Street View

Peebles is now on Google Earth Street View !
Have you noticed that wherever Google goes, it's summer ?

Anyway, it's worth a look at our pretty summer town.

Filigree

You get the picture.

More flooding photos

The River Tweed in spate.

You can click on any of these photos to get a full-size view.

Scroll down for more.

Thongor and the Boulders of Doom

Last weekend we drove north from Dunedin, stopping at a fine secondhand shop called The Oddity where I picked up all but two of the Thongor series of chronicles - you know the ones - for a few dollars. The titles tell all:
The Wizard of Lemuria (Thongor the Barbarian faces the vengeance of the Dragon Kings)
Thongor In The City Of Magicians
Thongor At The End Of Time (joyfully, not the last of the series !)
and Thongor Fights The Pirates of Tarakus
Several coffees and junk shops later we meandered through Oamaru.

Somewhere up that coast we stopped to view the Moeraki Boulders, an extraordinary collection of spherical rocks each about the height of a man and lying in the surf on a narrow sandy beach. Other tourists wandered, as we did, in a bemused way along the tight strip as waves broke over these dinosaur egg alien pod gallstones, as if luggage had been washed up from an unseen tragedy. I took photos, sat on one and wondered, as I often do, how to respond to them. Thongor would have known what to do.

In Oamaru two motels diverged on a wide street and we took the one less travelled by. It was, you may say, satisfactory.

Thereafter we headed upstream along the Waitaki river, stopping at Peebles.

That's right. Peebles.

The long road to Silloth

On Saturday we finished burying my Grandmother.

She died in 2005 and most of her ashes lie in an unremarkable banked field of wild grasses and young trees near those of my Uncle Chris, who died of cancer some ten years before her. But some of her remained in a small enamelled container, travelling about with my Uncle Andy on the back of his motorbike, tucked in his luggage as he packed his other belongings and moved to his new home aboard a boat in Dover.

A few weeks ago she was collected by my Mum and after a scenic tour of Essex, Wiltshire and York they made the trip North here to Peebles, where she rested until this past weekend.

My Grandmother Mary was widowed in 1943 when my Grandfather Bill piloted his warplane over the Solway Firth after a test flight and collided with a young Canadian flyer. They had been married seven years, my Mother was four, my Uncle Chris not yet born. Bill was buried in a tiny churchyard in Causewayhead, near the Victorian seaside town of Silloth, in a plot of what became thirty or so RAF graves amongst the local dead. He had been stationed at the huge RAF base which dominated the area and whose runway and aircraft hangars are still there today, overgrown and reoccupied by farms and local businesses.

Mourning would have been a perfunctory exercise during that war. My Grandmother was moved out of her RAF accommodation in Wiltshire several days later, became a mother of two six months on, filed the telegram and the few letters of condolence in a brown envelope which I found amongst papers and photos in a cake tin after she died.

So last weekend three generations of us undertook to reunite my Grandmother and my Grandfather 66 years after they were unexpectedly parted. Silloth is a little over two hours from Peebles and Carlisle was a pleasant overnight stop, including a walk through deserted streets of ornate Victorian brick houses to a downtown restaurant. The easy 30-minute drive to Silloth next morning lengthened to an hour and a half as we failed several times to achieve the critical velocity needed to escape Carlisle's gravitational pull. Finally on the right B-road west we met a 'Road Closed' notice. An elaborate sequence of detour signs took us through every village and hamlet in Northwest Cumbria before depositing us back on the same B-road half a mile and forty minutes later.

It was my Grandmother's last journey, the long road to Silloth and back to her first love, on the day before the anniversary of his death. She took the scenic route; her habit in life. It was fitting, humourous and poignant that we meandered through the same villages and byways visited by my Grandfather in the last few weeks of his life, searching with increasing exasperation for local accommodation for his wife and little daughter to join him on his extended posting in Cumbria.

In the 1980s my Grandmother finally learned what it was he was doing up there. An official secret for all those years, he was a test pilot on a programme developing a bomb that would bounce across water and explode upon impact with a dam wall. It became known as the Bouncing Bomb, delivered by the Dam Busters squadron, and Bill was one of its unsung casualties.

He is buried in Causewayhead Cemetery in the shadow of two wartime aircraft hangars. Buried next to him is a pilot from New Zealand, on the other side a Canadian. The plot is simple, well-kept, quiet. By his grave is a stand of blues irises, one of my Grandmother's favourite flowers.

We laid the last remnants of her in the bed with the irises, by the headstone. An old photograph of three smiling young people watched over this. In its battered silver frame it had stood on the mantlepiece in my Great-Aunt Elsie's house; her brother Bill, her friend Mary and herself standing in a roadway by a church, arms across each other's shoulders.

We recalled some stories, shed some tears, and I walked away with a sense of having done a good thing, somehow enriching my own soft earth, and of honouring our forebears.

chalk lines and jigsaws

You would think there would a limited number of ways to arrange a few rooms on a postage stamp of land, but the thick and growing file of drawings on the table suggests otherwise. Our house planning goes in fits and starts, along with enthusiasm, but it feels like we're getting closer to a final plan. This week I was marking out areas with chalk spray to see just how little garden we might have left, and mentally earmarking trees for recycling. A friend produced a photoshopped view of the plot with his own house - a three-storey wooden tower - on our plot. It works, surprisingly, because it matches the large stone villa (our old house) and reduces its dominance over the plot. I hadn't appreciated just how much our old place looms over the plot until he pointed it out.

