Haven’t been feeling very inspired lately but a few moments of good light in a grey day, a lot of cropping and going monochrome raise the interest here. This is one of the University’s more laid-back corners, a café located in what, about 100 years ago, was the main campus library.
Tattoo, stage 2. It’s still not finished. It’ll be worth the pain, that’s what I keep telling myself.
I’m a very nosy person, which is, I guess, one reason why I like photography. Invite me into your house and within a few minutes I’ll be checking out your book collection. I love things like this, collections of knick-knacks on shelves. Most of all I love the fact that my colleague Yevgeny, who is in his mid-50s , something of a Soviet era throwback and a very big wheel in UNESCO, has on his office shelf, amongst the dramatic photos and plaques inscribed in beautiful old Cyrillic script, a stuffed toy version of what appears to be Emile, the fat greedy rat from Ratatouille. Brilliant!
All bars are kind of different, aren’t they? Like people’s houses, different arrangements of basically the same ingredients but it all comes through into something original. The people who want to take all enjoyment out of drinking alcohol would rather there were no ‘public houses’ like this and we all just drank stuff bought in the supermarket, at home. Well, sod that. Where there’s life there will be pubs. Hell, we might even get the Railway back some day.
Spent the afternoon playing on the marble run with Joe, and when the light comes into our living room in the afternoon, it can be very fine.
Incidentally, I’d say it’s ‘his’ marble run, but I’d be lying. Actually, it’s mine.
Post-lunch pickings on the second day of the staff development workshop I have been running at the University of Bergen. The strawberries and pineapple slices have disappeared, the grapes are going down well but no one seems to be going for the lychees. This is the second disembodied hand of the week, I note.
Could have posted more pictures of glorious autumn colours here in Trondheim but I did that yesterday, and this book has personal significance.
I got to know the work of Machiavelli when I studied for my PhD in Politics back in the latter years of the 1990s. As part of my work here I was taken (with several others) round the special collections of the Gunnerus Library at NTNU and here am being shown an edition of Machiavelli’s complete works from 1550 (hence the M D L at the bottom of the page), published while he was still alive and in extraordinarily good condition. The book may well become largely obsolete as an active information medium over the next 20 years but the tactile and visual appeal of them, particularly old ones, will never go away.
Incidentally only those who haven’t actually read him think that M. was a fascist. Actually he was the man who reintroduced Greek ideas of democracy into the Middle Ages and basically founded the whole political wing of the Enlightenment. He said quite clearly that a populace would always, collectively, take better decisions than a prince or tyrant acting alone and driven only by their own mind. He’s right. Someone tell David Cameron (see the comment made exactly one year ago today, which I feel as strongly now as I did then).
Here I am in Norway again – specifically Trondheim, which happens to be the furthest north I have ever been on this planet. The views coming in on the plane this morning were spectacular, but though I got some good shots they were all taken through glass and none quite did it for me (though this remains the most beautiful country in the world – well, one of them anyway, perhaps alongside Greece).
Decided, in the end, not to go for the landscape shot, but instead picked one from our pre-conference-reception tour at ‘Rockheim’, a museum devoted entirely to the Norwegian rock’n’roll industry – and more interesting than that might seem to outsiders. This room was a homage to the ‘Pussycats’, apparently the first Norwegian rock band to really make it big in the 60s. So now you know.
Taken at the Palace Hotel, Manchester (with a fast shutter speed – it wasn’t actually that dark). Three Manchester photos in a row – that hasn’t happened before on the blog. It’s because I’m here for the ALT (Association of Learning Technologists) conference, although I don’t always like coming to conferences here – it’s hard to detach from other work. Nice meal tonight, though.
I have a few small tattoos, not that any of you have ever seen them properly. (If you look very closely you can just see one on my right bicep – or left, as it appears in the mirror – of the self-portrait of me in the gym last October.) But I’ve decided I’m getting another one, a fairly big one. This will give me something to document here, at least – there will be at least three planning and pricking sessions before it’s done, over the next few weeks. And yes, what you see on the right is, more or less, what it should end up like. Consider it a preview, if you like.
