A break in the clouds as they sweep through.
The old houses by the shore gleam in the temporary sunlight.
The rocks below the seawall are the inscrutable guardians of these shifting scenes, waiting for the rising tide.
Tag: Travel
Never The Twain…
“If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.”
– Mark Twain
Pictured recently, yours truly, seated with a bronze statue of the great man (real name: Samuel Clemens). As close as I will get to meeting him!
I have long admired Twain’s wry humour and sage veracity.
Like the quote above – you laugh first and then the wisdom drags you in and sits you right down, as you reflect on hard life lessons.
I sometimes feel his writing gets me, rather than the other way around.
When I was a young man I took a Greyhound bus from Chicago to New Orleans ( helluva long ride!), and the road more or less followed the Mississippi River south after St. Louis. My best companion on the journey was Twain’s ‘Life On the Mississippi’, published in 1883 . A great read – fantastic tales of diverse folk, working and up to all sorts otherwise, on the river back in the day (it’s well worth searching out).
It just made my trip feel damn boring by comparison though…
Blow Your Own Chimney!
Chimney Tops, Pittenweem, Scotland
Albeit a bit of a global warming horror show, I was delighted at this rooftops vista in Fife.
Rows and rows of chimney pots like soldiers on parade. Dozens of the buggers! And hundreds more throughout the village…
It wasn’t cold enough in mid-autumn for smoke to have been puffing from the chimneys.
Had it been, the ghost of my coal mining grandfather would surely have smiled…
Stone Box (Final Destination)
In the previous post Boxed In ,I touched on the boxes that we end up in.
In my recent travels in Scotland, I came across this ancient stone version in a cemetery at St. Andrews. Pretty impressive; nicely ergonomically tapered and contoured to fit the deceased’s head. Top design marks.
I suspect it was for someone of some importance. You wouldn’t go to all that bother for a regular dude or dudess.
Important person or not, as the pop-punk bard Wreckless Eric once said,” there’s only one destination in the final taxi”.
And on that cheery note, I too shall depart…
Boxed In
My fourteen year old daughter took this photo of her old man in one of London’s iconic red telephone boxes.
I do look just a little trapped!
We do it to others; we do it to ourselves mostly.
Put them, us, into boxes of our design.
Labels are for jars, and boxes, well, boxes are the caskets that we will go out in.
Pigeonholing and stereotyping behaviours kill the hope of the different and the unique.
In venturing into blogging , I am trying to think outside of a box I have spent years carefully constructing.
In expressing my creative side, I bury the negative self-thought (and perhaps the thought of others), that tells me that is not what I am, or do.
That final box can wait for now; I have a few more I need to tick…
Criss Cross
Spectacular curving, criss-crossed ceiling at London’s King’s Cross Railway Station.
So elegant with its purplish backlighting, and just vast as a piece of design
Even I hadn’t been hanging around for the train north to Edinburgh, this would have dragged me in to admire it.
Lines crossing over and over again, like the passengers scurrying to their trains, heading to different destinations.
Indeed, the kinetic and life energy in the place is amazing – all those journeys, with their beginnings and endings ; those unknown (to each other) plans and dreams – in the one place at the same time, intersecting for the briefest moment and then arching out and beyond, perhaps never to cross over again.
And when you board the train, it’s a little simpler – you’re away again on your own trajectory and at least the tracks run parallel !
Safe Harbour By Failing Light
I took a photo at dusk from the harbour wall at Pittenweem on my recent visit to the Scottish village.
The weather outside the harbour was getting rough, with the wind and the sea up, and the rain beginning to fall again.
But looking back to the town, things appeared calmer.
The saying “safe harbour” sprang to mind.
I could see the light of the place we were staying (at centre top) and headed back to its comfort.
(In the failing light the photo was a technical failure so I salvaged it (like a sunken ship!) and made this abstract picture, that captures for me the moment).
God In Segments
The view up to a stunning vaulted ceiling in England’s York Minster.
Justifiably lauded for its architecture, it was the complex symmetry of it all that left me dazzled.
Like this segmented design ,radiating out from the centre of the ceiling like a star, or a flower, then falling down smoothly to enfold the equally beautiful arched windows.
I am a bit of a sucker for symmetry, as some pictures elsewhere on this blog will attest.
As a religious house it is well nigh perfect.
