LOOK WHAT I DID!

This is a shot from my very first ever roll of film I developed myself.  Ilford FP4 Plus (125 speed) was already my favourite film, and I just became more in love with it than I was before.  I don't like the graininess of faster film, I'd rather just try and adapt my photography to suit.  I like being able to get the kind of clarity I achieved on the rose petals here and contrasting it with the softness of the out of focus tulips.  At least, today that's how I feel.  I have a couple of rolls of 400 I'm playing with at the moment.

This roll is from my Minolta, since Graham's Voigtlander is sick at the moment.  I had been a bit nervy about another roll of black and whites going through the Minolta, because the ones from the last roll (which granted sat about for too long before it was developed, and was 400 speed as well) came out a bit anaemic for my taste.  These?  Contrast is great!  There are a few smudges on them and the odd little crease, but so far no scratches AT ALL.  I can fix the smudges (by polishing the negs) and sort of like the creases (see left hand side of first shot).  The hard scratch lines across my shots when I've had them developed by shops with machines were making me sad.  These gentler and more organic imperfections I mind less.  Probably mostly because I made them myself.

Developing is FUN.  Not difficult, it's just a question of measuring out chemicals and jiggling things for the right length of time.  It's exciting though - you go into your bathroom and keep the light off and carefully block up all the gaps around the door with towels, then you pry your film out of its pregnant canister.  You wind it onto the reel, hoping that it won't get stuck.  You shut it into the tank, and turn the light on.  Then there's the arcane bit with the chemicals.  And then you can take the lid off and rinse it.  And THEN...you can unwind the sticky negatives from the reel and hang them, using hairgrips, from a piece of string tied between the light fitting and the curtain rail - and you can look at the shots!  And try and work out which ones are the good ones and which ones you really like...

 

There are quite a lot of variables in developing, in terms of times and temperatures as well as film and chemicals and so on.  I'm so looking forward to doing more.  Though I have just had it pointed out to me that the film I've stuck into the Minolta just now, while still be B&W, requires a different not-so-easy-at-home process.  Bah.  Need to finish it quickly and put another one in.  Which means I will have to send it away.  Which means it'll get scratched.  Which is very irritating.

  

All of this is Tom's fault.  Well.  It's sort of Graham's fault as well, that I was interested in doing my own development at all, and his fault that I have a scanner.  But it's TOM'S fault that I have kit and chemicals and confidence to try for myself.  Thanks Tom and Graham!

  

(Tom)

Why do people take pictures?

I've been on holiday.  It's been amazing.  There have been adventures across Europe with people of at least 4 nationalities.  I have made a lot of bread and muffins and stew.  There has been history and music and charades and poetry and culture.

The film camera I had been wanting to use to record it all started sulking on day three.  I was sad.  Instead, I fell back on my trusty little digital that I've been using for ages, my iPhone, and a Holga (not developed yet).  I was disappointed not to be able to take some nice black and whites, but there were compensations - like the shot above.  I was pleased with it.  It's not in focus. You can't see anyone's face. Bits are over-exposed.  But I think those are the things that make it more interesting.  You have to work at it.  The colours and the shapes are pretty.  It has movement.  Admittedly, a lot of this was chance and I had to take a few shots to get one I liked.

I guess people take pictures for different reasons.  *I* take pictures for different reasons.  If I'm posting a recipe, I take pictures of the dish for illustration or direction - recording-type purposes.  If I'm taking pictures when I'm out, I want more than just a record of what I saw - unless what I saw was worth it all by itself.  I want a capture of a moment or a place or a time or a mood.  I want thought not just a picture.

This piece of graffiti was on the wall beside one of the gates to the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris and was one of my favourites of the whole trip (it means 'Silence! We're asleep!', or thereabouts).  I guess the shot is a record, but I thought it was an interesting enough subject in itself to justify my taking a picture of it.  It really needs some trimming to remove the fence on the right, which is a distraction, but I don't think it really detracts from the interest of the subject. 

The second shot, of a road in Pompeii, is a bridge between 'record' and 'arty', I guess.  It is a record of me being in Pompeii, but I was also trying to find a way of capturing some of the essence of the day - the light, the fact that I was standing on the same road that people had used 2000 years ago before the looming mountain blew her top, the emptiness of the place and the scale of the tragedy.  Taking pictures of every piece of coloured fresco left behind on the walls wouldn't have had any of that.  Besides, most of such things are fenced off and badly lit - photographers taking pictures for postcards can get in closer and light things properly and take far better shots than I can of those things and their work is on the internet.  I could take the picture anyway - when I'm using a digital camera, it's not like taking pictures costs me anything - but what would it achieve?  Would I ever look at it again?  Unlikely.  Would anyone else? Maybe I'd show something particularly exciting to other people, to give them a flavour of what I've seen and pass on my enthusiasm, but they aren't going to want to see 50 shots of bits of ruin.  I'd be bored - why would any of my friends be any different?

