Paying Ready Attention

After fours days of desk bound office work, six hours of fresh air had a predictable narcotic effect.  As we drove away from the Spectacles my eyes grew heavy.  In the sugar crash of the late afternoon I started thinking about coffee, and maybe a sly bit of cake.  If it had been offered, I would have eaten the last bit of nut slice that I knew was somewhere in the car. I think Stuart was saving it for himself! Grey clouds and light rain ended a good day.  There is a small café next to my hotel. The coffee tastes good, the cake even better.    Hotel rooms (well at least the ones I pay for) offer a kind of cramped intimacy – nothing is every very far out of reach, and whatever TV the room has looks like a widescreen.  But strangely the electrical sockets are always just out of reach of the power cords for my laptop.  I look through the images for the day, tag a few, and delete more.  A pre-dinner nap beckons....

Prologue: The strangest places in nature exist in the tangled web between our ears. The forests trails, the mossy paths and neural tracks of the mind need to be explored; else we are left wondering what lies over the horizon. In the end these journeys filter, blur and finally focus our understanding of the world around us.  We see what we see because of where we have been. This is a story more of places than people, a story of the way landscapes can come to mean more than just hills and valleys.  So, how did I get to here? I was born in a thick-walled, small-windowed terrace cottage in the spring that followed a long cold winter.  Snow ghosts had hidden in the hedge banks until March.  I would later learn that the populations of herons and wrens had been laid waste that winter, the birds freezing to death in a frozen countryside. As I grew up, they grew back; loud voiced, sharp beaked.  The Cottage had a strange, organic kind of ar...

A day after unpacking I repack. Less pairs of shorts, no sandals and four shirts as dress as my wardrobe allows.  It’s work rather than a holiday.  But I still shoehorn my camera gear into the same bag as last week, hoping that a luggage fascist is not on duty at the airport.  Normally the elephantine size of other people’s hand baggage gives me a degree of moral leverage if objections are raised.  Boarding a plane with telescope or a long lens draws suspicious glances and muffled accusations of espionage, but a double stack package of Crispy Kreme donuts, with special requests for sensitive handling and a personal overhead locker does not raise an eyebrow.  I have to laugh, as I am no more likely to be a spy than the donuts are to be real food.  Of all the things I have seen brought on to a planes, the donuts seem to be the most wilfully strange.  Maybe their owners have just watched Alive, and have brought stores for a few mont...