Tag Archives: photographs

All Our Novembers

November 2014 and ready for Christmas in seasonal headwear. The red hats were gifts from someone who had a lot left over from a promotion. We were never too proud to accept a freebie.

November 2015 – Men in Sheds. Don’t blame me for the Health and Safety, I’m just the photographer. Nobody was actually blinded or set on fire, just in case you were wondering.

November 2016. The report from the Woodland Trust using the data we had gathered for them. We did do some useful stuff, apart from ll the fun.

Nest boxes in two different states of completion

November 2017, and Julia mobilised the MENCAP gardeners to start making nest boxes. One of the Men in Sheds cut the pieces for her and the gardeners put them together and decorated them. They were sold at the Christmas Fair to raise money for seed and a number of them have successfully raised families.

November 2018 and the dark nights allow me to take pictures of sunsets when I arrive home from work. There’s not much to say. I am now established as a shop assistant and am a regular at the Numismatic Society of Nottinghamshire. It looks like old age has caught up with me at last.

November 2019. We spend our Wednesday visiting a Garden Centre near Lincoln. We had tea and scones in what appeared to be a converted wartime hut and then I took pictures of a desolate lake. I thought you might prefer the tea and scone picture.

November 2020. One of our customers had a card like this saying “Clinically Exempt” which he used to claim he didn’t need to wear a mask. The cards were not official, they were sold by a charity. It cost me £2 to get this one, which I used to show to people who claimed they didn’t need to wear a mask, telling them that I did need them to wear a mask. The customer paid £6.99 for his, buying from someone on eBay who was buying from the charity and then selling them on. Just a little Covid anecdote for you.

November 2021. The picture is a Scottish Communion Token from a collection we bought in the shop. They were used in the 19th Century to control who was considered suitable to take communion, which gave the church quite a lot of control over the lives of the parishioners. The Scottish side of my family left Annan in about 1870. Family history says it was to do with an argument in the Church. One of my relatives may well have handled this token. They settled in Blackburn, which was a cotton weaving boom town at that time.

The few pictures I now have shows just how my world has shrunk since Covid.

November 2022, Another shop picture. This is sometimes called a smuggler’s box, though I don’t think you would smuggle much in a hollowed out Cartwheel Tuppence. They are also said to have been used for smuggling messages by spies. Again, unlikely. It’s more likely to be someone showing off their skills with machine tools. Coin is dated 1797. They all are, so I don’t need a readable date. It’s so worn it was quite possibly not hollowed out until half a century later. I don’t think they did much smuggling then, and spying had advanced to use invisible ink by then.

November 2023. I’ve been poorly, so all the photos I have for November are the three Julia sent me from Cromer. I really must sort my life out.

Musings

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If a picture truly is worth a thousand words, I have just loaded 12,000 words from my photos to this post. The theme of my 12,000 words is, initially, that although WordPress can, it seems, develop a new improved editor, they cannot work out a system to allow me to access photos from old posts. They charge me for unlimited photo storage every year but I note, on an old post, that some photos have disappeared. I also note that if I want to access photos from old posts it gets progressively more difficult as I get back beyond a couple of weeks. Once past that the system starts to grind and lock up and flick back to newer photos. At that point it is easier to give up or to search out old posts and either link to them or recopy the photos. That is what I did with the last post.

It would have been a much more exciting post if I had been able to simply access the photos by scrolling down the media file.

Blue Iris

Iris at Mencap Gardens

Yellow flowers in need of identification

If I could access old photos easily, this post would be more interesting too. However, due to the clunky and ineffective scrolling system I can only really access photos from the last couple of weeks. They are nice enough photos but they lack a bit of variety, you have seen them all recently, and they are not necessarily my better flower photos.

Yellow Flag

Marigold at Mencap

French Marigolds

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If I were developing a proper 12,000 word piece, I would then move on to muse on the mutability of life and how we change and improvement are not the same things. Life is simply a jerk progression, like the WP photo storage, where we jerk from one imperfection to the next. The final display is, like our lives, a poor reflection of the quality of material available, which has been severely limited by circumstances beyond our control. I think that makes sense, though it may just be self-absorbed twaddle. If that’s the case let’s agree to call it “deep”. That’s a useful neutral word to cover many eventualities.