Every tourist has a digital camera.  That's a given.  A really hefty proportion of them have digital SLRs.  I'm sure a lot of them do think about what they are pushing the shutter for and why, but the vast majority of pictures I saw being taken weren't ones I would have wanted to see afterwards.  The instinctive 'see something famous or ancient or beautiful; quick push a button and move on' I find faintly offensive - especially when the subject genuinely IS ancient or beautiful.  Where is the reverence?  Where is the appreciation?  In Pompeii especially, you're looking at somewhere thousands of people died.  That's a big deal.  I went to the Musèe D'Orsay while I was in Paris.  It contains some of the greatest masterpieces of European art of the last 200 years.  It's a fantastic experience, even crammed as it was the day I was there.  At every picture, there was a bundle of tourists taking pictures.  Clickclickclick.  WHY?  What purpose does it serve?  How is your little photo, with its bad angle and reflection and other people around you, remotely doing justice to this work?

Don't get a better camera.  Take better pictures.  Ones that make the world more interesting or add something, not ones that reduce it.  Enhance.  Appreciate.  An aim for life...

Taking pictures.

I love taking pictures. Partly, I like the recording nature of it – I've always been one for salting away experiences to come back to later. That's not a small part of the reason I've always had diaries and blogs and things; ever since I was about 12 I've written pretty regularly about things that were happening to me. That Wordsworth quotation I've talked about before from the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, about poetry being 'the overflow of powerful feeling remembered in tranquillity is relevant, I think – something about re-living, re-interpreting, making peace and learning might be some explanation as to why, along with a nebulous feeling that there might be some kind of quiz at the end and I ought to take notes. It's kind of strange to go back and read what was bothering me when I was 16. There are events in that year's diary that were clearly central to my existence that I cannot recall at all now – arguments with friends and places I went and things I did. Which just goes to show how little grown ups really remember about what it was like to be a teenager at school and the effect that inter-friend rows or worries about grades or whether that boy liked you or what your friends thought about what you were wearing had on your life. You learn to deal and your dramas gain context but such things are never actually easy - when you're that young it's so much more powerful for being new. That was the year I had been given a day by day journal, and I did write in it every day. Highlights* include my GCSEs and losing my virginity. I've just been given another daily journal for Christmas, so we'll see whether I can manage to keep it again. The way I write has changed a lot though. I have this for anything contemplative and my journals tend to be angsty and aggressively personal, for working out the things that bother me. We shall see.

Photos are part of the record-keeping, the knowing what the world looked like and felt like at a particular time in my history, our history. If they can be beautiful to look at too, that's an advantage. They can't be lie. Even Photoshop can't really lie, you can always tell. That expression on that person's face is really there. He really did spill a pint over her just when you pressed the shutter.

I'm not qualified to discuss graphic art. Mostly, I don't get it. Oh, I have some understanding I think about perspective and spacing and light and colour and even composition when I'm thinking hard so that I take pictures that are usually conventional and can sometimes be nice or maybe even engaging to look at if I get a good one, but I don't understand the context of it all. Of where pictures might fit in the timeline of other pictures, of what the journey is in history – where from, where to and why. Why people pay such large sums of money for things very often eludes me. Why is that black canvas with red squares on it worth so much, when you get right down to it? Is it exclusivity – the fact that you have something that everybody wants? I look at pictures for a mood or a story, in much the same way that I might read a poem but much less hard. If I saw something perfect for the purpose, I would buy something to hang on the wall – but that would be to reduce something that might contain a great deal of social comment to a mere ornament...wouldn't it? Maybe not. It would depend how I looked at it – whether or not it just became a thing. But I probably wouldn't buy something truly disturbing to hang on my wall. I may well buy a copy of a book I found disturbing – that would be a reason to buy it. There's more of the argument about the function of art in there but I need to do more reading before I talk about it again.

