Looking Glass WorldWild West Yorkshire nature diary, Monday 5th July 1999
It fills half of the sky, but we are still in sun.
The Skater is a skywalker, with the reflection of clouds beneath its feet. In its upside down, almost weightless, watery world, the Backswimmer spends its life with the real sky 'beneath' its feet. Although, when it comes up for air, I've always thought of it of it as suspended from the surface film, when I watch it closely it's actually more as if it braces itself to prevent itself 'falling' skywards through the thin film into the other world. On a calm summer's night it does sometimes take to the air to fly from one pond to another. Have you ever tried floating across an open air swimming pool on your back? It gives a refreshingly different perspective on the world. You're buoyed up in water with a dome of sky, and hardly any horizon, filling your field of vision. We call our planet 'Earth' but the view looking back from space is dominated by its unique features (in this solar system) of oxygen rich atmosphere and oceans of liquid water. In shallow, sunlit water a female Smooth Newt patiently stalks prey which is invisible to my eyes, then makes a quick, firm, lunge and snaps it up.
There are three Curlews feeding amongst the grasses of a cattle pasture.
Richard Bell, 
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BREAKFAST-TIME; a hot, brilliant sun shines from a clear blue sky, streaked with high cirrus, mare's tail, cloud.
MORNING COFFEE BREAK; the power of the sun is raising bubbling towers of cumulus. We can see them growing by the second.
MID-AFTERNOON; a sudden loud thunderclap, but the wall of cumulonimbus thunderclouds, and a heavy shower of rain, passes a few miles to the north of us, heading east.
It might partly be the pressure changes of the storm that give me a headache. I sprawl on the grass with my mug of lemon balm tea and look into the pond for a few minutes.
A thin film of surface tension separates the world of the Pond Skater from the world of the Backswimmer Waterboatman below.
EVENING; an expansive pearly sky. The red-gold sun is framed by a ragged hole in the clouds that reminds me of the puddles left on rippled sand as the tide ebbs.