Bills Posts

I don’t know what kind of clouds these are. I know they aren’t cirrus or stratus, they’re storm clouds? I think Cumulonimbus Nimbus are the high thundercloud.

What all of this is leading up to is that I am a member of the Cloud Appreciation Society, because I always look at and admire the clouds. Like a lot of things I need to beef up my knowledge on cloud types.

Clear blue skies are nice, but boring. I’d much rather have some clouds to watch.

The weather has been very up and down all week. There was one morning when rain was pretty much a certainty but I have a more than adequate rain coat, luckily I didn’t need it but it was nice to get out.

At the moment it is blowing a bit of a gale.

I spent a bit of time today, every time I went down stairs watching the starlings. We seem to have out own family of up to 20 baby starlings who have adopted our garden as their home. They are striping the bird tables which are there for that. They are beautiful to watch.

I’ve said before that I am reading Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Written in the year 731. I have to confess, that for the first time since I started this blog project, I am having major problems writing about a book that I am reading.

For the time being, I think I am going to read into it a bit more before commenting, if I do comment at all here. I have to say though, that it is a fascinating book, that gives you an opportunity to think about how things were in the times leading up to the 7th & 8th centuries. Where the focus of life lay, if you were in a position to write about it at that time. In some respects it parallels the history of Art, and what the subject of most pictures were before artists realised that they could and should paint what they want rather than what was expected.

In parallel with Bede’s book I also have a available volume 2 of the Oxford History of England, which deals with Bede’s time and the period from 550 – 1087. It gives the modern interpretation of the available facts. It is of course a fascinating counterpoint.

Given that Bede’s book is an Ecclesiastical history, the focus is naturally upon religious events. Whilst it is as already said a fascinating read, I’m not quite ready to discuss that aspect of it yet.

The walk to the waterfront usually takes me just about 10 minutes. I follow the same route most of the time. As I leave the house, I look up at the sky, to see what it looks like. I’ve looked at it once already out of the bedroom window, but that was 10 minutes ago, and things can change quickly. I don’t mind if it does change, the only thing that would stop me going out would be heavy rain.

As I walk down the road, I’m listening out for the birds. I can only recognise some birds, magpies & blackbirds, Doves obviously, and a couple of others. But nowhere near as many as I want.

On my route, I walk past places of history; St Georges Barracks, The Masonic Lodge. As I am walking I usually see the same people, some I don’t say anything to, some I say good morning. There are one or two with whom I’ll stop and have a chat.

Before leaving home, I always check to see what the tide is doing, and what the temperature and pressure are – the pressure I get from a local website, I compare with the reading on my handheld anemometer. If the tide is really low, the ramp down to the Gosport Ferry pontoon can have quite a steep slope on it. Before the lock down, there was a lady who would take a bike with a large facility on the front for making coffee. I often wondered how she managed to get down the slop without crashing as the bike was probably very heavy. Obviously, that all stopped with the lockdown. I do hope that when things ease, she is able to come back.

when I arrive at the waterfront, I always look to see what the sky looks like behind the Spinnaker, I like a good dramatic sky as that makes for an exciting picture.

It’s not very often that the water in the harbour is really rough. In fact, the largest waves I see are the bow waves of a ship coming in, typically one of the Brittany Ferries. I was advised by a captain of a ship that when the water has slow calm look to it, with an oily texture, and indeed, it can be called oily.

I know it’s the same walk every day, but I do change it especially at the weekends, although it’s easy sometimes to just do it, rather than go somewhere else. But, I really should do more of that – going somewhere else that is. Difficult during the working week though.

The main thing is, I enjoy it.

If I am going to devote tonight’s piece about the latest issue of Black & White Photography, I really should have a B&W photo at the head. I must admit that of the photos I took today, this I thought would be the least worst picture in B&W. But actually, it’s not too bad, even if I say so myself.

There were two articles that attracted my attention the first was a piece by Homer Sykes, there’s an exhibition on his article at;

http://lucy-bell.com

This was a piece about British customs, now admittedly some of them may seem a bit wierd, like the chap who covers himself in Burrs and tours the local pubs, being given his drink via a straw because he is wearing a back-to-front balaclava which is burr covered. I cw joy reading about the oddities of our country. I’m willing to bet though, that there are places in the world that are equally strange.

The next piece was by Jamie Johnson;

http://jamiejohnsonphotography.com/bigcartel.html

This was about how new book, Growing up travelling. Jamie has become firm friends with an Irish Traveller family and has been photographing the family over the years.

