Neighbourhood

This is the view from my bedroom window, taken last Wednesday evening. Our street organised a little party to mark the end of the school year, and it was a blast. We got the city to seal off the street, everyone fired up their barbecues, laws regarding consumption of alcohol in public were blithely ignored, and everyone had a great time. The kids all got horribly wet, the adults reasonably drunk. Some ladies put on a belly-dancing exhibition on the front lawn of a (very surprised) elderly neighbour. A band turned up and used our driveway as an impromptu stage to belt out some noisy classics. Eventually the rain came, along with the police to tell us that Second Avenue were complaining about the noise. By then though we'd had our fun. Malini was very proud that a rock band played our driveway - she whispered to me as she went to sleep, "Daddy, are we the coolest?" The evening was also a landmark for our father-daughter relationship. For the first time in her life, though certainly not the last time, she was too embarrassed to be seen dancing with me.

I don't know if they do spontaneous neighbourhood parties like this in other parts of the world. The closest we get to it in England is the jelly and ice-cream patriotic variety on the Queen's Jubilee - something to be avoided at all costs. The Germans have a fair stab at it with village and neighbourhood beer fests. The Belgians have nothing like it in my experience.

The thing I liked about this one was the slightly anarchic atmosphere couple with the strong sense of community. I find it hard to imagine such a spontaneous community event taking place in any of the other places I've lived. Canadians do this sort of thing really well. Something about their society just works. People are invested in their local communities. Belonging is more than just paying taxes. We need to think how we can recapture this spirit of community in Europe.

Details: Nikon D70, 18-200 VR lens, further details to follow.

Arachne

Arachne was one of those rare heroines in Greek mythology who hadn't been sleeping with Zeus. She was a famous weaver, and kind of arrogant. She claimed to be better than Athena, the goddess of weaving. Athena turned up in disguise and challenged Arachne to a contest. Of course, it wouldn't be Greek mythology without some Jovian hanky-panky. Arachne chose for her tapestry's theme the various infidelities of Zeus. Athena, not thrilled (Zeus was her dad), revealed herself to Arachne and gave her a verbal slapdown. Arachne, full of remorse, hanged herself (on her own thread, presumably). Athena, relenting, brought her back to life as a spider.

Here's another beautiful spider's web, which Arachne herself could have woven. If you look closely at the dewdrops, you can see that they're lensing the gatepost, the road and the forest behind. This was shot in the same location as the spider photo I posted a couple of days ago. Nature is so amazingly beautiful, and its beauty is fractal: from the biggest to the smallest structures, at every scale its beauty and complexity is humbling.

I'm posting this as a birthday present, of sorts, for my friend. Now I'm all out of spider web photos, so I'd better go out and shoot some more.

Details: Nikon D70, 105mm macro, f/10, 1/400s, ISO 200. Smith's Cove, Nova Scotia, 23 August 2005. Placemark.

Covehead Harbour Lighthouse

Bah! In a rotten mood today. Being stuck in a superchilled office on a sultry summer Monday doesn't help. Nor does ignoring my work to watch a stultifying 0-0 draw between Switzerland and Ukraine. I'm supposed to be too old for mood swings. Evidently I'm not.

So I need a happy picture to cheer myself up. This is another one taken on our holiday in PEI last year. It makes me think of long summer evenings watching the tide go out, building sandcastles, reading Harry Potter books, rolling up sandy towels and getting in the car to find a remote eatery serving lobster dinners. I wish I was there.

Details: Nikon D70, 18-70mm lens @ 48mm, f/10, 1/200s, ISO 200. Covehead, PEI National Park, 17 August 2005. Placemark.

Spider

So here's a good illustration of one of life's lessons: avoid sticky situations! This poor husk of an insect failed to see this web, as obvious as it is to us godlike observers. The sun's rays illuminate it against a dark background of foliage, just as they light up the body of the spider come to make the insect's bad day even worse.

Spiderwebs can be beautiful and enticing. But as our hapless insect here found out, they're best avoided.

Nikon D70, 105mm macro, f/7.1, 1/400s, -1.7EV, ISO 200. Smith's Cove, Nova Scotia, 23 August 2005. Placemark.

