Little Britain

So here we are at the end of another seven days.  It's been a funny old week.  Partygate and the war in Europe rumbles on and the weather has been behaving in that very British manner; I think the technical term is "playing silly buggers."  

In other news, Johnny Depp won his defamation trial, after losing on the very same evidence against The Sun in the UK and is found, celebrating in a pub in Newcastle.  

The Queen has also been enjoying a perfectly splendid week, with bunting everywhere marking her 70 years on the throne, culminating in a two day Bank Holiday on Thursday and Friday.  But more on that later.

We start on English Bridge in Shrewsbury; a masonry arch viaduct crossing the River Severn.  A bridge has been known to have stood on this spot since at least Norman times.  This incarnation was built in 1926, reusing the original masonry of John Gwynn's 1774 version.  Its sister bridge, Welsh Bridge stands on the other side of town.  Impressive as it is, the Norman bridge sounds way more interesting, comprising five arches, a timber causeway, a tower housing a gate and drawbridge.  The bridge also supported several shops and houses.

Anyway, the light filtering through the arches left in the female pedestrian's wake, caught my eye.  So here's a glimpse of the grade II listed version in all her splendour.

Further along, we encounter said bunting.  Platinum Jubilee fever begins.  Incidentally, has anyone actually seen a Platinum Pudding on sale in a supermarket?  

 

For me, the star of this photo is the wall painted ghost sign with its unusual typography.  

Elsewhere in town, there's a street art tribute to the local wildlife (and I don't mean the beer bellied punters spilling out of the pubs)....

...and a runner measures her miles alongside the flood measuring stick, which has seen some eye popping readings in recent years.

Back in the garden, I have been out and about with my macro extension tubes again (one day I will treat myself to the real deal).  Focusing is always a little bit trial and error with these things; a case of hovering back and forth until you find the sweet spot and then keeping a very steady hand!  If you want a successful outcome, stay off the caffeine would be my top tip.  

Little things up close never cease to fascinate me.  This little pollinator was getting busy with the raspberry flowers.

His counterpart was rudely awakened from his slumber on the leaf of the Gunnera.  For anyone who has been pondering this question, insects quite often like to call it a day, take shelter and a snooze at around 7pm.

This little sawfly was sheltering on the underside of a buttercup.

The ferns are like big green kaleidoscopes, on a seemingly endless growth cycle; unfurling and creating exquisite shapes.  I decided to create low key black and white versions of a few of my favourites, taking in a dandelion seed head along the way.

But come hither...

...join me for a walk around the block to take in the sights and sounds of suburbia marking Jubilee weekend.  My Dad, a lifelong republican, would be chuntering away to himself about "putting them all on an island" and "self sufficiency" if he were around.  Whilst I don't believe any of them are any better than the bloke down the road (unless you're talking about that bloke...the one at number 10), I can appreciate that this is an exciting moment in our history. 

The houses in our neighbourhood have gone all out with the bunting.

This being the one time industrial heartland of the UK, many locals are tradesmen and evidence of home improvements seems to be everywhere (the cost of living crisis hasn't caught on here just yet it seems).  I counted at least 3 skips on our 10 minute walk and some unusual tributes...

...including this one, which appealed to my sense of humour.  Do we think Ma'am would have had that same fixed smile on her face had she walked out onto the balcony of Bucks Palace, only to be confronted with a view of a skip on The Mall?  This photo ended up on Instagram, accompanied by The Sex Pistols' God Save the Queen.  

Despite being a Bank Holiday, the streets on Thursday appeared deserted, so on Friday, after a leisurely start and a spot of sunbathing in the garden, we headed to Arley again (second time in a month).  On the agenda?  A scenic 4 mile circular walk starting in Arley, heading through Eymore Wood and taking in Trimpley Reservoir.  We also thought we might catch a glimpse of the newly painted purple Taw Valley engine, which has been temporarily named Elizabeth II in honour of the woman of the moment.

Purple seemed to be the colour of the day as evidenced by the carpet of rhododendron petals at the entrance to the wood.

