Well, my summer holiday hasn’t finished yet, so there’s scope yet for more of this kind of thing. I could say this is a typical English seaside scene, but actually we’re in Wales — Llandudno in fact. First impressions: it’s like Aberystwyth, but bigger and with lots more Liverpudlians.
A relaxing day, spent enjoying pleasant weather, which has by no means always been the case in this relatively dull summer. No complaints today though. Taken at the Blue Pig beer festival.
A decent day of weather (it was nice to see blue skies for a change); I’m still off work so no reason not to go on a walk. Thornthwaite Crag was one of seven summits reached today, and has what is probably the tallest summit cairn in the Lake District.
I do the blog with a fairly crappy compact camera that needs replacing, only I can’t afford to at the moment. Rock gigs are like football matches, I’d probably be able to capture much better images of them if I had a proper lens or flash unit; in the low ambient light the participants tend to need to be stationary, which doesn’t happen that much. Best effort from tonight, where me, Clare and about 50 other people turned up to watch The Dictators go through their set: a band that can be dated by the fact they appear on a compilation I picked up last year of, not 70s punk, but 70s pre-punk… There were a few of people in the room aged under 40. But only a couple.
Clare says she here sees ‘only the dead one’ but the rest were good to go… and the apples in the background are also coming along nicely. Thing about raspberries though, they’re really just weeds; they seem to grow everywhere except where was actually intended.
It’s on its way…. Although it looks like the guy on the right may have busted me, I doubt it — this was taken with a very long zoom from the far end of the platform.
Back home, and from one of the world’s major historical waterways (the Tagus) to another (the Hebden Water) that is maybe not as significant, but still as photogenic in its own way. We could have done with better weather though — as has been true for two months — which may explain the expressions here.
Last day in Lisbon, and this was the last thing seen in it, in the first few moments of the plane’s ascent away from the airport. The Vasco da Gama bridge crosses that wide bit of the Tagus estuary that I mentioned yesterday, and at 7.8 miles (12.3km) it is the longest bridge in Europe. Barely a quarter of its length, at a guess, is seen in this shot.
Farewell to Portugal — coming back here has reminded me why I used to like it so much. A fine country, with a lot of characteristics that some more self-important places could learn from (but refuse to).
The River Tagus (in Portuguese, Rio Tejo) rises in Spain and flows west, splitting Portugal in half as it heads for the Atlantic. A few miles from the ocean, the estuary becomes very broad, but then narrows again, making an excellent natural harbour and explaining why there has been a city here since antiquity. In the background of this shot is the Torre de Belém, one of Lisbon’s most famous buildings.
This structure looks like it might be a tower, but in fact is the opposite, a well sunk into the ground. From the bottom there are tunnels to explore. The well, called the ‘Initiation Well’, can be found in the estate of Quinta da Regaleira, which is in the town of Sintra, an hour or so from Lisbon, and full of castles and palaces where the Portuguese aristocracy used to hang out to escape the heat of the city. Now it’s just full of tourists. Of which, of course, I am one. But that happens now and again.
Being 42 