Tag Archives: palm trees

Mar 06 2023
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Daily Post, Urban scene

Further south than I was this morning, for sure

Monday 6th March 2023, 7.30pm (day 4,211)

Arrival in Penzance, 6/3/23

This photo is garish and could certainly be sharper but with my camera in the state it is presently in (following the still-painful St Helena Tarmac Incident) it is as good as we’re going to get at the moment, after dark. I like the picture anyway: first, it represents that moment that I finally got to have some fresh air after nearly 11 hours on three separate trains today (none of which had on-board catering) and second, that I arrived in what is both the most southerly and most westerly decent-sized town in Britain, namely Penzance, Cornwall. Where you get to see palm trees outside the bus station. We’re not in Yorkshire any more, Toto.

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Mar 25 2019
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Daily Post, Urban scene

Palm tree graveyard, Dubai

Monday 25th March 2019, 4.15pm (day 2,769)

Dubai palm graveyard, 25/3/19

So the first stop on my tour of Asia and Australia is Dubai, just for forty-eight hours. My colleague Alex and I were worked hard all day in the University of Manchester office that exists here, in the ‘Dubai Knowledge City’ — which like the rest of this place has been raised out of the desert over the last fifteen to twenty years or so. The towers in the background are the Marina Towers which apparently started the whole property boom off as this was the first place in which non-nationals had been allowed to buy freeholds in pretty much the whole of Arabia.

But though I don’t know this place, not after one day (who could) and so can’t call this a considered opinion — there’s something about it which just leaves me cold. It’s just the antithesis of things I like about the world, in so many different ways. The chopped-up palm trees are my attempt to somehow encapsulate these feelings. The symbolism is deliberate.

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