There seems to be an obsession in photography with the capture of the moment. Which makes sense – the two biggest things it has going for it as an art-form are accuracy and speed. The best pictures I've seen seem to be where that aim is most clearly realised. Sometimes that means a picture where you can look at something for a long time that you can only see for a split second in the world, or a picture that shows you something you wouldn't think to look at because your eyes pass over it, or a shot that makes you re-evaluate something (object, person, concept, anything) that you know well because it's taken in a strange light or at a strange angle or out of context of out of focus - just a little twisted away from your own view of things. Much like the best literature, I guess. Those pictures have stories. They are the ones you're still thinking about a week later. This is why I object to overly posed, or at least badly posed, photos – it's not a moment that you get in a posed photo, unless it's done brilliantly. Which it can be. Just...it isn't usually, even by people who should know what they're doing.

Graham and I went round the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize Exhibition at the NPG yesterday. The shot that won was of a teenage swimmer preparing for the Olympics. It was a great photo – it was. The girl was there dressed in a swimming costume, not looking like a model and looking very seriously straight out at us. She was sharp in focus and the background was nicely blurred. Everything was blue. She had a plastic foot. Graham was suggesting cynically that this was why that portrait had won. It was engaging as a shot, I guess. I can remember the expression on the girl's face even now, and I can't have been looking at it for more than a minute or so. But t the time I wasn't grabbed at all, for all I stood looking at it trying to understand how it was 'better' than the shots around it for a while. Sitting here now, I can feel more in the picture than I did then, though I now might be imagining it – they didn't have a postcard for me to buy. Out of context, I can see that there is a story in the determination of a teenage girl training to be the best in the world. The foot is irrelevant in that context. I'm also haunted by a shot of a boyish girl with scars all over her arms and a portrait of a large and starched black woman sitting on a bench outside a house with two identically dressed little girls either side of her who are both laughing and crying. The first one affected me partly for the very naked portrayal of self-harm, which gave the picture a story that wasn't a subtle one – I'm wondering if that was partly why it didn't win, it was about the subject rather than the photograph, if that follows. The second – maybe too much risk of sensationalism or something patronising? It wasn't either of those things. I'm just struck, like Graham was, by how politically correct the winner was in the face of the rest, many of which drew the eye and the mind much more immediately.

There were other quite dark shots that show the more unpleasant things that humans are, and there was one that we thought was hilarious – of the head and torso of a very happy model, wearing nothing except a belt and a Native American head-dress. Little in the way of thought to the last but it was fun. I think the technically 'good' pictures that don't arrest your thought might as well be illustrations – which isn't necessarily to belittle them, just to ask, yet again, what makes it art? I take illustrations, usually – often deliberately ('I need a picture of this cabbage in order to write about it'; 'I want always to remember that this is how my dog plays on the beach'; 'this walk on this coastline has been beautiful and the light is beautiful and I want to remember it'). Graham takes pictures that talk a bit more, unless for similar reasons he wants an illustration. There is no reason why one shouldn't do both or either both in the same shot. In different contexts, the same picture could be both. That's the thing about a great portrait, I guess – you might have taken this picture of Granny, but it might also speak beyond that surface. There might be a captured expression, or a way of sitting, or a mood, that says something greater about her or about age or about England or about anything else. I want to see the pictures that draw thoughts on the walls.

It's a free exhibition and well worth a glance if you have an hour to spare on Charing Cross Road.

*There should be an 'ironic' html tag.

I have a thing about postcards.

Or rather, just cards in general. I still have nearly every birthday card I've ever been given, though I think they're in Cornwall somewhere. I started running out of space, so unless they were particularly important I began tearing the pictures apart from the backs and recycling the backs. I have some great ones. The postcard thing is slightly different, because it's about images I've chosen for myself. It still have the odd separated birthday card in it, or cards people have sent me and even the odd flyer or leaflet if it had a particularly good image. I have one photo taken by Graham, that fits in seamlessly. I have an ambition of one day wallpapering them all to a suitable wall, but in the meantime, I use the wardrobes.


It probably doesn't look like it, but they're quite carefully arranged. The idea isn't to have areas that are all the same colour or that are too busy. New cards often mean rearranging what's already there so that the newcomer fits. The too busy is a big factor in how I choose images to go in. It's much more effective to have a very simple image on each card, because it gets too hard to see otherwise.


This one is pretty simple - just one object to catch your eye in a sea of more detailed images. It's a flyer from The Baltic Centre in Gateshead. I went to a conference there a year ago, and spent a good hour or two in their shop - they had a Yoshitomo Nara exhibition on, so it was pretty cool. I love the doll - the cynicism and the cartoon aspect of it.


