Whilst the bitter cold had seeped into my bones every time I stepped out of the door it did have one bonus – wonderful views of the moon. Now, I’m afraid I won’t see the moon for a while as dense clouds have blanketed us. Is this a fair trade? The older I get the more certain it is. The moon will be back sometime in the future and in the meantime I look forward to the balmy temperatures reaching as much as 6 degrees C.
The beautiful dawn light this morning was so very very inviting. What great photographs might await the intrepid photographer? What photographs indeed – I’ll never know. I’ve been busy over the past few days and I was just too tired to venture out into the sub zero temperatures. I just couldn’t feel arsed to leave the warmth of my house for the bitter cold. There is a point where you just have to say no and that point was this morning.
Instead captured a few photographs out of my window whilst the bright bitter sun illuminated the world . As I captured the images I felt myself curling my warm and cosy toes as a pavlovian reaction to the cold just inches away. However, nothing lasts and as I write this all around you see the drip drip drip of the snow and ice thawing.
People have been living in the area where I live since the early Bronze age. Indeed, thanks to all the development over the past 30 years I know live in perhaps the best known prehistoric landscape in the whole of the county.
The most famous local prehistoric character, known throughout the world if you only did but know it, who perhaps might have even lived in one of the numerous roundhouses in the area is Leir (this is the person, or his legend at least, who inspired Shakespeare’s tragic play about madness, hubris and decay King Lear.). The local River Soar’s old name was believed to be Ligera from which Leir is a derivation and Leicester’s old english name was Ligoraceastre although I prefer the old Welsh name of Cair Lerion. In short Leir is all around if we only did but know it.
I’m not entirely sure why Leir’s image has been rebounding around my head over the past day or so as the weather takes a turn towards the Arctic and we all huddle down around the fire or central heating. Winter has really come for the first time this year and we have experienced the first real snowfall along with a couple of nights of frost. It won’t last long but while it does it keeps alive this notion within me that Leir once lived not too far from where I am writing this. Not sure what he would have made of blogging or the modern world in general. Recently, at times, I have had the same feeling about the world but all things change just as one day the winter will be gone and the spring flowers will bloom once more and and who knows, perhaps – just perhaps, we might be free to enjoy them.
And so things drag on. Winter has provided a covering of snow and the sky is a foggy grey. The depths of January – possibly the bluest month of the year – can be felt in everything. Add onto this the on going covid lockdown and we are all starting to feel the pressure. Perhaps the only good thing is that every day the days are getting longer which holds out the hope that not too far in the future spring will come to chase away the January blues. On a day like today that is small comfort.
I find my days disappearing in a miasma of routine: 30 minutes on the exercise bike; a similar amount of time walking around the neighbourhood and so on. Many years ago I was told about the importance of meals in a prison: skimp on the food and you’ll have a riot on your hands – nothing calms the frayed nerves like a full stomach. Now that we are all, well most of us, stuck inside our own prison I see the wisdom of that. Meal times are essential to lift the morale and to socialise. Then once more unto the routine.
I realise that this is so much moaning but I do feel it is important to release such stresses and to then try and deal with them. Not acknowledging these frustration only leads to further frustration and things could get so much worse. This is not a claim of equivalence to anyone who has really suffered at the hand of covid but rather an expression of my own personal journey through this January greyscape.
As if to add one final layer of insult to my pointless injury I can hear overhead the roar of engines of the United Airways flight to Chicago. I wouldn’t want to be on the flight but it is a reminder of the way of life we have all been deprived of. I think it will be foolish to think that once we have been vaccinated we all be leaping once more on such flights. In the January gloom I get the feeling that things have changed for good. What the world will look like in a year’s time is going to be different to the one a year ago.
The beginning of the end or the end of the beginning?
So today is a portentous day; A day that will go down in …well I’m not sure what type of day it will be other than to say today many of my fellow citizens will no longer be alive at the end of it than were at the beginning – a lot will have died because of covid perhaps before their time. This is such a clichéd phrase – who knows when their time is over on this crazy world? What we do know that as a statistic many more people will be dead by the end of the day than is normal for this time of year and that perhaps is the greatest tragedy of them all.
In an effort to try and reduce the incidence of this terrible disease to an absolute minimum I have been following the lock down rules as best as can. One of the effects of this is that my world has reduced to how far I can reasonably walk within one hour of where I live. This has meant that the opportunity to make photographs have reduced as well – my own sanity will allow only so many photographs of floods or mist or frost in my local park . So as a way around this last night, between the rain, I went out for a second walk and it was a thrilling experience. I walked along with my own soundtrack playing in my ears and from time to time I felt like I was in some strange, non New York, Scorsese movie.
This is third covid walk I’ve taken, that is a walk with my camera and one lens. The first one was with my iPhone; the second was with a 50mm lens and this was with a 35mm. I’m sure I’ll make several others before we are released out into the fresh spring air.
In other news today Donald Trump will no longer be President of the United States of America – so there is a reason to be cheerful.
Let us hope that is the last time we have to contemplate the name in relation to United States of America politics. I fear it won’t be.
