Squirrel watching in the local park is probably something I do frequently enough to legitimately describe it as a hobby – but if it’s not that it’s certainly a holiday tradition; there’s nothing nicer than wandering over to St Anne’s Well Gardens at lunchtime on Boxing Day and mooching around spying on wildlife. Accordingly – the latest dispatch from the animal kingdom:
Show off
action shot
I’m limbering up towards feelings of Christmassyness; this weekend Lynds and I trotted up to Cambridge to see my folks, and were given gifts of hats, scarves, socks and gloves. As always, my parents’ were liberal in their provision of alcohol. Over a long boozy lunch on Saturday, we managed to sample delicious ale, Italian wine, sloe gin, amaretto and spiced rum – bravely fighting off the offer of prosecco to finish. A long afternoon nap followed.
Best bit of the weekend was a lovely walk around a lake near their house – it was a beautiful winter morning, crisp and crunchy with frost but the sky was a clear and brilliant blue. Lyndsey picked some lovely purple catkins.
They’re now our christmas tree, following an aborted attempt to construct one out of cardboard.
Not many people flying red flags in rural Cambridgeshire, but I take your point. This sign actually denoted a little archery change in the village of Offord Darcy, just up the road from where my parents live. The archery looked fun, but I didn’t like the look of the ultra-modern bows. These sorts of things shouldn’t, I don’t think, be allowed to move with the times.
This timelapse was done on my phone, so quality is not amazing – but it’s still quite nice I think. Brighton darkening out of my back window. There goes Brighton. I can sit and look out of my window for ages, provided I have a beer. It’s sort of more interesting in the flesh. But imagine you’re me for a moment.
While we were in Alsace earlier this month, Anne-Sophie took us up into the Vosges mountains, where we spent a few hours clambering through a series of impeccably preserved, incredibly interesting, World War One trenches. It was quite an experience, although one that seemed to spark in all of us – except perhaps Anne So – a vague feeling that there was something important missing from our individual knowledge about the events of the Great War, or just a dissonance so huge between our lives and those lost then that punctured a hole in our capacity to imagine what it must have been like to have been living and fighting on the Front. We tend, here in Great Britain, to see the wars from a very British perspective, and unless my lack of awareness is atypical, we have a far more realistic sense of the travails of the Second World War than we do the first. We speculated, walking around, that much of people our age’s visualization of war in that environment comes not from books, nor even films, but rather from video games – although I’ve never played a war video game in my life, so I guess that’s not the case for me.
What did I feel? Mostly I think I just felt a sense of serenity, inspired by the stunning views and pin-perfect temperature, and a kind of placid fascination, which manifested itself in the kind of self-indulgent over-intellectualization you’ll find in these paragraphs. We talked a lot about how it must have felt, without really understanding. But once or twice, down in the cool dark chamber of a trench, I felt a glimmer of panic, a sense of the immensity of what was faced in that place. I need to read more about it. At times we stood at points where the French and German trenches were a matter of 20, 30 metres apart – a stunning contraction of distance in a vast landscape. Then, seeing a branch shiver in the wind or hearing the snapping of undergrowth, you could get something of that claustrophobic closeness – the notion of your enemy appearing suddenly before you.
Mostly we talked, paradoxically, about the near-century that has passed since. We speculated – in an uninformed kind of way – about how the forest would have slowly been repopulated with trees, about wildlife timidly returning to a landscape pockmarked with the echoes of gunfire. The incredible thought of a century of near-peace in a mostly unchanging landscape is quite something. It made us wonder, actually, if there might not be some potential in a book which was called something like ‘A Natural History of War in the Twentieth Century’ – a study of the impact of conflict on the natural world, on flora and fauna. Oddly I can’t find anything online that does that. We spent a lot of the weekend, actually, talking about bats, frogs, butterflies, the sound of cicadas. On the way down the mountain we passed a stationary deer, and it was – unsurprisingly – quite magical. We drove past and it stood alert in a pose which was simultaneously full of movement and perfectly still. Unmoving, and yet taut with the expectation of flight.
Here are a few photos from the afternoon.
This Sunday afternoon, I sat outside the lovely Berthom bar, in central Strasbourg, with my friends Vic, Alec, Ant, Anne-Sophie and Rich. We actually stumbled upon the bar about eight months ago and immediately fell in love with it; the stylish font on the sign, the dazzling menu of beers, the dark alcoves and friendly waiting staff. This time, barely recovered from clambering breathlessly up hundreds of steps (and 66 metres) to the viewing platform of Strasbourg Cathedral, we collapsed gratefully into our seats and ordered:
A Maredsous 6 Blonde and a Bel Pils, for me. The former a very refreshing Belgian beer, slightly sweet and dry, with a nice, burnt, orange colour, the latter a plain but hugely drinkable pilsener from the Duvel stable.
