Remnants: Blackpool

Since we haven't done a lot of travelling abroad recently, I'm going to post a series of older photos that I didn't release earlier. Here are a few from our 2005 trip to Blackpool.

Remnants: London

Since we haven't done a lot of travelling abroad recently, I'm going to post a series of older photos that I didn't release earlier. Here are a few from our 2005 trip to London.

Regents Park

In the stairway to the observation deck of St. Paul's Cathedral 

Aboard the Eye

Tourist trap

Playground

Here's my playful take on this week's Sepia Saturday "upside down, the wrong way up, and all over the place" theme.

Brighton, 2005

Citta della Domenica, Tuscany,2007

Anghiari, Tuscany, 2007

Eye, Norfolk, 2005

Monumental

Here's a selection of sticky-uppy things to fit with this week's Sepia Saturday theme.

In the summer of 2005 I escorted my son and a friend to England for a few weeks. We were staying in Oakworth - a suburb, if you will, of Haworth, which is where I spotted this abandoned woolen mill near the steam railway.  Ruin or not, it enhanced my sense of time traveling.

Haworth, 2005

The kids demanded a daytrip to Blackpool and I was happy to oblige.  While they went on rides I wandered the town and beach, as is my wont. While we were here, bombs were going off in London around the corner from what was to be our hotel in a few days.

Blackpool, 2005

Earlier the same year, I'd accompanied my son on a school-sponsored trip to Italy, a highlight of which was an all-too-brief (though stiflingly hot) afternoon in Pompeii. Antiquity which outstrips Yorkshire by a couple of millennia. That's the dreaded Vesuvius looming in the distance. I was struck by learning that, eruptions aside, the Pompeiians suffered many deaths from lead poisoning from their plumbing system which, although comparatively innovative, in an ironic twist was constructed of pipes made from lead that their British slaves had been mining - in Yorkshire.

Pompeii, 2005

I returned to Italy in the winter of 2007 with the whole family, and again those under 20 strongly urged visiting Citta della Domenica, a zoo and amusement park outside Perugia, as a break from cathedrals and museums and tiny hibernating hilltowns. Billed as a rival of Disneyland, it fell several leagues short but provided an interesting afternoon. These towers are new constructions but are reminiscent of the myriad ancient campanili in Italy.

Citta della Domenica (Perugia, Tuscany) 2007

Weather Abstract

Although this shot could be anywhere, it is in fact looking out a window of a friend in Banbury, England, summer 2009. Says a lot about English summers.  I love the shapes of the raindrop remnants and their reflections of the view/shades behind them.  The whole picture reminds me of a flag as well, the national flag of precipitation.

Change

Welcome to another Theme Thursday.

"We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing."
- R. D. Laing

...We rounded the corner of the York Minster cathedral to find children lining up thousands of coins on the ancient cobblestone street for some charity or other. Is it my imagination that I seem to recall their punning slogan being "It's Time for a Change"?

York, 2009

And for an added visual pun, here's the original shot I "changed" to monochrome for this post.

Letters of York

A vintage post-office display from the Railway Museum in York, featuring two of my favorite tropes, numbers and series of objects.

Flood Tide of Shadow

A sun-dappled morning in Locke Park, Barnsley, Yorkshire. Careful, don't get your feet shady!

Sweet

Mister Softee meets Mister Death in Haworth, Yorkshire, 2005.

Raise from your bed of languor
Raise from your bed of dismay
Your friends will not come tomorrow
As they did not come today

You must rely on yourself, they said,
You must rely on yourself,
Oh but I find this pill so bitter said the poor man
As he took it from the shelf

Crying, O sweet Death come to me
Come to me for company,
Sweet Death it is only you I can
Constrain for company.

- Stevie Smith

Interior Reflexteriors

Semi-abstract trompe-l'oeils done with the aid of mirrors, if not smoke.

Cafe, Sansepolcro, Tuscany 2007

Cottage, Carnlough, Northern Ireland 2004

Cafe, Durham, England 2009

BritRail Abstract

York 2009

Monochrome Monday

A serendipitous parade of kids against a whitewashed wall in Oakworth, Yorkshire, summer 2005.

York

More train shots... Last summer I and my daughter visited friends in Yorkshire, England. We arrived in the Viking/Roman city of York at the Victorian train station, with its typical arcing skeletal roof.




