Easter greetings to you all!
The header photo is of gorse coming into its best at our local nature reserve.
Then there are primroses, daffodils, crocus, celandines, marsh marigolds and cowslips.
For Debbie’s Six Word Saturday.
People photos. That’s Tina’s Lens-Artist Challenge #292. This is difficult. I’m only just learning to be less shy about making snapshots of innocent strangers, with or without their permission. One way or another though, people at work is an easier ask, so I’m off to see who we can find doing just that.
We’ll start at the second biggest fish market in the world: Jagalchi Fish Market, Busan, South Korea. Here’s someone who’s probably been filleting fish for decades. She could probably do it with her eyes closed.
Here are some workers who have a head for heights: Window cleaners in Warsaw; a telephone engineer in Wensleydale; and two workmen doing something useful at a Thames-side structure.
This auto-rickshaw driver isn’t working at the moment. He’s proud to have taken a very green, very-jetlagged-but-too-wired-to-sleep English tourist (me) on an informative two hour whistle-stop tour of Bengalaru, and is cheerfully posing for a photo.
Here’s a different kind of job. Most Brits have heard of Clare Balding, radio and tv presenter. One of her jobs is presenting a BBC Radio 4 programme, ‘Ramblings’ about the joys of walking. A few years ago, two friends and I had the pleasure and privilege of walking part of the Nidderdale way with her. You can read all about it here. And here Clare is describing the scene before her, as her producer and sound recordist Lucy saves her every word on that muff-on-a-stick while we hover in the background.
Not all work is paid of course. Every year, sheep farmers from all over the north of England and beyond gather for Masham Sheep Fair, to show their sheep off at their very best. Some of the keenest contestants for honours are under ten, the farmers of the future. But the featured photo shows someone who is paid – very little I suspect – for his work: A herdsman in Albania, constantly moving his herd of sheep and a few goats in quest of lush pasture.
But over in India, you could be working with different animals -elephants, perhaps at Dubare Elephant Camp. You might be washing them in the river, or cooking their next meal of jaggery, millet and vegetation.
You might be a waiter. Here are two French ones. Only they’re not really French, or serving at table. They earn a crust as actors – in this case at Ripon’s annual Theatre Festival.
Or you might be a slave. A willing one. At half term, my grandson was taken on – for half an hour only – to be enslaved to a Viking master who turned out to be extremely personable, and even helped him with some of his tasks, such as wood turning. Well, it was part of York’s annual Jorvik Viking Festival.
Children can be good at working for free – unless you want them to tidy their room. Catch ’em while you can.
Nidderdale: the first day totally without rain in I can’t remember how long. Our walk was punctuated with encounters with animals, from Highland cattle who seemed to have strayed south, to llamas whose forebears were definitely immigrants, via horses and – of course, since it’s now officially spring -newborn lambs.
Monday Portrait.
For Debbie’s One Word Sunday.
For Debbie’s Six Word Saturday.
When Patti proposed, for this week’s Lens-Artist Challenge, that we focus on cities, I wondered where to start. Busan? Barcelona? Bamberg? Instead, I’ve decided to return to the city where I lived between the ages of five and sixteen, and to which I often return because my son and family live there: London.
We’re going to journey up the Thames, from Woolwich where the imposing flood defences of the Thames Barrier are sited through the city as far as Tower Bridge and Saint Paul’s Cathedral. We’ll travel, as so many tourists and even daily commuters do by Thames Clipper, the city’s very own London bus of the waterways.
Here’s the Thames Barrier, its metal hoods stretched assertively across the river, protecting it from the ravages of high tides and storm. You can read all about it in another post of mine, here.
As our Thames Clipper passes through Greenwich, there’s the Old Royal Naval College, and the famous 19th century tea clipper, the Cutty Sark.
Passing through the Docklands, we’re reminded of the city’s industrial past, when this was the area for receiving and despatching goods from all over the world.
