Here I am in Stavanger, another new place to add to the list. I could have chosen a picture of the great view from the breakfast room at my hotel, could have chosen one of a rather attractive swan by the lake, but here’s one of a bunch of baby’s dummies (pacifiers) tied to a pole in the woods. Hundreds and hundreds of them. I’m sure there’s a good reason for it.
Life round here definitely feels chilled at the moment. It’s amazing what a nice, sunny four or five days does to this country, particularly when it’s been about a year since we had any such sustained period of pleasant.
Three days of photos back home in HB and they’ve all had a floral theme; which is certainly pervasive as a theme, round here at the moment. There is more going on in this picture than you might at first think, however: this was taken into a cloud of insects, several of which are lit up in the sunlight to the top right of the shot.
On the return home,
Fallen blossoms. I’m sure there’s
A haiku in it.
What have I missed while I’ve been away? Little things, the family, my DVD collection, pubs. Whitelock’s has in the past won ‘Best City Pub in Britain’ awards and is this great little oasis in the middle of Leeds’ shopping district. Plenty of reference is made within to its foundation date of 1715 AD: fifty-five years before any Europeans properly set foot in the country I have just left.
What have I not missed while I’ve been away? The weather…
It’s getting towards winter, and looked it, this morning – though it’s still warmer than at home, about 20 degrees C today. This will be the last photo of Brisbane itself on this blog, at least on this trip; I might be back next year, and I might still be blogging then, but on Wednesday I’m bidding it goodbye. It’s a decent city, it’s been good to me, so here’s to it.
Seen in an underpass near the Brisbane River. Has Banksy been visiting down under? (compare with this image, for example.) Or just an emulator? Either way – no one has yet begun adding street art to the wall. Which is a shame. I’m right with Banksy on this one: why should we be forced to look at inane corporate advertising everywhere we turn, but street art is considered ‘vandalism’ – particularly in an otherwise utterly bland underpass like this one? Well folks of Brisbane, it’s just off Coronation Drive, in Toowong, if you fancy trying your hand.
The Kookaburra Queen is a Mississippi-style riverboat that seems to spend all its time moored at Eagle Street Pier on the Brisbane river: this is its paddlewheel. I assume it does see active service but whenever I go past, it’s there, a feature of my daily walk to work at QUT. I don’t have many of those left however – one week to go in Brisbane (and I’m spending half of that away, with three days coming up in North Queensland after tomorrow).
Apparently today is the anniversary of the birth of Buddha – or at least, today is the day on which this anniversary was marked with a kind of fair set up in Brisbane’s South Bank complex. Happy birthday, Buddha – your religion always seems to me rather less dictatorial and more self-empowering than most of the others, so I feel relatively sympathetic towards it. I got a few decent photos today from a ride up and down the river on one of the amazingly cheap CityCat ferries, but I choose this picture instead because I like the light, the vivid colours and the calligraphy.
I’m sure everyone was really annoyed that they had to go sit outside for 15 minutes, I mean, what a tough break, in the harshness of a Queensland mid-autumn.
Being 42 