Category: Weather

Dramatic sky behind Parliament

Indeed. Photoed by me late this afternoon:

I photoed lots more photos today, but I also did a lot more walking today than I’ve been doing lately, and having, as I do, the choice between doing a long posting and going to bed quite late, and doing a short posting and going to bed sooner rather than later, I choose the latter.

I now intend (although I promise nothing) that more will follow about today’s excursion, including mention of the dramatic weather which caused that dramatic sky, and which caused me to be out photoing it.

Exotic Ely Cathedral

This, photoed yesterday morning by Ely Cathedral obsessive Andrew Sharpe, really should have gone up here yesterday, because apparently there’s a dog walker to be seen in the foreground, who, because walking, must have been clearly visible to Sharpe at the time of the photo, but who is less easy to spot in the photo, what with photos being, you know, still:

However, dog walking aside, what really interested me about this photo was also picked up by commenter Jane Elizabeth, who said:

It looks positively exotic.

Indeed it does.

Those spiky tower things, that look like small space rockets, what are they called? Anyway, those. Sharpe’s photo features several of what look like them, which makes Ely Cathedral as a whole look decidedly Islamic in atmosphere. There’s much talk nowadays about how Europe was profoundly influenced by Islam in medieval times. This is partly done to cheer up middle easterners, who have for several centuries now been on the receiving end of the influencing, but also because it’s true. Europe was indeed profoundly influenced by Islam, and not least by its architecture.

The clouds definitely add something. Clouds always juice up a sunset, or in this case a sunrise.

Ivor Cummins speaks to Niall Boylan

Yesterday. As an (I hope) intelligent layman, I am finding this radio interview to be at a very helpful level, so to speak, of scientific complexity. There’s plenty of science, but it is well explained.

Ivor Cummins’s work experience, so his Twitter feed tells us, has been as a “team leader” and as a “complex problem solving specialist”, which I take it means that he has experience of leading people with very varied types of expertise. So, he has lots of practice in talking clearly, in plain English, to enable such teams to work together effectively. With regard to each particular type of expertise being deployed, all the other experts in other areas are also “intelligent laymen”, so the man in charge has to be good an explaining complicated stuff clearly, to people not expert in it. So, I believe Cummins’s background has prepared him for the historically huge role he is now performing. The world now needs people to pull all the expertise of others together and to explain it convincingly, and from where I’m sitting, Cummins, more than anyone else, seems to be the man who is doing this.

Boris Johnson thinks he’s now Churchill in 1940, or at least he did a couple of months ago. Cummins isn’t Churchill either, but he’s a hell of a lot closer to being Churchill than Johnson is. Johnson thought that the “Nazi hoards” equivalent now was Covid itself, and he probably still does. But the real Nazi hoard equivalent is the crazy, panic-stricken and politically driven over-reactions to Covid. That’s what’s now doing the serious damage. And Boris Johnson is more like Lord Haw-Haw.

A crazy sports day

I don’t usually set the video to record MOTD, or for that matter MOTD2, but I’ll have to this evening. First it was Leicester, unbeaten until today, who were today beaten 0-3 at home by West Ham, but okay that’s a reasonably normal scoreline. However, ManU 1 Spurs 6 is not reasonable, but that was the result of that one. Nor is Aston Villa 5 Liverpool 2, which is the score in that after an hour. Whatever else happens in that game, which I would still not put it past Liverpool to win, the score will definitely be crazy.

Now it’s Villa 6, Liverpool 2. First time ever both Liverpool and Man Utd have conceded six goals on the same day. (I copied and pasted that from the BBC report of the Villa Liverpool game.)

And, in freezing October, the county cricket T20 finals finally got under way this afternoon, after being totally washed out yesterday. Surrey won their semi and made 127 in 16 overs against Notts, which doesn’t seem like nearly enough, so boo hoo there, probably.

However, more interestingly for the kind of folks who read this blog, because of the dates that these T20 quarter finals and finals were played (October 1st and October 4th), these T20 games … :

… were the first professional cricket matches played in England in October since 1864 – Cambridgeshire & Yorkshire v Kent & Nottinghamshire at Newmarket, October 6th to 8th.

They postponed these T20 games until now so that, maybe, actual people could come and watch, which could and should have been allowed by now but of course wasn’t.

OMG, more copying and pasting:

GOAL – Aston Villa 7 (SEVEN)-2 Liverpool

Like I said, crazy.

I recall speculating here that there having been no sport in the early version of Lockdown caused a lot of unfocussed energy to insert itself instead into political demonstrating. Notice how, since sport has resumed, even sport in deserted stadiums, the demonstrating just fizzled out. If I didn’t speculate thus, I should have.

Yes, I did a posting in July about Der Bomber, a German footballer called Gerd Muller, and I ended it thus:

The passions that used to attach themselves to bombing now have to find another outlet, and that outlet is now, mostly, sport. I believe that in recent months we have experienced what a gap is left in our world when sport is lacking. The sooner our politicians feel able to allow people back into sports stadiums, there to cheer on their preferred “bombers”, the better.

It turned out that to take their minds off being violent in the streets, people didn’t have to actually attend sporting events. There merely had to be sporting events, the results of which people cared about. This was enough to fill the sport-shaped holes in their souls.

LATER: boo hoo.

Michael Jennings London photos

I have done a lot less photo-wandering of late than I would have liked, so I have kept meaning to post a Michael Jennings London photo here, to fill that gap here. But, I’ve never quite got around to doing this. Time to correct that, with a gallery of some of his recent photos, as already shown by Michael, one at a time, on Facebook:

The same circumstances that have had me staying at home more than usual have caused Michael to be staying in London more than usual.

