Paying Ready Attention

There were house sparrows bathing in the dust and barn swallows hawking for insects above our heads.    Starlings, with their electric crackle voices, chattered     on the wires. The low hum of bees and hoverflies spread out from the flowerbeds, and an occasional wasp, yellow striped and predatory, flashed by. In the distance, the dull roar of waves, still pushed by yesterday’s winds, added a base background to the noises around us. The farm buildings stand solid and thick walled against the wind.   Most of the windows look south and west, away from the cold fingers of the East wind.   A small herd of cows adopt a similar alignment; backs to the wind, showing how good design can flow from observation.   Classically black and white and wet nosed they stared over the fence, agricultural but domestic.    The soil around the gates is poached to muddiness by their heavy, lingering feet.   Beyond a neck stretch and tongue length, a ...

I've been working in a piece of writing for a competition - hence the lack of words here.  I can't publish the competition  work until after the end of the judging - so wish me luck and enjoy these pictures of my trip to the Farne Islands - The Hills of Doggerland. Inner Farne Seahouses Gulls over a fishing boat Transport to the Island Lesser Black Backed Gull On Inner Farne (or On Stewart M) Puffins Puffins Arctic Tern Kittiwake Guillemot  Razorbill Bridled Tern The journey home The journey home II This whole set of picture will look much better viewed in slide show mode - so click on one image to be able to see them all in a larger format. Normal (wordy) service will resume soon.  SM

More things happen at edges than at the centre.   Dusk or dawn are better times to uncover secrets than the harsh hours of midday.   Spring and autumn bring out the hidden and the slow in ways that summer and winter do not.   The movement from problem to solution, that mental cliff edge of creation, is so much more exciting than the routine of production.   We gravitate towards the coast with its tide pools and estuaries, with its edges both temporal and spatial.     Tides and times.   Boundaries and borders.   And for me back in the UK, there is a strong pull towards the here and the past – that most intractable boundary of all. We headed north towards Northumbria, close to a political line that would soon be given the chance (rejected) to become thicker on the map and in doing so create a new edge of sorts. Not really looking for edges as such, but knowing full well that we would find them.   Up the A1, the old Great North ...

London slips away behind us as we head north and east.   Back out through suburbs served and invented by the tube.   Slow traffic.   Red light disappointment.   Green light anticipation. Creeping past houses with small gardens and smart cars.   Paused before shops with ghost signs, showing generations of economic change; markers of waves of migration that has made this place what it is today.    How easy would it be to map the history of London by looking at the names of shop owners and the brands of the products they sell? Post war migration, postcolonial economics, suburban decay and gentrification told through shop fronts and label fonts.   We move out past the ring fence of the M25:   a boundary in both directions.   How many of those inside look beyond the pale to greener lands – an escape to the country – and how many outside look inwards towards activity, jobs and mythically lined streets.   Sitting in st...