A the lockdown curtials any real opportunity for new and interesting, at least in my view – your view may well vary, photography I have found some relief by making dog and cat drawings.
Woof Woof or should that be Meow Meow?
I feel like a slack jawed yokel as I watched the disintegration of the United States of America live on primetime TV last night. I am sure there are many people out there justifying what happened yesterday in Washington DC. I cannot. I have always thought that on balance the United States of America has been good for the world since the end of the second world war. Don’t get me wrong they country and its people have taken many missteps along the way but these do not outweigh the good the country has done. My view your view may well differ.
Yesterday finally destroyed any residual fondness I had for the country. From yesterday onwards the country has to try really hard to step back from the edge and I fear they will not do that. The reason for this is that even after everything that happened yesterday there were enough members of the congress who wanted to debate about the last election. No one, not one person, has presented any evidence to any court of any significant irregularity. Nothing. Yet so called rational men, I’m not sure whether there were any women, in the last congress still thought that there was massive voter fraud. They didn’t seem to equate the riot that took place in their place of work as any reason for them pause and reconsider what they were doing. That message will not be lost.
So going forward the United States of America has a lot of rebuilding to do and I don’t envy Joe Biden’s task. Perhaps cometh the hour cometh the man – I somehow doubt that. Now it would be a legitimate argument for an American citizen to say that I have no right to express any views about their country but I don’t believe that is true. We all live in a world that has been built by the United States of America since 1945; A world that has at its core an assumption that the United States of America will be some form of a bulwark against mobs storming their parliament building and forcing their legislatures to do the bidding of their leader no matter how illegal that might be. After yesterday that is no longer a valid assumption and the world that I live in has just got a whole lot more shaky.
The only good(?) thing to come out of yesterday is that it helped me to forget that we are in our third lock down of the last 12 months. Hopefully by Easter, or shortly after, I may well have had my first jab which may mean some form of freedom to move around beyond the confines of my neighbourhood and perhaps start to capture different images. That is if Trump hasn’t blown the world to pieces by then… The mist and frost this morning didn’t make things feel any brighter.
Come back, 2020. All is forgiven.
Patrick Maguire
Those were the days my friend
We thought they’d never end
Eugene Raskin
So, according to the New York Times Britain is yet again going off on another crazy wild stab into the dark by trying to get as many people vaccinated as possible by only giving one dose out and then giving the booster in about 12 weeks. I have no idea who is right or wrong or if there is a right or wrong or perhaps it is nuanced? It was noticeable the air of disappointment in the New York Times’ reporting when the latest variant of the Covid virus, the main reason I’m sitting here in Tier 4, is not, infact, a British variant but rather a variant first disclosed by the British authorities. The cause of this disappointment is the fact that someone in a small town in Colorado has been diagnosed with the new variant. He apparently hasn’t traveled too far and not, to the best of his knowledge, been in contact with anyone who has.
Now before we all explode into a wave of jingoism it is worth remembering that few people in Britain, myself included, can understand why so many people in the States voted for Donald Trump. Yet they did and it is just the way they do things. I guess we are all guilty of trying to see the way we do things as the best and other ways as less so even when there is scant evidence that one or the other may be correct (this is a general observation as there are certain things that clearly are wrong – baseless challenges to the result of an election you most might be one such example).
We all have our own prejudice whether we like it or not. I think what we have to try and do is accept that and move forward whilst trying to improve on our imperfect world view and address what prejudice we might suffer from.
We can all do better.
A good number of years ago I learnt a very valuable lesson. None of us are irreplaceable. Some of us are more talented in one form of human endeavour than most of the rest of us but we all have to accept that it never ends. Life goes on; We go on right upto the point that we don’t. Then we are replaced. But it never ends.
Not sure if that is the uplifting message for a new year but it is a truth that becomes more apparent the longer we hang around.
Happy New Year?
Sometimes I find I capture a photograph without really realising the significance of what I have captured. This photograph is of a normal set of train platforms. I was attracted by the the arrangement of the three men standing there but didn’t give a second thought. When I first posted it on this bog I was still none the wiser to what I had captured. The next image tells you all you need to know about the significance….
These were platforms 9 and 10 at Kings Cross station and for many millions people around the world only means one thing – the location of platform 9 3/4 and the Hogwarts’ Express. As soon as this is pointed out the three individuals in the first picture start to take on a life of their own – are they Ministry Men? Perhaps they work at Hogwarts itself and are awaiting the arrival of students after the winter break – it was January and who knows when the new term starts? Perhaps they are … well I’m sure you can fill in the blanks yourself.
Of course many a Potter fan would think that St Pancras next door is where the platform should be as this is the exterior they use in the movies. Both are magnificent buildings in their own right but Kings Cross has never had the splendor to match it’s flashy neighbour. Even now after the overdue renovation it still seems a bit provincial as it doesn’t have the extra cosmopolitan feel of St Pancras with the hourly arrivals from Europe to give the place an international air terminal feel.
But then again St Pancras doesn’t have platform 9 3/4 and for any true Potter fan Kings Cross is the only station to visit…that is when you were allowed to do so…halcyon days…
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