Lindsay
I was in London earlier this week for a conference. I won’t bore you with details, it was a work thing, but it was quite a nice trip (apart from the conference bit). The venue was just by Tower Bridge and I stayed in a hotel right by the bridge with St Katherine’s Dock behind and it was a nice spot.
I had a little time to wander about during the lunch break of the conference. It was a chilly, clear day and it was nice to stroll round the dock and take the air.
It made a change from the presentiments in the weather in Northumberland on the train down. The journey down was fast and without hitch but there was a grim foreboding about the weather which had something of the tone of a horror B-Movie. I half expected to see a werewolf loping over the moorland or catch a glimpse of a troupe of marauding zombies lurking in the fields.
Northumberland looking grim
I usually like to write on the train but this time I wasn’t at a seat with a table and didn’t really have space to do much more than scribble some notes, many, if not all, of which were about work matters.
I’ve been taking a lot of photos recently on my phone. I’ve been trying to revive my “photo a day” project and have been taking snaps and uploading the best to Facebook (I’ll put some up in my gallery here soon). I’ve been taking them using Vignette and have been doing no post-processing at all. I like the idea of taking the picture, publishing it and moving on. Of course I’d quite like them to be aesthetically pleasing photos as well and I like the inherent challenge which the immediacy presents.
I am also benefiting from the camera in this phone being better than the old one – at least in the sense of having a higher pixel count.
By Tower Bridge
I’ve been limping a wee bit since Monday morning too – I was walking down to work and my foot landed on something slippy on the wet pavement and down I went – banging my knee on the ground as I did so. At the time I was more winded than anything but the knee is taking a long time to settle down.
Meanwhile we are getting an early manifestation of the BBC “it’s snowing in winter” shock and awe. It is Winter. It gets colder. Sometimes that manifests itself as snow. It has been this way for some considerable time now and probably will be for some considerable time to come. One day the British media will cotton onto this.
And that’s about it for today. Sorry not to be cheerier. There is some cheerful stuff in the offing but I’ll post about that once it all falls into place.
Ian; On Sunday night the main highway home from Toronto (401) was closed for a long stretch. I headed cross country, mostly ignoring the advice of a GPS device with a deeply annoying and condescending English accent that seemed to only want to send me back to the 401.
I ended up on some roads that would be great on the bike in midsummer. Narrow, winding, lots of elevation changes, hardly any houses and deeply forested. Indeed, they were also desolate, dark and almost untravelled. I too expected some grim apparition to appear and began to imagine noises in the car that might mean it was going to break down and leave me stranded in the middle of nowhere.
Later, in thinking about it, I reralized that it wasn’t that it was dark or that there was anything inherently wrong with the countryside. Most of the time I wouldn’t have thought twice about the setting – in fact I would have enjoyed this drive any other time of year. But it is late November, the grimmest times of year. The trees are completely devoid of leaves; it’s cold and – moon or no – the whole world takes on a grey and sinister tone. It was clearly this I was reacting too. Even if there had been snow on the ground I would have felt differently about the night. (And I detest snow.)
There is something clearly primeval that lingers on in our modern brains. I imagine this kind of fear kept our hunter-gatherer predecessors out of trouble and alive.
Alex