The thing about both articles is that the photo’s are of people. Flash may have been used but no studio work. This feeds two aspects of photography; one that pleases me, and one that doesn’t. This isn’t really street photography, but it is people mostly outside in a relatively every day setting. I have spoken before about my love of this genre. The second factor is that this isn’t studio work, formal portraiture. Now that I don’t enjoy. When I was a member of a camera club, we had a couple of portrait sessions. I never enjoyed any of them. I think it was the attention to detail with the lighting and backgrounds that was needed that I didn’t enjoy. I think the immediacy of the “spontaneous” street shot is more interesting.

Once again, I enjoyed the magazine, and can now go back to the two books that I currently have on the go, The Ecclesiastical history of the English people, and On the Trail of Stardust. Two books fast the opposite ends of time. The later the book of my latest obsession; more on that later.

There are a couple things I want to write about this evening. The first I think are the birds. Mainly starlings, like everywhere they seem to work as small teams or perhaps families. We have at least one crowd who visit us on a regular basis several times a day. They will go for the tables, the seed they throw on the floor, they are not tidy eaters. And they look for worms on the lawn.

I love watching them, when one bird finds something and starts tugging on a worm, the others will run towards it. They are quite fast runners.

This afternoon I counted eight of them on the lawn. We are getting some sparrows now as well. I must admit I’m surprised that they use the table and low level supplies as much as they do.

It seems like every time I looked out of the window through the course of the day there were birds in the garden. I really, really love that. I can’t quantify how much pleasure that gives me.

I want to talk a little bit about this locality thing. I may have done quite a while ago. Fort Gilkicker is one of the Palmerston Forts built in the mid 19th century it is on the coast. In May 2015, the three queens of Cunards Fleet were in Southampton to celebrate the 175th anniversary of the line. I was stood on the beach with my camera, and my scanner listening to what was going on, and things kind of clicked. Here was an opportunity to integrate my interest and think about how all my different hobbies and interests could be brought together under one banner. I called it locality because that means it’s wherever I am.

Even if I develop a new interest and there is one on the horizon, which will be the subject of a future post.

I went for a walk. I did the usual route, one thing I wanted to do was check on the Jelly Fish, only to find that they had open the sluice and were emptying the pond. I found the drain If you use what three words it’s cooks.onions.grow. I stood there for a few minutes watching the jelly fish. As they got closer to the drain, they were caught up in the flow, and were sucked through, flowing through a short pipe out in to the creek.

Just before then, as I was walking along the side of the pond I was approaching the point where the trolly had been thrown in to the pond. This had happened last weekend, I reported it to street scene via twitter, they did respond and it usually takes them a couple of days to follow up. Probably they knew that the pond was going to be emptied and so have left it. The really annoying thing is that the picture symbolises an act of disgusting vandalism, I was really annoyed. But I can’t get over the fact that I really like the picture, there is just something about it. It is deeply frustrating.

After the Cockle Pond, I walked down to the waterfront. Sometimes, good things happen when I’m out for my walk. I call them my rewards. Today, I had a reward;

The first thing I saw was this tug backing in to the harbour, as it was reversing, I knew a ship was coming in. I waited a few seconds and then;

This refer (ship carrying refrigeration containers). It’s been quite a while since I’ve seen one of these, and it was very nice to see. Now you see, this feeds nicely into my Locality activity. I probably need to do a post on that, what it is and how it came about.

All in all, a very pleasant walk.

You might have noticed that I had two 267’s. Now, if it had been 2×167’s I wouldn’t have bothered to change, but these were close enough that it was worth changing.

In my mind, it wasn’t a mistake to start this exercise. I didn’t know if I would go full term, I still don’t know, but every day I do this brings me closer to finishing properly. Probably one of the most important questions to ask is; am I enjoying it as much as I expected or hoped to before I started this? I don’t think that is an unreasonable question to ask at this stage. I have never questioned that I wanted to do this. I continue to want to do this. Not because I have to do it, because, yes, I am enjoying it. Now, there is no denying that I have had a couple of hiccups, and there have been a few times when I have sat down with no idea as to what I was going to write.

I think it’s time to consider whether there might be any lessons to be learned from this. I think the decision, made quite a while ago, to provide a weekly cycle of themes. That has certainly helped me, and also allowing myself to go outside those themes has given me flexibility to write about what I want.

But I think I still need something else. There are two aspects to this, I need to work on integrating my locality project in to my writing. I’ve written about locality before, and am not going to do so here, except to say one thing. That is to really do my locality thing, I need to get out more and do the area. That means travelling. And that has not been an easy thing over the last year. I am hoping that things will get easier, and that I am able to get out. That would certainly add fuel to my writing.