Can't get more simple than that, and it goes quite well with this one:


My favourite (at least at the moment...) is this one:

I found it in a tiny art gallery come shop called Frank in Whitstable. I bought about 5 cards in there and found I'd spent about £20. I have forbidden myself even looking at that site properly because I KNOW I'll spend more money.

My postcards range from the abstract (thank you Charissa!) to the silly, from adverts to Darwin and from The Wildlife Photographer of the Year to Joan Collins. I love buying them. It's surprising how much money you can spend on postcards. I don't intend to get into that antiques game, I just find it a nice way of remembering great images.

I pick them up in art galleries, from racks of flyers, from quirky bookshops and gift shops. People SEND me them sometimes...that's exciting. Interesting images from all periods, cultures and places. I remember pretty much where they all came from too. They're an extension of my own photography, part of the same thing. An easy way of having a record of a beautiful thing or place, but also a window into a different time and place. How ELSE could I have a picture of Joan Collins rehearsing dance routines from Seven Thieves alongside pineapples growing at Heligan?

...So. Pretty pictures. If you see one that you think I'd like, post it! And I'll send something back. Then EVERYONE can have quirky collections of of pictures to cover their wardrobes with...

Cats.

This is probably Graham's fault. The one of Cleo's less good, but I quite like the shapes. Too dark and too far away.

Mists and mellow fruitfulness?

Well, maybe fruitful in the very tentative sense that I remembered today that I had £250 of cheques to pay in, and discovered that I had £100 in another account I'd forgotten about. Necessary, that. It's misty in that there is mist. And if you want to metaphorical about it, in the sense that I still have NO CLUE what I'm doing and anything. Not sure about the mellow, really. Of the £250, only about £5 is new money, which I subsequently spent on the new Radiohead album, deciding that a fiver was a sensible price to pay for a recording that they weren't paying the record company for, weren't really publicising, and weren't pressing CDs for. Sal still owes me petrol money from last weekend, but when that's in, I'm going to be back to sinking into the overdraught. Meh. I know I should get some temping, but I know if I do that I'm really not very likely to apply for real jobs, and anyway I frankly don't want to do it. I've done my fair share of shoddy little jobs, and I'm bored of them. I want to get paid to do something I'm actually interested in now. I've done enough working for the money. I appreciate that I'm young and naive and that that's never, in reality, going to happen, but I want to TRY at least. Even if the job's not difficult, I want to be involved in something that I can be vaguely entertained by. I do not want to be responsible for paying other people's bills, serving customers food I don't like and they complain about, or filing exam papers, to name but a few.

I appreciate it's not a position I can keep up for long, but probably another month won't destroy me utterly. Meh. Probably not that long, really. In two weeks time, I will go back to the agencies and get some proper work. No actually genuinely I will. I suppose it might not be agencies - shop work, part-time/shift would do me. In some ways that'd be better, except I'd probably find myself working Saturdays. It also works if I get the job I had the interview for yesterday, actually - that's part-time, so I could keep the two jobs going together in a way that would make one full-time job. Perfect. Yesterday did actually go quite well - I came out on a high, and then recalled I'd not mentioned ANYTHING about PGP, which is one of the biggest parts of my work experience. Dumb. Meh. Anyway. I got on quite well with the two women interviewing me, and I didn't feel it went too badly. It was first round interview, anyway, so if I get a second round one I can make up for that. And if I don't, well, I know what to think about next time around and I'll be better prepared. It's a really very pretty job. I'd really like to do it. It's SUCH a shame it's part-time, but I think that's mostly to do with money on their end. I did mention that the part-time bothered me, but they also said there was potential for it to expand to a full-time job of for me to be able to get some more part-time stuff through their partners. Yay. I should hear how they thought it went sometime today if I'm lucky.