The novelty of 21 degrees made me lose my mind and I failed to take a single photo along the route.  However, with yet more bunting and a number of classic cars adorning Arley Station, I made up for it.

There was no escaping Jubilee fever...

...or photographers.

We heard that the train had been delayed and so we enjoyed half a pint of Thatcher's Cider in the sunshine while we waited...and waited for Elizabeth II to show her face.  Ultimately, it was her rear end we were presented with.  I'll never make a train spotter!  

Gareth took my phone and managed to snap the front of the locomotive and her nameplate.

Before we leave behind the Jubilee celebrations, here's one final tribute, spotted in a farmer's field on the journey home.  

We all know Brits can be a pretty strange bunch.  We can't agree on much, as evidenced by Brexit and Boris.  Many Brits who are already being directly and heavily impacted by the cost of living crisis, took to the streets en masse, to wave their Union Jack flags on The Mall in celebration of a family funded by the state.  We are a mass of contradictions.  So, if you think making an effigy of the Queen out of a hay bale is odd, captured "Erotic Elizabeth" in all her glory on the streets of Didcot.  

Photo:  Paul O'Connor

Last night we rounded off the week with an evening with friends at their new house in Stourport-on-Severn, a Georgian town popular with day trippers and the area's self styled leisure capital.  

We enjoyed cocktails in blazing sunshine on the terrace (really), a delicious array of vegetarian and vegan food, music and merriment.  There were cats and dogs adding to our number - including the gorgeous Saffy - our friends' rescue fox hound, who pinned me to the sofa at one point in a bid to show her affection.  For the uninitiated, this is a totally non threatening, but tricky situation to find yourself in.  Fox hounds are persistent and heavy!

The evening was not without drama however, as Saffy did what fox hounds do best and escaped for a while for a little nocturnal exploration of her own.  A very different kind of hunt ensued and fortunately Saffy was discovered in a neighbouring garden - apparently without a care in the world. 

I'll leave you with a pic of my outfit, featuring my often overlooked and groovylicious vintage St Michael maxi skirt, a Leicester born brand sold in Marks & Spencer stores between 1927 and 2000.

Have a fabulous week!

Pinky and Perky

Every year I find that I am drawn to a certain colour.  Is it just me?  It's all very mysterious, but for some inexplicable reason it happens as sure as the sun comes up each day and, half way through the year, I will suddenly notice that my clothes rail for example, is awash with a certain colour.

I can officially declare that this season's colour (as far as I'm concerned) is pink.  It all started in the garden.  Now I'm by no means a fashion victim.  I buy what I like and our outside space is no exception to this rule.  That said, if I had the perfect aspect garden with plenty of sun, I would favour darker, more dramatic coloured flowers; black tulips, blue hydrangeas, chocolate cosmos, etc.  I wouldn't necessarily choose pink - or yellow for that matter, although I do love spring daffodils.  But our garden has other ideas and lots of shade to boot, so many of the flowers I love probably wouldn't love me back. 

On a whim earlier on in the year, when nothing was in flower and we were all walking around with our heads in clouds and our feet sinking in the mud, I bought a pale pink sun lounger on offer in Sainsburys.  In retrospect, my subconscious was probably drawn to a colour that is the very antithesis of British gloom and what better colour than pink?  You may recall I also painted our bistro table and chairs a shade of pink - Raspberry Sorbet to be precise.  

Since then, nature's had some input.  The foxgloves have flowered.  

Now the lavatera is putting on a show.  Suddenly, in our garden, pink is having a moment.

As for the wild pink geraniums.  They appear every year and everywhere and when you consider that Ashwood Nurseries sell potted wild geraniums for £10.00, we're happy to embrace them.  I've just pruned them back to ensure a second late summer bloom.  

