Manna from heaven (fresh trout)

Manna (any divine or spiritual nourishment) for me often takes the form of immersing myself in nature. On the somewhat flimsy pretext of scouting the venue of a client I will hopefully be working for soon, I headed out early this evening into what turned out to be an enchanting woodland just south of Jedburgh.

On the edge of an estate and shielded from the outside world on one side by the river and on the other by a steep beech hanger, I found myself in another realm. Badger trails (and lots of fresh signs of rootling) wound through lush rafts of wild onions, with delicate little ferns and flowers in the glades. With the liquid sounds of song thrushes and babbling water, I felt like I was in a rainforest far away.

As usual, spent far longer than I meant to. Blip is proving to be good and bad for me - it's encouraging me take pictures every day, but I sometimes feel like Pinocchio being lured astray by the fox and the cat!

Around this time last year I was on one such bunk, down by the Tweed where it leaves Selkirk. I looked up to see an osprey being hassled by a couple of crows, who were trying to get it to drop the fish it had in its talons. Although ospreys are breeding again in the Borders, I'd only seen one here once before (also with a fish, but much higher in the sky near St Mary's Loch).

Eventually the crows pestered it enough that it dropped the fish to be more manoeuverable, and then both they and the osprey circled round lower and lower trying to relocate it. It had fallen with a great crash through a chestnut tree on the far side of the river, and after a while they gave up looking - the vegetation was too dense. I could imagine the osprey muttering under its breath "all that effort wasted".

The tree was very distinctive though, so I crossed the bridge and walked back along the other side. There, in the middle of a fish-flattened 'wild onion crop circle' under the tree, was a glossy, freshly-expired trout, complete with a long talon gash in its side.

I'm vegetarian, but I had to think long and hard about whether in fact I should eat it - you can't get a less artificially-procured fish than one dropped alive out of the sky by an osprey! In the end I gave it to a friend whose boyfriend was a chef, on the condition that they took a photo of the finished dish (which they did). Apparently it was delicious.

This is a shot straight up through one of the beech trees at the edge of the enchanted wood. I find it incredible that things as big as beech trees can find all that they need from the ground beneath them and the sky above.