I went to Oxford on Wednesday to see Eleanor. She's in a pretty bad way because her Dad, who is almost exactly one year younger than my Dad, had a stroke 10 days ago. It's a funny type of stroke, in that it was a bleed into the space between two of the membranes between the brain and the skull, rather than a more conventional clot inside the brain tissue itself. I think she almost knows too much for her own good at the moment, as a medical student. She knows what all the consequences are and the likelihoods and so on. I can't work out whether it's helpful to her to be that well prepared or more painful than not knowing. Anyway, she's understandably jumpy, nervous, and unable to concentrate. They've let her postpone the latest set of exams, which is definitely a good thing, but she's flitting between Oxford, the Royal Free Hospital in London, and her home in Knebworth. We went walking somewhere west of Oxford on Wednesday because she needed to get out of town and out of the familiar for a bit. I'm trying to persuade her that she should come and stay with me for a while, too. There's a vague (very vague) possibility that I'll head to Cornwall for a weekend at some stage in the next while and if I do I'll take her with me if I can, for both our sanities. But it was nice out. There was mist and greyness and all sorts, and completely no wind, so I could take pictures like the ones in this post (although not like them, because I've been playing with these...). Lots of cows and labradors and that kind of thing. Then we headed back to her house in the evening for dinner, and then I came back down to St Albans so I could be here in time to faff about what I was going to wear to this interview all of yesterday.

I need to see more London theatre, like shows at some of the places I've been applying. Should really do that. I'm going to see something on my birthday now (more because it's the only day possible than specifically because it's my birthday), and I really ought to organise that Royal Court trip to see The Arsonists that I mentioned on the DVD list. I'm feeling poor and lazy, so haven't done it. Bah. I am in the process of organising a viewing of the Return to the Forbidden Planet DVD that I haven't seen yet. Sadly, this doesn't really count. Bah.

My weekend is filling up - I'm meeting Pete McDonald at the Tate Modern on Saturday afternoon, then watching a film and eating with Melissa on Saturday night at hers and Kate's new flat, and going out with Mel, Kate and Graham on Sunday to do something. Don't think we've worked out what yet. Back here Sunday night to feed the cat. I like having a cat, she's lovely. And pleased to see me when I come in and EVERYTHING. The only downside is cleaning out the litter tray, but I suppose nothing's perfect.

Lazy or hard work?

Firstly, Nick Fyson's posted some vastly better Minack pictures than mine...well worth a look.

This week I have mostly been: applying for jobs, repeatedly. I was a bit fed up to begin with because the only things I could really find to apply for were unpaid internships. They're likely to be great fun, actually, and will nearly cover travel, which is something. Only trouble is I can't really afford to do that for very long. There have been a few good ones - particularly a job at the Writers' Centre bit of the Soho theatre, which is really nice. I'll be disappointed I think if I don't get an interview for that one, but we'll see. Half way through another application for a Real Job for a company called PHA which does panto management. The fact that it's panto interests me slightly less, but it is a great job mostly because it's a really small company and I'd probably get the chance to have a finger in all sorts of thing. It's also the sort of place where I'd really feel I was making a difference. And it's in Herts - not St Albans, unfortunately, but smaller local venues than most of what we have here. So we'll see. I need to finish that app today.

I went to Cambridge at the weekend to help Andy move house and to get out of St Albans while my dad and my brother sorted my brother's stuff out to go back to Durham. I stayed at Hugh's, because Andy was packing HIS stuff too, to move BACK into our flat in Victoria Road with Will Wykeham and one or two others. Moving Andy's stuff didn't take us long, since his parents had removed most of it the day before. We then wandered into town and sat on Jesus Green with a pile of newspapers, magazines and crosswords. Carl and Heather (in top pic) showed up too, so we had a convivial afternoon that culminated in me chivvying everyone to the Pickerel when it got cold and started to rain, and thence to the curry house. Carl had his camera, so I was playing with that - not that the set on Flickr are from that; they're from my camera. I took them for the playing potential, and I'm actually quite pleased with the results. Would like to see the ones I took on Carl's camera sometime, too. A 50mm lens makes for pretty.

I had a bit of a panic at the curry house. I COULDN'T FINISH MY CURRY. This never happens. EVER. I think I shrunk my appetite a bit in Cornwall, which was a good thing, and also that the more exercise I do, the less I actually want to eat...my body's just better when I do exercise. All in all, I'm feeling quite good about that. My running has been of the order of something like 2.25 miles a day, in just over 15 minutes most of the time, which is pretty damn good. My fitness hasn't sunk very far at all despite a more or less inactive summer.

I went to the (Abbey) theatre on Tuesday to a play reading thing. It's SO weird going back. Literally nothing has changed apart from my going to uni. Even the odd new person is the same as the old people. I know that it's mostly because all the people are real grownups with real lives, but it's still weird.

Anyway. Today I'm going to ring Faber Maunsell because they haven't got back to me about some temping, and finish the PHA app pretty much now.