Meanwhile we've made little cut-outs of the rooms we envisage and are trying to jigsaw them into a workable shape. Tricky, and rather contrived as they should really be 3D. Still, it gives the impression of progress.

Driftwood

Descent

Celtic Dragon

Moray

Rescue

Here are driftwood photos I've been editing.

A life in pictures

This week a friend passed on to me a collection of several hundred slides taken by a distant uncle of his over forty-odd years. When the man died his slides and old camera gear ended up in my friend's attic, emerging this week as bin-fodder and intercepted by me.

The slides, mostly taken in Edinburgh, divide into distinct categories. Many are up-close images of flowers, leaves, and a few of trees, clouds etc, all taken in the Botanical Gardens. There's a collection of monochromes of pavements, snow, shadows and various textured surfaces, and the other set is of dressed mannequins in fashionable shop windows on Princes Street.

This last set is what caught my eye; striking and complex images involving the dressed models, the lettering on the window's surface, the reflections in the shop window of Edinburgh Castle and of people passing by. He used high quality lenses so the light and the depth of field is superb, the models are shot to seem animated or engaged in conversation with each other. The reflections show the different layers existing simultaneously, overlaid on to a single static image. The older ones depict 1950s fashions, green Edinburgh omnibuses, people in hats and overcoats.

Looking through them on an old slide projector I tried to picture this man, this distant uncle seeing the finished picture in his head, finding the right angles and setting up all the manual controls of his Contax camera. What was he seeing in these images, what were they for ?

I read an article this week titled 'Don't Die With Your Music Still In You' and I've been thinking about how creativity flows through us. I wonder what he did with his slides, beyond selecting and arranging them in carousels, storing them meticulously in archive boxes. I felt privileged to have seen something of his creativity.

RSS

I'm enjoying RSS feeds. The Mac's Mail programme can subscribe to these via the little orange RSS icon on many websites. Every time the website is updated with new material a descriptive headline (or sometimes the whole article) is downloaded to my RSS reader. I check to see what might be of interest before looking at the website.

Currently I'm subcribed to Curious Read, Lifehacker, Indexed, BBC PM programme, and Zen Habits, amongst others.

You can even subscribe to this blog, and get a note downloaded when I post new stuff. Then again, why would you ?

Lomo

I have an old lomo camera which I picked up in a charity shop years ago. Never used it, but they seemingly have a cult following for the particular look they produce. It was unintended, apparently, a design fault but gained a following. Photoshop, of course, can be made to reproduce this effect, so here's my first attempts:

Local walk

Harry Lauder's walking stick

Postcard

Sleeping Beauty's perhaps

Bright van

Wedding Cake snow

Snow Odyssey

Squirrel verandah

auditioning for Mr Tumnus

winter blossom

Pix of today's snowfall !

A Gift From Siberia

It's three months on and we're in our tenth month of Winter. Today the snow arrived from the Steppes, bringing London to a standstill and dropping a light fall on us here. The heavy stuff arrives tomorrow apparently.

Here are pics from this afternoon's brief foray into the Arctic temperatures. Photo sessions last only as long as feeling remains in my fingers, the controls being impossible to operate with gloves.

It had to be today that I had a job interview in Edinburgh, of course, opening the curtains this morning to this, and the stern warnings on the radio to avoid all unnecessary travel. It was necessary, needless to say, and they thanked me for making the trip, though it's unclear whether this will be enough to secure me the post.

Three months on we are settled in our new home, welcomed warmly by friends, neighbours and even strangers who have heard our story. A fine return, and the opportunity to make a new place for ourselves.

The job ? Wait 'n' see if I get it first.

Just because I can

Now you can see how many people have visited my blog (about 6) and where they are (can you guess ?). And you can see where most of the photos were taken, on a handy map. Just click on the photos to go to the online album.

Then again, why would you ?

Roads paved with gold

The best view of the New England Fall was on the Massachusetts Turnpike, the main road out of Boston. It appears to cut through a forest of maple, sycamore, beech and aspen trees, all of which are 'on the turn', blazing yellow, gold and orange in the brilliant morning sun. It was breathtaking. The Mohawk Trail, a fifty mile stretch of road through equally pretty forest, had the charm of the canopy of trees over the road, and the entertainment of a bizarre gift shop at the hill summit which sold such oddities as souvenirs of San Francisco, rabbit pelts and truly terrible coffee.

Another city, another budget hotel. Yesterday we took the subway into Boston, visiting Trinity Church and walking through the Beacon Hill district experiencing the English familiarity of this most symbolic place for American Independence. Charles Street raised a smile, and gave us the chance to photograph some of the shots you see in the slideshow. The Science Museum was closing within an hour of our getting there, but we hit the gift shop and Simon enjoyed icecream chilled with liquid nitrogen. We finished up in Quincy markets, sitting at the curbside on a concrete rotunda eating excellent pizza slices and listening to a full orchestra playing in the street, surrounded by market stalls selling all manner of things. Bustling with people, the air filled with the smells of every kind of food imaginable, a clear cool night with a bright moon to finish our short visit to New England.

How many ways can you photograph a waterfall ?

Some new pix added showing Niagara. Click on the pictures themselves to go to the web album and bigger versions. Look for the No Smoking sign. Highlight of the day for me.