Bills Posts

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.

This morning’s walk was quite delightful. There was the threat of rain, but not really much of a threat. Of course, if it did rain I was either not that far from home or shelter, and besides, having had so little recently it would have been quite nice to get naturally wet. As it happens it did rain, firstly just a very few minutes before i got home and so little as for it to be possible to count the raindrops landing on me, but then we did get a bit more of a downpour a while later, which was very nice.

The first part of the walk from home to the high street wasn’t particularly exciting, with very little going on. There is usually at least one person whom I say “Good Morning”. The Mon St Michel came in whilst I was doing my thing on the radio, and then I walked to the Cockle Ponds.

Over the last couple of days there has been a few seagulls on the south pond, the bigger of the two. The crowd of gulls was even larger today. I assume they are there because of the really large shoal of small fish. I took a picture of a crab beside the pond I wanted to see if there were any more.

I was shocked to see not just one crab, but lots of them. There were crabs hanging off the side of the pond every couple of feet. I’ve never seen so many. I don’t know how big crabs normally grow, but these seem to be getting quite big, but it was the number of them that surprised me.

It was a really interesting walk.

I think a slightly surreal self portrait, admittedly taken accidentally is a reasonable offering for the book of the moment.

I wonder how many of you (here I am imagining my millions of non-existent readers) ever used one of the earlier internet (well, I suppose almost pre-internet service offerings; Compuserve? The thing about Compuserve was that it was a bit of a walled garden with different patches doing different things. I am now talking 1994-2000, positively ancient in internet terms. Anyhow one of my favourite areas covered art. I used to have some wonderful discussions there, mainly about what was and wasn’t art. My stance was that something (let’s say the Tate’s Bricks) couldn’t be art. Oh how naive was I? Of course it is. But the thing is that that was my first real encounter with people who knew art, and where I took are with any degree of seriousness.

It took until 2006 I’d say, until I had an experience with art that really stuck with me. We were on our first cruise, a 5 day taster and it was on board the QE2 no less (I am a bit proud of that fact). Our first port of call was Santander, but our destination was Bilbao, and a visit to the Guggenheim. I have no idea who the artist was for the main exhibition hall. But, the exhibition comprised mostly of pieces made out of huge steel plates, curved and fitted together which you could walk through. One of them inside, was so dark, I don’t think I had ever encountered something so dark. I think this was the first exhibition I really enjoyed. Prior to this, apart from my Compuserve discussions; Art? Boring!!

Whooo Boy, was I wrong. Now I’m still not sure what I do and don’t like, but I now formally acknowledge that i am interested in Art. Why on earth would I have read The History of Art last year if I weren’t? I really enjoyed reading that book. It was fascinating.. But I’m not sure that I am any better of appreciating, let alone understanding Art.

Which brings me to the book of the moment. Now, I have only just finished the introduction and one page of the body, but I am really looking forward to reading “How to look at Art”. By Susie Hodge. Obviously not a lot to say about the book at present, but let’s see how things go.