This month, Jude has asked us to find photos featuring brown. Well, I know about brown. Here is brown:
That’s right. Mud. We have mud everywhere.
I could cheer things up a bit however. Look at these. My featured photo was taken near Fountains Abbey only a few weeks ago, and here are more uplifting shots of the world in brown. We’ll start off with some that have been squared up – and can anybody help me identify that butterfly please?:
… and move on to a couple more autumnal scenes from Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal; a fish – part of a wall decoration at the Natural History Museum, London; tree bark: and our logs all stacked up for winter. Click on any photo for a close-up.
It’s 5th January. Tonight, one of the three kings (Balthazar? Melchior? Caspar? You can choose) will steal into your house and deliver you presents, as once they did to the infant Jesus. That’s if you live in the Spanish speaking world of course. Before that though, they – or their stand-ins – parade through the streets of every city and town they can find. There’s an eruption of lights, gaiety, colour, as the three kings and a cast of musicians, dancers, and hangers on of every kind process slowly through the streets. Joy and delight is uppermost, whether you attend the no-expense spared slickly presented civic offering, as we did in Barcelona in 2018 and 2019, or enjoy a more low-key event put together by your local community as we did in 2020.
These are not the best photos you’ll ever see of the Cavalcadas, But they might give you a small taste of this upbeat, family focused event. Which sadly, this year, will not be taking place. Of course.
This time last year, we were in Barcelona to spend Reyes – the Festival of the Three Kings, and traditionally a bigger deal than Christmas (Presents! From the kings!) – with Emily’s Catalan family. Here we are outside what’s considered the best grocer’s shop in town, all gussied up for festive shopping.
If you think I’ve muddled up my photos: well, the shop window did that, by reflecting the street scene as well as allowing us to see the goods on offer.
‘On the first Saturday of every month, a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. Readers and bloggers are invited to join in by creating their own ‘chain’ leading from the selected book.’
I included the starting point in this month’s chain, Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell in my own, the very first time I participated in Six Degrees, back in August last year.
This time I’ll link it with Nicola Upson’s Stanley and Elsie. Like O’Farrell, Upson re-imagines lives: those of the celebrated English painter Stanley Spencer and his family, and their live-in maid Elsie. Though this is a work of fiction, she sticks more closely to the known facts than O’Farrell. This story of love, obsession, the thought processes of a painter, the English countryside is written in a way that demands to be read, compulsively.
Another life – this time entirely fictional, entirely believable. Andrew Miller’s The Crossing has Maud at its heart. This unusual woman, very likely with Asperger’s syndrome, nevertheless has an ordinary enough life till tragedy strikes. Then it takes a different path, when Maud goes to sea … This exquisitely written book, and Maud herself, may haunt you, as they did me.
The North Sea – a view Maud might have seen.
A big leap now to two fictional lives. Soldiers from Senegal often provided the French front line throughout the First World War. Alfa and Mademba are two of them. When Alfa watches his lifelong friend Madeba die in agony, unable and unwilling to kill him to end his suffering, his slow descent into madness begins. David Diop’s At Night All Blood is Black is both hypnotic and heartbreaking.
Not a Senegalese tirailleur, but a British Tommy in WWI, plodding through the outskirts of Ripon.
I can’t face anything else that’s dark at the moment, but I’ll remain with a West African subject, this time a Nigerian. The Girl with the Louding Voice, by Abi Daré is written in the voice of fourteen year old Adunni who is married against her will to a much older man. Written in pidgin this lively, involving and often humorous story highlights the difficulties and limitations imposed on many women in Nigeria, particularly those of limited means: forced marriage, domestic slavery. This story, however, has a positive and happy ending.
Possibly acting the part of Big Madam, Adunni’s ’employer’? (Pexels)
Which leads me to another book where the prospect of a forced marriage changes the main protagonist’s life: 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, by Elif Shafak. This is the life of Tequila Leila, sex-worker, and her five very special friends, recalled in flashback just as Leila dies, and told in a vibrant, moving and engaging way. The second half puts her friends centre stage as they attempt a decent burial for their friend, and for me was less satisfactory. Read it and decide for yourself.
The streets of Istanbul ( Unsplash-Randy Tarampi)
Let’s end with another woman’s life, an autobiography this time: Tara Westover’s Educated. I approached this book with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. But once started, I couldn’t put it down. Tara Westover comes from a large dysfunctional Mormon family. Home educated, her upbringing was tough, Her journey from a rough country childhood to the world of academia is well-told, as well as giving me some insight into the Mormons. A thought-provoking read.
House in a rural Mormon community ( Jaron Nix, Unsplash)
With the pandemic still raging, I’m in need of uplifting reads: and with the exception of the David Diop, my choices provide positivity in varying degrees. I haven’t read next month’s starting-point-book, Ann Tyler’s Redhead by the Side of the Road. It’s very short: that’s the upside when my TBR list is so very long.