A Faro Lindemans and another Maredsous 6 Blonde for Vic, who (rightly) found the former – a Belgian Lambic beer – unbearably syrupy, although it also had a counterbalancing (but not very pleasant) sourness, too. The latter, as mentioned above, made up for the ordering faux-pas.
A couple of strong beers for Ant; I forget what the first was, but it was a heavy, dark, bitter concoction (and very nice for it). The second was the dark variety of the first beer I had – a Maredsous 8 Brune which was lovely – malty, thick, and laced with something spicy. Both these beers were 8% ABV and upwards. Brills.
A very sweet, light, fruity Pêcheresse for Anne-Sophie, which came – like all the beers at Berthom – with a really beautiful label. And I can’t recall exactly which beers Alec and Rich had, but I recall a very pale Vedett Extra White sat on the table, and also another brune, so thick and dry it was essentially stout. There may have been more.
Given false confidence by all this booze, we took these (very transparent) photographs of a guy we liked the look of. He totally knew.
It’s been a really lovely bank holiday down here in Sussex; Dan came to stay from distant Reading and we had lots of fun street partying, buying records, talking to environmentalists, listening to talks on radical dandyism, drinking flat whites, watching our friends play us songs in the park, playing bar-billiards and, of course, knocking back lots of Doom Bar.
Here are some photographic highlights – click to enlarge.
Thanks to Martha Rose, Do You Feel What I Feel Deer and Laura Hocking for the weekend’s musical accompaniment.
Nothing in Marseille was a disappointment, in that the city was everything I expected and a bit more – a bit more relaxed, a bit friendlier, a bit hipper, a bit more beautiful. But I did expect something from the daily market – held down at Vieux Port each morning – which it didn’t quite deliver. But it was nothing more than size; and the fact that it was smaller than anticipated – just a row of perhaps ten stalls set against the waterside – didn’t in any way reduce the amount of colour or life. Indeed, with most stalls stocking a still-wriggling haul, life was in no shortage.
The fish themselves were a wonderful variety of colours, and magnificently ugly. We seem to be obsessed with eating beautiful fish in the UK – Waitrose’s fish counter is a measured display of smooth, silver scaled treats. Here in Marseille, I discovered, they draw little distinction between the perfect, shimmering form of a sardine and a wonderful series of red, blotchy, lumpy, out of proportion little fellers – heads bigger than their bodies, fins apparently replaced with malformed little wings, twisted at the edges like loose leaves of lollo rosso.
The nicest sight of all was the fisherman, unloading fresh catches and untangling nets. The most compelling the fish surgery; heads getting roughly seperated from bodies on blood-stained plastic trays. Seagulls – lacking the rude manners of Brighton’s flock – waited patiently for the remains to be discarded into the water.
“You know”, I said to Lyndsey on Saturday afternoon, sat on the beach at Catalans, just along the coast from central Marseilles, “if I miraculously earn myself a decent pay rise at some point in the next few years, I’m not going to spend a penny of it on improving my day-to-day life. No upscaling the flat and paying more rent. No wardrobe renovation. No splurges at Resident Records. I’m not going to change a thing EXCEPT that I’ll use whatever the raise brings in to fund a sequence of citybreaks through the year”.
Could there be a better way of spending that money, after all? I think we all spend far too much of our time weighed down by domestic concerns, and where once I could put emotional distance between a week and a weekend, too often now I find one bleeding into another. A weekend away does wonders. Not just geographical distance but pyschological space.
We decided to go away for two nights quite late last week, and I’m very glad we did.
And glad we chose Marseilles, too. One doesn’t automatically equate the month of March with Mediterranean sun, so although the forecast was good I hesitated before plumping for a weekend in France’s southernmost city. But actually the weather was great, and Marseilles – so often characterised as Paris’s unruly, chaotic little brother – was simultaneously sumptuously beautiful and thrillingly edgy.
Our plane touched down around midday on Friday; and Marseilles airport is a funny little place. It’s not exactly tinpot, for it’s a major hub, but it’s all exposed wires and undecorated walls; steel barriers and customs sheds. The bus into the city immediately demonstrated that for all that Marseilles is a Mediterranean city, Southern France is a great deal more verdant than Spain or Portugal.
