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Wednesday 22 March 2017

365project - a photo a day

For several years now my wife and I have (separately) taken a photo every day and submitted them to 365project. For $19.99 a year you can make the images private so only the people you choose can see them. You can then also have more albums if you want.

Some of the photos sent in are "arty", but many are just a record of ordinary life. Looking back over the years, you can see what you were doing.

Often the most mundane subject matter is popular. Some years ago I remember a photo of mine of a mole hole being widely viewed, whereas something I thought would interest many turned out not to be.

We mainly do this for a record of what we did rather than to be particularly popular. It is great fun. The secret is not to take things too seriously.

Heathers in UK gardens

Heathers are usually associated with moorland.

At this time of the year, heathers are in flower in UK gardens. This show was in a nearby garden on our small Close. 

Sadly, they do not look so good all year around. They look very good at the moment and make good ground cover.

Tuesday 21 March 2017

Martin McGuinness Dead

Martin McGuinness has died of a rare heart condition at the age of 66. In his younger days he was a key member of the IRA and wedded to violence.

In later years he was deputy first minister in Northern Ireland working with Ian Paisley and was one of the "chuckle brothers", showing that mutual respect between two very different people is possible.

I am sure to the end he was very much in favour of a united Ireland, but he came to realise votes not bullets would bring this about.  He changed, as did Ian Paisley.

My hope and prayer is that those that follow will walk in the path of peace. Jaw, jaw is always better than war, war. This applies whatever your political beliefs.

See http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-39185899 .

Rare sunny day

We live in the last bungalow on the left overlooking the restored windmill. The windmill is nearly 200 years old. Today we have had a rare sunny day, although the rest of the week looks rainy. We are lucky to have a nice spot.

The museum, of which the windmill is a just a small part, goes on and on. It must be one of the very best local museums in the whole country. It is open from Easter to late October on Thursdays, Sundays and Bank Holidays. If you visit, you may be surprised by what is there.

See http://www.burwellmuseum.org.uk/ .

Monday 20 March 2017

Visitors to Cambridge

As a famous university town, Cambridge gets a fair number of visitors. With BREXIT, I guess the money now goes even further.

This was a group of visitors from the Far East outside St Johns College. Of course, you have to take a few photos! This café, Le Pattesier, just opposite St Johns, serves decent meals at decent prices, with a smile.

Backs (Cambridge), UK

Recently, we visited the Backs (of the colleges) in nearby Cambridge, UK. With all the flowers out, this really is a sight. This is in the grounds of St Johns College.

We really are quite lucky living so close. As residents, we get free entry into the colleges.

Sunday 19 March 2017

Soul shards

This was first posted here in November 2011:

Michael Rainey, a ham radio friend from New Hampshire posted this on Facebook today.   I thought I'd share it here too. It is the chapter called, "Soul-Shards" from Douglas Hofstadter's book, "I Am A Strange Loop", a book I have not read (yet).
"One gloomy day in early 1991, a couple of months after my father died, I was standing in the kitchen of my parents house and my mother, looking at a sweet and touching photograph of my father taken perhaps fifteen years earlier, said to me, with a note of despair, “What meaning does that photograph have? None at all. It’s just a flat piece of paper with dark spots on it here and there. It’s useless.” The bleakness of my mother’s grief-drenched remark set my head spinning because I knew instinctively that I disagreed with her, but I did not quite know how to express to her the way I felt the photograph should be considered.

After a few minutes of emotional pondering - soul-searching, quite literally - I hit upon an analogy that I felt could convey to my mother my point of view, and which I hoped might lend her at least a tiny degree of consolation. What I said to her was along the following lines.

“In the living room we have a book of the Chopin etudes for piano. All of its pages are just pieces of paper with dark marks on them, just as two-dimensional and flat and foldable as the photograph of Dad - and yet, think of the powerful effect that they have had on people all over the world for 150 years now. Thanks to those black marks on those flat sheets of paper, untold thousands of people have collectively spent millions of hours moving their fingers over the keyboards of pianos in complicated patterns, producing sounds that give them indescribable pleasure and a sense of great meaning. Those pianists in turn have conveyed to many millions of listeners, including you and me, the profound emotions that churned in Frederic Chopin’s heart, thus affording all of us some partial access to Chopin’s interiority - to the experience of living in the head, or rather the soul, of Frederic Chopin. The marks on those sheets of paper are no less than soul-shards - scattered remnants of the shattered soul of Frederic Chopin. Each of those strange geometries of notes has a unique power to bring back to life, inside our brains, some tiny fragment of the internal experiences of another human being - his sufferings, his joys, his deepest passions and tensions - and we thereby know, at least in part, what it was like to be that human being, and many people feel intense love for him. In just as potent a fashion, looking at that photograph of Dad brings back, to us who knew him intimately, the clearest memory of his smile and his gentleness, activates inside our living brains some of the most central representations of him that survive in us, makes little fragments of his soul dance again, but in the medium of brains other than his own. Like the score to a Chopin etude, that photograph is a soul-shard of someone departed, and it is something we should cherish as long as we live.”

Although the above is a bit more flowery than what I said to my mother, it gives the essence of my message. I don’t know what effect it had on her feelings about the picture, but that photo is still there, on a counter in her kitchen, and every time I look at it, I remember that exchange."