Always up for reading, and recommending good reads to others, this post is also my offering for Square Up today. But please visit the Six Degrees link to see what other readers have chosen.
A frosty walk on New Year’s Eve with my Virtual Dog had me taking snapshots of the icy puddles I came across. This was the last one. Here be monsters, ghosts, puppets, all kinds of flights of fancy. What can your imagination come up with as you peer at this ghastly frozen face?
And as it was my last shot of the month, I’ll pop it in for Brian at Bushboy’s World Last on the Card event. I’ve had to make it square for this month’s Square Up challenge, but apart from that, this icy image is just as it appeared, winking up at me from a frigid, frosted muddy path.
I was up-beat, focused during Lockdown last year. Every day I went out walking – three, four, five, six, seven mile walks: day after day without fail. Now? Not so much. Wind. Rain. Damp. Mud, above all, mud.
Then I had an idea. Our lives have become virtual. Virtual hugs with family and friends, virtual committee meetings, virtual book groups. Though I have no desire to have a real one, I would get myself a Virtual Dog, who would need actual walks every day, come rain, come shine.
My friend Barbara won’t know this till she reads about it here, but I’ve chosen her dog, Dilys. Dilys is always up for a long walk, an explore, a refreshing swim. She’s the best trained dog I know, and is always, like Barbara, an uplifting companion.
Dilys paddles upstream in the River Ure.
And if Dilys is unavailable, I’ll borrow the dog-next-door, Poppy.
The last day of 2020. We began our year with Emily and Miquel, in Spain. Then – Covid-19 happened, and has dominated everyone’s lives ever since. Optimism and general feel-good is in short supply after all this time, so I choose instead to remember those three months of Lockdown in the spring and early summer. This was a desperate period of isolation, anxiety and money worries for many, so I feel almost ashamed to admit that for me, it was a time when I did little but get out into the fine spring weather and walk, walk, walk, discovering in a way I never had before, the delights of our own home patch.
I was also beginning to get stuck into Jude’s 2020 Photo Challenge, and always took my camera with me to reflect on her latest demands. This review of a year of challenges is only partial: it leaves out all of the later tasks which as the year wore on, relied for me increasingly on archive material. But I’ve discovered a lot about getting the best from a shot – the benefits for instance, of a low viewpoint, or of framing the scene. I’ve had reinforced what I already knew: that fiddling around with dials and apertures ain’t for me, It’s my loss, but I’ll live with it. I’ve discovered too that black and white photos are anything but snaps with the colour removed.
And Su, I’m including this post in your The Changing Seasons theme, even though there are four seasons in every year, not just one. On this occasion, I wanted to remember the best of the year that’s on its way out.
Just click on any image if you want to see it full size. Thank you, Jude, for a mind-stretching challenge during a year when my brain usually seems to be filled with little more than bran. And Su, yours is a challenge I’ll join again too. Next time, I might even stick to the rules.
I am very late in joining Jude’s Photo Challenge #51, but here I am. She invites us to make a collage of images, some of which have strong geometric shapes, others of which are organic in form. I had fun looking back though my collection. And what I soon realised was how hard it is to determine what makes a good photo when those images are so bound up with the memories they represent. I suppose that’s what makes me a snapshot-ist rather than a photographer.
I also found myself choosing photos which were primarily geometric – of buildings and so on, but which were enlivened in some way by more organic forms. So Jude, I may not have quite stuck to your brief (again!) but you’ve made me think (again!)
I like this recent photo of Fountains Abbey, that the severe geometry of the ruined building, its dull grey stone, is enlivened by the informal way the autumn branches frame the scene.
This photo, taken in Granada, is a favourite too. The extravagant decoration of the window frames softens the geometry of the windows: but as a reflected image, the whole thing dissolves completely into something much more organic.
This is geometric alright: taken from a viewing platform near the Thames in London. I like that even the frame is emphasised by the vertical lines of the shelter in which this viewing window was situated.
This doesn’t qualify as a fine photo. More of a Christmas puzzle. This grocer’s shop in Barcelona displays not only its wares, but the buildings and street furniture in the street it faces into.
Liverpool. I’m looking out from the Catholic Cathedral up the road to its Anglican equivalent. I like all those bright verticals guiding your eye up that unremarkable road.
I had to have a drystone wall. This Yorkshire feature, solid and strong, contrasts with the distant landscape dissolving into the mist.
The featured photo shows Brimham Rocks in Yorkshire. Nobody could accuse them of being geometric.
It’s been a strange Not-Quite-Christmas – in our case quite an enjoyable one, and today I’m going to offer a Not-Quite-Monday-Window. Why not? Eyes, it’s said, are the windows to your soul, and we saw plenty of eyes when we visited Knole Park the other Christmas with Team London. Those eyes belonged to some rather over-friendly sika deer. I’m not clear about whether deer have souls, but they they certainly provided a different sort of window through which we could remember our visit. Here’s a picture of me with my son and his son, as seen through the eyes of a passing deer.
From Pyrenees to Pennines 
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