One I Got & One That Got Away

I was in London at the weekend, staying close to Kew Gardens. There’s an Eco Village there, on the corner of Kew Bridge and some-road-or-other. Personally, if I wanted to live in an eco village I think I’d pick somewhere quieter and where the air doesn’t taste of diesel fumes, but it’s a squatters encampment and good use of what will some day become several million pounds worth of luxury apartments, so best of luck to the squatters. There’s a facebook page here and a YouTube video here. Great use of global new media to promote a true grass-roots movement.

I walked past the Eco Village a few times and as always I kept my eyes open for hearts, but amongst the various graffiti nearby there were none. AND THEN. Driving away on Sunday morning there were two brand new bits of graffiti – a huge ‘Long Live the Eco Village’ and a lovely heart on the gate…. and me sitting in the passenger seat of a car belching diesel, stuck in traffic, about to hit the M3 back to the fresh air and quiet of Dorset.

So can I ask you a favour? If you live near or in the Kew Eco Village, can you take a peek on the gate and see if the heart is still there? Maybe take a picture… and then when you want a new place to set up an eco-village, how about the old Grammar School site in Swanage?

What I do have to show you is this: a heart from the shore at Osmington Mills. And look at that sandstone! What I love about sandstone is the fact that you can see sand dunes from millions of years ago, touch them, rub them and free sand that’s been trapped for millennia. It’s like being God. In a very small way.

And the Smugglers Inn at Osmington is one of the loveliest pubs I know, so that’s a plus. The rock this was on is precisely here.

love | landscape

happy valentines day

Every day of the year should afford the opportunity to tell somebody how much you love them, but that isn’t always the way it works. Today is important because it provides the opportunity to make a romantic and possibly foolish gesture, safe in the knowledge that if it goes horribly wrong all will be forgiven because that’s just what crazy, love-struck fools do on Valentine’s Day.

What’s odd is when you are snug and safe within a relationship and yet still you’re expected to make that additional gesture just because it’s The Most Romantic Day of the Year. I spend my life making pictures with hearts in them, to the point where Vicki should have lost interest in the universal symbol of romance. Last year we agreed a few days before not to get each other anything for Valentine’s Day. Come the morning, I found a card and a gift on my pillow when I brought in the coffee. I felt mean and unromantic and thoroughly caught out.  “And what did Swanage’s Most Romantic Man get his lovely wife for Valentine’s Day?” a friend asked a couple of days later. I explained. “You didn’t fall for that one?” he said in astonishment, amazed that I could be so foolish.

So if you think you may find yourself in a similar pickle in future years, I hereby give you permission to bookmark this site ready to rush to your PC, pick a heart from here to print out and make into a hasty card. It might help, it might not, but it’s just a suggestion and it’ll look as though you were planning a cool and artsy hand-made card for ages…

[the picture above was taken on a lovely autumn day in 2009 on Swanage Beach. The big red thing is on the end of a groyne down there. I didn’t Google ‘red thing on the end of a groyne’ just in case, but I assume that they mark the end of the groyne should the sea be particularly high and hiding the structure from boats coming into shore. A probable sounding factoid for you there.]

love | landscape

Deckchairs

There’s something about seeing deckchairs in pairs looking out to the sea. Often, especially in English seaside towns, I see old couples sitting in silence staring out towards the horizon and I always wonder what they were like when they were young, when they were first in love with each other, when romance was something new. They have spent so much time together and they have been so lucky to have that. I hope they know.

Empty pairs of deckchairs bring this to mind but they also carry the melancholy of loss.

That said, this was taken on a wet windy day in Bournemouth, 2006 – couples of all ages had more sense than to reward their romance with a cold, wet behind.

love | landscape

Rock On

I just have a minute or two, but had to put this together and post it – took it a while before Christmas and loved it even in the camera. Have a feeling the heart is a little soft-focus, but it was taken in the dark…

This is at Winspit, which is a very cool place. It was a quarry, a desolate planet in Destiny of the Daleks with no less than Tom Baker as Doctor Who, and now and then there’s an illegal rave there. It’s also something of a toilet, for ravers, climbers and Daleks I imagine. Watch where you step. Dalek poo is nasty.

What I like about it is that it needs no dressing up to be a sci-fi film set. Walk into the quarry-caves and stand in silence. It’s like being on the surface of the moon, only with the surface reflected on the ceiling. Actually, it’s nothing like the surface of the moon, clearly. It has stone pillars and graffiti. But it’s an alien place for sure.

It’s here – on the planet Skaro.

 

love | landscape

Persons Anxious To Write Their Names…

…will please do so on this stone only. Jodie Forbes, and all the many others who relieved their anxiety by writing their names on this stone, I salute you.

This stone has been relieving anxiety since 1887, and it’s fascinating to think of the countless names that have been written on it and worn away in all that time, and wonderful to think that Victorian England had a problem with graffiti that could only be solved by the use of two large slabs of stone set into the ground. Tilly Whim Caves nearby, locked to the public since 1976 and now home only to bats and Willy Tim the dragon (or so I tell my children), is also home to walls of graffiti, carved into the Purbeck stone near the entrances. I’ll get in there one day.

Ever since I started photographing graffiti I’ve wondered what it means to write your name in a public place? There’s a lovely answer at WikiAnswers to this question: “They think that writing their name all over will make other people know who they are. All it does is make other people see their name, of course, and not understand anything about them.”

Personally I think it’s about our anxiety with being so small and so temporary. We are tiny insignificant beings and here for such a short time, and we want to be noticed and then remembered. Some people seek this through fame and celebrity, maybe notoriety, some through creativity (and maybe fame through creativity). To some it gives them a sense of identity – think of taggers, whose mark is largely illegible to most of us, but which identifies them to their peers. And some resort to writing their name repeatedly all over the place. Jodie Forbes wrote her name on this same stone at least three times, in the same pen on presumably the same day.

May she be anxious no more.

The Great Globe at Durlston is here.

love | landscape

Beep, beep, ding, dong and jingle all the way

 

I took these / this in 2006 but here we are, verging on 2010 and I’ve only just put it together. Hearts, robots and Jesus – what could be more Christmassy?

I add it now purely to wish you, my loyal reader, a Merry Christmas and a happy and healthy New Year. You’ve visited me over 2000 times now, and for that I am grateful.

I hereby raise a glass of sweet Sherry to you and wish you all the best. Hurrah!

love | landscape

Boy with an Exquisite Heart

I’m no closer to solving the mystery of the royalist heart, but  here’s another offering from Versailles, this time from the edge of  the Forêt Domaniale de Versailles‎. I know the location because there was a big brown sign opposite with the words ‘Forêt Domaniale de Versailles‎’ written on it.

It was taken here, on the least interesting side of an unusually ornate and marbled electricity substation and was obviously sprayed in the same pink as the numbers marked on the stacks of timber nearby.

It is an exquisitely beautiful heart. I asked Sunny, age 7, to take my portrait alongside it, which is the portrait used at the moment on my profile for this blog. I took his portrait in return.

There is something about this heart that makes me think of Picasso – I think it’s the appearance of a swirl in the upper right that does it. I can’t think where I’ve seen a Picasso heart and several attempts through Google have only led me to a cross-stitch design based on an original, so I’m still not sure of the original’s title. I’ll keep looking, just so that I can be sure that I did  see a Picasso heart with a swirl somewhere other than on a cross-stitch pattern.

This was very close to the wonderful Huttopia, where we were staying, just at the entrance to the forest, close to a playground. It’s beautiful. I hope nobody paints over it before we visit again.

love | landscape