This week, for the Lens-Artists Photo Challenge, Ritva asks us to Pick A Colour.
I ruminated on red, pondered about purple, almost opted for orange, nearly yielded to yellow, gleaned several greens, prevaricated over pink, but in the end, went for ….
Well, obviously you have to have sky … even if day is long past and evening’s getting on for being midnight blue …
And water’s a must too. Nothing idyllic here. Just industrial sprawl near Rotterdam.
And let’s keep up our less-than-picturesque watery scenes, on the River Thames….
… before nipping off to the fishing town of Arenys de Mar in Catalonia. That’s better. Mended nets hung out to dry.
Let’s stay in Catalonia, but head to Barcelona and some street art …
We’ve got ourselves about a bit. Maybe we need another car wash. That’s where we began, and it’s shown in the featured photo.
This week, Dawn of The Day After fame, has asked us to consider Spring for Leanne’s Monochrome Madness. No, she doesn’t want daffodils, blossom, gambolling lambs (though actually they would definitely do). Instead she wants us to treat the word as a verb, and find images about springing, or synonyms thereof.
So I’ve headed straight for some shots from Ripon Theatre Festival last year, from the weekend of street entertainment:
… which put me in mind of more dancing, of the Morris variety …
The dancers of Four Hundred Roses are my featured photo, where Morris dancing meets belly dancing meets steampunk.
Then I remembered an exhibition in The Baltic, Gateshead where an astronaut was about to leap on my head, And the day at Thorpe Perrow Birds of Prey Centre, when an owl plunged down to seize a meaty titbit, before springing up and away once more.
And then those springing lambs. Considering I live in Sheep Central, you’d think I’d have plenty of energetic shots. Nope. This is the best I can do.
Finally, I’ll give water a look-in. It can be fairly lively. Here’s poor Atlas at Castle Howard, bearing the whole world on his shoulders. And getting soaked in the process as water leaps and plashes around him. And next to him is a frisky and ebullient waterfall near Muker .
Mondays at the moment are when I help some of the Wildlife Team here at Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal as we check nestboxes round and about the estate. I’m very much a junior member of the team – lots to learn. The questions change as the season progresses. Which boxes are occupied? (by no means all). Which boxes have meticulously constructed nests within – different species, different nesting styles? Which ones have eggs? How many? Covered or uncovered? Cold? Meaning more will be laid. Or warm? Meaning they are about to be incubated. Is there an adult sitting on said eggs? And now – increasingly – have they hatched? Are the absent parents out and about frantically securing food for those ever-open mouths. Which nests – partly finished or fully constructed have been deserted?
The first photo is of nuthatch hatchlings, maybe four days old, courtesy of Colin, a fellow volunteer. My – slightly fuzzier -photo is of some even younger blue tits.
It’s a tough year. It’s been cold, and insects and caterpillars simply aren’t about. Food is hard to come by. Eggs are abandoned, hatchlings starve. Today wasn’t as bad as we feared, and we were glad to see so many boxes with eggs yet to hatch, just as – finally – the temperatures are promised to rise this week.
For Monday Portrait.
I did rather wonder why not a single soul had either ‘liked’ or commented on this post. It turned out to be simple. I hadn’t pressed ‘publish’ after I had written it …
I thought of taking a walk, and pointing out all the textures I noticed, from moss to tree bark to muddy paths to rocky outcrops. I thought of showcasing an example of every different texture I could think of. But in the end I settled for this: a random gallery of Texture, in all its hard, soft, smooth, rough, grainy and prickly variety.
Fethera is part of a flock of sheep now dispersed all over northern England. She and her sisters came into being for the HERD festival – part of Kirklees Year of Music 2023. They were made and designed by artists Dave Young and Jane Gaffikin from salvaged materials and reclaimed wood.
Fethera’s home is a suitable one. She’s at Sunny Bank Mills in Farsley Leeds: from 1829, a bustling complex involved in the textile industry, from raw wool to finished product and all steps in between, and employing 900 people. Now it’s still bustling, but in a different way. It now offers creative business spaces for both small and large organisations. Sunny Bank Mills Gallery has exhibitions, workshops, studio spaces and events, and there’s also Sunny Bank Mills Museum & Archive, which protects and promotes the history of the Mills.
Fethera’s job is to welcome you onto the site, and her sisters are called:
Aina (the mother sheep) Eddero, Covero, Bumfitt, Dix, Ix and Jiggit.
