Lens-Artists Challenge: What’s In A Garden?
Posted on August 13, 2024
What’s in a garden? Many things, large and small. From stately homes to formal beds, from fountains to mazes. Obviously, not every garden has any of these, but I can pretty much guarantee that thy will all have flowers and insects that have a symbiotic relationship with them.
Cellpic Sunday: Power Station Plumage
Posted on August 11, 2024
The long and – mostly – straight RN147 (Route Nationale) is one of France’s principal north-south corridors and unavoidable if you’re heading north from our neck of the woods towards the Channel ports, as we were earlier this week.
Heading north towards Poitiers, the road passes by a major power station, whose huge chimneys are visible from a long way off.
The Bell Tower
Posted on August 4, 2024
The Sickly Sapling
Posted on August 2, 2024
This is a tiny oak sapling that has just sprung up – presumably from an acorn – on what we laughingly call our pelouse (lawn). It doesn’t look very well, does it?
There again, nor does the lawn.
Lens-Artists Challenge: Balconies
Posted on July 28, 2024
The popular image of Abu Dhabi focuses on the prosperity, and even luxury, of its built environment (as I suppose the architects would describe it). Beneath that marbled surface sheen, however, are the far less salubrious spaces occupied by largely unskilled immigrant workers, many of whom have to live packed in to tiny apartments in crumbling concrete blocks. Here, balconies are not for enjoying the sunshine but making the most of the available space.
Cellpic Sunday: Snail mail
Posted on July 28, 2024
In France, letterboxes in doors are very much the exception rather than the rule. Like most people, we have instead a boite postale (postbox). Commonly, these are stuck on top of a pole at the side of the road. However, ours – a metal one, as per the approved design – is actually built in to a stone gate post.
So my question is: given its secure and watertight location, – and the fact that it’s open for an average of no more than five seconds a day, six days a week – how in blue blazes did that snail get inside it? It’s not the first either. Do snails have access to technology that would put Star Trek to shame?
Cellpic Sunday: A venerable vessel
Posted on July 21, 2024
This beautifully simple storage vessel sits unassumingly in a kitchen in Guédelon, the recreation of a medieval fortified chateau.
Monochrome Madness: Tripods
Posted on July 18, 2024
This is the first time I’ve participated in Leanne’s Monochrome Madness challenge, so please be gentle with me.
This week’s theme is ‘tripods’. Now, I do possess a tripod but the truth is that I don’t use it very often. These days, most of my photos are taken with my smartphone rather than my DSLR. I don’t think I’m the only one, either.
Even when I was using a ‘proper’ camera kit, the tripod didn’t get deployed that often. However, I do have a very good macro lens (Nikkor 105mm) and it would have been madness indeed not to have used a tripod in conjunction with that.
Anyway, this is a macro shot of the reproductive parts of a lily, complete with that pollen (orange in real life) that you can never properly get off your clothes if you accidentally brush against it. The white leaves form the background (so those grey dots aren’t dust on my mirror).
Cellpic Sunday: Where they belong…
Posted on July 14, 2024
I don’t usually get involved in politics on this blog, but this is important. Last Sunday, 7 July, marked the second round of the French general election and, as a French citizen, I was proud to do my democratic duty and cast my vote.
In the first round, a week earlier, the hard-right RN (Rassemblement Nationale – just a polite way of saying ‘fascists’) – polled by far the largest share of the vote and in the view of many, including most opinion polls, looked set to command the largest bloc of seats in the National Assembly, and possibly even an overall majority. Not a cheery prospect.
In the event, after the second round the RN trailed in third, behind both the left-wing and centrist blocs, thanks to some well-organised tactical voting and a clear rejection, upon mature reflection, by French voters of what the RN represents. Politics in France may be at an impasse as a consequence, with no group having a working majority, but as far as I’m concerned it’s a lot better than the alternative.
Which brings me to the somewhat idiosyncratic practicalities of casting your vote in France. There’s nothing so simple as putting a cross next to your preferred candidate on a ballot paper. Instead, after registration, you pick up an envelope from a table which also carries piles of slips, each bearing the names and party affiliations of the candidates standing in your constituency. You need to collect at least two of these slips and then enter a curtained booth. You then put the slip of your choice into the envelope, come out and hand it over to an official, who posts it into what’s called the urne – a locked transparent plastic ballot box.
Before leaving the curtained booth, you put the rejected, unused slips into a waste-paper basket. That’s interesting, because voters can see which candidates have previously been rejected (although not who you or anybody else has actually voted for). To me, it was greatly encouraging to observe that there were already quite a lot of RN slips in that bin.
Exactly where they belong.
Lens-Artists Challenge: Tourist Attractions
Posted on July 14, 2024
Who among us has never been a tourist? And who among us has never thought that somewhere would be absolutely wonderful – if it wasn’t for all the bloody tourists?
This is Venice (of course), just off Piazza San Marco. And it wasn’t even high season.
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