WALL PLANTS ON OCTOBER 16TH 2017

You know when the sun went red earlier this week? And the sky went orange? And it was because ex-hurricane Ophelia had brought dust from the Sahara and debris from Iberian wild fires in the swirl of her skirts? It was a very wonderful orange and the atmosphere almost pre-eclipsical and it cast a special and golden glow over what was already a golden autumn.

Naturally just about everyone who owns a camera went out and took pictures.

Yellow leaves looked fantastic but, initially, my camera was keen to over-do the look, to make it seem pretty much as if we were ourselves in the middle of a forest fire or that the end of the world was truly nigh. Indeed, while I was taking a photograph of the sun - with lens pointing straight at it (what a day!) a man walking by stopped to let me know that this strangeness was not caused by humans but it was God's way of telling us the world was about to end. This might be today, tomorrow, five years time, ten years or hundred . . . but end it would . . . and that people who had accepted Jesus into their hearts (hand on chest) would be ok but everyone else would not. He said this in a very cheerful way so perhaps he's hedging his bets on a hundred-year scenario.

I didn't quite subscribe to his end of the world theory but if it were to be the end of the world I was anxious to get my photographs in first. So I think I should be congratulated for patiently and politely waiting for the man to stop warning me of my possibly imminent demise while what I really wanted to do was to capture the red circle which was the sun while it was there.

Previous arrivals of Saharan dust have left gritty deposits of brick red on the roofs and bonnets of cars. And on Monday I assumed the red of the sun and the orange of the light were because sand in the Sahara is red. So I pottered around town thinking about camels and celebrated the light with an ice-cream . . . and fiddled with the settings on my camera . . . and found which colours 'worked' and which were distorted in the eerie atmosphere.

Later, a weather forecaster explained that the reds and oranges were nothing to do with the colours of sand but that debris in the atmosphere was deflecting greens and blues from the rainbow which makes light white. (All science is daft.) But that was later. By then I'd already found I could filter out Ophelia herself and that my camera could turn everything back to 'normal' if it wanted. Or if I wanted. (That's the challenge.) So . . . while photographs of wall plants in this post show what things really looked like on October 16th, the street picture (cars, van, buildings) shows what things look like on ordinary days even though I took it when the light was orange. It's a camera lie.

Clever things cameras. Strange thing light. Funny thing reality.

Tweet

To see the red sun, go to my other blog (Message in a Milk Bottle)
The Day the Sun Turned Red - 4 - The Sun
and the preceding posts
The Day the Sun Turned Red - 3 - Leaves
The Day the Sun Turned Red - 2 - Street Light
The Day the Sun Turned Red - 1 - Portrait

NOT FOR THOSE AFRAID OF ALIENS

Coming up this hill one is always looking into the light
so grey dominates - and lines - and silhouettes.

What was unfamiliar is rapidly becoming part of the everyday. For much of the time now, I'm not much aware of the contrast between Halifax and Dorset. Perhaps the only thing which is particularly startling is that large patches in the hills around are turning purple as the heather flowers. You can see them from town.

What I haven't quite got used to yet, is the number of straight lines, especially the vertical. There's no point in listing them. You can see!

Contrast this with what I've been used to for more than the last twenty years which is lines curvaceous, horizontal and on the move. Admittedly, the masts of boats are vertical. But they sway, so however neat they are, however firmly attached to their buoys, they are never entirely parallel. They don't have the stolidity of the spire and minaret and railings in the first photo!

In contrast with urban Halifax, the lines which dominate 'my' bit of the Dorset coast are definitely and predominantly horizontal. The horizon itself. Portland Harbour Wall, the white foam streaks, the boat decks, the cliffs. (Chesil Beach.) And these horizontals tend to curve; the wavy waves, the rippling cliffs.

If we were to look out to sea, even the horizon is curved; and if I were to turn round in this picture, I'd be facing straight into a hedge, the broad line of which is irregularly horizontal. The function of a hedge is much the same as railings but in a hedge not a single shape is repeated  And nearly everything is non-stoply on the move. Nothing is fixed. Nothing rigid. And for every upright tree trunk there are masses of sideways(ish) branches. Some young hedgerow leaves (say elder) grow upright but once they've got going they tend, elegantly, to stretch sideways. I may be exaggerating - but you'll see the point. Apart from pine needles, glossy leaved plants and succulents (which don't tend to live in hedgerows) hedgerow leaves are likely to be in trouble if they are hanging straight down.

But here . . . if I turn round to see what's behind me, I find this. In the photo at the top of this post, for all its starkness there are wild plants. (I doubt many of you will have noticed and we can come back to them another time.). With a 180 degrees swivel, we find the usual, regulated, car-park planting: an uneventful tree and boring bushes and low growing stuff that's easily trimmed back or never does much in the first place. So although it's greener, it's more 'urban' in the sense of nature being kept at bay.

And beyond the car park there's one of the old mills I've been telling you about with broken windows, collapsing roof.

We'll go a bit closer. I don't know what the circular, red, stunted chimney thing is but earlier in the year there were pretty yellow flowers on its plinth. However, predictably, wherever there's an empty space there's also buddleia. And there it is on its pedestal. For all that we're getting brickier, we're also getting wilder.

But you ain't seen nothing yet.

Down the hill and around the corner a bit and looking up at the roof of the same mill there's more buddleia. Willow-herb too. Now look at the windows on the top left. This is where it gets scary. Really scary. There's a tree sticking out of the one second from the left. An odd place for a tree or a large bush but at least it has breathing space. But behind the very top left window is one of the scariest, creepiest things I've ever seen. 

It's so horrid I have to look away. A buddleia, in flower, but completely trapped. It's hit the glass and can go no further. It's as if alien hands are pressing and sliding and scrabbling to get out and all the while can't stop growing so it's squashed further and further into itself by its own self. An image of claustrophobia. Aaaaaaaagh. I like everything about my new home except this.

Tweet