Category: Environment

Something I forgot to mention

There you were, waiting for a good time to con your way past the front door of my block of flats by saying you’re the postman, to climb my stairs, to bash in my front door and to plunder my classical CD collection. All that was stopping you was the fear of me bashing your skull to bits with my cricket bat, which I keep handy for just this sort of eventuality.

So anyway, there you were reading all about how my life for the last week has been complicated. But, I clean forgot to tell you that the reason for all this complication was that I was off in the south of France. Silly old me. I’m getting old, I guess.

Here’s how the south of France was looking:

Those are the Pyrenees at the back there. In the foreground, lots of little wine trees.

The weather looks slightly better in that than it really was, what with it having been so very windy. Especially on the final day of my stay, up on this thing.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Spring in the air

Yes, I and a friend took a stroll around Stoke Newington this afternoon, and despite the drabness of the weather, spring was in the air.

And as if to confirm Spring will indeed be with us very soon, if it’s not here already, this was the scene outside the Anglo Spice Grill:

There were many other Stoke Newingtonian sights – animal, vegetable and mineral – to be seen and to be photoed, but today was a tiring day, with another activity in the evening before I finally got around to doing this. So that will have to be your lot.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Vapour trail light

Further evidence (see below) that vapour trail light is my favourite sort of light:

That photo was photoed by me in June 2008. In Quimper I think, but if not in Quimper, then somewhere close.

I had been browsing through the directory in which all my photos from that expedition are stored, and I was struck by how well the best of them came out, despite the fact that the camera I was using was quite antique compared to my current camera. I had always supposed that there had been a big jump in photo quality for me when I got my Lumix ZX150, which was a few years after that. Since that Lumix ZX150, I have had a Lumix ZX200, and now use a Lumix ZX330. All of those Lumixes (Lumes?) being much of a muchness. And I think that’s right, there was quite a jump. Nevertheless, earlier cameras of mine, when the light was really good, did just as well. Where they suffered, by comparison, was when the light was merely quite good.

Vapour trails are a feature of the Brittany sky. Basically, you’re talking about half of all the airplanes from Europe to America, and half of all the airplanes from America to Europe. So, in Brittany, if the weather is vapour trail weather, there will be vapour trails. A lot of vapour trails.

France also has excellent street clutter, with lots of wires. The wires go well with the vapour trails, I think.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

X marks the spot in the sky

Was out in Bermondsey today, and as usual photoed lots of photos. But the light was dreary, so here is a photo I took in the same place just under a month ago, on February 19th:

Vapour trail weather, which I love. And not just for the vapour trails. In such weather, everything looks good. Those two birds, for instance. They look very good.

Ah, the Summer of February 2019. They don’t make them like that any more, except that they just did.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Trees – no leaves – building – blue sky

Outside my front door, a few days ago:

I like how the sun picks out some of the branches at the top, but only some.

More “The February Summer of 2019” photos, of a similar sort, at Mick Hartley‘s.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Fighting back against IO and dust

As I said earlier, a nasty old sofa is due to depart from Chateau BMdotcom, and nice new sofa is due to arrive. And as I also said, I hoped it would be in that order. Well, now it looks like the new sofa will be here tomorrow, while the old one is still here. This threatened chaos. In a place already suffering from severe infrastructural overload (aka IO, aka too much crap everywhere and nowhere to put new incoming crap), it’s all I can do to find space for a new copy of the BBC Music Magazine without it getting submerged. Yet today I managed to liberate enough space for another sofa and still have a large chunk of change, volumetrically speaking.

The secret was getting rid of a whole clutch of things like this:

The main things that such devices store are empty air, and dust. Lots and lots of dust.

I also found a pile of home-made versions of the same kind of thing, in which I had been storing more air and more dust, and (this time) nothing else:

That being about a decade’s worth of dust, going by all the bits of paper in the pile that I will soon be culling and compressing.

As one of my heroes, Quentin Crisp, once said, the secret with dust is not to stir it up. Do that, and you find yourself living in a dusty home. Just let it be and it behaves itself very politely.

I now learn (such is the internet) that what Crisp actually said was more like this:

There was no need to do any housework at all. After four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse.

I actually do do some housework, mainly in my living room, so this doesn’t really apply to me and my home. But I like his attitude. That gag about being a “stately homo of England” is also a Crispism. The link above is to a large stack of verbal Crispnesses.

Back to my dust. To get rid of that dust, which did have to be got rid of because the receptacles containing it had to go, I had to carry them out of my bedroom very carefully, into the living room, and part of this involved stepping down from my bed to the floor. Imagine doing that with a tray full of drinks. But, all went well, and I have now liberated a hug gob of space which I had previously thought permanently clogged:

That will accommodate a lot of IO, in the days and weeks to come. Those two boxes on the right can go too, come to think of it. All they contain is big envelopes that I will never use and whose glue long ago stopped working.

Each time I have a campaign against IO, I think that I really have, this time around, completely run out of space. But, each time, it turns out that there’s more, lurking in plain sight.

A good day.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

A dramatic Chicago photo and the photoer who photoed it

One of the more tiresome things about Twitter is the way that a photo goes viral, without the photoer who photoed the photo getting any credit for the photo.

So, I am happy to report that, when I learned, via Mike Fagan, whom I follow, that a tweeter by the name of Arturas Kerelis reported that “someone” took this photo …:

… in Chicago, on September 3rd, the photoer was eventually identified. Commenter Chris Gallevo, to whom thanks and respect, steered any who cared, which included me, to the Instagram site of Kevin Banna, where the above photo is to be found.

