You’ll remember Lockdown. If you’re a Brit, you’ll remember the Dominic Cummings Scandal, when Boris Johnson’s senior adviser famously made a more than 50 mile round trip with his family to have an eye test. Dominic Cummings should NOT have gone to Specsavers …
He was widely ridiculed, and here’s just one example from Redmire in Wensleydale, spotted on a walk in that early period after Lockdown, when the world was slowly opening up again.
For Jude’s Bench Challenge.
Night photography isn’t really my thing, so Elke, this week’s host for Monochrome Madness, provided me with a real challenge when she proposed Night time as her theme.
Unsurprisingly, towns and cities provided me with a few ideas. Let’s go on a quick tour. Let’s visit Albania, England, Spain, France, South Korea and Poland…
Really though, Country Mouse prefers to dodge big cities. My featured photo is of the moon as darkness fell recently, while the photo below was taken just at the end of the road.
Chairs. That’s what Brian of Bushboy’s World fame, and host this week of Leanne’s Monochrome Madness wants us to get our cameras out for. And I’ve decided to show Chairs in the Service of Art
My first clutch of photos all come from Spain. A day out in Logroño, la Rioja, yielded some street sculpture featuring chairs and those who sit in them, whether alive or sculpted.
More recently, in Barcelona, I visited of of its newer museums, Museu de l’Art Prohibit – the Musem of Censored Art. It covers political, religious and sexual themes, and is not for the faint-hearted, but I found it fascinating and enlightening.
The first image here was exhibited at the Pamplona Festival in 1972 – a brave thing to do, as Spain was still in the grip of Franco’s dictatorship. This depicts one of Franco’s secret policemen.
The second is by the South Korean artists Kim Eun-Sung & Kim Seo-Kyung, and shows a Girl of Peace. It was exhibited as part of the Aichi Triennale 2019 in Japan, and received threats of attack for being anti-Japanese propaganda. The exhibition was closed but reactions against its censorship forced it to be reopened. This artwork has caused various diplomatic incidents between Japan and South Korea. For its creators, it is an icon of peace. There’s another view of it as my featured photo.
My final Spanish shot is of a chair (and the kitchen stove?) painted on a garage door in a back street in Seville.
Back in the UK, to visit Harewood House near Leeds, and show an image of a chair constructed by the Galvin Brothers specifically for the house’s Yellow Drawing Room – a place to sit, talk, reflect, share, remember. Created at the time of the death of Elizabeth II, this chair was intended as a sober reflection on her reign. Its design, featuring maturing crops as part of the backrest, references the transient and intangible.
Lastly, I’ll take you to Edinburgh, to the National Museum of Scotland. This is where we saw this chair. An astonishing chair. It began its life as a simple willow tree, but was obliged to convolute itself as it grew into the form of a chair by Gavin Munro. Do have a look at his website.
Well, this hasty tour has turned up quite a few different chairs. It’s perhaps the simplest ones that convey the most potent messages.
These belong to some of the dancers of 400 Roses.
A ‘brolly’ is British (and Australian?) slang for an umbrella.*
For Jude’s Bench Challenge.
Spotted yesterday, near Ripon. A removal van with these quotations on the side.
Eh? What?
Then it became clear…
All publicity is good publicity. Quite clever eh?
It’s time for Squares again. It’s a month when Becky takes up her place on the Blogging Podium to orchestrate photographic offerings from all over the blogosphere. Just two rules. The photo must be square, and this month, its theme must be Geometry.
I’m scheduling my post. As you read it, we’re probably battling extremely high winds as we drive to the south coast on the first leg of our journey to Daughter-and-her-Family-in-Spain.
We should be travelling by cross-channel ferry. But even if it sails, I don’t want to be on it, so we’re going instead by train under the Channel, courtesy of Le Shuttle. I’ve picked a shot taken on a different ferry journey, crossing the North Sea from Rotterdam to Hull. Those decks look suitably angular to me. And the day wasn’t even a little bit stormy.
For GeometricJanuary
WP again! I was careful to tick all the right boxes in order to schedule this post: something I’ve done many times before. As you may have realised, good old WP published it anyway, immediately. And I deleted it, immediately. Here it is again. Grrr. Sorry.
In 2010, we were living in France, and often made the trip back and forth between our home there and England courtesy of the cross-channel ferry from Boulogne to Dover. One April, in 2010, we had a Bad Experience. This week, we’re off to Spain, by the same route (well, Dunkerque rather than Boulogne). And the forecast is beyond awful. By the time we arrive in Dover, there will have been 50 mph + winds for more than 24 hours, rising to 70 mph as we arrive. Reader, we have cancelled the ferry (but lost our money) and booked the Chunnel instead. Why don’t you sit in front of a cosy fire and read about our Bad Experience?
We generally cross the English Channel by ferry. Neither of us is keen on the Tunnel, and a nice breezy trip on a boat always seems a cheery, day-out-by-the-seaside way of travelling between England and France.
