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My travel year in review, 2022
All of us who love to travel, and are fortunate enough to be able to do so, will I hope be looking back on a year filled with both familiar and foreign places. For most of us, 2022 was the year in which we began to feel comfortable travelling again. When, despite a few new forms to fill in and masks to be worn, perhaps reluctantly, on planes, the world opened up again and we could scratch that travel itch, relieve that homesickness ‘for the places we have never known’.
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Gallery: last chance to see (or possibly not!)
Tina’s proposal that for the last Lens Artists challenge of the year we share some shots taken in 2022 but not yet shared for any of the challenges sounds a simple ask. But I decided to make it harder for myself by searching out some favourite images not yet shared in any post.
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Ealing, the Queen of the Suburbs?
In 1902 Charles Jones, Ealing’s borough surveyor, published a book. In it he referred to Ealing as the ‘Queen of Suburbs’. His aim of course was to promote the area as a place to live.
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Gallery: some favourite English flowers
In the last few years, with the batterings the world has taken – Covid, war in Ukraine, prices spiralling – flowers have been among the constants that have kept many people’s spirits up. The pandemic in particular reminded many of us to value the little pleasures of life, and what gives more pleasure for its size than a flower?
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Gallery: pick a word (September)
According to Horace, 'A picture is a poem without words'. That would seem to be a good motto for a photography blog. But I like to write (and talk!) almost as much as I like to take photos. So my posts are usually a mix of the two, and I leave my readers to decide whether the pictures or the text say the most.
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Gallery: a farewell to a monarch
You must have been living on Mars, or as a hermit, not to have heard that Queen Elizabeth II passed away last week. Here in the UK we are in a period of official mourning such as most of us have never experienced. Whether you are a fervent monarchist, staunch republican or (like me) somewhere on a scale between those two extremes, it’s hard not to be fascinated by the sense of history that surrounds us right now.
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Gallery: an August selection
Although August has been hot, mostly sunny and very dry, I can already sense that summer is closer to its end than its beginning. The lights are going on earlier each evening. The warmth of the sun is tempered by a cooling breeze. And a few showers, and one day of steady rain, have started to re-green the weary grass in our parks.
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A stroll around Fountains Abbey
In 1132 a small group of monks left their Benedictine Monastery in York, fed up with the extravagant and rowdy lifestyle of the monks there. Seeking a more devout and simple way of life, they were granted a parcel of land by the River Skell where they built a small wooden church and applied, successfully, to join the Cistercian order.
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Radical Horizons: the Art of Burning Man at Chatsworth
Burning Man is a unique event that takes place every year in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, USA. But we are not in the deserts of Nevada; we are among the green hills of England’s Peak District.
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Eyam, home to the original lockdown?
When Alexander Hadfield, a tailor, ordered a bale of cloth to be sent from London to his home in the small Derbyshire village of Eyam, he cannot have dreamed of the dreadful consequences. Nor could he have dreamed that this simple action would be remembered centuries later.