Yet the city itself is resplendently decked out in the colours of the Med; eggshell white, olive, mustard, cornflower and terracotta. It is immediately rather scruffier than Paris, and walking down from the Gare Saint-Charles it was hard not to notice – with not the least bit of discomfort – how few pink-white faces there were. Outside coffee shops and tea-houses groups of men sat pulling at cigarettes and tiny coffees, dressed in the uniforms of arab Marseilles; a moustache and a Fez for those over 40, a tracksuit for younger generations.
Turning down to Vieux-Port, all begins to change – the buildings smarten up and more and more white faces appear – but the general feel of Marseilles is integrated rather than segregated; it’s a lively city, ethnically, with huge numbers of Italians, Armenians, Algerians and Tunisians. Like most ports, it feels like a working city (despite the fact that it boasts the country’s highest unemployment), and we spent three days pretty much without hearing another English accent. The odd surly waitor aside – of course – I found the whole place exceptionally welcoming; blunter, warmer and a great deal more laidback than Paris.
Having traversed the Port, with its fleet of lovely white-sailed fishing boats, and wandered up into the stunningly picturesque streets of Le Panier – the historic district North of the harbour which Hitler dynamited, having declared it “a mass of criminals, under-humans and saboteurs” – we sat out on the balcony at La Caravelle (34 Quai du Port, 13002 Marseilles), a small bar at Hôtel de Ville: one of the few buildings in the area which – happily – Hitler spared. I knocked back a couple of small, strong lagers and nibbled on delicious olives while Lyndsey merrily embarked on a run of mohitos which would eventually take us from bar to bar and decimate our plans for an early start to our Saturday.
In Bar Marengo (21 Rue Saint Saëns, 13001 Marseille), an unadorned bar where little distraction is provided from the serious business of drinking, we topped up our glasses and tried out our French on the incredibly friendly barman. Lyndsey started each sentence hesitantly (“Bonsoir. Je voudrais une pression et un mohito”) before transitioning seamlessly into flirtatious Spanish.
Around the corner, in Polikarpov (24 Cours Honoré d’Estienne d’Orves, 13001 Marseilles) the bar-staff forgot to charge us for cocktails and danced heedlessly around to the Talking Heads (“realisant mon espoir / je me lance, vers la gloire”) while we held our empty glasses out towards them, pleadingly. Somewhere along the way we had decided it was too late to eat and simply resolved to order more cocktails.
I’m back in Brighton after a couple of pretty wonderful days in Marseilles; me and my girlfriend decided a last minute city break was in order, both as a celebration of my having resolved a precarious job situation, and in order to recharge our batteries with a bit of sun. Sun in March is, of course, hard to secure – but Marseilles, a fantastically vibrant city on the edge on France’s Mediterranean coast, provided it in spades; so we spent two days walking, eating, drinking, and basking as the Mistral – a cool wind which rushes down from the Southern Alps – met the heat at Vieux Port, a gloriously serene harbour which is right at the centre of the city.
There was plenty more than just the port, of course – but for now here it is; as nice a focal point for a city as any I’ve yet encountered.
This first image was taken just off Chichester canal at lunch time – moments after I pressed the shutter I was rocking back on my heels, attempting to prevent my camera from a comprehensive slobbering. Luckily the animal diverted his attention to my face at the last minute. The second image – the ducks laid off. Luckily.
It’s a grey, drizzly day in Chichester. If I understood white balance better I could do something with that sky.
Last Sunday was perhaps the first real sunny day of 2011; and not just bright – in pockets of calm when the wind fell, it was warm and faintly blissful sat down on the beach, scuffing my shoes through sand watching four Italian men play volleyball in the artificial beach outside The World Famous Pump Room. Warm enough to enjoy an ice cream, warm enough to sit basking watching the ball fly back and forth while dogs, restrained on leashes, looked on eagerly.
A good photographer needs to be good at framing, sure. And a good photographer also needs to be able to use the technology in his reach to get the best shot possible. That’s a given. But most of all – and I bet this is something that David Bailey says all the time – a good photographer really needs, once in a while, to stumble across a seagull perched on a digger, pulling a boat. The rest is just luck.
My dad took this, not me. I’m plundering his Mac in search of things to fill up my blog with.
I spotted this fine fellow on my way to Alec and Vic’s on Xmas Morning. Resisted the temptation to scoop him up and present him as a festive gift.