Not that Dover’s much fun. Despite having some elegant and interesting buildings, Dover always seems a dingy, down at heel and down-on-its-luck sort of place. And this time, it looked as if we’d have longer than usual time to kill there, because LD lines sent a late text saying our ferry would have to leave at 1.30 p.m., not midday, and we’d arrived in town just before 10.00.
Why not go down to the port, then, and see if the ship before had been delayed, and whether it could perhaps squeeze us in? Down at the booking office, the news was that because of atrocious weather, the 6.30 a.m. sailing still hadn’t been able to leave. But it was loading, but if we hurried, we could go too.
We hurried. We caught the ferry. We regretted it. Even behind the harbour walls, the ship was pitching and tossing. As we started our voyage, the well-named tug DHB Doughty struggled to keep us on some kind of suitable path between the harbour walls. Out among the waves and spray of the open sea, the ship immediately started to lunge, roll, and sway, and kept up this uneasy surging throughout the trip.
I’ve always been a rotten sailor, but told myself firmly that this time it would be different: it was just a case of mind over matter. Less than 10 minutes later I was sick for the first time.
Nearly an hour and a half into our hour and a half journey, the French coast was nowhere near. Then the captain announced that some cargo had come adrift, and we’d have to stop till it was sorted out. Half an hour passed. Then yet again it was Our Captain Speaking. There was, he said, a Force 10 gale going on. He didn’t propose to risk getting into the harbour in Boulogne in these conditions. We’d just have to sit it out. I went green. I went yellow. I went glassy eyed. I used up several sick bags. So did half the passengers. The other half (including Malcolm) only had boredom and ailing partners to contend with, but they weren’t having a lot of fun either. Malcolm struggled off to find water for me, and found broken crockery all over the cafeteria, books and souvenirs strewn over the shop floor, and the toilets awash. He lurched back empty handed, though stewards came round with water and sympathy later on.
And we sat, hunched miserably in our seats, until finally, the captain reckoned there was a slight change in the weather. At last the French tug Obstiné brought us into port . Those tugs with those inspired names were the cheeriest things about the whole journey.
The photos show the sea hitting the harbour in Boulogne. That’s the sea as it lost power and hit the coast, not the raging sea we’d been putting up with in what felt like mid ocean. For six long hours.
Next time there’s a storm, I ain’t sailing. I’ll just sit it out on dry land.
Thanks everyone for commenting about the Featured Photo debacle. It looks as if the problem may lie with our phone settings (particularly for Android users), and sorting this out is currently beyond me. As reading your posts and commenting either on them, or on my own posts may be too – for the rest of the week – as we plan for and embark on our 1800 km journey in less than ideal conditions.
Nevertheless… Happy New Year!
The view from the study window … less than a month ago. No snow since. And none expected.
For Ludwig’s Monday Window.
Here in the UK, we know a lot about clouds. And at this time of year, we know a lot about grey clouds. Looking out of the window just now yields an unending vista of smoky grey, darkening over Mickley way to gunmetal and slate. No cotton-wool puffs of cumulus for us.
So let me whisk you to a day in June, when the plane transporting me from Barcelona to Leeds offered me a constantly changing cloudscape below me, with tantalising glimpses of beaches, landscapes and the Pyrenees, the Atlantic coast, and then crowded old England. The featured photo shows us just leaving Barcelona – hardly a cloud in the sky. And then …
Although generally a big fan of monochrome, on a grey day like this, I’m not sure I like these clouds and vistas in black and white. My memory of that summer day was of clear bright and optimistic colours. But needs must. This is for Monochrome Madness, and hosted this week by Brian, of Bushboy’s World.
Ann-Christine of Leya fame has offered us a challenge. She wants us to forget, if only for a moment, that we’re in difficult times: politically, economically, weather and climate-wise. What a good idea. Let’s smile.
We’ll start out with the intentionally humorous.
Here’s a battered house in down-town Seville. I hope the owners don’t hurry to slap on fresh plaster and paint, and cover up this jovial crocodile.
And here’s a puppet from the Puppet Museum in Cádiz, together with a jolly fellow who was part of a scupture trail in east London supporting chidren’s wheelchair charity Whizz-Kidz
Here’s a sign outside a bar in Liverpool:
All those intended to make you smile. These didn’t. I hope you’ll smile anyway, when you see our neighbour’s dog Poppy meeting her first snowman, and then spot this tree at Jervaulx Abbey.
We’ll finish with two different kinds of smile. The very first snowdrops of the year, I hope round about two months from now, always bring me joy. As did these wild flowers in the car park at Harrogate Hospital last summer.
My header photo is a shot that always delights me. Going down the drive early one winter morning, I just happened to have my phone on me. I recorded this scene for posterity: that serendipitous moment always brings a smile to my face.
From Pyrenees to Pennines 
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