Alpine Strawberries – Sherwood

A Bear in a Tree

A poppy, still crumpled from the bud

There are several things I could move on to discuss as an ending. Cooking with arthritis is a current topic of interest. As a condition, not as an ingredient. Despite the new medication my fingers are actually getting worse. More fingers are being affected and more joints within those fingers are being affected. The index finger on my right hand now has painful swellings in all three joints and I could probably find hand modelling work as something out of Lord of the Rings or for those appalling Versus Arthritis adverts we now have on TV.

It seems to me that the name Versus Arthritis was developed by an idiot and approved, probably at great cost, by a board of idiots. Same goes for the TV adverts they run. In fact, despite the advertising I have spent the last two years not seeking help from them because the adverts are so bad. Today is the first time I’ve actually been on their site, and though some of the stuff appears useful, I may not rush back.

I was amused to see that one of the organisations that merged to form Versus Arthritis was formed in 1947 as the British Rheumatic Association (BRA). Even in 1947 I’m sure bra was a well known term for women’s underwear. Assuming that the organisation wasn’t formed by 14-year-old boys, it looks like the pitiful naming tradition has continued over the years.

Cooking with arthritis used to mean that my fingers ached after kneading bread. Now it means I can’t grip a vegetable peeler properly, can’t (on bad days) cut through veg single-handed and can’t fetch and carry without using both hands, as my grip has gone.

Tonight’s tea is roasted veg with pasties, Yorkshire puddings and gravy. I may be arthritic, and dreading the new improved editor but I’m not malnourished.

Note on the Dominic Cummings cut-out I mentioned a few days back (though I can’t actually find the reference, so I may just have thought I mentioned it). It was taken down but my sister sent me a links after seeing something on Twitter. Here is a link if you want it. I find it amusing, even if the story is now dead and brushed under the carpet.

And at just over 700 words, I think there is just time to sign off, and take my tea, carefully, from the oven.

A Happy Selection

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Things that make me happy – Number One – Julia at a tearoom

Just a few photographs of happier times when I could actually get out into nature. I’m still allowed out, but as I’m not allowed to drive anywhere to exercise all I can see is tarmac, concrete and gardens. Unfortunately I can’t see myself being welcome if I start poking my lens into people’s gardens. Looks like photography might be severely restricted.

I’m having a bit of trouble searching for photos, and some of the ones I’ve uploaded don’t seem to be loading properly so I’m just going to press the button and see what happens.

I will be writing another post soon but that probably won’t be as cheery as birds and flowers.

Ducks on the Mencap Pond

Sorrel

Daffodils at Mencap garden

Sticky Toffee Cake

Peacock on crocus

Derbyshire Trees

Sunset over Screveton

Whitby Abbey

Wooden Wizard and Dragon at Carsington

Dogs at Sutton on Sea

Winter Aconites – Sibsey

Snowdrops

Long-Tailed Tits

Peak Shopping Village

Wind Turbines – Horseshoe Point

An attempt at artistry

The river Wye at Bakewell

Love Locks at Bakewell

Julia with enigmatic smile

Update

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Well, it’s been a chequered few days.

I’ve struggled with technology in various ways, but am managing to get round the problems in a variety of ways (even if I did fall asleep before posting last night!)

I’ve put photos up for the Scone post, as I said last night, and I’ve now put photos on the enamelled coin post. With any luck I’ll get some on the Harlow Carr post next. That might be tomorrow as the netbook doesn’t make things easy.

I’ll keep plugging away and next week I’ll try to get my laptop in for repair.

Moan, moan, moan, etc…

Today’s photo (which I already used on the enamelled coin post) shows a parcel I prepared for posting today – every stamp ends with half a penny, a coin that was withdrawn in 1984, In other words, all the stamps are at least 35 years old. The fact that we are now using them on envelopes indicates they may not have been a great investment.

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Stamps from 35 years ago…

The William Caxton stamp is actually from 1976 – 43 years ago. A lot has happened since then. But not to the stamp – it just lay there in an album and did nothing until I pulled it from a packet, licked the back and stuck it on an envelope. It’s now on its way to London, and probably to a bin.

Change is Easy…

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I’m giving the new editor another try. I don’t particularly want to, but I do want to access some of my older photos and I can’t do that in the normal editor. Anyway, it’s time I started embracing new technology.