These wharves are now repurposed as sought after apartments. But even with the modern Canary Wharf behind, we shouldn’t forget the Dirty British Barges (sorry, John Masefield) that continue their work of haulage up and down this busy river.
And maintenance works goes on …
Then it’s Westminster. Here’s Westminster Abbey and The Houses of Parliament, but what a shame that my most recent photo has Big Ben bundled up in tarpaulin.
Then it’s the former County Hall, with the London Eye in front.
And on to the beating heart of the city: Tower Bridge, which I have never seen raised, though it still happens often enough. And here too is HMS Belfast, which saw 25 years of service during and after WWII. This most ancient part of London, site of Roman walls, and the Tower of London, is also where London’s most modern high-rises are found.
Are you getting a bit windswept and weather beaten here at Blackfriars Bridge?
You are? Well, we’ll finish with a miscellany of photos. Enjoy the rest of your day – but just enjoy the view from the Millennium Bridge across to Saint Paul’s Cathedral first.
If London -and the quirkier aspects of its history – interests you, I recommend hopping over to Steve’s blog: A London Miscellany. He’s a mine of useful, and useless-but-fascinating information.
Honestly, we do try. Our weekly vegetable shop is a seasonal organic veg. box from Riverford, which arrives in a re-useable cardboard box and nowt else. We supplement this with a trip to the market, taking our own packaging. Household and bathroom products such as washing up liquid and shampoo come from the refill station at our local GreenHouse. But still plastic packaging enters the house – every time we visit the supermarket actually. The cheese that’s packed in plastic: the odd box of blueberries: the package of pitta bread … and so on and so on.
This week The Big Plastic Count invited us to join in and count all our plastic waste for one week only. So we did. It was tricky, because the family from Spain was here, and spending our time with our three year old granddaughter and her two month old baby sister was the priority. But we bunged everything in a sack, and with the family now gone, made our inventory this morning.
And it was shocking. The smoked mackerel we can’t buy loose; the toothbrush pack (I haven’t embraced the bamboo toothbrush); the pizza bases bought for an easy supper that three year old Anaïs could help create … and so on. Here’s what we learnt.
Like almost everyone who took part, I imagine, we do try to think about what we buy, and avoid packaging where we can. Yet our plastic footprint is huge – larger this week no doubt because of our visitors. What about those who because too busy or lacking motivation have an even larger footprint? Shops – especially supermarkets – and manufacturers don’t make it easy for us. Who, for instance, needs to have their bananas packaged in plastic? Why can’t supermarkets sell us the number of apples we actually want, rather than supplying them packaged in units of six or so?
We take any plastic bags we do acquire to a supermarket recycling point, but that’s a faff too. It’s usually full to bursting point.
And here’s what happens to it.
But even that’s better than this horribly common sight, a tiny proportion of the result of an urban litter pick. …
The Big Plastic Count is being conducted among individuals like us, and in some schools as a project, as a means of raising awareness among children. And the results are being fed to the Government. Individuals and groups, however well meaning. really can’t effect much-needed change alone. And we have an election in the offing. I can’t imagine lobbying by The Big Plastic Count will make an impact on a dying-throes government chaotically falling apart. Another year of inaction. Another year wasted.
Last week, I showed you a rather characterful shuttered window I’d spotted in a French village. Many of you really liked it, so I’m showing it again in my featured photo, but in colour this time, Which version do you prefer?
While we’re about it, here are a few more shots from Siran, most of which include the odd window, or has-been window.
Here’s a post I wrote at the very end of February 2014, shortly before we moved from France back to England….
Facing the task of packing and moving our library, I was reminded of that wonderful book I used to read with my children, Wanda Gag’s ‘Millions of cats’.
‘Hundreds of cats books, thousands of cats books and millions and billions and trillions of cats books’.
Oddly, I no longer have the book, though I hope one of the offspring has. ‘Oddly’, because I seem to have most of the others that have accompanied me through life. Both of us is incapable of downsizing when it comes to books. Till now.
