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It’s that time of year again, nuff said!

 

Taking a break from life as a bard so, here’s a Jerusalem post…

One of the places we used to play as kids in the 1960s, was the crew yard of an old farm in the middle of the village. We knew it as “the paddock”. It was a square patch of land about the size of two tennis courts, overgrown, unused, and full of old farm machinery of another age. It was enclosed by open fronted barns and high brick walls. Like most villages these days these places have been lost to small housing developments. They are usually given an uninspiring name reflecting their history; “The Paddocks” or “Hayfield Rise” etc. Not in Scampton, former home to the WWII 617 Dambusters squadron.

 

Further info:
The Blitz Tea Room (this blog) 
More about Jerusalem project
The Dambusters (Wikipedia)

This was my first home though, it was a bit different then. It’s now sheltered housing for retired folk. Back in the 1950’s it was called Temperance Place and was two rows of slum terraces separated by a patch of wasteland. The houses were two-up-two-downs. No bathroom – outside privy and a tin bath in the back yard.

The shadow of the old style gas streetlight is a fake. Lincoln once had beautifully elegant streetlights which were replaced in more recent times with clumsily designed fake olde-worlde versions – shadows of what they once were (see what I did there?).

From an existential perspective a photograph is time frozen into a discrete moment. The stuff in the photograph will never be seen again in exactly the same way – the world has moved on. Similarly, shadows cannot exist without light. Photographing your own shadow is evidence that something once existed, tagging the landscape, saying I was here…

Erik the tiny viking welcomes ramblers to the Viking Way…

 

Back to the beach, again! With the North Sea Observatory and the wind turbines it could almost be another planet.

 

Cottam power station has been decommissioned and the turbine hall demolished. Should at least one of these structures be preserved? They are a monument to the 20th century, and the folly of an age of fossil fuel that has brought us to the virtual destruction of the planet as we know it. Seen in a more romantic light they are also  a kind of modern Stonehenge. Almost unimaginable structures that dominate the landscape like no other structure.

Also see: Cottam Power Station

It’s been almost a year and my mojo has finally returned. The past year I have continued to wander the landscape like some sort of misdirected pilgrim.

So, here we go again – NATIONAL LANDSCAPE is the latest chapter of Jerusalem. It’s black and white, back to basics! I was always happier with black and white. How can it seem more natural than colour? I guess there’s some irony there given the subject of the project. You might get that better when you read on. Find out more here…

I have been doing this blog for eight years now, time for a reset and a break.

Until I return take a look through the archive on the right.

Back soon-ish…

“Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers show that the marking strip for the prime meridian at Greenwich is not exactly at zero degrees, zero minutes, and zero seconds but at approximately 5.3 seconds of arc to the west of the meridian (meaning that the meridian appears to be 102.478 metres east)”. (Wikipedia)

I hope the strip at Cleethorpes is a little more accurate otherwise it will be in the sea.