Weekly Photo Challenge: Future

When I saw that this week’s topic was ‘Future’, I knew exactly which image I wanted to use. Unfortunately, I didn’t take it (my son did) and nor do I have a copy in my library. However, the immensely talented Madame made a wall-hanging based on it, which now sits over our stairs. Here is my photograph of that:

Future-2

It shows our twin grandsons taking their first unaccompanied walk together down the beach to the Arabian Gulf in Abu Dhabi. It always looked to me that they were heading off into the future.

I think I know why, too. When I was about their age now (eight), I remember a big – or so it seemed to me at the time – picture painted on the wall of the old Birkenhead Market. It showed a boy and a girl heading off down a path together towards a brightly shining sun: As I recall, it was actually an advert for childrens’ shoes and was captioned ‘The Highway To Health’. Anyway, the photo on the beach brought it back to me.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Future

Weekly Photo Challenge: Landscape

Not far from here, if you go down a country lane and then take the lane that leads off that, you will come across this tranquil landscape:

Landscape-2

Weekly Photo Challenge: Landscape

Weekly Photo Challenge: Half-Light (Ozymandias)

I don’t matter. Ultimately, nobody does.

And if there’s one poem to keep you focused on your own mortality and complete inconsequentiality in the great scheme of things, it must be Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’:

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

In other words, however great or important you may think you are, even your most stupendous monuments will not stand the test of time.

Specifically, ‘Ozymandias’ refers to a massive ruined statue of the Pharoah Rameses II. Unfortunately, I don’t have any images of Egyptian ruins, but I do have quite a few showing the ruins of what must once have been (well, still is, even in its current state) the awe-inspiring city of Petra, in Jordan. Including this one:

Half-Light

No doubt the Nabateans, in constructing their ‘rose-red city’, were out to impress, inviting visitors to ‘Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

Weekly Photo Challenge: Half-Light

Weekly Photo Challenge: One Love

Nothing comes between a boy and his pain au chocolat:

One Love

Weekly Photo Challenge: One Love

Weekly Photo Challenge: Harmony

On paper, the juxtaposition of this medieval stair-tower (in Chartres) with the modern-day aspect of the attached house shouldn’t really work, but personally I thonk it forms ‘a pleasing and consistent whole’ – in other words, ‘harmony’.

Harmony

Weekly Photo Challenge: Harmony

Weekly Photo Challenge: Seasons

In 2014 I set myself a project to record the passing seasons by every month taking a photograph of the field behind our house, from the same point of view. This week’s Photo Challenge provides an ideal opportunity to show the results.

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Seasons

Weekly Photo Challenge: Life Imitates Art

Claude Monet painted over 250 pictures of waterlilies, mostly those found in his garden at Giverny and most famously those which also included a view of the Japanese bridge. When visiting Giverny, it’s quite something to recognise a vista from one of Monet’s paintings and realise you’re standing in the same spot he must have done with his easel over a hundred years ago.

waterlilies2 copy

Monet himself, of course, did it better; this version is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York:

Waterlilies1

Weekly Photo Challenge: Life Imitates Art

Weekly Photo Challenge: Time

Not the most ‘out-of-the-box’ take on this week’s theme of Time for sure, but an interesting and unusual object nonetheless: the great 24-hour clock, dating from the 1520s – and looking for all the world like a sundial – on the North tower of Chartres Cathedral:

Time

Weekly Photo Challenge: Time

Weekly Photo Challenge: Vibrant

This display of individually hand-painted plates outside a shop in Sarlat certainly meets the brief for this week’s challenge of ‘Vibrant’.

Vibrant

Weekly Photo Challenge: Vibrant

Weekly Photo Challenge: Optimistic

‘A Vendre’: For Sale. Ladies and gentlemens hairdressers, Perfumery and Angling supplies.

Yes, well….good luck with that.

Optimistic

Weekly Photo Challenge: Optimistic