Day Forty Three

Today was a day of industrial action. Apparently. I would have thought that idle inaction would be a better phrase. Next door to my office is a branch of Bournemouth University. These four mounted a brave picket, until boredom set in a couple of hours later. And they went home. So....not the most dramatic display of solidarity.

Day Forty Two

Going up. When it reaches the top, floor 8, I get off. And work begins. Sigh.

Day Forty One

 

This is an everyday scene from across the street from my workplace.Not everyday can be a 'great photo' day. Somedays you're uninspired, pushed for time and just surrounded by the same old sights. But still, in years to come, when you look back on a 365, it can be those dull shots of familiar everyday scenes that bring back the strongest memories.

Day Forty

 

I ran across the New Forest today. Parts of the forest are very picturesque. I'm not a huge fan of the place though. A lot of it is really rather bleak.

Day Thirty Nine

 

Paola in a fabulous Thai restaurant we found in Salisbury, with a very beautiful tea set. She wants a tea set for Christmas, methinks.

Day Thirty Eight

We're nearing the end of November. And it has been the mildest November I can remember. It's not rare for the leaves to be fully off the trees by my birthday in mid October. And yet here we are at nearly December with an awful lot of trees still almost fully clad in greenery.

Day Thirty Seven

 

St Pauls Cathedral in London, taken with the Camera 360 app with the HDR Light filter, then sent to the Flickr app for the NYC app to turn it black and white. Love how it came out with so much detail and clarity considering the lack of natural light.

Day Thirty Six

Today was haircut day. A total of eight British pounds to have a few grams of brown and grey hair sheared from my bonce. Plus the opportunity to take a discreet shot of the chair moment before the dastardly deed was done.

Day Thirty Five

 

Voila. The lounger/dining room decorating is complete. See Day 33 and 34. Truth be told, I needed to get this photo shot a few hours earlier, when there was still some daylight. Just so as the warm new terracotta paint job would shine through a bit more. Such is life.

Day Thirty Four

 

Paola has been 'helping' me decorate. Sort of. I think she misses the turtles.

Day Thirty Three

 

This is the 'before' photo. I'm decorating the lounge/dining room. The after will come soon. I have a few regrets in life. We all do, bar the liars and delusional. One of mine is that I failed to pursue a career as a painter and decorator. I like decorating. It's very therapeutic. And, until the collapse of the construction industry in the late noughties, very profitable.

Day Thirty Two

Today I did a 5km run from Bournemouth to the end of Boscombe Pier and them back the the end of Bournemouth Pier. Which is where this photo was taken. It was a surprisingly mild day for November. It's been a surprisingly mild November.

Day Thirty One

Another shot from above, taken from the highest available window in my eight storey office block.

Day Thirty

One should always reflect a little, don't you think?

Day Twenty Nine

 

I captured a shot of one of the pooches a few days ago. Here's number two. A poodle of some descript, now 16 years old. Almost blind, pretty deaf and completely mad - but she just refuses to die. You have to both admire such determined resolve and pity her stubbornness. There does come a time when the best course of action is to simply curl up in a corner and go over to the other side...

Day Twenty Eight

There are few things more 'English' than a seaside pier. Our coastal towns sport an array of world beating piers, including the longest at Southend. This one, off Bournemouth, is of a more modest length. But still a decent size. 

Day Twenty Seven

Here's where my journey to Mexico started. Sort of. It's a piece of papyrus, hanging on my wall. I wasn't born with the urge to travel. I was born with a vivid imagination though, which was well exercised in history classes when I was 6 or 7 years old. We studied the Pharaohs and ancient Egypt in depth. 

Those classes left an indelible impression, and planted a dream in my head - to one day wake up, open the curtains and see the magical Nile in front of me. I had the opportunity to travel to the Sinai in 2000 and, having arranged a 7 day detour in Cairo, fulfilled my dream. And caught the travel bug. Mexico would come later.

This papyrus isn't the greatest example ever. I did buy it in a mysterious Cairo slum from a group of young guys who did me a great deal. They hoped I'd return the favour and get them some booze. I'd forgotten  my passport, and they were disappointed. 

Day Twenty Six

We have brought back lots of little bits of Mexico to the UK. But here's a little bit of Mexico that was already here when we arrived. He's half Chihuhua. And called Nelson - he was (temporarily, as it turned out) blinded in one eye when the matriarch adopted him.

Day Twenty Five

I've mentioned the landmarks in doing a 365. This photo brings up one - the quarter century. If this were the Queens 365, we'd have a street party. It isn't though. It's just my blog. And I live in too rural an area to have much of a street party. Perhaps I could get a stream party going instead. 

Day Twenty Four

 

This may be the twenty-fourth day of my 365, but it's the seventh day of an altogether more important project. It's the seventh day since I quit smoking. Seven whole days. There are still old, empty packets lying around. Mostly Pall Mall red or JPS blue. The cheapest of the cheap brands. There's a few lighters and boxes of matches. But they will all, soon enough, be history.

Day Twenty Three

A Ringwood sky at dusk.

Day Twenty Two

The public spat of the week is, again, England versus Fifa. This time, it's because Fifa won't allow the England team to wear poppies stitched into their shirts when they play Spain on the Saturday before Remembrance Day. 

This time, for the first time, I'm in agreement with Fifa. Sport is supposed to transcend politics, religion and cultural differences. Sport is supposed to enable us to leave all the baggage on the sidelines for an hour or two. Are the poppies political or religious? To us Brits, no they aren't. To others, they potentially are. We can start an international argument about where we draw lines regards decorative fittings to shirts. Or we can do the sensible thing and just maintain the status quo, and not have the argument.

We've managed to play international footy games for the ninety years since the poppy was adopted, without wearing poppies. And without having a hissy fit about it. There will be a minutes silence before the game. The poppy appeal gets all the publicity it needs. No one in the UK can get through November without passing by a poppy box.

This argument seems to me to simply be for the sake of having an argument. Worse still, the argument could turn the poppy itself into a patriotic, nationlistic symbol. Which it isn't, and shouldn't, be. I support the poppy appeal. There's my poppy, featured in my photo of the day. I didn't need to see one on an England shirt to buy it.

Day Twenty One

This shot won't win any prizes. But I just kinda liked it. The clarity of the boxy office tower, the glare of a light and the blur of a bus, all wrapped in one shot.

Day Twenty

Lunch in the rest room on Floor 4. Courtesy of Pudding Camera.

Day Nineteen

 

A day out in Burley, where sis was selling cup cakes at a village fair.

Day Eighteen

 

At the Littledown November 5th fun fair. Surrounding by the local chavs and cackers. But Pao puts a brave face on it :)

Day Seventeen

The thing about doing a 365 is that you soon start looking around for inspiration or just something new. I was parked by the side of an unlit road in the forest tonight. There was no light other than that from the end of my cigarette and from the moon. I thought about it. What sort of a shot of the moon can you get with a mobile phone? 

I imagined it'd need heavy cropping and would end up being a blurred blog of indistinct light. I was right. Here's the proof. Mobile phones aren't yet good enough to shoot the moon. Just in case you were wondering...

Day Sixteen

In Mexico, in theory, you have Rainy Season and Dry Season. There's not much difference between them really. Especially in recent years of drought. I always thought of seasons in Mexico as Jacaranda Season and Not Jacaranda Season. In the UK the seasons are much more sharply defined. And autumn is by far the most beautiful of those seasons. Death is colour.

Day Fifteen

A spooky underground car park shot. I was last out of the office tonight.

Day Fourteen

I tested out my Samsung Galaxy S2 at night today. It's not a patch on a proper camera. But still. It's not too bad a result.