This false goat's beard seems happy next to the pond and provides a touch of kitsch 1970s garden styling.  All I need is to arrange a "Brangelina" style photo shoot in the garden on the pink lounger with a huge beachball and an inflatable pink flamingo, cocktail in hand.  Maybe that's what Gareth was getting ready for the other day when said lounger, with little in the way of warning, frayed at the edges and sucked Gareth unceremoniously into the upside down (one for Stranger Things fans).

Back to our garden and all things pink, our sweet peas have also finally started to flower.  I bought a mix of grandiflora types dating back to 1900s as they contained some dark purple colours, but no prizes for guessing the colour of the first one to flower?  Pink, of course.

Prompted by Vix, I bought some pink tinged Mexican Fleabane.  

Who doesn't like a daisy-like flower and for a big garden, anything pretty that is said to "spread like wildfire" is welcome...unless of course, it's bamboo and then it can do one!  After a recent encounter with a couple of pigs - not Pinky and Perky, but Biscuit and Butterscotch - at Vale Head Farm, a small biodynamic farm in nearby Kinver (more on this below below), I Googled the question "Do pigs eat bamboo?"  (That's a good one for the internet history).  I'm pleased to confirm that they do root out bamboo and as we all know, goats will eat anything, so if I ever feel totally panicked by our bamboo and its relentless growth spurt gives me sleepless nights, I can remind myself of these facts and give serious consideration to starting a smallholding.

Biscuit

Butterscotch

I knew very little about Biodynamic farming before we literally stumbled across this small local farm on one of our recent walks. It still don't know an awful lot, but it's is a form of alternative agriculture very similar to organic farming.  However, it includes various esoteric concepts drawn from the ideas of Rudolf Steiner.  

Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) was an Austrian philosopher, social reformer, architect, esotericist, and claimed clairvoyant.  We have a local Rudolf Steiner school in fact (attended by a couple of my relatives and, I believe, Robert Plant's son).  A Steiner education takes account of the needs of the whole child - academic, physical, emotional and spiritual and sees artistic activity and the development of the imagination as integral to learning.  The "taking as a whole" principle is also applied to biodynamic agriculture.  Initially developed in 1924, it was the first of the organic agriculture movements. It treats soil fertility, plant growth, and livestock care as ecologically interrelated tasks, emphasizing spiritual and mystical perspectives.

Some methods use an astrological sowing and planting calendar. Biodynamic agriculture uses various herbal and mineral additives for compost additives and field sprays; these are prepared using methods that are more akin to magic than crop production and soil management, such as burying ground quartz stuffed into the horn of a cow, which are said to harvest "cosmic forces in the soil".  Unsurprisingly, it has been labelled as pseudo science by some, but whatever methods Vale Head Farm utilises, it exudes an atmosphere of peace and tranquility, there seems to be a coherent plan and the animals appear content.  It's hard not to be intrigued by the concept.

My own reading material has been confined to Joanna Lumley's No Room for Secrets, which I can thoroughly recommend.  Whilst I like Joanna, enjoyed her in Absolutely Fabulous and have caught a few of her travel documentaries over the years, I wouldn't necessarily have elected to read her book.  However, a family friend passed it onto me and I was intrigued by the concept of this well written, autobiographical book.  I enjoyed getting to know her by participating in a guided tour of her house via its pages, discovering her London property's contents (she's a bit of a hoarder) and hearing the stories and memories her personal possessions invoke.

In one of the chapters, centred on the dressing room, she recalls memories of her favourite designers and labels from her modelling heyday.  Jean Muir was a firm favourite and Joanna maintains that she was hard to beat for her dressmaking skills and the sheer quality of her garments.  She also references Kings Road Boutique Granny Takes a Trip and another boutique with carrot in the name which now escapes me.

In this photo (one of my favourites from the book), she is wearing a dress from Granny Takes a Trip.  She also loves cats and is an extremely empathetic human being, so I think she's alright!