All of the above were photoed, I believe, with a mobile phone, during the late afternoon or evening, that being an interesting time of day for light, especially when natural light and artificial light are about even in strength. (Is that why it’s called “evening”? Could be.) This also accounts for the predominantly sepia colouring that one normally associates with nostalgia-prompting photos of times long gone.

Will there be nostalgia for Lockdown, if and when it ever ends? Probably yes, on the same principle that some people, for accidental reasons, remember WW2 with some fondness, in among all the grief and stress. Many will remember liking the peace and quiet, even as they realise that it could not be allowed to last. Michael himself has spoken to me of the cleanness of the air. Not least because it allows photoing to be better.

Cricket contrasts

This is remarkable:

Although, Pooran might have thrown a catch to the nearby fielder and got the batsman out. All he did was save a few runs. So, not ten out of ten.

I also recommend a look at the scorecard, if you care anything about cricket. Biggest successful run chase in IPL history, apparently.

Thankyou Maia Bouchier, who I once saw play in an otherwise all male cricket match at Lord’s between my old posh school and another posh school. (Memo to self, transfer to here two blog postings I did about this strange event.)

I misspent (by which I mean I greatly enjoyed it) quite a bit of today watching Essex get their draw against Somerset, and win The Bob, as I hear they are now calling it. This was a very different sort of game to that IPL game. For starters it went on for five days, yet it was still a draw. But despite it being a draw, Essex won. You don’t see that very often. Meanwhile, that IPL game, like all IPL games, was all done in a few hours.

The only major thing these two games had in common, aside from both being cricket matches, is that, because of The Plague, there was nobody watching them at the actual grounds where they were played.

Pressure

Yes it’s the Bob Willis Trophy Final, between Essex and Somerset at Lord’s, in front of a crowd consisting of nobody. And on and off, I am watching it at the BBC website, as well as tracking the score on Cricinfo.

Somerset have just resumed after lunch on Day One, the interval having been prolonged by rain, and have gone from a precarious 90-3 to a precarious 94-3, at which point, just as the weather had, the runs dried up. Batsmen like to score runs. When they don’t, they feel the pressure, especially if they are in the habit of playing limited overs cricket (where you just have to get on with it), which they all are these days.

So, reporting this passage of play from right to left, Cricinfo tells me this:

Bartlett caught Cook (Sir Alastair of that clan (still playing for Essex)) bowled Porter 12. Somerset 94-4. There were about another dozen dots that I couldn’t include because Cricinfo doesn’t go back that far to the right.

All the people who hate county cricket hate it because of all the dots. Nothing is happening! And all of us who love county cricket know, just from the dots, that a hell of a lot is happening. Because of all the dots.

It’s now raining again. Somerset 107-4. Never mind. They have five whole days to settle this thing.

Good vapour trail – evil vapour trail – hybrid vapour trail

This posting began several evenings ago as a quota photo post, with this pretty little scene being the beginning and the end of it:

But then I again got thinking about how significant it is that, typically, vapour trails look at they do above, but do not look like this, below:

That evil vapour trail (there’s another dimmer one further away) is made dark and evil by a line of cloud in the distance, in the evening, allowing the sun to continue lighting up the sky, but throwing a huge shadow over the vapour trail itself. This combination of circumstances, with everything all lined up just so, is rather rare.

Finally, here’s a fun photo, where the shadow from the evening cloud doesn’t engulf all of the vapour trail, merely some of it:

I know I keep banging on about how air travel wouldn’t be so popular if vapour trails typically didn’t look so pretty, but I really think this is true.

Equally significant is that the nastiest internal combustion engine pollution is now invisible. Just about all the actual smoke, certainly in London (where all of the above photos were photoed), has been done away with. If you do see smoke in London, chances are something’s on fire, in an undeliberate way.

A sunset fifteen years ago

Fifteen years ago today, I did a posting at my old blog, which later got transferred to this blog, which featured the sunset, as seen and photoed by me in Hampstead.

Here is one of those photos, which I chose for the roof clutter:

Very urban picturesque.

I seldom do sunsets, if only because others do do them so much. What can I add? But sometimes the sky is just so dramatic that I can’t ignore it, and so contrasty that even I can’t go far wrong with my photos. These photos are worth another look, if you like that sort of thing.

Win a home in London!

I haven’t been getting out enough, what with my back hurting. But today, I was determined to get out and about, as well as needing to do some shopping, and I decided to do that even before doing anything here.

The plan was I might manage to photo something of interest. When I got home, and took a close look at this, …:

… which shows an advert for a lottery the winner of which gets a new home in London, I thought maybe I had. Whenever I hear that you can win something as a prize in a game of chance, I suspect that the thing in question is proving harder to sell than had originally been assumed and they’ve got some to spare for things like lotteries. Did this advert signal a London new housing slowdown?

I went to the website in the advert to investigate. And it would appear that my suspicions may have been excessively suspicious. This is an Irish fund raising operation, and apparently someone won a similar competition in 2018. But on the other hand, that could mean that even back in 2018 they were having trouble shifting newly built London homes.

One thing I will say, which is that I’ve not seen this advert on a taxi before. Maybe the number of people in London who are only able to think of owning a London home by entering a lottery has now gone up. That’s not the entire market for London homes. That’s global. But it doesn’t help, if you’re selling these places.

Whatever the truth of such speculations, I did at least, at the website in question, encounter an excellent photo of the London City Island tower cluster, photoed on a nicer and brighter day than today has been:

London City Island has already been noticed with a posting here, not so long ago.