Bills Posts

Another picture of yesterday’s misty morning. Unrelated to the main topic of today’s post, about which I don’t have a lot to say.

With regard to the vlogg, I really do have nothing to add. I have done nothing at all about it. Well, I have thought a little bit about it. I’ve kind of decided that you don’t really want five minutes of me talking to the camera. What do I want to give you? Education (arrogant of me) relaxation (yeah, I don’t think I’d be good at that) entertainment (to be honest, I’d be even less effective at that). I must admit, there is a pressure building up in side me, so I am going to have to do something about it soon.

I included Downton Abbey in the title as I wanted to say something about this TV series. Today, we watched the film. The end of an era. Over the last few weeks we have gone through the six seasons and various sub-episodes, finishing today with the movie.

Over the weeks I have to love the characters in the programme and have been captivated by the story. I confess that I did not expect to enjoy it, but we both became involved in the series very quickly. I am very sad that evenings and weekends will no longer involve deciding whether to watch one, or because of the gripping story follow on with the next episode. We often watched two because we couldn’t wait. I think it’s fair to say that the only other series which has generated any kind of equivalent pleasure is Star Trek.

I usually do this blog between 7 & 8 in the evening (I am tonight). At the moment, we have Michael Portillo’s Great British Railway Journeys running in the background. It’s the episode from the London Victoria to Abbey Wood. As it happens, this episode was talking about the state of the Thames in the 1800s, at the time being the open air sewer of London. Just a little unpleasant!

Early in the 1800’s the effluent of Londoners was collected and sold as fertiliser to the countryside. Then the clipper ships started bringing Guano back from South America, as I have been reading in the Clippers (Book of the week). The Guano was a better quality than the London Poo, As the london stuff was no longer required, it had nowhere else other than the river to go. I must admit I never expected to find a link to The Clipper from a programme about railway journeys. Interesting,

It started as a clear morning, but I approached the waterfront it turned into a very misty morning. I like misty mornings. They add a sense of mystery to the day. It was a very pleasant walk.

Now, the title of today’s post isn’t what you might think, a reversion to an early writing clock – oh well, perhaps it is in a way. This is really about an application called Day one – it’s a journaling app. I started using the app nigh on ten years ago. But it was about 5 years ago that I cottoned on to a concept. I called it Locality (my domain localitystories comes from it). Locality came about that I could integrate my interest in ship watching, amateur radio, photography, my interest in the local area, my desire to write, could be integrated into a single topic.

I started using day one because I wanted to write “online” and I wanted to do a blog but, to be honest I didn’t have the guts to go into the public domain. I have barely used Day one since starting this blog. which since I am getting my daily writing “fix” here is I suppose understandable. I had though put a lot of effort into organising my locality admin structure in Day One, tags, projects, pictures, writings. I had a lot of fun doing it. But, I really needed to do something like this to make sure I at least attempted to do some reasonable writing every day.

I have no idea if you think what I am writing is reasonable. I have some followers which is really really nice, so I hope you enjoy it.

If the truth is told, is isn’t really much of a secret because I am happy to talk about it to anybody, at the drop of a hat. It’s something that entertains me nearly every day and I suspect that if people were honest (which to be fair, pretty much everybody is in this case) they get a lot of pleasure from it as well.

It’s something that most people can do without any problem, any time of the day or night and it always brings me pleasure. Well, I suppose I’d better tell you what it is. It’s something related to a feature in this morning’s picture, and probably in most of my pictures. No, it isn’t ship watching. That’s no secret, everyone knows that. Nope, I am Member No. 04462 of the Cloud Appreciation Society. Who doesn’t enjoy watching the clouds. Everything from the thin whispy cirrus clouds that occur high in the sky, through to the deeply impressive CumuloNimbus clouds, the thundercloud. I love them all. After all, who doesn’t enjoy a few minutes on a nice day, when there is a fair bit of blue sky, laying back and seeing the dragon, or the dog, or an island in the clouds? I know I do.

Of course it is clouds that is the link with today’s topic – the weather, Yesterday was different, it was one of those mornings where you look out the window and decide that you aren’t going for a walk because it is tipping down. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to it I must admit. But it must have been raining for a fair bit of the day because the ground was sodden. Frustratingly, I didn’t do a lot of steps. I Made up for it today though, so I’m quite pleased with that.

It’s fair to say I think that there aren’t many days where I am put off walking because of the weather. I even go out and walk in the rain, in a proper raincoat of course. I just tend not to do it for my early morning walks before work.

