As the summer rolls on and the lockdown rules out picnics on the beach, sangria parties in smokey Balearic nightspots, and wild swimming adventures in the Barents Sea, I am restricted to my quest to scan my garden. Whilst cutting the lawn today, I plucked this seeded stem out of the ground and subjected the poor thing to a high resolution scan. The results gave me enough images to fill a holiday album.
Elland Power Station used to sit on the floor of the Calder Valley like a mucky residue, creating black shapes against a grey sky. It’s been replaced now by a bright business park; all very clean and the slightest bit boring.
A dead flower head. The stem and leaf thinks it’s in the peak of health, but the flower has crumpled into a shadow of its former self; like a deflated brown paper balloon. On some of these mornings, I know how it feels.
It can’t have been much more than four months ago when I took this photograph. We were on a boat about to leave Antigua. They were on another boat, also leaving Antigua. We waved to each other saying goodbye. Little did we know what we were saying goodbye to.
Cleethorpes in the 1980s: out of season and tired. Back then, colour seemed as absent from the persona of this seaside town as meat did from the hamburgers at the burger bar. Everything looks a lot brighter these days; colour is back – long may it stay.
I think this is York and I suspect this is a bit of York Minster in a contest with the gable ends for visual supremacy. The photograph must date from fairly late in my monochrome days – late eighties or even early nineties – and it demonstrates that nothing does shapes like a black and white photo.
It’s raining: not fit weather to be out taking photographs. I still had to take the dog out, and I managed to pluck some blossom from a tree. What else is there to do in this locked-down world that to come home and subject it to a high resolution scan.
A Yorkshire stone wall. Dry. Designed by a craftsman, not a committee. Solid. Coated in soot from generations of hard industry. Formed from layer after layer of grit.
Lockdown cabin fever has progressed so far that last week I found myself scanning a biscuit (it was a McVitie’s Rich Tea Finger if that is of any interest). After that, things can only get better – so here is a scan of a lump of moss pulled from a stone wall.