Kids wander round these campuses barely looking at the mountains surrounding them. I guess they get so used to them. I can’t. I nearly bumped into about four people walking round the campuses, head (almost literally) in the clouds. If it wasn’t so cold here, I might refuse to leave.
University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah.
Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.
It’s funny, I’d never dream of walking around Brighton taking photographs of graffiti, much less post the results here, but whenever I’m away I’m transfixed by paintings, doodles and blocks of colour on walls and doorways. I have a very vivid memory of going on holiday to Lisbon when I was young, with my parents and our family friends, John and Wendy, and spending an entire afternoon dashing enthusiastically around the city taking photographs of the walls – communist graffiti and ripped Whitesnake posters.
I spotted this downtown in Salt Lake City; not even sure what the caption means, in all honesty.
I’m writing this in a pub in the West Village, not far from the Hudson. I arrived in New York on Tuesday, and since then I’ve noticed one disturbing but inevitable thing. Each time I come here – this is my fourth trip – it feels less like a wonderful holiday, where I socialise a little with my American colleagues, and more like a work trip, where I temper a concentrated burst of quite testing work with moments of reprieve in the city. That’s not to say that I’m not enjoying myself, but it’s a pity of sorts to discover that New York is not a playground, after all.
It’s autumnal here, but not so dramatic, in the New England sense. The trees are dipping towards the colours of rust though, inevitably. Tomorrow I’m going to head up to Central Park, which is invariably the part of my trip I never plan for, but often enjoy the most. Other things – watching the skyline from Dumbo, shopping in Tribeca, I may have to leave ‘til next time. Thus far I’ve not really engaged with the city’s wider spaces, so it’s been a few days of packed delicatessens in SoHo, busy bookshops, bustling storefronts in Chinatown. I’ve sought refuge, to an extent, in the fact that I now know this city relatively well, so I can head straight to places which are reliably lovely – the Housing Works Bookstore, Shakespeare and Co and McNally Jackson for books, Other Music for records. Here – the White Horse on Hudson St – for an end-of-work drink.
The abiding memory of this trip, I think, will be the election. It’s not my job, as a liberal outsider, to weigh into these matters, but it’s hard not to conclude that America is making an incredible mistake jettisoning the spirit of optimism that came with Obama’s election. I’m prepared to accept that he has not been the revolutionary leader people were looking for, but it’s such a failure of the imagination to elect someone on the basis that they might deliver change, then judge them so early, when its seems so obvious that change of the nature that Obama promised would take so many years. As is so often the case, self-interest guides the electorate – it does in England, too.
I watched the election results come in – some of them – in a bookshop in SoHo. New York, like California, I bet, feels pretty weird at the moment. The coasts must wonder at the middle, must feel so separate. At work my boss wearily complained ‘I’ve decided to become a Republican – it’s so much easier’.
Yesterday, before I headed up to the University of Columbia, I checked in to the Strand Bookstore off Union Square to get some books, and spotted this graffiti on the walk up from Astor Place. I guess this guy – a lonely conservative in liberal NY – feels like his fellow New Yorkers do, when they check the Midterm results.
Me and Lyndsey went up to London at the weekend to watch an episode of Miranda being filmed; my first time to the BBC headquarters and I was very excited, even though it took us an age to get there – Sunday service meant that our train was routed via Lewes and the journey was interminable; an experience not helped by my decision to spend it reading Saul Bellow’s ‘Dangling Man’, a super little novel but counter-productive if one is looking to escape, rather than consolidate, a feeling of stasis and ennui. In the end I resorted to taking photographs out of the window.
When we got – finally – up to White City we found that, of course, the recording had been cancelled at the last minute; no explanation nor forewarning. It was maddening; others had apparently reacted tearfully, but something about the long journey had prepared me for the fact somehow. We had, in the end, a nice evening regardless, wandering through Covent Garden eating ice-cream. We eventually found a pub off Leicester Square which, to our mutual amazement and joy, had Brew Dog Punk IPA on tap – making up at a stroke for the earlier disappointments. (Until the long journey back).
Anyway, here’s the view at East Croydon, on our way in.
Me and Lyndsey were playing this during the Question Time debate the other night – we each drew lots and competed over who’d get the most references. This is basically how I’ve got through the Labour Leadership contest – bingo and drinking games.
For what it’s worth, I thought Ed Balls was the clear winner. (Not of the bingo, of the debate).
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