It appears there is the possibility of snow in Hampshire over the weekend. Some areas of the county to the north have had at least one reasonably sized dusting. Apparently, it may come further south this next time, possibly even to Gosport. Let’s see what happens.

It’s a bit of a dilemma. I confess to feeling a little bit guilty. The thing is, I have a perfectly good DSLR camera, a Nikon. I have talked about my early cameras, culminating really in the Cannon AE1. I sold it. I can’t remember why. I probably needed the money.

The D5300 is nowhere near the top of the range, but it is a Nikon, and I had always wanted one. It’s a beautiful camera, and I have loved using it. But I barely touch it any more. I haven’t felt the need to, I think I probably will though when the weather starts getting better and I don’t feel guilty about going and spending a couple off hours at the Sea Wall.

I have been an iphone devotee since they first came out. I even changed the provider that I had been with for the best part of ten years because they weren’t going to sell them. A couple of years ago, I thought I would give android a chance. Because of the reputation of the camera I bought a Huawei P20 Pro, wonderful camera, I loved the colour rendering and the night mode. It made the iPhone 6 I had at the time look pathetic. Trouble was I didn’t really like Android. Nothing wrong with it, just couldn’t get on with it really. Anyhow, as you will now know, I am back with apple. “Institutionally content” I think is probably about right. And I do like the camera. Thing is though, doesn’t matter what I have I’m no better a photographer. So I am looking for a book, or something on line – phone photography. I know I said that last week. Chances are I’ll say it again next week. But I am looking.

It’s worth saying that I am perhaps overly critical of myself. I enjoy what I do. I know I could do it better, but that doesn’t stop me.

IT’s that time of year where you can’t be certain that you’ll be able to walk in the morning. Last night the forecast showed that rain might just clear the area at the right time. It was difficult to tell whether or not it was raining, and that being the case it probably means that it’s not heavy and the wearing of the heavy duty raincoat might be appropriate. As it happens, listening in the conservatory showed no signs of a downpour. Normal coat then.

Walking down the road, I suddenly noticed the quiet. Well, almost. The only things I could hear were my footsteps, the swish of my coat and a solitary bird singing a beautiful song. It must have lasted two minutes before a car came along. The rest of the walk though went well.

I reached the waterfront probably about five minutes after the Mon St Michell had passed in to the harbour. It was a little bit blustery, and a bit nippy, I appreciated the hat, gloves & padded jacket.

I hadn’t realised that when we talk about the spring and neap tides, they are in name only. Tides of this scale happen twice a month, all year round. Why didn’t I know that? Why hadn’t I learned this before?

Just goes to show doesn’t it? You learn something new every day.

The picture shows the tide is well out in Portsmouth harbour. Not fully out, but only about an hour after the tide had turned and was going up. When we were out walking yesterday, the tide was pretty much fully in. The range in the tide was really brought home to me, between low and high over the last two days has been at least 4 metres (12 feet ish).

Why am I talking about the tide in Portsmouth Harbour when the title is the Clipper Storms? I’m getting towards the end of the book, more than 3/4 of the way through. As a chronology of the Clipper Ships the book is naturally reaching a close. The graceful clipper ships ultimately will not bee able to compete with the steamers.

In an earlier post about the clipper ships I painted a picture of little loss of life and ships. Oh Dear, how wrong I was. This last part of the book is a litany of loss. Most of the time it is due to the storms of the Roaring 40’s and Cape Horn, ships being broken up at sea and being driven on to the rocks. Loss of life, and injuries resulting in amputation. Horrible Seas. In the day of the clipper ships, crew would have to be up the 100ft high masts, standing on a swaying rope, hauling in sails so solid with ice that they had to punch and kick them to make them manoeuvrable.

Waves three times higher than the ship wash over them washing people overboard, smashing deck fittings, ripping sails off their masts, bringing those 100ft high masts crashing down either on to the deck or over the side where the risk is run of them crashing in to the ship and holing them. Of the stories I’ve read one thing that did surprise me was the compassion of people. I must admit that I thought that they would think of life as cheap – far from it. Courageous rescues, efforts to save lives. One story in particular, although gory – the amputation by a medically unqualified captain and the determination that the injured man would be saved were documented in detail.

The book has not yet, soon it will though. I am thinking about the next book and have not yet made up my mind. Perhaps the Hubble book, or Secret Britain. Who knows. In he meantime, I continue with the story of those graceful sailing ships; The Clippers.

It’s around 12PM. It’s not that I’ve wasted the morning, I have been busy doing “stuff”. The realisation came that the day was marching on and I had plans for the afternoon, mainly involving Downton Abbey, a family Zoom and Roast Pork (which was especially nice). If I wanted to go for a walk, I was running out of time.

