How very British is that? The photo just above is of the quietly flowing Ripon canal, upon which the rain is gently beating down.
More man-made flowing water: A lock on a different canal, the Leeds -Liverpool Canal, near Gargrave: and a detail from a different lock – er – somewhere else.
No waterfalls on a canal. To find those, you need to find trainee waterfalls, like this little torrent in Cantabria, or these jumping, weaving and bumbling ones on the River Wharfe at Grassington, and the River Swale near Muker.
Then there’s the sea: a winter sea here, at West Wittering: and a summer sea at Premià de Mar. All that equipment tells you the sea had been flowing rather too much, and nicking the beach. The citizens wanted their sands back.
But if you’re going to do this, or any other challenge, what you need most is a photographer to record these images for you. Here he is. I can’t use his photos, because he went off, unidentified, taking all his images with him.
You know the sort of day. When things just go right. When, perhaps unexpectedly, you have your camera with you just when one of the flighty, nervy Neighbourhood Squirrels is posing nicely, as ours was one day last week.
When, camera in hand, you manage to point-and-shoot at just the right moment. These images come from a long-past day in the Farne Islands when the Arctic Terns, frantic to protect their young, wheeled and dive-bombed overhead, giving chance after chance for action-packed shots even to a strictly amateur type like me. We had no idea where their nests and babies were and certainly weren’t going to go looking.
There were those red squirrels in Málaga, who managed to forget me for just long enough for me to whip my camera out …
Or that heron in Córdoba. It wasn’t so much the heron I was afraid of losing, as this collage of evening light.
As you read this, I may be on a train to London. No not THIS train, silly. Something far less romantic, which may or may not run on time. But which will not bring me to journey’s end covered in soot and smelling of coal. Signing off for a few days.
British readers! Did you take part in The Big Plastic Count last week? We did. It involved tallying together every single bit of single-use plastic that we bought that week. The yoghourt pot. And the plastic film that covered it beneath the lid if it was a a big pot. The plastic net bag that the satsumas were in. The cellophaney-plastic that the package of pasta/rice/dried fruit/coffee/tea/you name it was packaged in. The plastic disc wedged into the lid of the (plastic) pot of kimchi. The cling film parcelling up the cheese, bought loose from the cheese counter. And so on.
Our haul for the week
So why did we do it? Well. The Big Plastic Count is a Citizen Science project aimed at collecting evidence on household plastic waste to pressure government and supermarkets to take action. It challenges the idea that solving the crisis is purely a personal responsibility, arguing for systemic change to reduce plastic production.
So we and hundreds of like-minded individuals, school students, cubs, brownies, scouts, guides, U3A groups and so on tracked our plastic waste for one week to build a realistic picture of how much plastic is thrown away and what happens to it, highlighting that much less is recycled than widely believed.
Past results showed that only 12% of UK plastic waste is recycled, while 45% is incinerated, 25% is landfilled, and 17% is exported.
Honestly, we try to be plastic free. We buy unpackaged goods where we can, use our local refill shop, never use products like clingfilm. But still we assembled 18 pieces of plastic last week.
Litter is a whole other issue. Living in the country, as we do, albeit along a main road, the quantity of plastic bottles, crisp packets and other packaging that we see on any roadside stroll is truly shocking. The same applies to a beachside walk.
Local litter
On a personal level, this audit encouraged me to redouble our efforts to cut out single-use plastic. Whether our results, gathered countrywide, have any effect on either government or supermarkets remains to be seen. And whether the world will eventually be knee-deep in plastic waste, as we ingest a daily diet of micro-plastics also remains to be seen.
A scene in America; courtesy of Documerica, via Unsplash
Team London and I visited Bradford on Friday to spend time in its Science and Media Museum. And here we found Feathers McGraw, anti-hero star of The Wrong Trousers and Murder Most Fowl. Surely he should still be locked up at His Majesty’s Pleasure, instead of gazing out of the windows of the museum?
The British Sovereignhas an Official Birthday in order to conduct the Trooping the Colour at a suitable time of year. Our family: or at least the London and Spanish branches and us, had an Official Christmas at a suitable time in December: and we went to West Sussex together. Here was the winter seaside. A couple of these shots are natural monochromes because – well – the weather was naturally monochrome.
And that herring gull I showed the other day seemed to attract a few fans – as a bit of an anti-hero, I guess. So here he is again, on sentry duty.
Here’s a window to cheer on a Monday morning. You’ll find it in Chichester Cathedral, and it’s designed by Marc Chagall the Jewish Modernist painter, who enjoyed working with stained glass too. You’ll find his windows in churches in France, Germany, England and the USA, as well as in Jewish settings. Essentially, this window illustates Psalm 150, a hymn of praise to God suggesting He be praised – noisily – with every instrument to be found, as well as by singing and dancing. That’s what this window illustrates.
Chichester Cathedral came with surprises. This quintessentially English place of worship was built, as so many English cathedrals were, between the 11th and 14th centuries. So it was unexpected to find so many works of art from recent years there: a startlingly bright tapestry designed by John Piper; ‘Noli me tangere’ by Graham Sutherland; murals by Hans Feibusch, exiled from Nazi Germany in 1933; the ‘Reconciliation Tapestry’ designed by German artist Ursula Benker-Schirmer and woven partly in Germany, partly in England tells the story of Saint Richard and is a symbol of reconciliation between Britain and Germany after WWII.
Chichester CathedralJohn PiperHans FeibuschThe Reconciliation TapestryGraham Sutherland: ‘Noli me tangere.’
It’s November, so leaves and petals in the UK have largely done a bunk. Still, maybe I can find a little spring and summer time cheer in the archives, and fulfill my obligations to Monochrome Madness‘ host this week, Dawn; as well as to Becky’s NovemberShadows.
The header photograph includes both: tulip leaves shafting upwards, and topped by the simple clean lines of the tulip flower.
For the rest, it’s a miscellany that took my fancy. But all are either in shadow, or casting a shadow. So first … leaves…
… and flowers…
And finally, a doughty dandelion, flourishing on a brick wall in the gardens of Beningbrough Hall, near York. How it nourished all those leaves and petals is quite beyond me.
From Pyrenees to Pennines 
You must be logged in to post a comment.