The Classic

Aaaand it's a brief return to form with one of my favourite orange flower pictures.

This was taken at Buckfast Abbey. It's the home of a group of practising Benedictine monks, who are very devout and incidentally brew a highly caffeinated tonic wine famed as the scourge of Scotland and mentioned in over 5,000 crime reports in Strathclyde between 2006-9.

We only saw one monk while we were there, though, and as he was sitting on a wall with his head in his hands looking incredibly depressed I decided not to accost him and ask him about it. We did buy some wine, though, and took it home to try later. It tasted like alcoholic cough medicine.

On the plus side, as well as encouraging alcoholism in the distant north, the monks have some nice grounds including an interesting herb garden with plants segregated by use; medicinal, household, kitchen, and poison (amusingly, the poisonous plants were kept away from wayward hands by means of a small moat).

All at Sea

Believe it or not, these fisherfolk were only metres from the train station at Dawlish. It's right on the beach. I took the photograph while standing on the platform waiting for a train to arrive.

Cyclamen

These are cyclamen, and very nice they are too. I like their little wiggly stalks, they're like pig's tails. And they grow out of a corm, which is an excellent word.

Another excellent word I discovered recently is globster: an unidentified mass of organic matter washed up on a shoreline, and the source of many a sea monster myth. Apparently decomposing basking sharks strongly resemble plesiosaurs. Who knew?

Incidentally, Wikipedia has a page entitled "exploding whales". And believe me when I say it's a blast.

Lichen

This tree was insanely bedecked with hangers-on of all shades.

Interestingly, what we think of as lichen is actually a symbiotic relationship between a fungus and a photosynthetic organism like a green alga. Who knew? It's like when I found out that a Portuguese Man o'War is not a jellyfish.* Except lichen doesn't have 50 metre long tentacles. For which I am sure we're all thankful.


* It's a siphonophore, a collection of different organisms called zooids. So. Now you know.

Grapes!

A couple of weeks ago, as I was leaving the house, I heard the sound of someone singing a song - apparently a song entitled "everyone loves grapes". I deduced that this was the title because these were the only words.

I walked my usual route and quickly noticed that a stick was protruding from the high fence around the house at the end of the road. From the stick hung a piece of string, and a small bunch of grapes was tied to the string so they dangled at about head height for anyone walking by. Two children were sitting at the top of the fence and appeared to be the grape-stewards.

"Do you want a grape?" the small girl cried jubilantly as I approached.
"Er, no thank you," I said. "But it's very kind of you to ask."
"Grapes!" she said. "Grapes!"
"Grapes!" cried her brother. And they resumed singing.

***

When I returned from work at the end of the day, the empty grapestalk was hanging forlornly at the end of its string next to a hand-written sign that said "Grapes! Help yourselves!"

Guest Photographer

I did not actually take this picture! My boyfriend did. But it's such a nice shot it had to go on the blog, and I'm sure he won't mind. Plus I did hassle him about making sure he got a picture of the cool hole in the tree, so. I totally contributed. Even if he had already taken one >.>

 This particular tree lives in Killerton House, in Devon, another stop-off on my travels there.  As well as attractively hollow treetrunks, Killerton sports the Bear's Hut, a curious little cottage in the grounds. It has a roof lined with pinecones, a stained glass window and a floor made out of the knucklebones of dead deer; one of the family kept a bear in there in Victorian times, hence the name.

Making a Splash

This picture took a few tries to get right! Fortunately my mother was very good at warning me when a big wave was coming, while I tried to hold the camera as steady as possible. The end result is surprisingly un-wonky, I feel.

You could probably guess it's another picture from my holiday in Devon. We had a couple of days of really summery weather, but I only actually made it into the sea once, and even then only for a paddle in the very late afternoon. However, I did eat copious amounts of ice cream and jam my last two-pences into a shove-penny machine, which on the scale of seaside experiences is practically equivalent to full immersion.

The thing about seaside towns is that they get eerily quiet at night. Even the funfair, which for me is a late night activity, was silent and dark by 9 o'clock, and the restaurants in the town where we stayed were... variable. On walking in to one of them we were informed that there was only one menu because all the others had been stolen (?). My dad was asked if he wanted his beer chilled or room temperature. He said room temperature. They only had chilled. When it came time to pay we waited for ages, despite being the only people in there, and the old man who ran the place kept giving my dad's credit card nervous looks as it lay on the table. He finally scuttled forwards, holding the chip & pin machine... only to scurry straight into the kitchen. His wife eventually emerged to explain that she was the only one who could work it.*

*Incidentally, the food was extremely tasty, but that's not the point.

Dappled Light

A return to my traditional "yay! flowers" approach to photography - although as I recently proved, I am trying to break the cycle of addiction. This is some kind of rose, which was boldly protruding from a stranger's garden fence. If this were the olden days, perhaps I would have picked it and stolen it away with me, leaving them with a sadly denuded floral display. Fortunately, however, the power of the digital camera means I didn't have to.

We also discovered some very cool African Geese. Sadly all the photos I took of them were rubbish, but when I tried to find a better one on Google, it seems that all the other photos out there are even worse. Consequently I may, somewhat shamefacedly, put up the rubbish pictures, just because I want to convey how awesome these geese are. They have strange knobbly heads and one of them (I'm guessing the male) had a huge dewlap which wobbled disconcertingly as he walked around.

Diversify

What an odd-looking flower. OH WAIT.

