Juxtaposed in London

Juxtaposition. That’s what Patti wants from us for this week’s Lens-Artists Challenge. The unexpected frame-pairing.

I thought immediately of London, of a shot I took a while ago now showing the Gherkin, begun in 2001. Nearby, in the foreground, is one of London’s oldest still-standing buildings, the Tower of London, begun almost 1000 years before, in 1078. One, a glass and steel landmark in London’s present-day financial district: the other a foresquare stone monument to royal power, to Norman dominance, and to conquest. One is peopled by office workers – financiers. The other, once upon a time, by royals, nobility, and political prisoners. It’s my featured photo.

Let’s continue down the Thames on the waterbus service, the Thames Clipper. It’s easy to spot new development – apartment complexes for more moneyed citizens, with rusting old ships and barges tied up in the shallows.

We’ll leave our Thames Clipper at Greenwich, and walk up towards the Royal Observatory. Let’s join the crowd leaning over a balustrade to look at the city beyond. They echo and complement the skyscrapers they’re looking at.

Nearby, in Woolwich, an unlikely garden. A cracked and battered wall serving as an impromptu flower pot.

My last London shot is a slightly incongruous juxtaposition. Mudchute Farm, a community city farm and charity is on the densely-populated Isle of Dogs, surrounded by city life in all its forms – tower blocks, offices, social housing, businesses old and new. How mis-matched it feels to wander among farm animals browsing in their fields with the nearby back-drop of the high-rise development at Canary Wharf.

Thanks, Patti for an interesting challenge. I thought I couldn’t come up with anything. But I (sort of) got there in the end.

Just a Few Steps from Home …

This week, for Monochrome Madness, Leanne asks us to stay in our home patch and show us what we can find within 10 km of our home. Well. I’m sorry Leanne, but frankly, one kilometre is as far as I can stretch today, and I may not even go that far. Let’s see. Have you met our next door neighbours? They’re in the featured photo.

We’re a bit light on neighbours generally. You might find these characters:

They’re from the local ponds – quite honestly the heron and egret come from just a little further up the road- but not much more distant.

Even nearer than the ponds is the River Ure.

Go the other way from the house, and it’s fields and crops…

Winter
Spring
Summer

… and more sheep …

But please don’t think our life lacks drama. On Monday evening we were unexpectedly treated to a starling murmuration at the bottom of the garden. At dusk, starlings in their hundreds – perhaps thousands – swirled above us, eddying back and forth, cacophanously landing as one on the trees, which bowed under their weight, before they took off again to wheel and turn above us. Then some signal, known only to them, indicated that they should disappear and roost in the nearby reed beds. They never seem to come to the same place twice, so they weren’t here on Tuesday, and they won’t come tonight.

This is just as the shot emerged from the camera – a natural monochrome.

So that was our drama for the week. Just an everyday story of country folk.

Feathers McGraw visits Bradford

Team London and I visited Bradford on Friday to spend time in its Science and Media Museum. And here we found Feathers McGraw, anti-hero star of The Wrong Trousers and Murder Most Fowl. Surely he should still be locked up at His Majesty’s Pleasure, instead of gazing out of the windows of the museum?

For Ludwigs’s Monday Window, hosted today by PR.

A Capybara in Cosmo-Caixa

Here he is. The world’s largest rodent. The capybara. He lives in Barcelona’s Cosmo-Caixa Science Museum, in the Bosc Inundat (Flooded Forest) . This, along with other South American species, is part of a huge simulated Amazon rainforest ecosystem, with animals, birds and fish. 

Monday Portrait

Astonishment and Awe

Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention

Be astonished

Tell about it

Mary Oliver

For this week’s Lens Artist Challenge, Beth asks us to show shots of what has astonished us, and takes her inspiration from this short poem by Mary Oliver.

For some reason, my mind was drawn back to Lockdown. For us, Daily Exercise was one of the pleasures of that peculiar time. Country dwellers, we could range freely over our home patch without meeting a soul. And here, it happened to be a wonderful spring, where plants, birds and all life could flourish in balmy temperatures and just the right amount of rain.

Walking by myself down deserted paths – M was exploring on his bike – I discovered Wonder and Astonishment anew. Day by day, I could watch leaves unfurl from tightly-bound buds; flowers appear; lambs totter their first hesitant steps.

I had the leisure to enjoy the intricately-designed feathers of a common-or-garden mallard, or the complexity of dandelion petals.

Best of all, creatures we rarely saw close up crossed my path. Who expects to stumble by a toad on a riverside stroll? Or, best of all, come across shy curlews nesting within a foot of a normally well-used road across the moors.

Skies, undefaced by plane trails seemed more multi-faceted and interesting. And back home, day after day, hour after hour, from dawn until darkness, this thrush gave an apparently unending performance with almost no breaks.

Such a time of loneliness, grief and isolation for many remains in my memory a period of joy in the rediscovery of the astonishment offered by the countryside just outside our front door.

A Circular Sort of Trip

No expense has been spared in preparing this post for Leanne’s Monochrome Madness, this week hosted by Dawn. Circles are what she’s looking for.

So I travelled to Catalonia, to Barcelona, and went to La Sagrada Familia.

I passed the Arc de Triomf, and took another shot of the Bubble Man at work.

And then I zipped along the coast to Canet de Mar and took a shot inside the house of the architect Lluís Domènech i Montaner.

Oh, and finally one of oranges. They’re everywhere.

A flying visit to France next. To Laon to take a shot of one of its many shop signs. I chose the toy shop.

And I caught the ferry back to England.

London next. Greenwich, and looking upwards at the staircase in the Queen’s House.

Then I only had time for a quick visit to the Horniman Gardens in Forest Hill.

I got back home just in time for Masham Steam Fair. I saw plenty of wheels (circular, of course) there, and you can see a few of them in the featured photo.

And that’s me done.

Park-Dwelling Parakeets

The parakeets that live round and about Ciutadella Park in Barcelona are opportunists. They know that all they have to do is hang around tourists, looking winsome, and the next meal will appear. If they’re lucky, maybe specially purchased nuts and seeds from equally opportunist street vendors. Otherwise, croissant crumbs and biscuits. They don’t seem fussy.

For Monday Portrait.