Spoil

The first sun in a week, but worth waiting for. I hardly knew where to point the camera, the light was so perfect. At lunchtime a bowl over the tops to Teesdale to the Bowes Museum, that mad French Chateau of a place, to host another book festival event.

On the way back we stopped at Bollihope where the river was sparkling in the sunlight. The old spoil heaps from the quarrying, finished now decades ago, looked like some kind of expensive land art, contoured and shadowed. I thought of the thousands of times I've rushed past here on the way to somewhere else, always wishing I had a camera, and this time I had.

As I jumped out the car before the sun sank behind the hill I could suddenly see, in my mind's eye, my girls, tiny in shorts and t-shirts on summer days splashing about in the river looking for fossils, and felt the slip of time. It was just a few months ago wasn't it? But no, it was years, and that time has gone without me even realising it had vanished.