Photo Challenge

Thursday’s Special: Seeing Red

I’m in love with the Japanese crab apple tree in my garden at Sheinton Street. There is hardly a moment in the year when it does not give pleasure. Even now in February there are still a few tiny apples on its bare branches – minimally disposed like a left over Christmas tree that someone forgot to undress. The black bird still visits, although by now the apples have been frosted and lost their bloom.

But then I also know that by the time the last one has fallen, there will be tight rosy-red buds bursting to make the next crop, bees permitting. And while I think of it, I’m grateful to fellow blogger, Mélanie at Mon Terrain de Jeux who tells me that crab apples sound much lovelier in French, and I agree – pommes sauvages.

On the other hand, my little tree is so finely wrought and well bred, and its fruit so exquisite, that I can imagine no situation when it might be tempted to wildness – unlike its large, unruly English cousins that grow in our farm hedgerows. Those I raid in October for their not so pretty fruit to make jars of crab apple jelly. (How could I possibly pick my own pommes sauvages?). The jelly is delicious on toast and croissants, and the jars glow like jewels as the hot jelly is poured into them. Mmmm.

More things to look forward to then: blossom, bees, pommes sauvages, toast…

For Paula’s Thursday’s Special challenge ‘Red’ at Lost in Translation

One Word Photo Challenge: Seafoam

Here are some more Lamu photos (see previous post). Some of you will have seen the top one before, but it is one of my favourites, and I thought the colour of awning fits with Jennifer Nichole Wells’ one word seafoam challenge. It is a colour that I anyway associate with the Indian Ocean. This shot was taken on a dhow taxi in the middle of a tropical downpour. It was December, the monsoon season, and we had just flown in to the little local airport on Manda Island. The strait between the two islands looked suddenly grey and forbidding. It seemed strangely cold too in the midst of the hot season, and not the best start to our four-day Christmas break from Nairobi.

But then the rain passed. This is the waterfront of Lamu stone town, one of the best surviving Swahili settlements on the Indian Ocean seaboard, and a world heritage site. You will have to look harder here for the gentle shade of seafoam.

Lamu is a captivating place. I was so impressed by our four days there that I wrote a teen novel, Sea Running, published by Macmillan Pacesetters for the African children’s literature market. It’s a good yarn about drug runners and first love. It also has a splash of seafoam on the cover.

For more posts on Lamu:

Dhow-dreaming

The Swahili

Christmas on Lamu

One Word Photo Challenge: Strawberry

I’m being utterly literal in my response to Jennifer Nichole Wells’ latest challenge. Well, what better example of the colour strawberry than an actual strawberry, and ones that were growing so happily last year on my allotment ? Also they look so juicy, and remind my cold toes that summer will happen, if not quite yet. I’m also thinking – looking again at Jennifer’s colour swatch – than I can also use a shot of my raspberries to illustrate ‘strawberry’, or is that being too perverse?

Anyway, it’s clear where my thought are heading. February is the month when things can be started off in my polytunnel – this in preparation for the spring planting. There are potatoes to chit, broad beans and peas to sow, and excitement is building like rising sap. So much to look forward to.

Guest Challenge: Knowing your place (colour photo challenge)

This week I’m also over at Paula’s blog, Lost in Translation. She kindly asked me to post a guest photo challenge ‘Knowing My Place’. It’s all about finding some cunning new angle that tells you something fresh about a place you think you know very well. To find out more read on, and to see Paula’s own amazing photo response go HERE:

Lost in Translation

Tish Farrell:

Music: Vaughan Williams On Wenlock Edge song cycle inspired by A E Housman’s A Shropshire Lad

January can be a lowering month – at least in the North. We are expected to burst, sparkling new, into the New Year, when we might feel more jaded than go-ahead. Hopefully this photo prompt will have you seeing things in a new light.
I’ve called it ‘Knowing My Place’, and you can interpret it in any way that strikes you. ‘My Place’ will be somewhere that you think you know inside out: your home town or street, the journey to work, your office, kitchen, garden or desk; your state of mind, or work in progress. Now search it with the camera’s eye. Sleuth out an angle that starts to tell you something new about it.
When I first thought of the prompt I was thinking about my home town, Much…

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Mischief in the Mara

These photos were taken in the Maasai Mara during a game drive. For more scenes of mischief visit Ailsa’s travel challenge at Where’s My Backpack

And now for a treat, and even more mischievous behaviour: a short film about Daphne Sheldrick’s Elephant Orphanage in Nairobi, Kenya. The baby elephants you will see in the film have all been orphaned, mostly due to ivory poaching or drought. Sheldrick discovered that orphaned infants will only survive if given 24 hours a day emotional support. At the orphanage each infant has a keeper who becomes its surrogate mother. The ultimate objective of the Sheldrick project is to restore these elephants to wild herds in Tsavo East National Park. This approach has had many successes, and in fact just before Christmas it was reported in the British press that one of Sheldrick’s former orphans had just given birth, back in the wilds with her own herd.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvA52oAvcZ0