Julia has had an adventurous day, first cutting herself whilst trying a spot of woodcarving, then melting a hole in her fleece when she transferred her attention to pyrography. Well, I say “attention”, but if she’d been paying attention she wouldn’t actually have melted the fleece.

I’m now going to put some photos in, if I can. The new editor doesn’t seem keen. I’m already remembering why I switched it off and went back to the old one.

This, hopefully, is a selection of my favourite photos from the last year.

I’m not finding it as easy as the old editor because I’m having to load one large photo at a time.

Change is easy, as they say, but improvement is hard.

Day 101

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To be accurate, it’s really only day 75 because I missed a day. While I’m on a roll I’m going to go for the extra 25 and make it a genuine 100.

That’s probably all I need to say about that. From tomorrow I’ll stop rattling on about targets and just get on with it.

I have a few things to do and then I’m going to set to work listing suitable subjects for future posts.

The morning started with sunlight streaming into the living room and dazzling me. An hour later it has now gone grey and the temperature has dropped significantly.

That will do for now – I’m feeling a bit slow due to the pain in my face and Julia needs to go out.

Here are some cheery photos.

Anderby Creek, Lincolnshire

Robin

Backlit Sumac Tree in the MENCAP garden

Sunrise, Trent Bridge, Nottingham

Lithops at Mencap Garden

Julia, Sutton-on-Sea

Sunset over Basford, Nottingham

Cranesbill Geraniums

Guinea Fowl at Screveton

Fish and Chips

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I haven’t had much luck writing today – just the same dull drivel as I normally churn out on a Sunday. Washing, shopping, sleeping…

Even I felt bored. So, continuing from the last set of photos, I decided that fish and chips was what we needed, particularly as I lost out earlier in the week.

Sheringham

Felixstowe

Cromer

Sutton-on-Sea

If you want more information on fish and chips the link has plenty of it. You can tell it’s a big part of British life from the number of times I have pictures of fish and chips.

They are a good subject – appetising, well lit and not prone to move suddenly or fly away.

Photography Puzzles

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Looking through the old photographs, as I was yesterday, I am reminded of the complexity of regulations around photography.

Care Bears came to visit

I have photographs of children and vulnerable people and I have permission to use them. So I’m clearly OK to post them on the blog aren’t I? Well, no. According to some regulation, which may be data protection rather than safeguarding, I should have asked for time-limited permission and I shouldn’t use them indefinitely. Schools, for instance, are only supposed to use photographs of children while they are attending the school. This would tend to suggest that I shouldn’t use the images now we have closed down.

This suggests that even if you are lucky enough to get a decent shot of a child you can’t keep using it. Unless you’ve paid a child model – that will be OK. That’s one anomally. Another is that I can’t publish names, but newspapers can. Presumably predatory perverts only cruise amateur blogs – professional photos and newspapers hold no interest for them.

The Quercus Group in disguise

There’s another anomally – if I want to take pictures of children on a visit I need permission, which some schools take more seriously than others. We once had a teacher shouting at one of our group members because they had taken a picture with their telephone, which might have included a school pupil.

Yet that teacher thought it was OK for the school to take pictures of the visit without asking our permission and without checking with the vulnerable adults in the group. In fact no school ever asked permission to take pictures.

I’m not saying they should do, but I am saying that there should be one rule for everyone, particularly for schools that insisted on coming on days when the group was in. Julia, being soft-hearted always resisted my requests that we should have a photo permission form for visits and only give permission to groups who gave us permission.

It’s funny how a train of thought can rise from a few photos…

Agroforestry project

Imagine what that would mean for the famous Pears Soap advert. They used this one for years. Oh, how Admiral Sir William Milbourne James GCB must have mentally thanked his grandfather for this portrait of him in green velvet as he strode the decks of his various commands, where he was known by the nickname “Sir Bubbles”.

Image downloaded from the website of the Victoria and Albert Museum, with permission. Despite a lack of medals and dead animals this kind gesture has elevated thm to the status of one of my favourite museums.

Some Photos

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Here, courtesy of Julia, are the seal photos that should have been in the last post. She downloaded them onto a flash drive, then added her Pied Wagtail photo. Of course, as soon as I returned from running No2 Son to work I tested the camera again and it worked. Don’t you just hate it when that happens?