And so, the journey back, via Brighton, St Pancras, King’s Cross, Leeds and Hebden Bridge stations. Pictured — the fourth of these. It’s now time to find inspiration at home for a while, in various senses.
It’s still not high summer tourist season yet — give it another week or so, until the kids start finishing school. Anyway, today the weather was very poor, so no one felt like going to Brighton Pier to drive around in little electric vehicles and wondering whether they will obey the ‘no bumping’ signs. While I do like this shot (which is why I chose it), it is another example of how true symmetry in life is only occasionally achieved.
The Mary Rose went down in the Solent during a battle in 1545 and then sat on the sea floor for 437 years until what remained of it was raised in 1982. I remember watching this event on TV in my teens and then not long after, on my only previous visit to Portsmouth, visiting a mouldering hulk that was hanging in a big shed being sprayed constantly with water to stop it drying out catastrophically. Four decades on and the Mary Rose‘s transition from the mud of the sea floor to hanging off a wall has been completed, and what we’re all rewarded with is one of the most interesting museums I’ve ever visited, for sure. The amount of stuff — not just weapons, but personal effects, foodstuffs, even the skeleton of the ship’s pet ratcatching dog — that came up with the wreck is astonishing. Not an easy thing to photograph with my mediocre equipment, but I gave it a shot.
It’s our silver wedding anniversary this week. “Take me overseas!” the wife demanded, so I said, ‘sure’, and we have headed to the Isle of Wight. Well, you have to cross the sea to get there: starting with Portsmouth Harbour, pictured.
I spent the whole day, from 1.30am in Toronto when we boarded the plane, until 6.45pm when arriving back in Hebden Bridge, on a series of rather overcrowded tin pipes. If we included Heathrow Airport itself as number 2, this train at King’s Cross was the fourth, and the most overcrowded pipe of all — the East Coast main line going into spasm once more thanks to some ‘operational incident’ or other. But at least I was in a seat. Home now, anyway, and no more flying aboard for a while. I need a rest.
Staying over in the Premier Inn after last night’s gig provides the opportunity to observe the morning traffic on the Mancunian Way from fifteen floors up. Heading west seems to be the route of choice, but the one car going east has the preferable journey at the moment, if you ask me.
Was sat in an office for all the first part of the day and a train for all the second part of it. But at least, when travelling home from Scotland, the Forth Bridges usually make an appearance, and they’re almost always worth photographing. The monochrome, as so often, conceals colour balance crimes caused mainly by the scene being viewed through the windows of the 13:59 from Aberdeen to Edinburgh (arrived 16:20).
With the only relatively easy road out of Jamestown temporarily closed due to being covered in stones after Wednesday’s storm, there is a need to find alternatives. You’d think that being used in a very challenging transportation environment would have imposed a kind of evolutionary process on the local vehicles, a sort of natural selection if you like. But if it has, this truck hasn’t benefited: that’s not dust it’s raising. And look at the bend that is about to come.
Jacob’s Ladder has 699 steps, and rises 602 feet up from Jamestown to the fort above. It was originally built to transport goods, using carts and a mule-powered pulley system. Nowadays it sees traffic from the locals who breeze up and down it as if it were nothing more than a stairway at home, and the occasional visitor, like me, who thinks — yeah, OK, I really should give it a shot. But bear in mind there is only one escape point, at step 285: after that, you are committed. My time up this morning — 13 minutes and 45 seconds, not bad for an ageing geezer. But I am never going down it. Nope, not ever.
So here I am back on St Helena, for my third visit — but not the last. Whereas, up until 2017, everyone arrived at Jamestown where the boats dock, nowadays, unless you are on a yacht, first sight of the island is always the airport, one of the more dramatic approaches in world aviation, I am sure. Behind is Great Stone Top, which I climbed in January last year.
Being 42 