a big step up in terms of picture quality.



It even has enough of an optical zoom to make taking pictures of waterbirds a possibility, though I think I need a bit of practice at that.



(Images from this weekend's swims: Friday in the river, starting in rain and ending in sun; Saturday in the river, starting in sun and ending in rain; and today in the lake, with grebes.)

It's a year since I abandoned my attempt at Couch to 5k after falling over and spraining my wrist, and decided to go for walks before work instead. I haven't been for a walk every day since then: some days I've chosen to start work early so I can take time for a swim later on; a few times last summer I went for early swims at Port Meadow instead; there have been a few days when it has just been too wet; and for some of Michaelmas Term I was in the office a couple of days a week, and although I parked in Summertown and walked from there, commute-walking isn't the same as walk-walking. I have, however, tracked more than 200 walks in Runkeeper; last year I clocked up just over 500 miles and this year I've already done almost 250 in three and a half months.

There aren't a lot of options for 3-4 mile walks starting from my front door. Down the canal towpath to the nature reserve and back. Up the canal towpath to the Jolly Boatman, through the woods to Thrupp and back along the towpath. Across the fields or along the cycle path to Begbroke, along the bridleway and back via Yarnton; across the fields or along the cycle path to Begbroke, up to the top of the hill and back the way I didn't come; across the fields or along the cycle path to Begbroke, up to the top of the hill and down the other way and back via Yarnton (that is one of my favourites, and is the one where you can just see Oxford, but it's actually four and a half miles so needs a bit of extra time). Through the streets to the church and back via the fields and the canal towpath (you can go either side of the fields, and with a bit of extra time you can go across the meadows and through the woods instead); through the streets to the church and down to the river (though that's my least favourite, as you have to go back through the streets which tend to be getting busier by then, so I've only tended to do that one when it's meant I was walking towards a stunning sunrise rather than having my back to it). I must have done each of these dozens of times in the last twelve months, and yet I haven't got bored, because there's always something new to see.



I've learnt the lay of my few square miles of countryside in a way I never thought I would. I've been surprised to realise just how few walks there are where I can't see the church spire at all, or the Forest Hill transmitter. I've found the one spot where you can see the spires of the city centre, which I haven't seen from closer to since last March. I've watched the seasons move through a full cycle; I've learnt to recognise far more plants and trees than I could before, and I've seen wildlife both expected (deer, muntjacs, hares, skylarks, red kites) and unexpected (otters!). I've taken a lot of photos, and I think I've got much better at it.

Somehow we have already managed to get through two months of 2021, and while winter isn't quite over yet (unless you're a meteorologist and think seasons change on the first of the month instead of mid-month in a much less handy way) there are definitely signs that spring isn't far off. There's a real warmth to the sun now, at least when there is sun, and after a few warm days the snowdrops have all withered and, appropriately for St David's Day, the daffodils are coming into bloom.



I often walk past this tree stump and have been amused to observe the ever-changing collection of small plastic toys that occupy the hollow at the top of it. A couple of weeks ago I noticed there were also some green shoots poking out, and today there were daffodils. I do sometimes wonder who puts the things there, and why. To amuse people walking by? An informal toy exchange (though it's quite a way from the houses)? A shrine to the old gods?

As those of you who follow me on Instagram or Twitter know, I've been posting photos of my daily walks over the lockdown (and getting pretty good at using the camera I bought not long before it started, too, if I do say so myself). I enjoy doing it, and a few people have commented that they really like seeing the pictures, because they don't have such easy access to countryside (I may live on a 1970s suburban estate, but we are very close to open countryside).



Anyway, yesterday lunchtime I got a message on Twitter from a man I don't know asking if I could follow him so he could send me a private message. I was a bit wary, as strange men wanting to DM female-appearing people on social media is generally fairly dodgy, but I did notice that he had just liked the post with that day's photos, and checking his profile suggested that he was a local BBC journalist, so it seemed likely that he wanted to ask about using the photos rather than anything more nefarious. Which was in fact the case, and then this morning one of my team messaged me to say that she'd seen the photos on last night's local weather forecast (they always show pictures of what the weather actually looked like).



So that's probably my fifteen minutes of fame...