And also, I'm listening to the Planet cast recording at the moment. WOW. I really need to watch the DVD. Perhaps I shall arrange a Planet DVD watching evening. Takers?

Busyness, sort of.

Well. Much chaos. Excuse the messy desk - it's tidier now, but Tolly was trying to help me type. Cleo had her op, which went fine, though she's less than impressed at having to wear a lampshade and take pills. Tolly's been the funny one though; he's been absolutely all over us, demanding attention and playing and all sorts. I think he's been quite lonely, especially to begin with when Cleo would only hiss at him any time he came near her. He's been chasing down newspaper and flies and all sorts of things, not to mention my leg and my fingers. The one I like best is below (though they're all much of a muchness), but there are more here, here, here and here. He's a silly kitten. Sorry about the messy room - I was busy tidying at the time, and Tolly was assisting, by deconstructing the newspaper.



We went to see the LLAMAS on Friday night! They're SO COOL. The two we're probably getting are called Pepper and Brandy - Pepper's dark brown, and Brandy's a mix of ginger and cream with a skewbald face. They're boys, and will be somewhere over 18 months old when we get them. That won't be til Autumn/Spring, because we need to fence the place properly and build them a shed and the like. YAY LLAMAS. We'll need to do a fair amount of handling of them, and train them to take a head collar properly so we can walk them in the woods. LLAMA WALKS. YAY!!!!

I've been staying at the Village Hall in Paul with the Pinafore cast for the last couple of nights. I went with them to the Meadery in Penzance on Friday night, post llamas. (People have been asking me about whether I was REALLY late because I was at a llama farm. I could say yes. How cool is THAT??) This was a very silly evening all round - films again here and here. This was not the half of the debauchery that went on. Very entertaining.

I spent Saturday making Becky Thomas a birthday cake, of which I'm actually quite proud - large and pink and filled with strawberries and butter-cream. Excessively sickly and very pink, but that was the specification. I sang with them in church in Paul this morning, too. Nothing MASSIVELY exciting - Stainer's I Saw The Lord - but it was really nice to be singing with a big group of big voices. I didn't stick out! Yay! And so many men, and I didn't have to sing tenor, though I did sing second alto, which is actually pretty similar, because there were more sops than altos. Nice. I'm heading back with them tomorrow to see Twelfth Night at the Minack, and then to deliver timps on Tuesday, and then to see the talent night and cook ANOTHER cake on Wednesday. Lots of drifting about Cornish roads. I'm beginning to think I should just stay there all this week, but it seems a bit harsh on my family and I do want to see my animals.

Erk. I'm SO tired, despite all I've done today was the service this morning and lying on a beach reading all afternoon...

True Cornish.

Hemmick sunglasses
Originally uploaded by hazelsheard

True Cornish lazing, that is. I went walking with my dad on bank holiday Monday, with the dogs, while my mum went diving from Hemmick beach. This picture is taken from somewhere along the South Coast Path above Hemmick beach, through my sunglasses. The sun wasn't low enough to take it without, even at the fastest shutter speed. It's an odd effect - when I look through the glasses, the colour doesn't all leach out like this. If anything, the glasses intensify it. The sepia's quite pretty, but I could have done that with a filter on the camera itself, I think. Also note the awesome spider web we found. They put ponies out to graze the cliffs at quite a lot of places round the cliffs, but this was the first time I've actually seen them.

Cornwall's not a happy place to be on a sunny bank holiday though - everywhere was rammed. Hemmick is down a very steep hill and on a road where the wing mirrors of an average car touch on BOTH sides. When people park in all the passing places and you have to reverse straight up a very steep hill and the road is that narrow, it's an issue. People are dumb.

I went to see the Minack crowd yesterday. I pootled around watching them rehearse for a bit, and then took Salvador to Tescos. I ended up staying for dinner and catching up with people, and then in the pub playing silly card games. Hopefully this time I'll remember the rules of mafia - I really should, it's awesome. Had a great evening all round, even if I did feel a bit spare part-y. I'm going down again tomorrow, on commission from Becky Thomas to bring her ingredients for a birthday cake.

