We went on a nature walk in the woods. It was quite chilly because it was winter, but it was nice to see the sun out for once. I was surprised to find that some peculiar plants we never had seen before any other time of the year had survived the cold, dreary weather, and were sticking out of the trees in large coloured clumps. Most of them were berries, but of course there was ivy and holly, which were cool to look at. Quite a few of the trees were dead or at least missing some branches, but it gave it a fun wintry look and I loved it. One of the few things wrong with it was that there was lots of mud, most of which we got our feet stuck in, but we had wellington boots on, so it didn’t matter as much as it would have done had I kept my crocs on. Tilly once got stuck in a gigantic bog, and I was sucked into a puddle that appeared to have covered up layers of sinking sand. At the beginning, just before we moved into the more marshy layout of the wood, we had to walk through a field of sheep. They had recently been moved into the field and they were clearly having fun.
We brought a small tin foil tray with us to collect some of the funny winter plants and things that had shown up. We found all sorts of things; pods of seeds, orange and red berries, yellow leaves, ivy that could well have been poison ivy, and all sorts of birds too. But you must know we do not perform animal cruelty and we did not catch the birds and put them in our tin foil trays and cover them up with their hands so there was no escape – instead, we preferred to let them roam in their own little habitat. One of the birds we saw swooping through the air was a blue tit, with his little yellow plumage of feathers under his blue and black back, and his white and navy head. He was really cute. Sometimes we get blue tits in our garden. In January next year we’re going to do a nature walk every week and make a journal of it all. I’m really excited to get going with it. We’re going to go in all sorts of woods, too. We’re going to make a Christmas Nature Collage from all the things we collected. We were going to make a ladybirds’ old folks’ home, but there weren’t many ladybirds about, so we decided to press the flower-like plants and stick them on a sheet of coloured paper. It doesn’t sound so flattering but I think it’ll be really quite fun.
There were some dogs as well. This might sound a bit strange, but I love dogs, and I think they’re really cute; yet I can get scared of the big ones as well. We met one large labradoodle who came bounding down the hill, stopped a foot or so away from us, cocked his head to one side, and ran back to his owners, and also one black labrador who barked until I thought he’d turned into a werewolf. There was a little husky pup along with him, who was, luckily for me, on a lead, unlike the other two. On the way back we had to pass the sheep field again. I got a little scared there, too; there were some lazy sheep who had thought it would be generous of them to take over the path for themselves, but they were very polite and got up to let us pass. In fact, we pretended they were Animals of Faith and Respect. We bowed to them, saying, ‘Pleased to make your kind acquaintance, Mr. Sheep,’ before going on our way, and, soon enough, home.