Spring is on the air. It may be a fake Spring but Sunshine + Daffodils is a hint towards better things.
Posters for a genuine Spring exhibition are another sign that we are on the homeward stretch towards Spring 2024.
1200 Blogs of unfocussed ponderings. A daily pondering pilgrimage, pulling a nugget of nonsense out of my daily life. A few hundred words and some pictures tossed into the abyss of the internet. Landing on the devices of friends, family and strangers. Thank you for taking the time to ponder along with me.
Spring, for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere is just in the next room.
Today was the first time I heard the word sunsetting to describe something being cancelled or discontinued.
The context was President Trump ‘sunsetting’ Equality, Diversity and Inclusion legislation and the consequent race by business leaders to ditch EDI to gain favour with the new president.
Even in writing that sentence it was easy for me to write the more common word ‘ditch’ for ending something. I could have used ‘dump’.
By using the word sunsetting are the president, big business and the reporting media polishing a turd.
Sunsets and therefore sunsetting suggest a gentle transition towards the bible-blackness of night. A benign feeling of anticipated change.
Unexpected change doesn’t quite fit the sunsetting phrase either.
No lover scorned is ever going to suggest that they were sunsetted.
Words are a constant source of fascination. I love them and sunsets.
What a difference a week makes. Last week I was happy to have created an image that shows rainfall on a February Day. Yesterday someone was brutally attacked, at night near the bandstand and this location is currently swathed in police tape.
I immediately feel differently about an inanimate object that was created for pleasure, and wished I had represented the bandstand more joyfully. I suppose rain and bad people are inevitable in life. The impact of negativity always seems to leave a disproportionate mark on landscape and our minds. When the police tape is gone I will go and take another photo and make sure I create something that reflects the joy that this structure deserves.
Monday’s blogs are either early or late. Not because I am sleeping on the job like this sloth. Mondays we do childcare and choose not to be on our phones when she is around. So a blog is written early or late.
This is the late variety while our small person sleeps. I love this picture from a friend’s recent holiday in Costa Rica.
I am very fond of sloths and envious of their lifestyle under normal circumstances.
But dozing like a sloth in a tree and proper pondering is not for me today.
Sunday morning and a gift of church bells, should you choose to watch the video above.
Today’s ponder was seeded in my head by the smallest of coincidences. Saturday found us on a back street walk at Ashburton, a market town on the edge of Dartmoor. We were pulled in the direction of the church by the bells ringing. On the way I caught sight of this blue plaque.
When we arrived in the churchyard we saw a small crowd of beautifully dressed wedding guests having a cheeky last minute smoke before going into the church.
Something Sir Walter, despite being entirely responsible, would never have seen during his stay in Ashburton. Smoking tobacco was only an upper class habit in England until the late 19th century and did not become commonly used by all of society until the end of the Industrial Revolution.
And with a delicious coincidence, there is a mural of Sir Walter actually pondering, overlooking the pub where he spent his last night of freedom. Before being locked up for twelve years in the Tower of London.
His ponders must have been far more consequential than mine ever are.
Not pissing off James 1st might have been a good thing to ponder. And after 12 years in jail and 3 years of freedom, not pissing off James 1st a second time would have been a prudent ponder in my humble opinion.
I picked up this postcard at The Archaeology Museum (Acropolis) of Athens in early autumn.
I’ve added the heart because it has become a favourite image. A girl standing with her dad.
I am fairly certain I don’t have a similar image of myself with my dad. Not for any estrangement or complex family dynamics, but because in our family my dad was the photographer and therefore never in pictures.
This is an almost unimaginable concept in a world where smartphones allow everyone to be a photographer.
In our spare room there is a big blue Ikea bag of family albums to be gone through before I put them back up in the roof. I can’t say I hold out much hope of finding a father-daughter picture of us together until I was in my teens.
In pondering and googling this thought I found a really interesting article which I have shared below.
And just like that I have found a long form blog about artiness that I really enjoy. I like New World art writing for the same reason that New World wines are so interesting. No snobbishness, less entitled twattery.
Pondering and googling and a day walking in the sun.
It makes me think and that is always a good thing.
I have been pondering my digital footprint and to a degree my ultimate digital ghost. Mostly because of articles that I have read or heard in the media. To be honest I am quite baffled by the thinking. The blog is probably the deliberate ,majority of my footprint and ghost, but what do I know. What is done is probably done. Nature put my thoughts into perspective a little.
My digital and real-life shadow appears on the surprisingly small root system of a fallen oak tree. Discovered this morning on a dog walk. Maybe 300 years old, this tree was taken down by a recent storm. The old tree left a surprisingly shallow footprint.
Like me the tree has children.
So close their roots probably touched.
Do trees grieve a brutal loss in a storm? Do they have ghosts or worry about their footprint, real or digital.
Funny things to ponder on a lovely day in February. I sense my digital footprint is actually quite shallow. So no need to overthink things on a sunny day.
Is this timeline random?
I have no intention of creating a similar one , my girth and corresponding contemporary facts will forever remain a mystery. Or maybe it would be fun to try.
I’ve finally cracked a small achievement in my creative wishlist for the winter. A bandstand in winter can be a forlorn thing. Useful only to shelter people and dogs from the rain. But bandstands in themselves are quite heart-warming things. Memories are made in and around bandstands. Music is the obvious #1. But they are so much more. A meeting point for friends and lovers. A hang-out for teenagers grappling with hormones and impending adulthood. Parents with buggies trying to form useful, supportive friendships with strangers ; who just happened to conceive a child at a similar time. Somewhere to think about friends and family in other realms.
Essential to me, in this image, is the ever present rain and the complete banishment of greige. Even though that was my reality.
Yesterday was a fabulous February weather day. Fabulous because the sun was up and greige was banished. I was on a mission to take a bad photograph for my ongoing dabbling at image-manipulating. The day itself was full of other stuff. Shopping, child care and book club. So my moments of image manipulation were snatched in the rare quiet moments of the day. Time poor is sometimes a good thing. At the early stages I am. happy with my multilayered image.
Not quite sure that I am where I want to be image wise. But sometimes the enemy of good is better. and multi -layered is the tenuous link for this blog.
I woke myself up this morning to get out of a multi-layered dream. Certain that I did not want to be where my subconscious had dumped me.
Like many people Airbnb is in my travel portfolio.
For reasons unknown my early morning dream had me checking into an Airbnb late at night above a coffee shop. I awoke in the dream ( Probably when the first real life alarm went off) to find my bed in the midst of the coffee shop with people stepping around my bed with coffee and breakfast items. Seemingly oblivious or being discrete about having to step around my bed. It was definitely a contemporary 2025 coffee shop but the disturbing thing for me was not that I was in bed, but that many of the customers were smoking indoors and there was an unmistakable smoke fug filling the room. Just as used to happen before indoor smoking in public places was banned. I quickly woke myself up.
In my waking life I have never given such a thing a moment’s thought. Where and why on earth do our brains write such bonkers scripts.
I wonder if my creative thinking is all about layers so my dream world is being a bit layered and book club was about parallel lives.
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