cheap-breaks | Andy Roberts

Ideal Spot – Where is it Cheap Breaks…

http://distributedresearch.net/status/ideal-spot-where-is-it-cheap-breaks/

Ideal Spot – Where is it? Cheap Breaks? http://www.cheapbreaksblog.co.uk/cheap-breaks/ideal-spot-where-is-it-cheap-breaks

February 21 2012, 12:31am | Comments »

I posted to distributedresearch.net

Country diary: Claxton, Norfolk

http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/02/21/claxton-norfolk

Thinking of taking cheap breaks over half term to Norfolk for the countryside, coast, broads and wildlife. Lapwings make a great spectacle.

This article titled “Country diary: Claxton, Norfolk” was written by Mark Cocker, for The Guardian on Monday 21st February 2011 00.05 UTC It may be a projection of my own sense of seasonal change – such as the crocuses in our hedge and the song thrush shouting from the wood – but I cannot help thinking that there is a definite edginess in the birds gathered on the Yare floodplain. It is as if they know themselves that it’s in the air – a kind of pre-migration tension – and it will soon well up and drive these wigeon and lapwings north for their breeding grounds. The mood is stirred further by a male peregrine, who rises above the woods and glides south so smoothly that it feels as if I’m watching a floater pass gently down the curve of my own eye, rather than a distant physical object. The anxiety among all the 5,000 ducks and waders across the marsh wells up in a great symphony of flight. Momentarily their lives are shaped and answer to the beating of one falcon’s heart and I wonder how we should process morally that all this glorious spectacle of the rising flocks is a product of raw fear? Can something so dreadful truly be beautiful? The most compelling part comes when about 2,000 lapwings lift in a single elongated group. As they rise so their upper wings are tilted towards me like a billowing sheet of black. Then, as one, they present their undersides and rise higher in a broken veil of white. From below and almost through the middle of these lapwings blasts a denser flock of wigeon with even greater urgency. They cross. I can hear all the woodwind chaos of their wings. Out of this terror they build upwards into a great momentary cathedral of birds and the peregrine, shining powder-blue even in this flat light, twists down upon them. Yet he fails. They scatter and in sub-groups slowly they simmer back down until all are once again spread across the marsh. Still nothing has happened.

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February 20 2011, 6:29pm | Comments »

I posted to hubpages.com

Cheap Breaks

http://hubpages.com/hub/cheapbreaks

More and more people are reluctant for whatever reason to spend a year's savings on one big annual holiday these days and instread prefer to arrange cheap breaks away at weekends or for just a few days...