photography

Strange What Comes Flying Over Next Door’s Ash Tree When You’re Eating Supper

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Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No it’s…a…a paramotor wing, and it came looming low over the new shed last night as we were eating our cream of broad bean soup. It was so very much something where you didn’t expect to have it, and also very loud, that for a moment I felt like Arthur Dent in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy – you know, the scene near the beginning where a huge ship from the Vogon Constructor Fleet comes gliding over his house as a prelude to demolishing the planet:

People of Earth, your attention please.This is Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz of the Galactic Hyperspace Planning Council. As you will no doubt be aware, the plans for development of the outlying regions of the Galaxy require the building of a hyperspatial express route through your star system, and, regrettably your planet is one of those scheduled for demolition. The process will take slightly less than two of your Earth minutes. Thank you.

Douglas Adams The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

Anyway, it turned out to be nothing so threatening, though at one point I thought the pilot had completely lost the plot as he whirlygigged for several giddy seconds over the rapeseed field. He sorted himself out though.

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Last Night In Downtown Oakengates, Looking For Roofs, Real Ale, And Having A Slight Fit Of The Edward Hoppers

Just in case you think Shropshire is all ‘blue remembered hills’, we do have our urban quarters. Oakengates in Telford (New Town) to the east of the county has ancient roots. The Romans came marching through these parts in their bid to quell the Welsh, leaving us the remains of a military fort – that’s to say an on-the-hoof marcher camp (nicely squared earthen ramparts reduced to a field crop mark). Then there was a lot of monkish settlement (physical evidence obliterated), but it was during the C19th that the town truly came to prominence and prosperity, its coal and clay deposits making it one of the key settlements of Shropshire’s Industrial Revolution.

Since then, though, the once traditional street scene has somehow had its heart ripped out. Well, mostly. There are still some good old pubs. In particular the  Crown Inn – THE watering hole for real ale lovers, and the place where we were heading last night to meet good chum Andy. And just by chance I had taken my camera, and I was struck by the evening light, and the strangely compelling surrealism of the streets that someone had kindly tried to prettify with bunting, and there were a few rooftops too and I had that feeling that I get when I look at Edward Hopper’s paintings: a spinal twinge of fascinated  displacement and disquiet (for his work is nothing if not about light and shadow in all connotations) – hence this set of photos, taken before and after a glass of good Mild Ale…

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Roof Squares

Inside A Copper Beech Looking Out

The beech tree is in Much Wenlock’s Linden Field ~ the place where the modern Olympic Movement had its beginnings in 1850

And every July the Wenlock Olympian Games are still held on and around the Linden Field and at the adjacent William Penny Brookes School, which is fittingly named after the Games’ founder.

Six Word Saturday

Flower of the Day ~ Wild Arum Lily

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Last week I found an arum lily behind our garden fence. On Sunday afternoon I found another fine specimen growing in the shade of the lime tree walk in our nearby Linden Field. I had gone there to photograph the lime trees coming into leaf, and the avenue was a haven of leaf shadow and dappled light, and wonderfully cool in our unexpected heatwave. There was also the heady whiff of wild garlic. The plants whose leaves I had been cropping earlier in the year were bursting with white star flowers. You can eat those too. But you definitely can’t eat the arum lily, also known as Cuckoo-pint (pint to rhyme with mint), Lords-and-Ladies, Parson in the pulpit and Willy lily  – though the roots were apparently once crushed to make household starch for crisping up Elizabethan ruffs (Richard Mabey Flora Britannica).

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Cee’s Flower of the Day

Last March Square: Bouquet For Becky

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Well, it’s almost a circle, this gorgeous tulip. And it does come with its own bee. And I’m sure everyone who has had fun with March squares in squares and circles in squares will want to say a big ‘hurrah’ and thank you to BeckyB for keeping us so alert and amused with this challenge even as she’s moved between two countries and not been very well.

Not only has it been fun, this challenge has also opened my eyes to the  quite surprising compositional dynamic of the square format. Laura (at Eljaygee) and I have been having  a bit of chat about this. If you go to her post linked here you can see a range of photos that she feels have been given new life by applying a square crop. It’s all fascinating stuff, and anything that makes you LOOK with fresh eyes is always a bonus.

THANK YOU BECKY AND HAPPY EASTER

 

March Square Please visit BeckyB for her final March Square

Six Word Saturday  Debbie has also been doing some fine squares so I’m also linking to her 6WS – another challenge that keeps us thinking as well as viewing.

Solar-Powered Apple Lanterns As Repurposed By Blackbirds ~ Thursday’s Special

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Sometimes it takes me a long time to reach the allotment. I set off with great purpose, shouldering a big bag of vegetable waste for the the compost heap. It is only a short hike across the field, although after rain it can be treacherously slithery, thus requiring due care and attention to avoid all outbreaks of undignified slippage. And then there are the distractions. And if I happen to have a camera in my pocket: well then, gardening must wait.

So that’s what happened when I spotted these apples that someone had slung over their hedge in the autumn. During the winter the blackbirds had nibbled the insides so neatly that only the skins remained. Not only that, the delicate apple ‘shells’ had now accrued quite new and surprising properties. Lying scattered in downtrodden grass and browning leaves, they were now capturing and emitting that too rare glow of winter sunshine. Thank you, blackbirds. A fine light show.

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Thursday’s Special: recycled

copyright 2018 Tish Farrell

Ice Magic

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The continuing freezing temperatures in the Britain made me think of this photo, taken back in December. Now I have cropped and enlarged it, it looks like a Christmas Tree bauble, a piece of intricate glass. I also imagine I see a cloaked figure, a woman I think, fleeing for her life on a galloping horse. Or else it looks like a Victorian woman’s reticule, soft velvet with a drawstring closure. Or perhaps one of Scrooge’s stash of money bags.

How it formed like this, suspended from a coat thread caught on a barbed wire fence up at the allotment, I have no idea. It just goes to show that we do not need to know the hows and whyfors and whats of something to see its wonder. When I found it, I thought the elements had left me a gift.

Copyright 2018 Tish Farrell

Daily Post: out of this world