Yes ladies and gentlemen, for your viewing delectation it's... a picture of a landscape! With sunshine and everything.  Taken from the top of Langstone Rock at Dawlish Warren in Devon, on my holidays. A very nice coastal path runs along the edge of the beach, and my very intrepid mother and I* couldn't resist the chance to climb up the Rock, despite our impractical footwear.

It's only a shame that you can't see how red the cliffs are; even the sand is actually quite dark there. The route of the old South Devon Railway follows the coast very closely; it's very picturesque, gliding out by saltwater marshes and past beaches. The history of the line is interestingtoo; built in the mid-nineteenth century, it was originally conceived as an atmospheric railway with the trains powered by the use of vaccuum pumps. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was the brainchild of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who (in addition to having possibly my favourite name ever) was fond of making cool stuff. Also he wore a top hat. So I think we can concede that he was pretty much a legend and it was not his fault that rats ate his vaccuum tubing.**

*Note grammar.
**Not a euphemism. Euch.

Sunshine After the Rain 2: Sunshine Harder

I am proud to announce that I have worked out what this flower is! Exciting because these were some of my favourite flowers to see this summer, even though I found them really tricky to get a good picture of. It is a crocosmia, although I have no clue what kind. The damp kind?

Anyway, this website proved helpful in narrowing it down! Even though all I really had to go on was "it's orange" and "it's probably not a tree", we got there.

Brightness

After all those drab rainy pictures, it's back to chirpy flowers! Although for how much longer, I can't say. I'm afraid my large backlog of photos is already starting to run low after only a month or two of blogging... eek. Hopefully this will provide the impetus required to go out and take lots more lovely pictures and not the impetus require to go "ah well, nevermind" and completely abandon this blog. That would be sad. But it's definitely trickier to enjoy photography in the winter. For one thing, the light's not as good; the flowers have all disappeared and (horror of horrors) sometimes it's pretty damp and chilly to be standing around taking forty pictures of the same tree to get it just right. And I refuse to post pictures which I don't actually like!

So I guess I better take advantage of whatever sunshine sees fit to grace our shores this September, and get snapping...

Incidentally in Ghana I noticed that they use the word "snap" in the same way we use the word "photo"; a photo is a snap, while to take a photo is to snap. I thought it was a cute usage of the word (although briefly confusing when people ask if you want to snap them...)

Lost in Thought

Another picture from the trip to Castle Howard. I promise I'll stop going on about it now, but I really did like the statuary there. This is another one from the Temple of the Four Winds.

Balancing Act

I believe this is a european honeybee, aka apis mellifera, although I'm not entirely sure. I hope it is, because honeybees are nice. For one thing, they make honey, and honey with butter on toast is one of my favourite breakfasts (second only to toasted cinammon fruit bread. And ice cream, except obviously I don't actually allow myself to have that for breakfast because I don't want to turn entirely spherical). For another, they pollinate things in a useful and civic-minded manner. What's not to like?

And of course the poor honeybees are suffering from colony collapse disorder, which seems to me a rather ridiculous name, but there you go. No-one knows why the bees are disappearing, and it probably doesn't help that, bizarrely, there is genuinely a booming black market for bees, with thefts happening all over the place. On the one hand, it shows that British criminals are displaying an impressive level of knowledge and expertise in the field of beekeeping, which can only be admired.
On the other hand, they're stealing all the bees.

Dead Head Hoverfly

An insect I actually identified - this is a Dead Head Hoverfly, so called because allegedly the pattern on its thorax looks like a skull. And it's a hoverfly.

I don't see it myself, but I guess the 'Dead Head' hoverfly is a much cooler name than the 'Looks a Bit Like A Skull If You Squint At It, Maybe, In Poor Lighting Conditions' hoverfly. Scientific name myathropa florea, it's very common in Europe and North Africa.

I suppose humans have always had rather an obsession with seeing (and creating) skull patterns everywhere. One of my favourite paintings I saw for the first time last year in the National Gallery - The Ambassadors, by Hans Holbein. The painting itself is a vast canvas, larger even than life-size, which takes up most of a wall at the gallery. Standing directly in front of it you can see this long, thin, curiously distorted object at the bottom of the painting. It's only as you slowly walk to the right that the distortion corrects itself, and from exactly thge right angle resolves into a perfect image of a human skull. It's incredibly clever and rather disconcerting - it's a shame it's much less impressive online, because with the image shrunk, the skull shape is more obvious from the outset.

Upside Down

Another bumblebee! I do love them. It's funny - if a bee comes up to me while I'm sitting eating or reading or whatever, I tend to run away from them for fear of being stung, but I'm quite happy to get really close to take pictures when they're in amongst the flowers. I feel much more comfortable about them then - I know they're a lot more interested in the flowers than in me.

I wanted to identify this bee for the blog, but sadly I have been thwarted. I think I can say with reasonable confidence that it is either a bombus terrestris (buff-tailed bumblebee) or a bombus lucorum (white-tailed bumblebee), but alas it turns out that the workers of these two species are virtually indistinguishable except through dissection. Damn it! Better start carrying a scalpel as well as a camera...

For my sister's birthday, I bought her a bumblebee bracelet from Swarovski. She was debating what name to call it, and settled on Albus - like Albus Dumbledore, dumbledore being an archaic dialectical word for a bumblebee. Rather a cunning name, I thought! Apparently, the word bumblebee was preceeded by the phrase "humble bee" which Wikipedia tells me was first used in 1450 in Fysshynge wyth Angle, "In Juyll the greshop & the humbylbee in the medow." I rather like it.