But, there was the nagging thought in my mind that it was a grand, and failed, attempt – it was made by imperfect humans after all ! – to capture a universal spirituality that is at times:
unpredictable,
jagged,
asymmetrical,
not compartmentalised,
indefinable…
Holy Family Fragment
La Sagrada Familia, Barcelona
A personal favourite of the photos I took on my recent visit to the cathedral (and I took a shitload, if I can use profanity in proximity to the sacred).
Just one view of a small portion of the Gaudi structure.
So many many fragments to the seamless whole it is mindboggling – true visionary stuff.
(Holy Family is an English translation of Sagrada Familia).
Where The Heart Is
A row of houses close to the water in Pittenweem, Scotland.
People’s homes – and the locals I met in my short time there were as sweet as their abodes.
I felt very much at home in the small town, and even though I have returned to my antipodean home, I think I left I piece of my heart there…
Gravestones And Battlements
It was a dismal weekday afternoon as we trekked towards Calton Hill in Edinburgh.
Then, joy of joys, just before our destination I saw some stone stairs leading up to a small cemetery.
Like a rat up a drainpipe, I quickly found my way to this vista, with looming castle battlements to ice the proverbial cake.
Victorian gothic nirvana!
I would have lingered, but my wife and daughter were less than impressed with another funereal photographic detour.
I rejoined them, and when we reached the top of the Hill, the drizzle became hard rain, forming waterfalls down the steps.
So wet, so grey…and I was so happy with it all.
Sometimes I wonder what the f**k is wrong with me.
Victoria Blushed
An optimistic view of London’s Victoria Station on arrival by train – looking up at the glassed roof stretching forever (or so it seems).
Well, an optimist always looks up – always.
And sees the view through rose-tinted glasses.
In a way this picture captures the hopefulness that travel brings to me – the pursuit of the new and the dream of the possible.
Monumental
Sixty one metres of Victorian Gothic goodness towers above Edinburgh’s Princes Street, in tribute to literary great Sir Walter Scott.
The monument is grimy and blackened with weather and age and is all the more striking for it.
The below view, in darkened silhouette, emphasises the spectral in the structure.
Scott was a man of letters – novelist, playwright, historian. I, on the other hand, am somewhat of a philistine – his monument appears to me as if Dracula had a hand in designing Thunderbird 3(the coolest Thunderbirds rocket)!
Beth, Dolly & MargaretJane
- MargaretJane
Three Scottish ladies up on the hard, and in varying states of fitness and beauty !
Bespoke
Spokes in the big wheel – the London Eye from below – always turning…
Ain’t No Saint
Portrait of a blogger – me, Andy L.
Almost a year into this blogging gig, and since I am always behind the lens for the pictures you see here, thought it time to move around the front and say hello.
This shot was taken last month on the harbour in the lovely Fife town of St. Andrews, with its famous ancient castle and abbey ruins, some of which can be seen in the background.
As the place is named for the patron saint of Scotland, my namesake, it seemed appropriate.
Not that I am any sort of saint, mind .This picture has a dark haloed effect, just in case you get the wrong idea….
Seahorse In The Sky
Have you passed by a place a thousand times and never noticed something, and then suddenly you do?
I had one of those moments during the week ,when I had a few minutes up my sleeve and stopped on the way to my work shift up at the marae.
Okaku Bay is a lovely flat beach on the Waitemata Harbour in Auckland and the seahorse statue atop a column adorns the art deco changing sheds there. How I had never spotted it before I don’t know.
In my recent travel overseas I filled my photographic boots with all sorts of animalistic symbols – lion, wolves, and unicorns, to name a few, so perhaps had become attuned to seeing such things. Travel in new places causes us to look at home with fresh eyes, too.
It’s all about the magic in the mundane, where ordinary buildings and spaces come alive with images of fantastic creatures. The seahorse discovery transformed my routine day!
Don’t Hurt Lions,But Knock Them,That’s Alright!
Positively scary leonine door knocker in Barcelona.
One hopes that there is something equally intimidating behind the door!
Floating Madonna
A statue of Mary appears to float within an arch on a church wall in Barcelona.
There is of course a small ledge on which the icon sits,but it is a neat trick of religion to create images and symbols to inspire, and to aspire to.
Apart from the prayerful pose and purity of her robes,the Madonna levitates above the ground, but is well below heaven.
Someone to look up to, or just another struggling seeker?
Nevermore
” Quoth the raven -“Nevermore”.”
Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Raven’
One of the famous ravens at the Tower Of London – darkly majestic avians that rule the roost and would seem to know all the secrets of the place, secrets that, erm, might otherwise be nevermore…
ebb then flood 