Muted Colours Over the Hamlet
February 3, 2012 – Muted Colours over the Hamlet this Evening This project is all about being creative. In my case I choose to combine images with my thoughts, as I am as much a words person as a visual person. I am developing more and more of an eye for the visual as the time goes on and this morning when I was driving to and from the town I saw the most amazing skies, colours and rural panoramas that I was just aching to capture. Truly it was a time of amazing light. Unfortunately I was just not able to stop the car and take a photograph (the camera was sitting helpless beside…
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Promises Broken – Fields of Gold
I have been sadly remiss in keeping my blog up, I confess, although I have been keeping active and creative in other environments. Mostly this has been on Google+, but I feel that I would like to tie in my creativity there with my personal blog here, if that’s okay with all of you who read this blog. I have begun a project of posting an image every day on my Google+ gallery and always like to write my thoughts to go with the image. I thought that I would like to feature some of these postings on my blog. I hope you enjoy them. The photographs are all my own. The first one is…
Maggots and gourmet cheeses
We lived for a number of years in the Perigord Noir, a region of France renowned for its gastronomy. The residents pride themselves on eating pretty much everything that can be made vaguely edible, even if at times the results defy both good taste and common sense, at least from an outsider’s perspective. From the time we first moved to France we had heard about older country people who would enjoy a special delicacy with their camembert, brie or similar soft rind cheeses. We heard how they would leave the cheese on the window ledge in the sun so that the flies were attracted to it and would lay eggs on it. With time the…
Alternate endings to a real life
Family stories give a personal perspective on history. You know they are true because you heard them directly from those concerned, or those close to them – they relate family memories through the ages. The stories below were both verified by those who heard them directly from their parents who were children of Thomas. They both concern the story of this man’s death. The only problem is that they are both completely different, yet each comes with details and emotions that colour the way these people and their own children have thought of their grandfather and great grandfather. The proud family that you see in the photograph taken in 1889 has not long arrived in…
Where the road signs only point back to where you come from
There are no public toilets in Kongsfjord in Northern Norway. At least there were none in the late 1960′s. At about the same time as I discovered that interesting piece of trivia I also learned that there are main roads you can travel on where the few road signs only have directions for going in the opposite direction to which you are travelling. This gives you an overwhelming feeling that the nearest place with a name is getting farther and farther from you as you go. Common sense tells you that where there is a road, there must be a reason at the end of it, but it is hard to fight the evidence of…
Family secrets – things we don’t talk about
My early family life was fairly ordinary, or so it seemed to me. I was the oldest child with a younger brother, Gary who was fairly close in age and after a larger gap, a second brother, Tim. I was precocious talked a lot, very early and so Gary found that he didn’t need to bother to learn to speak himself. I probably interrupted his attempts and was certainly convinced that I could express what he wanted much better than he could. I spoke for him and I was probably under the impression that I thought for him, too. He allowed me to do this until I suppose his desire to communicate was stronger than…
Trains and Dreams
A good train journey holds all the promise of the destination and often far more excitement. At one point while I was living in France, I was taking a 3 hour train trip every week and this brought back the love of trains that I had had as a child and the mystery that these still hold for me. The first part was on a sleek fast modern train, but the last – into the depths of the countryside – was in a few tired carriages pulled by an ancient diesel locomotive stopping at all the little stations on the way. On one of these trips while I was rattling along in the old carriages…
