Egidio, for this week’s Lens-Artist Challenge asks us ‘Where does it lead?’ He invites us to be literal, with roads, footpaths, animal tracks, waves and railway tracks, or not-at-all-straight-down-the-line metaphorical I’m going stolidly literal.
‘The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.’ GK Chesterton.
But pushing a route up a mountain demands even less direct route-finding.
Hairpin bends in Cantabria, Spain.
Roads over a thoroughly under-populated chunk of Russia. The ony signs of human intervention – apart from little-used roads is that line of wind turbines. Some of those roads seem to lead nowhere much. Quarries?
But this road is FAR less remote, and also features a a wind farm. We’re in Spain again.
I’ll finish with memories of a dreadful walk with friends. We could have done with some kind of path – any kind – leading across this dreadful field. I hope you feel suitably sorry for us.
A well-placed footpath sign would have helped. The happy wanderers in the featured photo above probably had one. Or at least a good map.
Dancing in the street – music in the street – is part of our heritage. Part of the heritage of just about every nation on earth. Music helps us celebrate moments of spontaneous community togetherness. It provides rhythm and atmosphere for traditional dancers in town streets and squares who’ve come to entertain us, of course, but who would cheerfully make music and dance together even if we hadn’t turned up.
Here in the UK, brass bands appear when there’s a civic or community event to celebrate.
And individuals with guitars, saxophones, voices, even pianos scratch some kind of living by performing to any pedestrians prepared to listen.
My header image – the worst photo on earth – is one I love, for somehow conveying the joy in this community in Barcelona – Gràcia – brought together for one special day of events, singing and dancing to celebrate their love for their own special corner of the city.
So why not get out onto the streeets today and see what music you can find?
Ritva is our host for this week’s Lens-Artists Challenge: Music. Some of the photos I chose were monochrome, so for consistency I made this a post of black and white images. To the undoubted disgust of some of my readers – looking at you, Jo.
Boats eh? Brian wants us Messing About in Boats for his turn at the helm of The Good Ship Monochrome Madness, captained by Leanne.
I looked at all my shots of attractive little harbours, busy little fishing ports all along the coast of the Spanish Maresme, where daughter Emily and family live. I thought back to our seabourne days in Sweden. But in the end, I settled for city-centre boats, set against not the wide open skies of the ocean, but with a backdrop of skyscrapers, warehouses and townish busyness.
My header image is taken from near Greenwich, now firmly part of London. I’m not overlooking the elegant naval buildings of Greenwich itself, but gazing across the Thames, with its little flotilla of small boats, toward the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf and beyond.
And here’s another. These busy barges and boats look more workaday. They’ll be conveying goods and services up and down the Thames, which is every bit as busy a highway as any other major route in London. London new – The Shard and London old – Tower Bridge provide the backdrop.
But London can offer quieter scenes, even in the centre. I was only five minutes walk from Kings Cross Station when I snapped this scene at the Regents Canal – houseboats.
Off up north to Leeds now, and the Leeds-Liverpool Canal. Once mucky, rubbish infested and something of a no-go area, the canal basin has been transformed into a relaxing city-centre destination to while away the time with friends, or perhaps to have an informal business meeting.
I’ve got two slightly left-field images to finish with. One’s from Portsmouth (yes, I know it’s by the sea, but it IS a city, and this shot was not taken on the seafront) and shows small boats after they’ve been put to bed at night.
Last of all is from Cádiz, which also sits by the sea. But this shot comes from the city’s museum and shows small maquettes which were, I think, for stage sets at the theatre there. I found them rather charming.
And that’s me done. Why not join in yourself, and link back to Brian’s and Leanne’s posts? Or failing that, hunt down some more posts illustrating this challenge. You’ll find we’re not all in the same boat.
Continuing my From Dirty to Clean theme with windows, here are some to hang your washing from. All but one are from Spain. The odd one out is our very own washing line. Which one though?
PS. British Readers for the use of. I’m very taken by an app I’ve come across. It’s called The Washing Line Index. Supply it with your post code or allow it to use your location, and it will tell you how wise it would be to hang your washing out today. How likely is it to rain? How warm will it be? How hard will the wind blow? It’s brilliant, ad free and … free. As a confirmed hanger-out-of-washing-in-nearly-all-circumstances, I love it.
