Bills Posts

I managed tov get out for a walk today. It was a route the followed paths within Gosport that I am very familiar with. I must admit though that it was a bit frustrating. Now it is probable (very probable) that we will be moving to Dorset in about a years time. I have spent a fair bit of time, mostly on Google maps working out driving distances around the county, and it is the case that there are only a very few areas that I would need to re-charge seven if only for a little bit for the return journey. The idea being to visit as many parts of the county as I can without having to re-charge the car. That really amounts to an out bound leg of 50 – 60 miles. (100-120 miles round trip). That really does cover most of the county.

Now my frustration from today’s walk relates to my not being able for some reason to do the same thing in Hampshire. Just to identify places I would like to visit, so that on any random weekend, I could just jump in the car and go for a drive with an view to visiting somewhere different.

A few weeks ago, we did exactly that, we went to Warsash. I wanted to visit a pub that had very close links to the preparations for D-Day. Warsash was interesting, and we had lunch in the pub, which was very nice, and it was a really nice trip out. I want to do more of those.

I really must do some more preparation, so that we can have other days out. That would be very nice.

It wasn’t raining this morning, so I was able to get out for my morning walk. I must admit, I have become a little bit jaded with photographing the high street. But, earlier today I watched a show from one of the photographers I follow on YouTube. It was about what to photograph when you can’t think of anything. His suggestion was to look for and photograph the alphabet. The thing is to learn to look.

Talking of looking. After I spend a bit of time on the Haslar Marina WaveGuard I walk over to the Cockle Ponds, as I enter the car park next to the ponds, I got into the habit of looking for the fox family that’s taken up residence there, just one of them this morning. There have been up to three. I couldn’t help noticing that the cockle ponds had a calm surface, except it wasn’t.

All over the pond were ripples like there were raindrops hitting the surface, but it wasn’t raining, so what was going on? As I started walking along the side of the pond, I noticed movement on the path, small things which I realised were jumping out of and into the pond, trouble is I couldn’t make out what it was.

I have this rather good app, which identifies plants, and fauna it told me I was looking at Decapods, which includes shrimps, and having taken a picture I could see what they were. There were literally thousands of them piling up on the edge of the path. I’d never seen anything like it.

As I was walking away, it was like the shrimps were trying to get away from me. I was reminded of the scene from The Hunt for Red October when the sub is being hounded there was a line of ripples rushing away from me. Again, something else I had never seen. A really interesting walk.

One of my regular magazines is Country Walking. Normally I really enjoy reading it, and make a point of reading cover to cover. For some reason I don’t appear to be enjoying this issue as much, and I can’t understand why. I will of course persist, especially as this is the first time I’ve encountered this.

Troubling is that the next magazine in my “schedule” has turned up and that means I have another magazine lined up ready to go. This one is Dorset Life and, like the county, is very photographic so I really look forward to reading that.

It also hasn’t helped that I have been getting to bed a little bit later than usual, which cuts in to my reading time, which. Means that by the time I am ready to settle in for a bit of reading, I am not that far from falling asleep. OK, so perhaps that tells I need to be a bit more disciplined about bedtime.

When did you buy your first MP3 player? I think it was probably around 2004-5. I bet yours was stuffed with music. Mine wasn’t. I had some music, but it has never been a great love, I know what I like and tend to stick with it.

Podcasts were a revelation, “radio” shows about topics that I was interested in, produced to a high quality on a regular basis. I had quite a list of them that I would listen to usually on my way to work, in the early days of the MP3 that was a two hour drive each way so my journeys were usually never boring, and passed much more quickly than I had a right to expect.

I still listen to podcasts, although the list has shrunk, and are not as regular as they used to be. Perhaps I should look in to that. In fact, I will do. Plus of course, I now don’t have a separate phone and MP3 player. Audio Books then are a bit different to podcasts, the main thing being that they are not free. But, for what i consider to be a reasonable price, I get one a month for a fixed price.

There are my old favourite Science Fiction; Larry Niven, Ben Bova, Arthur C Clarke and others and at the moment, I am listening to Jeffrey Archers The Clifton Chronicles a series of I think four books. I am on Book three and it is absolutely gripping.

Of course the problem comes when you finish a book early, I could pay the full price, or wait until the beginning of the month when I get the next credit. Which is why I can use podcasts to fill the gap. Hopefully.

Normally, I try to do two pieces of writing every day, during the week at least. One in the morning on FaceBook and the other here. They might both cover similar topics, but I try to give my self a bit more free reign on the artistic licence (that really is a euphemism for experimental, possibly/probably rubbish prose).

This mornings facebook efforts never made it in to the app, and resides still in my notes diary. This is because as previously mentioned, my prose are dreadful. Stilted, limited vocabulary with no feeling to them, very dry writing. You tell me, which is better;

I got up and left the house, it was 18C and there was very little wind, but there were a few drops of rain.