Somewhat inspired by her, although clearly not expecting to find anything from Granny Takes a Trip (rare and hugely sought after now), I decided to have a nose on Ebay for something interesting.  Recent searches have proved fruitless, but this time, I came across a gorgeous 1970s dress by Mina of England Carnaby Street.  I made the seller an offer which was accepted and so I await its arrival with bated breath.  If you're still with me, you might be wondering what it's like.  Well I'll tell you.  It's pink!  I'll endeavour to share a photo in my next blog.

Incidentally, Granny Takes a Trip also featured in this week's Secrets of the Museum on BBC2 - specifically a red lurex suit previously owned by Slade's Jim Lea.  According to Jim, every time he waved his arms around, which was a lot when you were a member of a 1970s glam rock band, the suit jacket arm seams would split and off he would trot to Granny Takes a Trip to purchase a replacement.  Apparently he got through at least a dozen jackets and was, for a time, one of the boutique's best customers.

In other fashion news, this week I became the proud owner of a Pony-O Bun Bar.  It's the brainchild of an American company, although they now have a UK supplier.  The pony-O is designed to give you a more voluminous looking ponytail by virtue of simple bit of tech.  The Bun Bar works on the same principle.

It's basically a large bendy two pronged tool which gives you a bun in seconds without the need for hair elastic, pins or indeed a mirror.  For someone like me who has always struggled to maintain a decent bun without getting a headache, it's been a gamechanger.  

Here's the link for the long haired amongst you. BUN BARZ – PONY-O

In other news, the frogs are multiplying - 3 at the last count.

These are either very large wasps or hornets.  Whatever, they were having a good time...

...and they weren't the only perky ones.  We did manage one short walk the other day in the heat, which was surreal for a couple of reasons.  Firstly, I was again experimenting with intentional camera movement, stopping periodically to get some slightly abstract shots of the numerous silver birch trees in the woods surrounding Highgate Common.  The second reason was perhaps a sign of the times.

It started when we took a detour to get out of the midday sun and in an attempt to locate a large pond which appeared on the map.  We crossed a country lane and noticed a number of cars parked up.  I also became aware of a man on our trail.  He was alone and minus a dog, which may have been entirely innocent, but somehow he put my senses on alert - possibly because what are the chances of someone else getting lost and trying to beat a path through undergrowth in exactly the same place at exactly the same time?  We re-joined one of the numerous paths and spotted that a woman appeared to have lost an important undergarment in the undergrowth.  The area, like many beauty spots, has long been dogged by rumours of nocturnal dogging (sorry I couldn't resist!) but I'm starting to think that daylight dogging might be a thing and that we had inadvertently strayed into a hotspot. Maybe the weather is making these people bolder and even more frisky!  

I was quite relieved when I eventually spotted the man return to the lane with all the parked cars and we reached a more familiar path, although we did notice a mobile phone number scrawled on a piece of paper and weighted down by a rock in the middle of the path.  No message, just a number.  I have my suspicions. 

I think the heady combination of a heatwave and the releasing of restrictions has sent everyone a little crazy over the common.  Still, we're set to have the mother of all storms to end this unprecedented spell of hot weather over the weekend.  Gulp!  Hopefully that will dampen both earth and ardor a little.  

In the meantime, when sleep evades me, I've been roaming the street outside, looking for good night sky vantage points, pursued by my ever present, but useless photographic assistant, Lotte the cat.  Try as I might, she seems distinctly uninterested in learning how to carry a tripod!

Have a good weekend and please feel free to pass a comment!

  

It's a Wrap

 It's Friday and finally the weather forecast is something I'm happy to come out from behind the sofa to watch.  Ever late to the party, I considered today - on the brink of a heatwave - that we really should have bought a water butt to enable us to safely refresh the pond water.  Can I blame my idiocy on this morning's second dose of AstraZeneca?  I reckon so.

Much of this week has been clogged up with admin and other mundane activities.  However, we did have a knock on the door from a local former musician who now supplies vinyl wraps, requesting to purchase some of our rust paint to add a creative final flourish to his VW T5 in the form of a rusty bumper.  Gareth willingly assisted, showing him the best technique for texture and depth of colour, much to the bemusement of the neighbours, who are very much a part of the manicure your lawn/rush-out-and-sweep-a-single-leaf-off-the-drive/clean-and-valet-your-car-every-Sunday brigade (they don't get it).  This prompted an amusing conversation about gorilla rust painting and who would make the most amusing victims.