I finally got the eye test today I've been needing to get for ages. I'm entirely unsurprised to be given a prescription for glasses for driving - short-sightedness is usefully hereditary. Grr. Ah well. TV and driving only, as yet, so could be worse. My right eye still feels weird, I think from the glaucoma test where they puff air at you. Anyway. I'm stupendously poor at the moment, so had to talk nicely to my dad to get him to pay for them. Meh. I have to work harder at getting a job...I just can't bear to. I have sent a few emails to a few people about work experience/placement type things, but I've not really looked very hard and I haven't sent the begging letters I need to. I'll try and get a Stage when I'm in town tomorrow, though I'm not sure where to look. I do know that the other person who went for the Donmar job didn't get it either...which I'm not exactly pleased about because it was an equally perfect job for her as it was for me and I would have been pleased for her if a little jealous, but it did make me feel slightly less inadequate. Meh.

Took the cats to the vet today - Cleo has a lump on her stomach which the vet pronounced to be a massive umbilical hernia and which needs almost immediate operation. She's apparently extremely lucky that it's not caused her any problems as yet, especially considering she's been living wild. The kitten has a gender...definitely male, as I was fairly sure. The family seem to have accepted my naming of him as 'Tolly', short for Ptolemy, which goes nicely with Cleo. And Tolly is a perfect slightly silly name for a truly bananas cat. I'm sure he's getting bigger already, and we've only had him since Friday. He was completely unfazed by the vet - he was contentedly playing catch with my fingers through the bars of the box when his mother was being examined, and wanted desperately to explore when it was his turn. He did squeak very indignantly when she stuck a needle in him though, but who wouldn't?

I think Cleo will hate us again tomorrow when she has to go back to have her operation; hopefully it'll blow over soon enough. It's hard to reconstruct her history. She plainly understands and is comfortable around humans, because if you catch her in the right mood she'll play and sit on your lap and generally be very friendly. At the same time, you couldn't look after that cat as a pet and love her as she appears to have been loved without doing something about that great lump on her tummy that's been there since she was a kitten...can you? And surely people in this country and in this day and age don't just put a cared-for pet out to starve if they can't afford or don't want to be bothered with doing anything about it? I think when she finally calms down, she'll be a truly lovely animal, which makes it even harder to understand how anyone could do anything like that to her.

Anyway. I need to sleep. Meh.

Snuffles...

I'm in Cornwall now, having driven down from Cambridge yesterday. The drive was actually fine, in that the traffic wasn't too bad and neither was the weather, but I was pretty dead by the time I got here. This cold is turning out to be a pretty nasty one, though I suspect that anyone other than me who hasn't been running around so much or sitting in any damp caves in wet clothes would probably not find it so icky. Davina and her boyfriend Neill (Davina's an English student who sings in choirs and does theatre...we have connections) stayed last night before heading down to Minack today to see the Philip Pullman plays, which was nice. Davina played the piano for a couple of songs for me for a bit, which was awesome - I don't get the chance to have them accompanied that often. We then moved over to the CD player and sang along to Handel's Messiah...I like THIS sort of karaoke...stuff just has to be at least 70 years old, and then I'm in with a fighting chance.

The dogs have been all over me since I got back, which is always lovely...I miss them SO much when I'm not here. Rocky especially won't leave me alone - he nearly slept on me yesterday. Quite hard sleeping when you have what feels like half a ton of very solid spaniel on your feet. Kiri's a bit more sedate most of the time, but even she's really affectionate when you just come home. She's trying to make us believe she's getting on for an old lady, which she entirely isn't, she's all of 8 and a border collie. YAY dogs.

Today's excitement, though, was new cats! We went to the Cats Protection shelter and had a look at what they had, but nothing really fitted exactly what we wanted. They did, though, have on their waiting list a mother and her kitten. The mother had been a pregnant stray, and the rest of the kittens had already gone to homes, but the general idea was that these two would go together. Our last pair of cats was a mother and her kitten, and they cordially hated each other, so we're not sure these two will really get on in a year or two, when mum decides baby should have found its own patch. We've got room enough that it's unlikely to be a problem though. We don't know the sex of the kitten, so haven't named him yet, but mum's called Cleo. The smart money's on the baby being a boy though, so I want to call him Tolly, short for Ptolemy (yes, I'm an English student. Ptolemy Philadelphus was Cleopatra's son. He wasn't the famous one (there are getting on for 20 of them), and he was never a Pharaoh, though.). Not sure for a girl. Looking it up, Cleopatra's daughter by Anthony was Cleopatra Selene, so maybe Selene would be the answer. That will depend on what the family think.