I was not able to discover what Kevin Banna himself looks like. That’s the trouble with image googling the name of a photoer. Are the results photos of him, or merely photos by him? It’s not easy to know, without more labour than I was prepared to give to the question.

In a backhanded compliment to Banna’s photo, and also to the extreme drama that the weather in Chicago is apparently capable of providing from time to time, some commenters accused “someone” of having Photoshopped this image. Other commenters assured us that the weather in Chicago that day really was very dramatic, in just the way the above photo portrays, and that it general it regularly lays on such displays and dramas.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

A better way to package bananas

I can’t remember how Twitter caused me to arrive at this, but it did:

Bananas that are either not ripe enough or too ripe are a constant irritation to me. This – bananas sold in sets of bananas of different stages of ripeness – looks like a rather good answer.

A commenter immediately joins in and makes this into an argument about plastic in the oceans, the latest Green obsession that replaced the fading fear of climate catastrophe, except that the recent heatwave has now got them back going bananas about how the climate has now changed. Like there have never been heatwaves before. The climate presumably is changing, because it always does, but that’s no reason for humans to stop selling stuff to each other. Or for them to stop thinking of clever and helpful stuff combinations.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Interesting headgear

The final full day of The Great Heatwave of 2018 was two days ago, on August 7th. August 8th was a couldn’t-make-up-its-mind day, and today was a could-make-up-its-mind day, and it made up its mind to be cold and wet and generally horrible, perhaps in honour of the Lord’s Test between England and India, today’s first day of which was totally rained off. One day, magic beams will rise up into the sky from around the boundaries of all major cricket games and will divert the rain into giant vats, also on the boundary, and play will proceed no matter what the weather beyond the ground. (Such devices will also transform global agriculture, and make the entire population of the world obese.)

So, as I was saying, two days ago was the last day of the Heatwave, and maybe it was this heat which cause this lady to be wearing, in a street near me, this headgear:

This lady looked normal enough, apart from the headgear. I made no secret of the fact that I was photoing her, and she clearly saw me doing this and didn’t seem to min. Or maybe she was concentrating on her phoning and actually didn’t see me. Either way, I waited until her face was hidden.

The sane explanation for the headgear was the heat. And honestly, I do believe that this was what it was for. That heatwave really was very hot.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Heatwave jacket derangement syndrome

I don’t believe I am the only man to have been deranged by the heatwave in the manner I am about to describe, in fact I know that I am not, because I had one of those How-Very-True You’re-So-Right type conversations with GodDaughter2’s boyfriend, Only The Other Day, about exactly this matter.

I refer to the fact that I, and many other men, do not merely wear a jacket to fend off frigidity. We also wear it to carry stuff. It is our version of a handbag. In my case: wallet, cheque book and paying in cheques book (so I was born before you were – live with it) (both these items serve another purpose besides handling the financial instrument relics of the previous century, which is to fill up the pocket containing my wallet and stop the wallet falling out (which would be a catastrophe)), pen, purse, Old Git free London transport pass, keys, handkerchiefs, mobile phone, spectacle case with reading spectacles, spectacle case with spare camera batteries and spare SD cards (the latter for if I forget to put my regular SD card back in the camera), Disprins, cough sweets, regular sweets, eye allergy spray, and no doubt several other things I can’t now remember.

Unlike some men, I also carry an actual bag around with me on my travels, containing: a folder with paper to take notes, a shopping bag for if I shop, a camera, a book, a small bottle of fruit flavoured anti-dehydration liquid, any food I have bought, any spare garments I might need for if it gets colder, an umbrella, and even sometimes a laptop computer, on those days when I am in a mobile laptop computing sort of mood (although lately I have tended not to be in such a mood (too heavy)).

But, transferring all the clobber described in paragraph two above into the bag, and into the midst of all the clobber described in paragraph three above, is a serious derangement, not least because the bag gets far too full. For remember, what if, late at night, if the heatwave abates, I need the jacket? I have to have the jacket in the bag, just in case, even though it is far too hot to wear it and in fact, throughout the heatwave, it remained so. So, with everything now in an unfamiliar place, much of it buried under other bits of it, all the usual reflexes stop working. Nothing is any longer where it usually is. I start suffering from that frightful female syndrome of digging about inside the bag, frantically trying to find whatever it is. Which may in fact be in one of my trouser pockets, or maybe even my shirt pocket, for goodness sake. Oh God, where’s my wallet (which contains all sorts of priceless stuff which I dare not even itemise (see above))?!?! Etc..

Today, the heatwave sort of ended, as in: the weather oscillated between pleasantly warm and somewhat warmer. But unfortunately the London Underground didn’t get the email containing the link to the short-term weather forecast, and chose to remain full of the horribly hot air that it had been accumulating throughout the previous fortnight, or however long it’s been.

But the discomfort I suffered was the discomfort of wearing my jacket when it was rather hot. That I can live with.

But worse, just like the London Underground, I too found myself suffering a systemic hangover from the previous period of high temperature hell. Earlier this evening I was in a pub, and when my pubbing was done, I picked up my bag, and visited the toilet, prior to leaving. Luckily, while there, I realised that I had left my jacket on the back of the seat that I had been sitting on. I reclaimed it, seemingly unmolested by plunderers, except that … hell’s bells, my wallet wasn’t in it! It was, of course, in the bag, where I had recently been learning instead to put it.

It’ll be a few more days before I recover my usual calm and suave demeanour, when out and about.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog