Soggy underfoot and the leaves tired and damp. Welcome to October in England. One moment the sun shines then next it hides behind a layer of cloud.
The acorns ripen and are consumed or concealed by Squirrel or Jay. It won’t be long before the frosts sharpen the wet puddles. Yet this year there has been little flooding so maybe the winter won’t be too harsh. Or it could be a bad one although with the way that global warming is taking hold it is more likely to be damp and wet than snow and frost.
As October starts to bite deep into the year so the mists rise. Today found me out once more pursuing the sun as it peaked through the dampness of October. Over the last three years I had spent my time in the hills and valleys of the very rural Melton Borough. I Now wander the highways and byways of Harborough for next project.
Whilst it is easy to assume that Harborough is as rustic as Melton this is not true at all as Harborough takes in both the south and south east of Leicestershire and so is attracted by the distant pull of London.
The far west of Melton had the Fosse Way and the road to Lincoln. Harborough, on the other hand, has possibly the most important junction in Britain – Junction 19. Here the traffic from the North East and North West meets the traffic from the East and encrusted around these arteries are more and more sheds that hold so many treasures in this pandemic restrained shop online land.
The ‘new normal‘ requires new social etiquette. Here are just some of the things I now find myself doing:
Covid Leaning – When sitting in a cafe and someone walks near to you you tend to turn your head and lean away from the person whether wearing a mask or not;
Mask Stare/Dirty Look – This is when someone is somewhere that requires a mask and they don’t have a mask on. I must admit in the past I have told people to obey the law but that is muscle memory from a previous life. Now I just tut, stare and give a dirty look – like most other people;
Exposed Nose – this is another version of Mask Stare and it happens when some has a mask on but they don’t cover their nose.
I’m sure there are many more that over time, and I think this is really is the new normal, I will develop many other. Sp apart from this new etiquette what else have I been up to? Well, I’m sorry to say it has been a week of burying myself in textbooks, PhD thesis and archaeological reports. This time I’ve been trying to get my head around Iron Age Oppidum – a very niche pursuit!
The result of this research is that the use of the term Oppidum is a complete mess and doesn’t really help to understand the late Iron Age in Britain. I am putting together a paper for myself to bring together what I have discovered. The purpose of this is twofold: Firstly it consolidates what I have found out and secondly it highlights what I don’t know. This then allows to consider whether I need to dig any deeper.
One final thing. WordPress has changed the interface used to create posts and it is driving me nuts. I am sure that over time I’ll get used to the blessed thing but until reach that new level of karma I’ll moan about the bloody thing. Perhaps I should develop a new etiquette for that – the WordPress Shout!
Just recently my social media feed has seen an increase in ludicrous clickbait like the title of this post. Photographers telling other photographers how to take ‘better’ photographs. I have no idea what a ‘better’ photograph is and honestly I don’t care. I only make photographers for myself and having been at this strange pursuit for nearly half a century I would suggest that is all any photographer can hope to do.
So the five mistakes all new photographers make are:
Listening to Opinions on Social Media about what is and is not a good photograph
Listening to Opinions on Social Media about what is and is not a good photograph
Listening to Opinions on Social Media about what is and is not a good photograph
Listening to Opinions on Social Media about what is and is not a good photograph
Listening to Opinions on Social Media about what is and is not a good photograph
I know what I enjoy and what I try to make. They only way to do that is to make photographs and then make some more and then…well you get the idea.
Does this count as “…Listening to Opinions on Social Media about what is and is not a good photograph…’? Yes. I rest my case.
Over the past few days I have been rewatching Game of Thrones and especially the last season and I have to say on the whole it isn’t that bad. I would agree that it did seem somewhat rushed. I guess some on the internet would argue that it was rubbish and that is fine but it is also worth recalling that it is just fantasy and isn’t real.
