Monday Window – Page 6 – From Pyrenees to Pennines

One Misty Moisty Morning …

… yesterday in fact, I woke up to this.

It’s the same window I showed you last Monday, but now November mist has descended. I went downstairs. This.

It wasn’t raining. It wasn’t particularly cold. What’s one of the Commandments of Lockdown? ‘Thou shalt exercise daily’. So I did. I took my camera, and explored the local lanes: familiar sights blotted out, as others loomed out from the general obscurity. At just 11 o’clock, I stopped, just for a while: it was Remembrance Day. I heard what a rarely notice as I walk – the constant undertow of birds murmuring and chittering on more distant shrubs and trees. It reminded me of John Lewis-Stempel’s book – Where Poppies Blow. This wonderful account examines the restorative role of nature to those soldiers confined to the trenches in the First World War. For just a fleeting instant, this was a moment I could share with them. Except I came home to a glowing wood-burning stove and a hot cup of coffee.

Monday Window

Two views from a window

This is the view from one of our windows on a sunny morning, just before I raise the blind. Only the silhouettes of the wisteria give a hint of what’s beyond. To see what I see after that, look at the header photo.

Monday Window

Be-kind-to-your-car-day …

… Give it a wash.

#Kinda Square

Monday Window

A New Kind of Sightseeing …

… looking at the view in a car window.

#Kinda Square

Monday Window

My Yoga Window

I’m kind to myself – at least once a week – when I go to my yoga class. This is what I see from the window of the characterful late Victorian town hall in Masham as I stand, balanced and purposeful, in mountain pose.

#Kinda Square

Monday Window

My Kind of View from My Kind of Window

It’s time for another Virtual Vacation, Let’s go to Seville, just for the day. If we pop into this bar, we can look through its window, and see for ourselves the view of la Giralda and the city centre which is currently reflected onto the outside of it. Which is kind of fun.

#Kinda Square

Monday Window

Varied Viewpoints on a Murky Monday

I’ve woken up feeling unaccountably gloomy this morning. Is it the fine but insistent rain? Is it the spike in Covid figures that seems to presage what this winter may be like? I don’t know, but Positivity seem to be called for, and a Virtual Day Out in the Sun.

Let’s go to the seafront in Barcelona, and have a look at a very up-beat window with varied viewpoints.

Monday Window

A Window into the Past

I’m back volunteering at Fountains Abbey, and every time I’m there, I’ll spend time in the ruined Abbey itself. I’ll gaze up at the voids which were once windows. Any stone tracery has long disappeared, revealing views of the sky and trees beyond. And I wonder what the monks saw, during their long hours of worship – eight sessions a day, the first at 2.00 a.m., when the night was charcoal-black and only smoky tallow candles lit the space? The ascetic Cistercians had no statuary in their churches, little stained glass, so the monks probably glimpsed a barely-to-be-discerned landscape beyond, through water-greenish, slightly uneven glass.

In her challenge this week, Jude has invited us to compare the same scene in colour, and in black and white. I thought it would be interesting to do this in a building in which colour plays little part. Surely there would be little difference? Well, apparently there is. I find the black and white version a little too austere for my tastes. What do you think?

And here’s a view of the Abbey with Huby’s Tower, which was completed a mere 13 years before Henry VIII brought the Fountains Abbey community to an end in 1539 during the Dissolution of the Monasteries. I’ve tried to show it more as it might have looked then, set in a wilder landscape than the manicured parkland we see today. And when it came to the monochrome version – well, there’s black and white, and black and white. Again, there are choices here ….

2020 Photo Challenge #34

Monday Window

Windows? Or Washing?

August is traditionally Silly Season in the media. I’ll join in. I’ll pretend that it’s the two windows you can just about see that are the subject of this post. We all know it’s really the washing line. And its contents.

Disclaimer: this is not our washing.

These are Silly Season entries for both Monday Window and Jude’s Photo Challenge, which is this week about colour with a bit of zing.

Monday Window

2020 Photo Challenge #31

A Train Ride in London Docklands

Canary Wharf, Crossharbour, Cutty Sark, Mudchute, Pudding Mill Lane, Royal Victoria, West India Quay, Woolwich Arsenal.

Is it any wonder I love travelling on the Docklands Light Railway in London when I visit, with all those evocatively named stations, speaking among other things of London’s past as a thriving port? A port complicit in many things we’d rather forget, such as the slave trade, but can investigate at the Museum of London Docklands.

The journey is a window onto a watery world of harbours, jetties, watery cul-de-sacs and wharfs: old and new in close juxtaposition. And the windows of the train carriage itself reflects the cosmopolitan society that London has always been.