Snow + Beach

We've had the unusual occurance of snow that hasn't melted as soon as it lands this week.

So, for the first time in my life, I've seen a snowy beach.

I couldn't resist taking photos until my fingers were too cold to work the dials of my camera.

And there's more to come later in the week...

The Sky Saves The Day (Again)

Yes, I know we've only just had Skywatch, but I couldn't wait until next week to post these photos. I had yet another super frustrating day. You know the type, when you think, aha, this will take ten, maybe fifteen minutes, and you're still wrestling with it four hours later? Yep, one of those.

So again, it was 'take some deep breaths and look out the window time'.

Carpe Diem

Today my leisurely email and coffee wake up was disrupted by finding out about the sudden, and unexpected, death of a fellow Samaritans volunteer, who I’d been working with since I joined earlier this year. We’d only met ten or so times – enough time for me to appreciate his kindness, desire to help others and interest in the world.

The effect has been the emotional equivalent of a sudden cold drenching and stupid surprise you can have a perfectly normal phone conversation with someone one day, and within a week they can be dead.

And I have to confess to a selfish appreciation of how lucky I am to be alive right now. I’ve been taking the second looks at the sky, the cats, the world in general and appreciating the fragile beauty of the ordinary.

Instead of getting crabby in the Post Office queue, I reminded myself that it didn’t really matter, it wasn’t worth wasting the amount of time I have getting angry, and that plenty of people would be happy to swop grievances. I felt appreciation for the human bonds that make us send Christmas cards, rather than being impatient and wondering why what seemed like everyone else had decided to post their mail at the same time I did.

My mantra for today has been carpe diem, and I’ve been thinking of all the little things that I’ve been putting off doing, waiting until a ‘perfect time’ to do them. I suddenly realised that if I do this too long I’ll waste all my tomorrows waiting for something that doesn’t exist.

Skywatch Friday

November You Say?

I took this on Sunday, about twenty minutes before the overwhelming blueness, which was featured earlier in the week. I was struck by the unusual silhouettes of the palm trees, but it was difficult to find a shot that reflected how dramatically incongruous they seemed on a windswept November promenade. It wasn’t until I started tweaking in Photoshop that the photo really came alive, and gave me a chance to pretend this wasn’t really northern Europe in winter – perhaps I’d slipped away to a balmy tropical island for the afternoon instead.

Skywatch Friday.

Sometimes Reality Is Stranger

I promise I did not edit this in Photoshop (well, apart from to crop some shingle from the bottom). Walking along the beach at dusk yesterday, the muddy sand, sea and sky were all this intense blue colour. I've lived by the sea almost all my life, and never seen this light effect before. And to think I nearly didn't take my camera!

My World Tuesday.

Mellow

Today I trudged through the rain and the last of the skimpy November daylight to post my application form for the MA course I want to do. If I think about it, I get a little butterfly sensation in my stomach, because I want it to work out so much, but I had a bit of a life disaster with my last postgraduate application, where I managed to get into a course I never thought I would but the funding all went horribly awry, which meant I couldn’t do it.

Sometimes I have to remind myself that after I certain point, there’s nothing I can do, and that worrying about is a waste of my life. So I’m going to try and channel the mellow serenity of this photograph and concentrate my mind on the beauty and good in the here and now, rather than something that might go wrong in the future.

Did I just sound too much like a self help book? Maybe. As a reward for my form filling and getting wet feet on the way to the post office, I’m going to contemplate the beauty and good in a some brie and grapes and a bottle of cider.

Skywatch Friday

Doorways: Dog Days

Ok, so there's no actual doorway seen, but this is the view through the doorway of the pier amusement arcade. It's something that I cast my eye over without really seeing, until my brain processed the unusual addition of the toy spaniel.

I wondered if he'd been selling the family valuables to fuel his addiction to the penny pushing machines, although it must be terribly difficult operating the button with paws... I hope at least the attendant provides him with some steps, and perhaps let him swop his winnings for dog chews.


I couldn't really decide whether I liked this best in b+w or colour, what do you think?

Sarf Coast

Like many seaside towns, Worthing sports a pier, and on the end of that pier sports a nightclub. Having been a regular for years, I haven't been know for at least a year and half. Obviously that's partially due to having spent a significant portion of that time in Asia, but what really vexed me last time I went here was, when we stepped outside to get some air and have a chat, as we'd been doing for about nine years, we were corralled into a tiny roped off area along this window. Once we's wedged ourselves into the crowd, we had to dodge cigarette's being waved around with drunken abandon and were jostled and foot trodden on more than we had been inside. That was the point were I thought 'I am too old for this'.