We did a lot of sauntering around town, including along the ancient city walls and a twilight "ghost walk." Another attraction is the railway museum. Here is the view from beneath an old steam locomotive.




Another locomotive has been opened up like something from the "Bodies" exhibit to show the workings of a steam engine.

York

Yorkshire Railway Museum

Last days in York – we went to the art museum, full of paintings from the 17th to 19th century, as well as a smattering of modern pop work. We went on a “Ghost Detective” walk one evening, which was quite amusing though only minimally scary, aside from the tendency of the “detective” himself to suddenly shout some of his words (“…covered in BLOOD!!”). Someone across the stream from our house decided to start a bonfire, which left our street shrouded in odoriferous smoke, and our neighbor took the opportunity to start his own in his back yard, flames about ten feet high…fortunately the wind was low and no sparks reached our house!

On our last full day, Pi stayed home to read and rest, while the, indefatigable as ever, further explored York’s byways, wall-walks, snickelways, and street market, as well as visiting the enormous railway museum, which featured both famous engines (e.g. Mallard) from the beginnings to the present, and “rolling stock” such as postal cars, dining cars, sumptuous passenger carriages, etc., as well as a warehouse of miscellaneous railway paraphernalia (signs; switches, lights and other hardware; furniture; engine bits; etc.) and a workshop where men are refurbishing the Flying Scotsman engine.

York and Durham

YORK







DURHAM
Before leaving York, Piper and I took a one-day expedition to Durham on Sunday, an hour’s train ride north through green hills towns of Darlington and Northallerton. We walked down the hill from the station on the hill above the river, crossed the old bridge to the historical part of town, and back up the other side to visit the cathedral. Also browsed around an antiques sale, wandered some tiny cobbled alleyways down to the river and the historical museum, and finished off a pizza lunch with icecream bars before returning to York.

York

Maggie picked us up in her newish Toyota and we dined at her house.  Yesterday was hot, and after Pi woke at noon, she and I bused to York center and spent a few hours traipsing around, from the lower Ouse bridge through massive crowds, through a street fair, towards the Minster via the Shambles, lunching at a little sandwich place and walking it off along the city wall-top.  Checked out the Monks Bar museum of Richard III and then followed a unending glittering trail of small change laid end to end around the perimeter of the Minster by kids collecting for the Heart Association, to ascend 275 tightly wound steps to the roof of the Minster tower. HOLY CRAP --  exhausting!  95-mile view from the top, nicely windy to dry the rampant sweat. Back down to seek out an icecream cone, then down to the river and along it for a bit, crossing over the railway bridge and back up the other side to catch the bus to Maggie’s again. Whew.

Manchester

Thursday after I had an early morning walk (Piper asleep) down the “ginnel” (moving from the grafitti-laced alleyway to a semirural path through the neighborhood, mostly of Liverpudlian decrepitude), Pi and I took the double-decker “Magic Bus” down Wilmslow Road to the center of Manchester (Piccadilly Gardens). 


There we spent several hours walking around with our trusty cameras: from redbrick Victorian oldtown, along the very urban canal, across to the river, up to the circular main library and the town hall; then toured the art museum of 17^th-19^th century works including by Blake, Rosetti, Renoir, etc. as well as some contemporary folks.  Quick lunch from a Subway -- of all places! – and after getting a bit lost (little or no signage when you needed it) decided to forego the Manchester “Eye” and bused back.



Friday I took another morning walk through nearby Birch Park (Piper asleep) which was a “beautiful” large, grassy, wooded acreage but ultimately boring; and then D and I walked (Piper reading) to the grocery store via Platt Fields park, more interesting, including a big pond filled with moorhens, ducks, a hundred or so Canada geese, and swans.  I was able to ruffle the tailfeathers of a cygnet who was nose-down in the water (the mother was unamused).  Next to the park was a large neighborhood of student housing (once terraced housing for the lower classes) – pretty desolate and wholly without gardens or decoration. And then we took the hour-and-a-half train from Piccadilly Station to York, via Huddersfield, Dewsbury, and Leeds. [At Huddersfield, at Huddersfield, there was a cow that wouldn't yield. The reason why it wouldn't yield? It didn't like its udders feeled!]