Elephants at Dawn

There is nothing more imposingly serene than a large herd of unruffled elephants on the move. We humans, on the other hand, may become thoroughly over-excited by such an encounter. The elephants are not impressed though. They note our existence, weighing us up with scant regard. We are quickly aware of being mentally ‘put in our place’. And as we watch, and watch the herd’s slow and steady progress through the Mara thorn trees, we find ourselves succumbing to the collective elephant will. There is the urge to follow, to step out, placing each foot with quiet intention on the surface of the earth, moving at one within ourselves instead of forever rushing about, seeking fresh excitement. As they disappear from view, we are left with a sense that something has changed. Have we been changed? In any event, it seems there is much to be learned from an early morning meeting with elephants.

Later that day, as dusk is descending, we meet the herd again. They are crossing the trail that leads back to our camp. The guide stops the truck, and we stand up, leaning out of the roof hatches as the herd moves all around us. It is breath-taking. This time they are close enough to touch. We can smell their musky hides. They move around the truck as if it is not there, then fade into the darkness as quiet as ghosts.

Daily Post Weekly Photo Challenge: Serenity

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Serenity

Thursday’s Special: Dusk on Wenlock Edge

I may have mentioned once or three times that I spend a lot of time watching the sky from our house below Wenlock Edge. Silhouetted in this photo are the wooded slopes of Wilmore Hill which lies between us and the Edge. The land then dips, then rises again until it reaches the scarp, at which point the ground simply falls away alarmingly through a hanging woodland of giant beech, oaks and ash. Far below the trees stretch the farm fields of Shropshire. And so from our vantage point the Edge gives us a false horizon, providing a stage for much interesting weather-watching. Hours can slip away…days. There’s a real danger of finding oneself turned into Rip Van Winkle. Maybe it’s already happened…

For more evocative dusky scenes, or to post your own please go to Paula’s Thursday’s Special and be inspired.

From My Window in Wenlock: Trucks…

The other day I was astonished to look out of my kitchen window and behold this perplexing vision on the side of a carpet truck. It was a bit like spotting a unicorn. Well, what do you think this image is saying carpet-wise? Hey, come unravel me? Anyway, it made me laugh. And some days you do need a sense of humour to live where we live.

Trucks are a daily feature of Sheinton Street, a town lane that somehow in the 1980s was upgraded to an ‘A’ road. This means it is designated as a “through road”, and that there should thus be nothing on it to impede the flow of traffic.

Anyone who has read my previous post (By the Silurian Sea) will know that while the back of our cottage mostly overlooks farm fields and woods, the front is very close to this road. Along it come all manner of large vehicles – many so big that they get jammed together trying to pass one another. This includes school buses, and combine harvesters, garden fencing lorries and clay trucks. Sometimes they block the road completely. Not good news if you are trying to get to hospital in an ambulance. There truly is no other way to go without a huge detour.

Over the years I have captured a few of these HGV encounters. I call the phenomenon Truck Stuckage. Most of the photos are taken from my upstairs office window. See what I get up to when I’m supposed to be writing. (I know: it’s hard to say what is more oddball – the photos or the person who took them). And not only do I snap stills, I also from time to time put short video clips on You Tube so I can forward the links to Shropshire Council’s chief highways engineer. She’s called Alice. I think we are on first name terms. She doesn’t know what to do about this road, but a team of consultants has recently been employed to think about what might be done. Or not.

In the meantime, if the trucks get any larger, we will need the local fire brigade on permanent standby to unravel the stuckage. They will have to do this before they can answer any emergency calls north of Sheinton Street. One can see where the “through road” designation begins to fall down somewhat:

Cee’s Odd Ball Photo Challenge

Winter’s descent

Christmas Day and it was almost dark at noon. And then, most eerily, the sun broke through a skylight in the cloud, lighting up a thread-like silver waterfall, and a single golden meadow.

Snowdonia, Wales across the Menai Strait from Anglesey (Ynys Môn )

DP Weekly Photo Challenge: Descent

Today is My Birthday ~ We went to Ludlow

I was born on Halloween, so here I am today – not too scary I hope, wearing my autumn colours. The Team Leader snapped me by the bridge over the River Teme, in the ancient town of Ludlow, Shropshire. We went there for my birthday lunch.

It was warm enough to eat outside at The Green Cafe, a wonderful little restaurant that sits on the riverbank between the bridge and the weir. It serves divine food in rather cramped quarters, because it is simply so popular (voted third best in Ludlow, which is quite something in the foodie capital of Shropshire).

After lunch we wandered around ancient streets that were full of autumn sunshine.

Happy All Hallows Everyone

Ailsa’s Travel Theme: Autumn