This reflection of the suburban south coast in the blacked out windows caught my eye, even if I did have to stand an extreme angle to get it 'just right', which annoyingly means that I get stuck with underside of the balcony in one corner.

By the way, this photo looks much better enlarged!

Skywatch Friday

Doorways: Dolphin Cottage

As I got ready to photograph this rather striking doorway, in an otherwise somewhat rundown street, a couple in their fifties stopped so they didn’t intrude onto my shot. Knowing my propensity for fiddling around with different settings, I said something like ‘come by, it’s no trouble, I might be awhile’.

There was then a minute of British ‘no, no really, it’s no trouble’ on both sides, to the point where I just wanted to say, actually, it makes me quite uncomfortable having two people standing and staring at me whilst I’m trying to take a photo.

Although obviously, not as uncomfortable as it would’ve done before I went to China.

After this polite agonising the couple went to walk past me, and the man asked what I was photographing. ‘What do you want to do that for,’ was his response. His wife then made a spirited defence of the merits of the door as a photographic subject, and, standing right in front of me, they had a self-contained, but rather heated, argument about this.

I had a few minutes of thinking, ‘well, this isn’t a situation you find covered in photography books’ and feeling exceptionally awkward, before they moved off without acknowledging me.

So far, I’m feeling that this incident sums up my week: things almost go right, and then…

Photo Fishing

If you’re peckish, Worthing beach offers you a choice between ice cream and raw fish. Not a sushi bar, but fish from the independent fishermen who sell their catch from stalls next to where they land their boats. For me, indifferent to the pleasures of piscine dishes, the fishing ephemera offered a suitably engrossing photographic subject.



On a wonderfully sunny afternoon, the winches, buoys and nets gave me a good opportunity to experiment with the manual settings on my camera, and I happily lost myself amongst apertures and exposures. Contemplating a photograph you are proud of is satisfying, but what I love about photography is the way that it offers me a sense of peace, a complete absorption in what I’m doing that drowns out my mental background noise.

Worlds shared

Doorways: Arcade

This week's doorway is a seafront amusement arcade, snapped whilst the early morning clear up was still going on.

Sweetly Sleazy

Sweetly sleazy: this defines the appeal of British seaside towns for me, the dichotomy between the for-the-tourists-and-municipal-brochure attempt to tart up and gentrify and the pervasive reality: the cheap and not always cheerful-ness, the homeless sleeping under the pier, the down at heel amusement arcades filled with the poor and desperate, the atmosphere of ‘this is as far as you can go’.

Echoes of Georgian and Victorian propriety vie with shadows of insalubrious raffishness – the seaside is where a young lady might elope with an unsuitable chancer, an adulterous couple might hide out, Mods and Rockers would have street battles and hen and stag parties descend for ‘what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas’ weekends.

Tuesday worlds.

Sunset

I think this gorgeous sunset is the perfect way to celebrate my 200th post, and a good reminder that you should never forget to look up. I was beavering at the computer one evening when I realised how stunning the sky was. Unfortunately you can't get a great view of the sunset from our house, mainly owing to someone down the road who thinks that 30ft trees are a great idea in a suburban garden. Luckily my dearest chauffeur (otherwise known as mother) did her duty and ferried me to a nearby hilltop, that has rather more spectacular views!

Skywatch Friday

Fading Fun Fair

Skywatch Friday

Domestica

Skywatch.

The Great Frame Caper

Back in the mists of a timidly emerging Beijing spring, I purchased some paintings as wedding gifts for my friends. The prevailing framing choice was a ‘traditional’ Chinese scroll, which, however, I felt goes a little bit too far from ‘something cool my friend bought me from China’ towards ‘my house now looks like a suburban Chinese restaurant’.

No problems, I thought, they’ll look much better in something sleek and contemporary. Arriving home, picture framing wasn’t exactly top of my ‘to-do’ list, and I confess, I left it until a week before the wedding to get them – after all, it would just be a matter of nipping into a shop.

Obviously, it wasn’t until I was in the aforesaid shop that I realised that the standard frame sizes might be different between the UK and China, and that apparently Britain doesn’t do square frames anyway. I searched, I bought, I got them home and discovered they were slightly too small. I returned them, gave up on square frame and went for a rectangle with black mount.

I’m quite short, the frames were quite big and Brighton is quite hilly, so I alternated between accidentally banging my bags into the pavement [sidewalk] in front of me and holding them in my arms, only just managing to peer over the top in an endeavour to avoid the dozens of people that didn’t seem to notice that the person struggling to maintain control over a package half her size might actually need more room to get by than, say, a catwalk model about to die of heart failure.