The second aspect is Gosport, and as I suggested earlier this week, a focus on the history of Gosport. So, I am going to try things. Let’s see how it goes shall we?

It was a grey morning, rain was threatening, there was a bit of a breeze blowing. The tide was low, the clouds were low and heavy, it felt quite oppressive, it felt gloomy.

I did my weather report as usual from the end of the Haslar Marina Pier Wall, a police launch swung by as I did so. I have no idea if they were looking at me. The Normandie came in and the local ferries did their thing.

After that , I walked across to the cockle ponds. There were a lot of Jelly Fish about but they weren’t clumping. The surface was moving a fair bit I’ve found that they don’t like rough water. They were quite spread out. But there were still a lot of them.

The rest of the walk went OK, it didn’t start raining until i turned on to the road leading to home, and even then it only lasted a few seconds. Even with the gloominess of the waterfront it was a good walk.

Yesterday I wrote about the desire to have a thread running through my writing. As i suggested, History is a huge component of Gosport, my words were “absolutely stuffed” and that is the case.

The picture at the head of todays post is that of Gosport’s Victorian rail station. One thing that you won’t see here are pictures from that era. There are lots of those about, and the story of the station is well told.

That’s because I want my history of Gosport to be that of today. It’s almost a kind of “Where are they now?” Gosport as it is today.

Gosport’s railway station today is a collection of flats, offices and conference rooms that can be rented for single meetings. I haven’t gone any further in as I feel I am treading on private property.

Some effort has been put in to restoring what had been a derelict facility. It was that or demolish it. That would have been very easy. The building today is a very presentable structures reminding people of a past time.

There are no rail tracks here. To the west of the station, runs the route that was the line up to Fareham, and down to Stokes Bay. That has been converted to a regularly used cycle track and footpath for the first part of the track with a bus route added up to Fareham, taking traffic away from the road.

To the East, once you have crossed over Mumby Road, you encounter the Gosport Ramparts, now fenced off and heavily overgrown, and with large parts removed. The fortifications are another part of history that will be addressed in a future article. Once over Mumby Road railway tracks can be seen for a short distance, not much probably about 100 yards. The tracks, at the behest of Queen Victoria punched a hole through the walls to take the Queen and her entourage across to Clarence Yard. It is possible too walk up to the eastern end of the tunnel which is probably about 10 metres long, this alone gives a perspective on the size of the defences. And then, for a few metres, you can follow the tracks to the edge of Weevil Lane and no further beyond that.

It is sad that the railway has gone from Gosport. But in it’s place is a safe walking and cycling route – a good price to pay for the loss.

Please don’t get me wrong. I am not at all dissatisfied with my writing. It’s not perfect I know, but I am pleased with what I have done so far. The reason I’m saying this is because I have been thinking about how I can introduce a narrative thread through the posts.

Now, what is the thread and how do I weave that thread, but what is it? I’m trying to work that out. I thought last night that I could write about parts of the journey and the link would be the journey.

The thing about Gosport is that it literally is stuffed with history. Every street has a story to tell. That story might be a recent one; I don’t think our street existed a hundred years ago. The first mentions of Rowner & Alverstoke were around 942AD. The intervening years have seen incredible changes. I would love to devote more time to exploring those years, but it will be done in dribs and drabs, as that is all I feel able to give at the moment. Research takes time and resources, both are limited. So, I will do what I can.

Several years ago, I started playing the Augmented Reality Game Pokemon Go. I enjoyed playing the game on my morning walks, initially because the way the game works enables you to learn things. I had the idea of writing a book about the history of Gosport but weaving it into the game. I even spoke to a lady who publishes local history books, not a specific conversation for the purpose of writing the book, more to see what she thought of the idea. She didn’t laugh me out of court. I never went ahead and did it – I don’t know why, probably something distracted me and I didn’t let myself create the time.

Now with this blog, and with the fantasy holiday that I am conducting on my facebook page I am writing and researching every day. I am not going to give either of these activities up. Certainly not this blog, and I will see the fantasy holiday through to the end. But it is taking time. I can use that time when I finish these activities. I never really intended for there to be separation of content between Facebook and here, it just seemed to happen that way.

This is Post No. 271 of 366. There are 95 days left to go, that’s just over three months to go, and the Fantasy holiday is scheduled to run to almost the end of the year. I have been thinking what to do next. A unified project that works across both platforms is the way to go, and it pretty much has to involve history and gosport. So, I know roughly what the project is (subject to change of course). I can think about planning as a sideline.