This is not the sort of thing you see in every pub visited. But The Griffin, in Amersham, certainly takes its food preparation seriously. The ray in the back of this drying cabinet was enormous. However, I hold back from recommending this establishment thanks to its charging me £7 for a pint, which even for the Home Counties is outrageous.
In the Blackness area of Dundee there is this huge old industrial complex, now abandoned and crumbling. Open doors and windows allow views inside here and there, like this one, which I nearly entitled ‘Arson attack waiting to happen’: tyres burn most satisfactorily, and for a long time. The place is for sale, and I wonder whether there is profit in buying it and keeping it this way, as a film set or somewhere that urban explorers can simply be let loose to play.
What beauty there is in this filament. As if it is a whole swirling galaxy of electric light. Worlds within worlds, within such an everyday thing.
It’s three-quarters of an hour into the afternoon, he’s still in his dressing gown and wearing odd socks. Guess a first year at uni hasn’t changed Joe all that much.
The day was spent indoors but the horizons ranged rather wider. What you see here amounts to about 40% of my collection of Ordnance Survey 1:25,000 maps of the UK; ‘the hiker’s Bible’, for sure. I shall hopefully be making use of one chapter before the week is out.
More junk, like yesterday. But no one would come in if it were called a ‘junk shop’, so the word ‘antique’ is employed to give these various discarded pieces of trash some cachet. But it’s all for show. Take the false teeth visible to top right, for example. However old they are, I doubt they would be employed by a set decorator for some period movie.
A working week in London, and this becomes the third time that city has been the setting for five pictures in a row. Friday morning was spent at the Victoria & Albert museum, where this collection of sarcophagi reside. Whomever was the subject for the one second from bottom, they clearly wanted to be portrayed as studious, even in death.
The page of text you see here was enscribed some 1,150 years ago, in the later part of the 9th century AD. This is a page from the MacDurnan Gospels, created in Ireland and now held in the library of Lambeth Palace in London. What you see here are the originators of the idea of a cross-reference: this must be a passage from the gospel of John, because here, the scribe has noted that the same events are also recounted in Matthew, Mark and Luke (listed from the top down).
It’s to look at, and be taught about, beautiful things like this that I am in London this week and this was certainly a good place to start the day. Michelle Brown, whose fingers you see here, is such an expert on this time and subject that listening to her is like being immersed in a river of learning: we’re coming up every so often for breath but it’s no hardship to get back in afterwards, and I was actually disappointed when the day ended at 5pm. And it’s been a while since I could say that about certain other aspects of my job.
On the move again. A scene on the train to London, where I will be for the whole week to come. The field of poppies outside — somewhere near Doncaster — was so extensive that I had time to see it, get the camera out, set up the shot and still capture it OK, despite moving at around 75 miles per hour at least. I believe black won the game in the end.
After the expanded horizons of yesterday, it was back to work today. I could have posted a pic demonstrating that I am a Pinball Wizard (all-time high score on the pub machine) but that would just have been me showing off, so let’s try to make out that I was engaged in some gainful employment. Whether the message on the pen is a metaphor or not, that’s up to you to determine.
Being 42 