Amongst many Sci Fi fans the Isaac Asimov the Foundation series of books are viewed as masterpieces of Sci Fi literature. I finally got around to wading through the first of the series called Foundation and I have to say I’m not that impressed. The reason why I finally ventured into the series is because Apple TV+ are making a big buck series based on the series. I wish them luck because they are going to have to rewrite most if not all of the dialogue, there isn’t much else, as it hasn’t, in my view, aged well at all.
So the snow has gone but I’m stuck in and around the house. Yes I’ve had my first jab and so this is the first step to something approaching a return to freedom but nonetheless I am not convinced we’ll see any real easing of the restrictions until Easter. I’m OK with this but it does mean I have lost a lot of my photographic mojo – so instead I’m working on different types of paintings.
Beautiful, beautiful light streamed in through the window this morning. Did it tempts me outside? Not a chance – it’s minus 3 degrees C outside and I’ve had my fill of cold toes for the time being. So instead I decided to work with my iPad Pro this morning. Far more comfortable and occasionally rewarding.
Yesterday I was allowed out of my local area – I had to take the car into town to be serviced and MOT’d. Now I am aware that my sticking to the lockdown rules are certainly more strict than many people in my neighbourhood but I feel we’re doing our bit even if many other people have decided to have a more liberal interpretation of what the restrictions are. This isn’t the time nor the place to argue who is right but the upshot is that for the first time in since before Christmas I went into the centre of Leicester.
The whole lockdown has drained my enthusiasm to capture images as visiting the same places again and again – this is something I’ve complained about before on this blog but it is something I am really feeling. The hopeful thing is that it would seem that I should be vaccinated by the end of March which should enable me to feel safer to widen my circle of operation beyond what it is at the moment.
Just to add to the restrictions it has been cold over the past few days and so this has kept me in doors as well. Today I decided to brave the cold and frost and just try and make some images.
The one good thing is that the days are noticeably longer which always lifts the spirits and as I write this most of the snow from this morning has all melted away. One final thing to suggest that spring is not too far away away the catkins have started to appear on the willows.
Perhaps this will encourage me to get out a bit further and try and make some more interesting photographs? I doubt it because I have too many other stimulating this things to do at home at the moment.
So another ‘mould breaking‘ camera, the Sony Alpha 1, has just been announced and the talking heads are disgorging their views on something they know nothing more about than we simple folk whose clicks they are desperate to harvest. It is all so familiar and also so pointless. I am sure that the camera will be outstanding, very few cameras nowadays aren’t, yet it does seem to miss the broader point. Who will buy such a beast? I suspect it won’t be the legions of people passing comments when encouraged to do so by those well worn encouragement from the talking heads..”but what do you think? Let me know in the comments below.” I suspect most of the people who will buy this camera aren’t people at all but rather corporate buyers who will then rent the camera out or provide it for their staff photographers to to cover the olympics or whatever is left of popular sport after the pandemic has finished its work.
Does any of this really matter? Well if you work for Sony I’m sure it does but for the rest of us? I’m not sure. We now seem to live in a world where we must all like comment and subscribe less we miss out on whatever is the next greatest thing. And the way we know that it’s such a thing is because of the talking heads who then insist that we like comment and subscribe whilst all the time Google hoovers up more data about everyone. We all know that we are the commodity being traded and yet we all continue to like comment and subscribe and so the circle is completed and slowly any meaning we might have slowly disappears.
Of course this is shameless nonsense on my part because I am as guilty of the crimes I outlined above as everyone else. I watch my selection of talking heads although I don’t like nor comment but the longer I do it I start to notice that certain people are starting to slide down the charts. The first tell tale sign is that they start to try new gimmicks to get their numbers up. Perhaps their USP has passed its sell by date; Perhaps they have just lost whatever they had when they were first successful or perhaps the world has just moved on.
Maybe one day when, like cows being let out onto spring pasture, we will no longer bother about these talking heads as we no longer are afraid of straying outside but as the mainstream media’s conveyor built of content slowly drys up we are stuck with the talking heads. We know we shouldn’t but we do watch and of course we “…Like; Comment and Subscribe….”
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.
Simon's Blog 