These are all ancient words, used in a sheep-counting system traditionally used by shepherds in Yorkshire, other parts of Northern England and beyond. There are countless variations, but here’s one common in Yorkshire :
You’ve come far too early – just as They’re getting us organised for the summer. You could have waited. Mind you, so could They. I’d have hung on to my woolly coat a while longer, but They decided differently. Do you realise it’s still only 1°C in the night? It’s a sheep’s life …
You’re not crawling out of bed at 3.30 because you’ve got an early shift at work. You’re not getting up at silly o’clock because you’ve got to go through the whole dismal business of airport security and a flight before beginning your holiday. No. You’re getting up because you want to. You can even largely skip getting washed, let alone finding presentable clothing.
That was me, last week.
3.45: I crept out of the house before it was even light, not waking anyone else up. In the car, on the way to Studley, the full moon shone cold white in an charcoal sky. The first glimmer of light – a sort of navy-with-apricot-ish coral stole across the horizon. Rabbits loped along the verges. A barn owl rose silently from the road ahead, clasping its prey.
About 4.05: At Studley, those rich salmon sky-tones were flaring brighter now. A blackbird sang. Just the one. Within minutes, he was joined by others. Then robins, song thrushes. After that, wrens, bluetits, then blackcaps, chaffinches, chiffchaffs and nuthatches. Even a curlew. Even a tawny owl. Not that I’d have known all this if it hadn’t been for Merlin.
I walked towards the trees, not yet quite in leaf, silhouetted against the brightening sky. Deer, more curious than startled, came to gaze at me before resuming grazing, or sometimes deciding that fleeing silently away together was a better option.
Gillet Hill gave views of Ripon and beyond, the now magenta sky beginning to halo the cathedral. But maybe the view from St. Mary’s would be even better? The deer thought so.
The church was a fine sight in its own right, but haze now hid the cathedral, and down the hill I went to catch, at 5.20 (not 5.35, as advertised), the sun rising over the horizon. I watched it climb – rather quickly, rather dramatically actually.
Then the early morning chill (1 degree ….) finally got to me, and I elected for the warmth of the car home, then a hot shower, cosy clothes, and – just a bit later, breakfast, fresh-brewed coffee, and the chance to share news of my adventures.
I was that girl at school who cheerfully accepted yet another detention for ‘forgetting’ her sports kit rather than endure yet another hockey lesson on a freezing pitch. I was that woman who married the man she was certain would never switch over to catch some sporting fixture on TV. So sporting pictures for Monochrome Madness , hosted this week by Elke of Pictures Imperfect fame, are very thin on the ground for me.
My only chance is to catch sight of a knock-about in the park …
… or to notice a roller-blader honing his skills in the skateboard park.
Other than that, Big Cycle Races are our only concession to sports-viewing. When we lived in France, the Tour de France passed before our house there twice, and when it began here in Yorkshire in 2014, it yet again chose to pass our house. These photos show a glimpse of the Caravane Publicitaire in France, and of – not the Tour de France – but the Tour de Yorkshire, passing near where we live, and cycling through nearby Kirkby Malzeard.
Me? I prefer a long walk out in the Dales with a friend or two.
Does that count?
I’ve included a little bit of street art spotted in Angers as my header photo. It seems to be a rock climber picking her way carefully upwards in … Rue Montault.
Though I love little better than having a good book to read, amassing favourite quotations in my battered and becoming-unfit-for-purpose brain isn’t something that comes naturally. So Anne-Christine’s Lens Artist Photo Challenge this week – Pick a Favourite Quote and Illustrate it – was a challenge indeed.
Then a silly ditty my children and I enjoyed popped into my head – well, it had been raining all day, and how.
The rain it raineth every day upon the just and unjust fellah. But more upon the just, because ... the unjust hath the just's umbrella
And here they are, those (stolen?) umbrellas
‘A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain.’ — Robert Frost. Is this an umbrella bank, I wonder?
Umbrellas sometimes simply aren’t enough …
‘The best thing one can do when it’s raining is to let it rain’. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Somtimes it’s best to have a sheet of glass between you and the rain.
‘Après moi, le déluge’ – Often attributed to Louis XV or Madame de Pompadour. Well, we WERE on our way to France at the time.
From Pyrenees to Pennines 
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