But, I thought, hard part over, only black paper to get. I went into a paper shop, a shop that actually has ‘paper’ in its name, only to be told by the snotty sales assistant that they didn’t have any, as if I was some kind of loon for even thinking they’d stock something so boringly essential.

I eventually found black paper back in my home town, after finding that all the shops I thought would have it have either closed down or don’t, in a backstreet art shop run by someone whose demeanour and shirt pattern suggest him a potential warning for a teenage drug awareness campaign.

Seriously – all of this for two picture frames and two sheets of black paper? Please tell me the result was worth it. (And if you don’t, I wouldn’t say so, cos I might just find out where you live.)

Waterless Garden

These wooden uprights are part of a ‘desert garden’ on Worthing beach that stands as a warning to the perils of fashionable doom mongering. Built a few years ago, when a couple of hot summers had led the media to run hysterical features recommending people to replace their roses with cacti, it’s meant to be an example of how gardens might change for a drier climate, and comes complete with a nice little homily about how summers are going to get hotter and drier and we need to preserve water. (Nothing in there about mending leaky water pipes though.)

The smug self righteousness I feel every time I’ve walked past it has nearly made the last three wet, chilly summers worthwhile.

Skywatching all over the world.

Saturday Night Conundrum

‘Odd’. That was the verdict of a friend who has recently started working in my hometown about the denizens of Worthing. And, having witnessed the following on Saturday night, I can’t disagree.

We noticed a guy that my friend had actually pulled once, but whose behaviour made him seem increasingly less attractive as the night wore on. To start with, he had his own name tattooed down his forearm, implying that he lacked a certain faith in his long term cognitive ability.

His indecision as to what shooter to order at the bar resulted in the barmaid wearing an expression that suggested that if wishes came true there would have been a mortuary ambulance on its way to the pub.

About an hour later, he was refused service after he snorted the salt that was meant to chase his tequila slammer, then squirted lemon juice into his friend’s eye. He laughed maniacally, then squirted some into his own eye. And kept on laughing.

On the plus side, he did have a certain devil-may-care joie de vivre about him, but, in general, it was a good demonstration of why people curse the difficulty of finding decent (ie, non psychologically challenged) boy/girlfriends in this town. And it led onto a conversation about why it is that the guys level of confidence in approaching those of the female gender seems to be in completely inverse proportion to their level of attractiveness.

An antidote to our wine fuelled cynicism regarding the possibility of ever achieving a non-dysfunctional relationship came when a guy at the table next to us sent us over a bottle of wine, which until that point was something that I thought only happened in American TV shows.

Painted Backdrop

This was the view from the end of Worthing pier earlier this week. The light and the sea were both very unusual – I thought it looked like a backdrop painted on silk.

See what other skies have been up to this week.

Coming Home

Thank you all for your well wishes for my journey home: I had a delightful last weekend in Beijing, a good flight, and since arriving home at about five yesterday evening have enjoyed a takeaway Indian meal with my family, a shopping and lunch trip to Brighton with one of my closest friends and cat adoration, all of which I badly missed in China.

Before I readjust to England, I wanted to record how my hometown, Worthing, looks through ‘China eyes’. On the way home from Heathrow airport, the first thing that struck me was how sedate the motorway traffic was, compared to the honking and weaving and constant near collisions of Shijiazhuang.

Then I noticed how intensely green southern England is at this time of year: it seemed like someone had poured a tin of green paint over the countryside.

And everything is so quiet. When I first moved to Shijiazhuang I thought the noise was going to drive me insane, but I’ve gotten used to the constant honking, the trucks going over speed bumps that rattle my apartment windows, the school bells and announcements, the noise of students, my neighbours banging their doors and yelling at each other on the stairs – and did I mention the honking? Now Worthing seems eerily quiet, the streets too deserted – where is everyone?

Walking to the train station today, the near silence actually started to make me feel quite oppressed and anxious.

I’ve always thought of my town as nothing special, and certainly parts of it are scruffy and, like so many places, it is blighted in spots by ugly brutalist rip buildings and unimaginative apartment buildings. But as I walked down the main street I realised how beautiful some of the buildings are, how blessed the location and how little anyone appreciates what we have here.

Oh, and I’ve had to restrain myself from spitting on the street, smiling at random children, saying ‘xiexie’ instead of ‘thank you’ and putting rejected food on the table in a restaurant.