No walking for the last.few days, other matters have interfered. I'm off to the physio for the second visit tomorrow at Kendal hospital. Last Tuesday she ran out of time after a thorough assessment of all my movements, and just managed to give me a couple of exercises to work on. I was impressed with her attention to detail and her pleasant manner. That has resulted in me just being able to touch my face with my hand, but not sufficiently mobile to allow me to use it with my fork for feeding. I tend to pre-cut food American style and then wade in with the fork alone with my right hand.
I have been chilling out watching Le Tour, and kidding myself that I'm not up to tackling my now hugely overgrown garden, and in the evening watching multiple episodes of House of Cards - I have just kicked out Sky TV and gone for Freeview and Freesat (including Netflix). From my armchair I viewed this seagull through my window and watched it for a couple of minutes debating about a photo, but pessimistically assumed it would disappear before I could go to the other room and get my camera. All in all my seagull stayed there for about twenty minutes. My armchair is about ten feet from my window, and the chimney-pot is perhaps another fifty yards away. I was quite pleased with this triumph of armchair photography. The view, excluding the chimney-pot, was the major influence on me for buying the house seventeen years ago. I have a fantasy of winning the Lottery and making them an offer they can't refuse for that house then having it demolished, chimney-pot and all.
I can understand you getting rid of SKY tv, we did it ourselves last year and saved around £60/month. I kept SKY fibre broadband as it has been the most reliable purchase for the last decade. Not a minutes worth of problems.
ReplyDeleteIve just finished reading The Fell Walkers Legacy by Michael Wood. A good easy read.
The question is: do you buy lottery tickets?
ReplyDeleteAlan R - Yes it was costing me £50 and all the programmes I used to watch seem to have turned into repeats and I found I was rarely watching it - an expensive whim.
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Gayle - Oh yes! I have a monthly direct debit (only £2 per week) but I never check the results. They just send me an email if I've won which has happened about twice in seventeen years for puny amounts, but at least the Lottery supports many worthwhile areas.
Enjoy Le Tour Conrad. Though you'd have had to wait a long time today to get much excitement!
ReplyDeleteAs armchair photographs go, that can't be bad! I left Arnside late in 2000, we may even have been near neighbours for a while!
ReplyDeletePhreerunner- I'm now denying myself watching the 6:00 pm news in case I get a spolier for watching Le Tour highlights at 7:00pm.
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Beating the bounds - Hi Mark. did you live near Hollins Lane?
For shame (about the chimney pot). Without it that view would have been photographically dull and featureless. The chimney pot gives the photo a third dimension and the sharp eye of the gull helps animate the view (Animate as used to describe certain passages of play in the TdF.)
ReplyDeleteI invite you to look more closely at the chimney pot. It's a comparatively rare design, its function is not entirely clear and deserves some speculation, it brings contrasting colours to what you see from your window, although it is admittedly an artefact natural forces (eg, lichens) are modifying its straight lines in a pleasing way, by shifting your viewpoint - especially that of the camera - you can alter its relationship with the distant horizons.
Strange how knee-jerk humans can be about aspects of humankind. Imagine you're driving towards towards Arnside from Milnthorp and you glance up at that hillside on which your house is located. Imagine you have billions - enough to acquire the whole of that area, destroy all the buildings and return the slope to mere grass and trees. Imagine the complex morality that exists in finding that desirable.
Watching the TdF should have taught you differently. The helicopter shots show buildings as well as natural vistas; we see the essence of France, people and their needs not mere topography. Often the Tour can seem incidental to this endlessly varying magnificence, except that the Tour animates that which would otherwise be immobile. The Earth is people, you are a person, people make twelfth-century abbatiales and, of course, chimney pots. At 1500 feet a Peugeot resembles a shiny insect.
RR - I feel vindicated by the fact that I recognised the potential photographic artistic merits of all components of that shot before I took it - it was no flook, and I do not see myself as a philistine. In close-up, as you say, the pot has its attractive nuances, but in un- foreshortened context, viewed from my window it is an eyesore slap bang in the middle of a panoramic view across the valley backed by the distant hills including two of the The Three Peaks.
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