We realised that much of what we own has remained unopened since the day it arrived in France and probably for some years before that: our days of writing essays about mediaeval history are long gone. We realised something had to change. Jettisoning them was unthinkable. And where in France could we re-home so many books in English?
By chance, I was browsing on the web one day, and realised that many of these old faithfuls have a value. They could be sold. So that’s what we’ve decided to do. But it’s really not about the money. It’s about knowing that these books will end up with someone who has chosen them and wants them, rather than in some charity shop where, as we know from experience, some would simply moulder or even be thrown before reaching the shelves, even though many would be snapped up.
So…… we now have three kinds of book. The central core: books we can’t think of doing without – mainly reference books and other much-used non-fiction, with some of our best-loved fiction. The second kind, the saleable ones, are now boxed up to send to England. And the last, and smallest group: the ones we’ve decided to do without, and which have little apparent value. We’ve opened doors to all-comers who want to browse, and we’ve probably re-homed about half. There are still some 450 still remaining. They’re heading to Amnesty International in nearby Castelnaudary, who raise funds by selling to both English and French customers. We know how excited we get when we get the chance to browse a new collection of English books, so we hope they’ll be a good money-raiser for them. (Addendum, 2024. When they were collected, by a woman with her two teenagers, she filled her boot, the empty seats, and even slotted books in and about her passengers’ bodies. They finally drove off, the back axle nearly grinding the road beneath)
Come and look at some of our books – rejected and selected.
You can tell how long I’ve had this one: it was priced in pre-decimal days, before 1972, so even many British readers may have difficulty in deducing that this scholarly work of non-fiction cost me….. 57 ½ p.
This book was given to me as a leaving present from work back in the mid ’70s. It was a good read then, but even more so now as a history of the area we now live in.
This book belonged to my grandfather, a man who died long before I was born. Beautiful marbled end papers such as this often came as standard in the 19th century.
And finally, a book which though incomplete, is a real piece of history. It includes handwritten recipes for making ink, polish, peppermint cordial, stove-blacking. Here’s how to keep your brass and copperware in tip-top condition.
It includes just one newspaper cutting. By snooping around on the net and looking for this particular (and unsuccessful) cure for cholera, I surmise it comes from the 1820s.
Surely even the most die-hard minimalist will forgive me for keeping this book firmly among the family treasures?
And now the books are packed. Every single one – apart from a few bedtime stories for the next three weeks. One room done, seven to go.
And back in England, we realised we really did have to continue the downsizing. It took weeks and weeks. Some we sold, but most went to Oxfam books, and we still regularly get updates telling us how many have been sold and how much they’ve raised. The featured photo shows that we are running out of space again …
This week for the Lens-Artist Challenge, John invites us to focus on the tools we consider when taking photographs: Shape, Form, Texture, and Light.
Sarah of Travel with Me fame (You don’t follow her? Why not?) decided to focus on texture alone in her role as Guest Presenter for Leanne’s Monochrome Madness . I’ve decided to follow her excellent example.
I often like to use monochrome to ‘describe’ texture. It seems to highlight shape, form and – er- yes, texture to advantage, with no colour to distract the eye.
In fact my featured photo of nearby Brimham Rocks is changed very little by the use of monochrome. The sky was a bright azure blue that day, with whiteish clouds. Realistically, grey is so much more authentic this year.
Let’s stay with the natural world, and go to Mossyard Bay in Dumfries and Galloway, to inspect the rocks there, and a sheltered pool as the tide goes out.
We’ll stay by the sea, but in Arenys de Mar in Spain this time. A rusting chain, a decaying lump of concrete in the fishing port.
More man-made creations, battered by wind and weather. A has-been saint awaits repair in the stone mason’s yard at Rheims Cathedral.
And here’s a characterful shuttered window that’s lived a long life in a village in the Hérault, France.
An English country garden, complete with bee.
… an icy puddle …
And let’s leave you with that most Yorkshire of animals, a sheep: happy to show off a magnificent fleece, magnificent horns.
From Pyrenees to Pennines 
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