I said to Alexa (yes, we have one of those); “Is it going to rain in Gosport today?”

The response was “There’s a 56% chance of Rain at 2PM in Gosport, England.”

We decided to take the risk, and because it was a bit cold out we made sure that we wrapped up well. Following the counter-clockwise version of the walk I normally take weekday mornings. It wasn’t raining, but it was like there was a very fine & light mist, not rain, and note completely dry. There is a point on the walk, where we could easily cut it short and return home quickly. As we were nearing that point there was water in the air quite a bit more dense than when we started out, but still not really rain, we made the decision to continue.

As we reached the waterfront, it started raining properly. Not an absolute downpour, but enough to cause us to put our hoods up. Our reward for being out (as I see it) was to the see the ship departing the harbour.

we were quite wet by the time we got home, but our coats had held the water off. We were pleased to have a nice cup of tea, at the end of a walk that we had both thoroughly enjoyed.

If you read last week’s piece about the vlog. You’ll know that one of the decisions I am having difficulty with is where to do the to the camera bit. I thought today that if the weather were OK, I could do it out doors. Today, it has mostly been raining there was a point around midday where it did ease off, so I went out with tripod, and the face followin gizmo. Near the cockleponds I found a spot where I didn’t think too many people would pass. I’m still a bit self conscious about speaking to a camera in public. I don’t know why I should be, and having done it today even when people were walking by it was OK. I did get strange looks, but that was OK.

I’ve realised that I am self conscious in front of the camera. I want to stop that, I want to be used to being in front of the camera, myself not someone artificial. Also, I’m pretty sure you don’t want ten minutes of me talking to the camera, so I need to do things – like Victorias railway line and the tunnel through the ramparts. Or perhaps a piece about Gilkicker Fort? Or just me at the Haslar Sea Wall watching ships and working the radio?

Of course, underneath all of this there needs to be a bit of planning. I am trying to see if my daily writings can be fitted in to the plan for the vlog. It’s all waffle really isn’t it? I just need to get on with it and do it.

As I wrote last week, I wanted to end up at one place, where I knew what I could write about weeks ahead. I am not there yet. Will I ever be? I really like the moleskin notebooks, very nice quality. My first journal was a moleskin, as was the second (the current one). They are nice and linear, but I wanted to try something different.

I’ve bought a day to a page A5 diary. A4 would be too big and Filofax too small. The diary gives me a little more space, and being a diary there is a degree of inherent organisation. I was sad to make the decision to stop using the journal, but I wanted to give it a go for a year – just to see if it works. The experiment is ongoing.

I wonder if you have been following my writing? Over this last week, I have written with ease each night. I’m not saying what I’ve written is good, just that it hasn’t been too hard to write. It’s ironic then isn’t it, that only with tonight’s task of writing about writing, is when I should encounter writers block. The solution is to write about the block. Try to analyse the cause. Tonight’s analysis isn’t being very successful. I am thinking about what I’ve written over the last week. I haven’t made any note about what I’ve written, but I do know the topic for each day. I just haven’t reviewed the last weeks efforts in the context of tonight’s exercise. I had the thought that perhaps I need a theme sometimes. But I need it to not be too specific. Perhaps this is where, every so often I need to remind myself of my Locality Project (think about the name of the blog locality stories.com.

Really sorry, tonight’s post is a little bit waffle. I need to try and think about this.

I do like the way the morning lights of the Spinnaker and the “Lipstick” have been diffused by the low laying cloud. The weather plays such a significant role in almost every part of our lives that it is pretty much impossible to ignore.

One of the first things I do when I get up on a weekday morning is look out the window to see what is happening to the weather, I confess that sometimes I wished it was raining so that I could go back to bed. Most of the time though, I want an exciting sky. That could be anything from a clear sky in the depths of winter, with lots of stars. It’s especially nice when there is a planetary arrangement.

A walk where the weather is full of character is particularly nice, not a sky full of cloud, but clouds scudding along in a brisk breeze, just as the sky is starting to brighten in the East. As the year moves on, the light changes, the sun will be behind buildings, behind cloud – every day is different. That’s why I don’t get bored with repeating the same walk. Why I am always happy to take pictures of the same skyline, because the light and the weather always makes it different.

I want to talk a bit about rain. I love a good rainstorm. Sitting and watching the water hitting the window, and hammering on the conservatory roof. Sometimes, I am happy to go out for a walk in the rain. Making sure that I have the right coat of course. Sometimes I get caught, most of the time it really isn’t hat unpleasant. Enjoy the weather.