This week, for the Lens-Artists Challenge, our host John invites us to share waterscapes: scenes where water has changed the landscape, perhaps changed lives. In six images or fewer. Well. That IS a challenge.
Here’s the beginning of the story for so many of the world’s great waterways: a small insignificant waterfall, tumbling downwards, eventually to become a brook, a stream, a tributary, a mighty river, coursing its way towards the sea. This one’s in Cantabria in Spain.
One of the many waterfalls in the Cordillera Cantábrica, Spain.
Soon, these little watercourses gather strength and character. Here’s stage two, in Swaledale in the Yorkshire Dales.
As it journeys on, the river becomes slower, deeper, lazier. It ploughs a straighter furrow and may even threaten to overflow its banks unless contained. The Thames in London was tidied up and forced to conform in the 1860s and 70s, under a scheme devised by Sir Joseph Bazalgette. But that wasn’t enough. The sea caused problems from the other end, surging and flooding, often every winter. So eventually the Thames Barrier was built, about a hundred years after Bazalgette’s efforts upstream. Here it is.
TheThames Barrier at Woolwich
Of course some rivers do have coastal flood plains. The Júcar and Turia rivers, near Valencia together form a deltaic flood plain which is a wildlife haven, a fishing ground, an important rice growing area … But I’ve decided to make this shot my featured photo. Look at the top of the post!
Which leaves me with two more shots. Round here, gravel extraction is an important local industry. As each seam is exhausted, the company reponsible does a pretty decent job of allowing the area to flood to become a nature reserve. Here are two grateful local residents.
An egret and a heron at Nosterfield Nature Reserve ignoring one another.
Finally – human intervention again. Not too far from here is an immense reservoir, built early last century to provide water for the fast-growing city of Bradford. Scar House changed from being hilly moorland to becoming hilly moorland surrounding a huge lake. I haven’t been there this year, but we were there at the end of the last summer when drought had hit the area, and hit it hard. I can’t imagine what it looked like this year, which was even hotter, even drier, for even longer.
A drought-stricken Scar House Reservoir, Nidderdale.
A brief tour indeed. I’ve shown you no ponds, no canals, no seas, no oceans. No boats and ships. No fisherfolk, sailors, or other workers-round-water. No pleasure-seekers or holiday makers either. But only six photos? If that’s the limit, you have to trim your sails; limit your horizons; keep your feet on the ground; lower your sights, and other relevant clichés.
By which I mean animals that have been immortalised in stone. I thought a gargoyle or two would be appropriate on a Sunday. But it turns out not one was part of a religious building. Here are gargoyles from Barcelona, Bury and Bath. Whaddya mean, dragons and frogs aren’t – strictly speaking – animals?
How very British is that? The photo just above is of the quietly flowing Ripon canal, upon which the rain is gently beating down.
More man-made flowing water: A lock on a different canal, the Leeds -Liverpool Canal, near Gargrave: and a detail from a different lock – er – somewhere else.
No waterfalls on a canal. To find those, you need to find trainee waterfalls, like this little torrent in Cantabria, or these jumping, weaving and bumbling ones on the River Wharfe at Grassington, and the River Swale near Muker.
Then there’s the sea: a winter sea here, at West Wittering: and a summer sea at Premià de Mar. All that equipment tells you the sea had been flowing rather too much, and nicking the beach. The citizens wanted their sands back.
But if you’re going to do this, or any other challenge, what you need most is a photographer to record these images for you. Here he is. I can’t use his photos, because he went off, unidentified, taking all his images with him.
You know the sort of day. When things just go right. When, perhaps unexpectedly, you have your camera with you just when one of the flighty, nervy Neighbourhood Squirrels is posing nicely, as ours was one day last week.
When, camera in hand, you manage to point-and-shoot at just the right moment. These images come from a long-past day in the Farne Islands when the Arctic Terns, frantic to protect their young, wheeled and dive-bombed overhead, giving chance after chance for action-packed shots even to a strictly amateur type like me. We had no idea where their nests and babies were and certainly weren’t going to go looking.
There were those red squirrels in Málaga, who managed to forget me for just long enough for me to whip my camera out …
Or that heron in Córdoba. It wasn’t so much the heron I was afraid of losing, as this collage of evening light.
As you read this, I may be on a train to London. No not THIS train, silly. Something far less romantic, which may or may not run on time. But which will not bring me to journey’s end covered in soot and smelling of coal. Signing off for a few days.
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