What photos there are, are here, but they're not great as yet. The kitten's a nutter, chasing around and hunting people's fingers and mum's tail and generally making use of the many excessively sharp points at his disposal. He's (I can't say 'it's'...) adorable though. Cleo has spent most of the afternoon that she's been sat on the windowsill in the study staring outside, desperate to go out, or growling at the dogs when they knock on the door. She's purred tentatively when someone's caught her at the right moment, but she's not really keen yet. Hopefully she will get used to the idea that we're OK when we feed her enough, but at present it's pretty clear that she's been a stray long enough to HATE being cooped up inside. Sadly it has to be, at the moment. She's absolutely beautiful, though - my pictures don't do her justice at all. I'll have a go with the SLR at some stage and see if I can do better. She's a real dark tortoiseshell, the complete opposite, really, of Tiggy, though Tiggy did have a kitten with very similar markings. Kitten's pretty too, with a little white bib and belly, white socks at the back and little white bits on his front paws. YAY CATS.

The other news is that the man who owns the llama farm came down this evening to look at our space and tell us what he thought before we get llamas. Apparently, he's thrilled with the space (I was asleep through this...evil coldy illness), but we need to sort the fencing. I think the general idea is that we'll eventually have four, but we'll start off with two probably in about six or eight months' time. Which means my mum is going to set the island up for ducks sometime in the next few months, probably after she's been to the wildfowl show in November, which means early spring. Menagerie is growing...woohoo!

I uploaded the very few pictures I took in Edinburgh, beyond the statue in the previous post. I was pretty pleased, actually. The evening light in Scotland is lovely because it's so far north, and this particular evening it was so clear you could see the hills on the other side of the Firth of Forth. The skyline lends itself to this kind of picture, too, just in the middle like that. A lot of Edinburgh is big, Georgian, and square, but leaning towards the gothic - so there are lots of turrets and towers like you see here. The stone is also a particularly attractive honey-coloured limestone, with black slate roofing. They whole effect is great!

French pics.

framboises jaunes
Originally uploaded by hazelsheard

I've just posted the pictures I took in the French Alps - see here. I wanted to share this one with you...have you ever seen YELLOW raspberries?! They tasted, actually, just the same as pink ones, but they're an awesome colour. Weird.

Particular French favourites include this one, which is a supershroom. Have decided mushrooms make awesome photo subjects, along with snails. I even passed that particular fetish on to my dad, who spent a quantity of time photographing a French snail which had considerable size on my humble Cambridge specimen. Other highlights were a waterfall picture I'm really quite pleased with, and this one of the cloud flowing down the hill over a town called Avoriaz (which you can't see, it's under the cloud at the top of a sheer cliff...).

Memory Lane.

I went to Ashwell today, to see Olive. Ashwell's my home, if anywhere is. It's a truly beautiful village, and very old. There are cottages still inhabited that feature in the Doomsday book. This wall is pretty ancient, though I'm not sure exactly how old it is. It's made of wattle and daub, and the top is randomly thatched. The bees love it - the whole thing is basically a hive. When they restored it recently, they had to be really careful and only do it at times of year when they wouldn't disturb them. The hollyhocks cover the whole village, and are spectacular in the summer. I've seen colours there I've never seen anywhere else - like a peach colour, or a red so dark it's almost black. There are even double ones, but they don't breed true. Olive was saying that there are people who collect the seeds these days and sell them.

Olive took my by surprise by feeding me lunch...sadly my vegetarianism hasn't reached the ears of vast numbers of my family or old friends yet. Bah. This resulted in a slightly uncomfortable scene. Meh. Olive is very easy to offend, and I'll probably get an earful from my parents about it. It never occurred to me she was intending to feed me though - she never has before. Anyway. I had the vegetables and she had the casserole, and it could have been worse, I suppose.

Also, I split my good jeans. I'm annoyed about this. I've done my best to fix them, but whatever happens I'm going to need new ones soon enough. Meh. I also need new shoes, particularly flipflops since I broke mine in Italy. Clearly, this is going to be expensive.

Finished!

I finished my shawl! I've been making it for a while, and just got around to finishing it off. Isn't it pretty?? I was sort of uncertain about the colour for a while - it's a bit yellow, really. It's sort of undyed wool, but bleached, so it's quite bright. I'm keener now though - I think it'll go quite well with most of my brown stuff. I can always give it to my mum if I decide the it is wrong; it might be a bit old for me, if you know what I mean. I was also debating the number of tassels. I could add about the same again between the ones I've already put on it. Any suggestions? Incidentally, sorry for the mess you can see around, but I'm in the middle of packing.

Oh, and the lemonade? With the grapefruit, you need less sugar, but it's really rather nice. :-)