Well that was an interesting experiment – bolt a couple of Canon FD lens circa 1975 onto a Sony A7 R3. Suddenly you come to appreciate just how sharp modern lenses are! I find when using these lenses the best images are usually black and white. Interesting as the experiment was I don’t think I’ll be repeating it anytime soon.
In the afternoon autumn light the old trackways across the Common are secret glades of light and autumn fruit. Occasionally a Coney’s tale can be seen bobbing through the undergrowth. Less than 500 metres away a new brewery is coming to life yet along trackways there is a timeless feel. People have been living in this area for milenia – the Roman armies that marched along the nearby Fosse Way are closer to today than they are to the first houses and farms in the area. Somehow, in the autumn sun you get a glimpse of what the world was like back then.
The next day’s dawn breaks through the mists of autumn. Another year seems to pick up it’s skirt and cantor towards the winter solstice. However, this year, unlike the last, the common has seen little flooding. Whether that will last is really in the hands of forces much larger than anything that man could unleash.
“Our lives can no longer be put on hold,….We must learn to live with it…”
Rishi Sunak
Whether I agree with his politics or not this just about sums up my views of the Covid 19 crises. The world is changing before our eyes and we have just got to somehow learn to live the situation. It is not going to be easy and we are all going to have to give up things that we don’t want to but that is the way life will be for the foreseeable future.
On other Covid related news it was recently reported that going on an awe-inspiring walk will help you deal with the mental effects of nights drawing in and Corvid bad news. So today I did just that – well not awe inspiring but went for a walk in the bright autumn sun.
And along the way way I was sniffed at by a herd of fisky bullocks.
It has been a long day. At dawn I was out to catch the first light of probably the last day of what has passed for freedom this year. Tomorrow promises to bring more restrictions for most and sorrow for some.
So with this in mind we made a dash upto Liverpool to catch the Don McCullin exhibition. McCullin is a wonderfully forceful photographer who has recorded some of the worst things man can do to man over the last 60 years. He has also been a huge influence on the photography that I make. I didn’t really realise just how much until today as I stood by the display cabinet and saw McCullin’s work in the Sunday Times Magazine. This is the same magazine I used to consume as a kid each Sunday and so perhaps without knowing it was exposed to his work.
As for the photographs well what can be said? Nothing I guess other than I have seen many of them before and they don’t lose their power.
It has been a long day and I am tired. Tomorrow I have the welcome task of sorting through the 1000 images I have captured today….There are worse ways of spending a day.
Over the past few weeks I have been wading through Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy and I have to say it has really coloured my world view at the moment. We, the UK ( Yes around 40% of Scots voted for Brexit as well as a similar number in Northern Ireland) are going through yet another convulsion in our confused relationship with continental Europe. We have a fickle leader who doesn’t seem to know from one day to the next what he thinks. His supporters claim that this is a cunning plan to put the nasty Europeans on the backfoot. Unfortunately, the only foot that seems to have been injured in this latest example of government thinking is our own as we seem to have shot ourselves in it.
On a wider scale this whole thing does remind me of the divorce of Catherine of Aragon from Henry 8th – a very disunited Europe coming together only to condemn the English King. Eventually some form of compromise was found although it took years. This sounds oh so familiar.
As a result of Wolf Hall I started to look once more at the sketches of the English court by Hans Holbein. One of them caught my eye, Thomas More and Family, and this was the inspiration for the drawing above. I wondered whether Jacob Rees-Mogg should have been included, even though he is such caricature in real life, as he is being frozen out of the whole Government process. Then of course he went and opened his mouth. Endless Carping! This is a Government that just keeps on putting their foot in their huge mouth! I think I’m going to stop with these foot metaphors .
So maybe it was all a cunning (or is that Cumming’s?) plan and we will get a deal of sorts with the EU, it won’t be the end but just the beginning of years of squabbling, and we may well hit the Prime Minister’s 500k testing capacity by the end of next month. But given the current incumbent of No 10’s performance who knows other than there will be yet another unforced error just around the corner. Then another…then another…then…..
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