Seascape

After that last post, you know, the ecstatic bee one, it's time to kick back and draw breath. This is about as far removed from magnified frenzied insect gluttony as is possible with the tools at my disposal. Look at this seascape. Imagine yourself there. Picture the calm. Inhale deeply. Life is good...

Details: Nikon D70, 18-70 lens @ 35mm, f/5.6, 1/80s, ISO 200. Rustico Harbour, PEI, 14 August 2005.

Bee!

Here's one for the insect fanciers out there: this shot of a bee I nabbed last summer in Annapolis, Nova Scotia. As you can see, this bee is about as high on pollen as it's possible to get without overdosing, and such was its state of ecstasy that I was able to get up very close to it with my macro lens and snap away with the result that you see here. I was pleased with this because I have more blurred bee shots than you can possibly imagine.

Details: Nikon D70, 105mm macro lens, f/6.3, 1/500s, ISO 200. 24 August 2005, Annapolis Nova Scotia. Placemark.

Global village

This photo was taken while hiking near Bukittinggi, Sumatra, during my post-university world trip. We broke for lunch in a farming village in the shadow of a volcano (it erupted a couple of weeks after I was there - I left a trail of disaster in my wake on that trip: volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, LA riots, Thai democracy riots, a typhoon in Hong Kong, monsoon floods, and John Major's election victory).

The walk was wonderful, amazing, beautiful. We wandered through paddy fields and villages, meeting friendly people at every turn. Everyone was fascinated in me. Not often did they see lanky blond bespectacled men with hairy white legs, at least, not in the flesh. I felt like a rock star.

We found a place serving food. Within seconds of our arrival it was full of kids come to watch us eat fried rice, along with the owner smoking pungent clove cigarettes. See the picture of Maradona on his mirror? We had no language in common but somehow we managed to spend an hour talking about the football - we were in the middle of the 1992 European Championships in Sweden, which the Indonesians were following avidly.

The World Cup is obviously what got me thinking about this episode, prompting me to dig out this photo. It's a cliché, but it does unite the world, for a month every four years. It does more for international brotherhood (and to a lesser extent sisterhood) than any amount of top-down UN-prescribed festivities. As a practising internationalist, I believe in the UN, at least in the principle of the thing. But frankly if George Monbiot's vision of the Age of Consent is ever going to become reality, it's more likely to happen via football.

I've been reading the Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup, a perfectly timed Father's Day present. There's a lot of very interesting stuff in there about football and politics. For example, there's a strong body of opinion that football's appeal to the working classes led to its suppression in the US in the early 20th century (later, a Republican Congressman tried to block the 1994 World Cup coming to the US by calling 'soccer' a "European Socialist sport").

Things seem to be changing in North America, thank God, definitely here in Canada where there seems to be huge and genuine interest. All matches are being shown live, everyone's talking about it, the papers are full of it, and Ottawa's highly diverse citizens are walking around wearing various national strips. It's actually a lot more fun following it here than it would be back home in England. All of the excitement, none of the simmering xenophobia.

Details: Minolta X-500, 50mm lens, flash, exposure not recorded. Near Bukittinggi, Sumatra, June 1992. Placemark (approximate, very).

Beaver dam

Went for a fantastic walk in the Gatineau Park with Malini on Sunday afternoon. We hiked right across the escarpment, from the Ottawa valley side to a stone outcrop with a view down to Meech Lake. This is a beaver dam visible from the path, about half way across. We were both bitten half to death by mosquitos and horseflies, but it was worth it. It was one of those golden June afternoons which will stick in the memory.

Details: Nikon D70, 18-200mm lens @ 52mm, f/5, 1/250s, ISO 200. 18 June 2006, 16h09, Gatineau Park, Quebec. Placemark.

Pink Lake sunset

Ooops! How long has it been??

What can I say? Work, Dragon Quest VIII, the summer weather, leaving parties, the World Cup... I've been a lazy blogger!

Well in the unlikely event that anyone's still checking this site for updates, here's another shot taken during our recent holiday in British Columbia.

Details: Nikon D70, 18-200mm VR lens @ 26mm, f/13, 1/100s, ISO 200. 25 May 2006, Pink Lake, Pender Harbour, British Columbia. Placemark.