Or this one;

The stillness of the morning engulfed me in its warm embrace, the darkness of the receding light yielding to the grey clouds.

Personally, I think I prefer the second version, but its still not perfect. I think it needs practice. I did wonder if I should go back to the creative writing course. The first time I went, I did tell the tutor that I didn’t want to write fiction, but in reality hers was a creative fiction writing course as that was what everybody was doing. I just fell in with it, and my efforts were, well… Rubbish, no bones about it, completely lacking in wonderful flowery prose, and an absolutely abysmal story telling capability. Where I have been looking at Vlogging tutorials, the one thing they say is don’t compare yourself with others. And that is correct, don’t compare. inevitably, yours will be of a different standards, and comparing yourself to someone who is well established will only lead to disillusionment and disheartening.

I want to avoid that. But I do need to do something.

Joining North Cross Street, it was obvious that the golden time was imminent. The question in my mind was would it be gone by the time I reached the waterfront? It might be called the Golden Hour – but it doesn’t last that long. Plus the sky has to be right.

The bright band low in the background is the edge of the cloud bank. Luckily this yacht just happened to be passing just as I got in to position.

Every time I take a few days off and resume my regular walks, I know the town isn’t that different from the last time I walked, but every time it feels like I am renewing my acquaintance. It was a bit like that this morning.

As usual, when I woke up I really didn’t feel like getting up, but I was glad that I did. Even with the rain (there wasn’t much) it was very pleasant.

I didn’t do a post last night. It was a decision that I made partly because the wifi was a bit flakey, and the mobile signal was very poor for data.

We went on a Balloon ride, it was a Virgin balloon ride. Now normally I try not to talk about companies but I am more than happy to make an exception in this case.

I phoned Virgin a couple of months ago. I had been looking on the website and there wasn’t a flight arranged for the date I wanted and I thought I would phone to see if anything could be done. The girl I was speaking too put me on hold. Turns out she was phoning the pilot to see if he would do a flight, to which he agreed. When she came back to me and told me what she had done I’m afraid I became a bit emotional, she really didn’t need to do that.

The flight was perfect, the pilot superb, the weather ideal. The landing was perfect, so gentle that we didn’t even have to sit down there was a barely perceptible bump. It really could not have gone better. Now, this was the third flight that we have been on, we phone up, we book, flight goes ahead – we pretty much give it no more thought.

You can imagine then our shock when speaking to the other passengers to find that one couple had waited for eight years, another six years. Now, I could understand two or three years because of Covid, but eight years? Wow, like Wow.

I can remember very easily, because it is only just over a year ago that we bought a Nissan Leaf, a fully electric vehicle. Now, without going back over previous posts, I am confident that II have written about my frustrations with EVs and it extends mainly to the infrastructure. We encountered a time where we would probably want to charge the EV and yet the only chargers that were conveniently available were dedicated exclusively to Teslas.

Now, I ask you what kind of place installs a good bank of chargers that only one manufacturers car can use? Isn’t that just selfish? I don’t blame Tesla, they are looking after their customers. I do blame the owners of the facility and their shortsightedness, in my view anyway.

Now there is a charger that fits our car, but it is a couple of miles away, so I would have to make a special journey to get to it. I suppose in a way, that’s no different to having to find a garage to fill up with petrol.

Doesn’t stop it being frustrating though.

The frustration stems from a conflict between wanting to do a regular vlog and the amount of effort needed to produce one. It all starts with the idea, lets say some historical matter in the town, perhaps Henry Cort?

• Who was he?
• What did he do?
• How did he do it?
• Where did he do it?
• Why was what he did important?
• What are the after effects?

So now, that’s started me off with the wiki page.

I know that what he did was done, at least partly in Gosport. Sufficient for there to be a blue plaque dedicated to him. Unfortunately the plaque is covered by a banner for a charity. That’s both annoying and frustrating.

So, I have some research to do. Having started, I guess I had better do something about it.

There’s nothing wrong in an aesthetic sense with the header photo, I’m not calling it out as a good picture, but it is one of those pictures that I would routinely take whilst out and about on my morning walk.

That’s the thing about my morning walks, they are very “samey”. In fact, I think it was Einstein who defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result. It kind of almost holds true, except there are a couple of variables not least of which is the weather.

I follow a route most mornings. I do have a couple of minor variations, but it is pretty much the same. I’m not bored with the walk, it’s very convenient and suits my purpose. The point is that whilst I sometimes notice a detail but I do wonder how many opportunities that I am missing. I think it would be quite interesting to do the route with another person who is both a keen photographer and good. Just to see what opportunities they would find.

This all drives toward this very active perception I have that I have a not very active imagination or photographers eye, and it is that, not the walk, or the place that doesn’t have the opportunities.

One problem is, what can I do about it? This a bit frustrating.