Anyway, this van is purple, with a Marvel's Suicide Squad-themed wrap.  It was simply too pedestrian as it was.  It needed a rusty bumper to make it stand out.  

A couple of days and a few photo messages later, the customer is really happy with his "swampy, rusty looking bumper" and dropped off a crate of Thatcher's cider as a thank you.

You think the man on the van looks insane?  Here's my latest self portrait or postcard from the edge, taken during one of our recent cold, wet, housebound days.  My other accessory is a latex Elf ear (I have no memory of why I purchased Elf ears, but I knew they would come in handy).  I shared this with a local Facebook photography group.  No one mentioned the obvious.  Perhaps they were afraid to ask.  Eventually, one tentatively commented "Elvish...?"

Our daily exercise has taken us to Kinver this week and after a lifetime's knowledge of our local area, it's always exciting to discover a new route.  We started at the usual viewpoint and I took my usual silhouette shot of whoever happened to be passing at the time.  The greyhound threw some cool shapes.

One of the best views from the top.

Eventually we wound down and back to a different car park at the far end of the National Trust's land and followed a different footpath.  This one took us away from the Edge and through an area of enormous Beech trees, leading to this stunning bluebell woodland glade....

...and onto a beautiful cabin in the woods, complete with woodcutting tools...(see inside),

....past an interesting farm/commune...

and back through some wonderful Hobbiton-like scenery...

and this glorious rapeseed field.

Back at home, I soaked up Rankin's Great British Photography Challenge.  I was initially sceptical that it was just another formulaic show and a direct copy of Masters of Photography.  However, there were some key differences.  First up, no one goes home.  Secondly, Rankin really seems to take an interest in the contestants as people and artists, nurturing their talent and sharing the benefit of his experience.  One thing I was very pleased about was when Rankin congratulated Jackson on his submission for the "Nature is Fragile" challenge.  It was a badger skull in woodland, with foliage placed in and around it. In true Blue Peter style, here's one I took earlier.  Genuinely, I took this a couple of days beforehand.

Sadly I don't have access to Anna Friel (the Celebrity challenge), but maybe I can count this portrait of Flynne, a well known Irish local VW enthusiast with ankle bothering dreadlocks.

On Monday evening, we also paid a visit to the local fair (it's been years!)  We didn't go on any rides (some of the most terrifying experiences I've had have been on fair rides), but happy to capture events for posterity.  Despite the sometimes questionable safety of these ride and terrible, pumping music, I think I would miss them if they were gone.

For some reason, this reminds me of Happy Mondays' Step On video.  I kept imagining Shaun Ryder's profile to pop up above the Blizzard sign.  (Just me?)

Back to reality and garden-wise, I've photographed some of the latest garden visitors,

Honey Bee

Brown Butterfly

potted up some pretty annuals,

a Dahlia...

...and some gorgeous black Violas.

We've also transformed the rusty old wheel barrow buried in undergrowth at the top of the garden, into a herb garden.  I may have mentioned that we don't have many sunny areas in our garden.  This way, we can chase the sun!

Included in this arrangement is a Bronze Fennel from The Hairy Pot Company, the brainchild of Derek and Caroline Taylor, whose hairy pots are planted directly into the ground with zero waste.  You can read about them here.  Kirton Farm Nurseries Ltd home of the Hairy Pot Plant Co

The wisteria's also out and smelling wonderful.

And so as another day comes to an end, feast your eyes on these images taken two nights ago, during the rise of the May full moon "Flower Moon."  The cloudscape was incredible.  I was disappointed not to see a UFO dropping below it.

Bank Holiday looms.  Ours is to include a National Trust visit with friends and a picnic. I have a blanket and some G&Ts.  The rest will come together I'm sure.  Have a good one!