Hare & Tortoise

Viper's bugloss, Breckland, Norfolk. Photographed by Jo Sinclair

Weeds. Jarvis Cocker threw shapes on stage singing about them. Richard Mabey cooked them and wrote a tome on them. A doom-mongering voice in a TV ad for herbicide shrivelled them. I've noticed them everywhere this month. Primary colours colonise arable edges, hard shoulders, roundabouts, railway sleepers and dumps. Sulphur yellow stonecrop and sunshine yellow ragwort, cobalt blue viper's bugloss, red poppies and pink valerian , blue meadow cranesbill and purple common mallow proliferate in concrete cracks and tarmac miles.

I found a tree drooping with luscious, glossy red cherries today. Poppy petals flare perfect and sun-shot. I want to stop and take it all in before the year turns, but I'm in a hurry all the time. I want to be outside dawn to dusk. Mindful that sometimes half an hour will do, the other day I spent time just watching a predatory spider catch the light in its web as another sunset seeped into the midsummer eve.

Spiderweb, photographed by Jo Sinclair

With less time than I had before to stay outside and stop and look I catch myself trying to force experiences. Instead of recreating the sensations of a time and a place, or letting a new one come along, I fretfully go looking for it. Last week I tried to find a corner of Norfolk I'd come across two years ago. I'd stood beside a five-bar gate admiring an old meadow surrounded by hawthorn hedges. There was a pond, a house on a hill that looked like a kid's drawing, a lapwing, a hare and a barn owl. Just as I was settling into the scene and looking through my binoculars at the owl I saw someone at a window in the house on the hill. They had binoculars too, and they were pointed straight at me. I had to honour the fact that it was their own very special place and leave. I didn't find the spot again two years on, but I stopped in my tracks to watch some hares. They loped towards me and hared away. Then loped towards me again, hopped, played, hared away. What a pity I couldn't hang about.

Hare, photograph by Jo Sinclair