Hold the press…no can this be true? This afternoon I went out for a walk in the park and I captured some photos. Not sure this is the start of my photographic reanimation but it did feel good.
It is also for a very long time that the sky has been full contrails. What does this mean? Not sure other than there was an awful lot of CO2 dumped into the atmosphere and that isn’t a good thing. I know how self centred of me to remind people that the airline industry is a major contributor to the increase in CO2 levels. Damn Remoaner! No wait isn’t Boris Johnson going green..well at least until the COP 26 conference is over. My god it is a confusing world we live in it was much simpler when Covid was a thing…no wait it still is as we are rapidly catching up with the USA in the number of daily cases. remember that the USA’s population is over 6 times larger than ours. Life is really really confusing.
As we enter the next phase of the Coronavirus pandemic (don’t believe the hype…it is not over…it is far from over when, here in Britain, yesterday over 45k were infected and 45 people died. A pandemic is over when both of those figure are 0). One of the strangest change to my life is that I have abandoned the world of social media – I recognise the irony (is this ironic?) but I have almost given up on following all sorts of things. Has this made me a better person? Better is a bit strong but certainly different.
My social media drug of choice was Facebook – I know….so 2010. I no longer log in for days on end and when I do it does look really trivial. Now, of course, Facebook is hardly the latest and greatest on the block but all social media is the same: Post, Comment, Like and Subscribe. The more you do that the more money they make out of you and I just don’t care anymore. Yes it is nice to see friends and people I used to know having a great time but my life carries on just fine without knowing all of these details.
Will things change? Will I be sucked back into the morass that is the Social Media world? I can’t answer that but I suspect it is more likely to be no than yes. The world seems a lot worse for such sites. We seem to be able to find new and more horrible ways to hate one another. Our views are hardened and I don’t think that is price worth paying for the undoubted good that has been delivered by the social media epoch.
Is this ‘Old Fartism’ taking hold of me? Of course it is – afterall I am fast approaching the age of being a fully paid up member of the Old Fart club. One of the advantages of getting old, as Yusuf Islam wrote many years ago, is:
I was once like you are now Just relax, take it slowly But take your time, think a lot Look at me, I am old, but I’m happy
Perhaps I’m too much of hippy which really would be Ironic.
The sun sets in the west and this is about as far west as you can get in Wales (roughly in line with Newquay in Cornwall so not quite as far west as you can go in mainland Britain). It is magical to stand on a beach and watch the sun go down – especially after a warm sunny day.
My favourite water fowl – the Common Eider Duck. The best time to see and hear the males in all their prime is early in the New Year. Standing in the harbour at Seahouses and doing just that is a really enjoyable thing to do. However, you do have to remember that the North Sea is bloody cold in January! So wrap up warm.
A mixture of one of the smaller and the largest (cattle and horses accepted) fauna in the country. There is also a topical nature to the Red Deer given we are entering the rutting season.
There was a time not so long ago that such a sight was a relic that was deemed to be in the past. Well funny how things work out and now this sight is going to be around for a while longer because this government, which has been in power for over a decade, appears to have done little or nothing to develop energy security let alone a real move away from a carbon based energy policy. This is something to think about as we approach COP 26. If we don’t sort something out then the current refugee crisis will be nothing compare to when millions upon millions of people are on the move because either their former homes are now under water thanks to sea level rises or their former homes are uninhabitable due to heat and drought. This is just one of the many things that will come about as a result of global warming.
It has been a rough few weeks for me for many reasons and I am still not sure whether I have fully recovered. One thing that is clear is that I have lost my drive to capture images. I know this will change, I’ve been through these dry patches before, but until that time comes I thought I would remaster some of the images I captured in previous years. I plan to make one image a day for the month of October, hence Photober. I have been a little tardy in my posting so these are the first seven images. They were captured between come from 2005, and 2007. Oh simpler times.
I am glad to report that there were no werewolves on patrol in the park at dawn this morning – although as it was nearly dawn I suspect they may well have been reverting to their human form.
Just prove me wrong this morning the aircraft were flying once more – I even saw the U2 out of Fairford heading north to do whatever it does.
Other than that it was very much situation normal on the dawn patrol…apart from a Mute Swan preening itself on the playing field. I guess a Swans got to do what a Swan’s got to do.
