A Moment of Beauty

I've been inspired by a visit to another blog, "...follow the yellow brick road", winner of Best New Blog at the Manchester Blog Awards on Wednesday night. I'm not jealous, not in the least and not sulking at all for not being nominated for anything - there are after all far more deserving and worthwhile blogs than my random dèrives around an eclectic range of topics. The author describes a charming little family of sparrows in the waiting room at Manchester Airport, and the fact that only she seemed to be aware of them. The little fluffbundles couldn't even charm a few crumbs from a man with a danish.

I've found that Nature often provides little encounters with beauty that seem to be there just for you.

It's often like that - a glance up at the sky last weekend showed me and my children a beautiful rainbow effect in high altitude ice crystals. No-one else ever looks up in cities, I've noticed that on quite a few walks around Manchester with the Loiterers' Resistance Movement - we've been looking at interesting things about Manchester's skyline and the occult significance of twiddly little bits of architecture and had people giving us odd looks for daring to raise our eyes above street level. I think my children and I were the only people to appreciate that little moment of beauty. (The picture's from beloblog, by the way - not mine. Google images is brilliant!)


Later that morning, we saw a rainbow effect on the floor as low sunlight hit the edge of a glass shop door and spilled all its component colours out on the pavement in front of us in an otherwide dull and dreary alleyway. No-one else appeared to have noticed. It was an "Oh wow" moment just for us. I thought someone else must have seen it, given the number of people who habitually shuffle along, gaze locked on the floor about three feet in front of them. However, it was just a narrow band of coloured light only a few feet away from the invisible busker. (Neil Gaiman is right, by the way - it is dangerous to notice such people, and often only those who live on the Edges themselves do so.) That little ray of light provided us with both an impromptu science lesson and another bright moment of beauty on a cold and windy day.