The weather has been slightly more unsettled today with a little intermittent drizzle. Lighting conditions will still not permit me to undertake a few local photo experiments, which I have in mind; but things are bound to change soon.
Heading out of Bollington and deep into the night.
Last night I managed to do a full circuit of the Bollipot Loop without mishap — (mental note to self) must return Jane’s light! This time I had the good sense to take one of my cameras, actually a bit of a cop-out as I decided to take the little Sony w50 — which is still rather surprisingly good and allows a lot of creative latitude — no pun intended mind! Generally, it is not quite up to ultra low light exposures as the slowest shutter speed is about 2 seconds but it did allow me to capture some interesting deliberately shaky shots of lit objects and also carry out a little “light painting” with my bike lights. A kind of luminous abstract homage to the Bollipot Loop I think.
I seem to become ever more taken with Bollington every time I visit the place, the cosy sense of community, a certain down to earthiness and the general aesthetic of the architecture, which is both typically rugged and at the same time quirky and whimsical. Bollington is full of intriguing little details. The shear variety of cottage door designs and also the way that people decorate the stone lintels and a door surround is a very charming feature. Bollington does have some semblance of an active cultural life, which is contemporary and genuinely artistic.
Night Ride
light painting with LED bike lights on drystone wall Bollington.
Next I need to do the much more challenging trip up to Bakerstonedale and Charles Head where wind formed Scots pines and gorse bushes line the hilly high altitude roadsides. A landscape which can at times appear very surreal and cries out for my black and white treatment.
Since Farrow & Ball set up shop in Wilmslow I have noticed a steady return to more traditional paint colours and finishes on a lot of the local buildings. Prestbury is starting to look a little more colourful again with personalised but tastefully traditional paint applications on New Road instead of the universally applied and rather drab black and white timber work. I have noticed quite a lot of transformative activity in and around the village since I have been enjoying the luxury of extended free time, job in-betweening or whatever euphemism is currently in vogue for the inevitable down side of capitalist labour exploitation. The large swath of land behind Ford House (the village allotments during the war apparently) is currently being landscaped, no doubt for private use. This patch would make an excellent communal village green but I have an awful feeling that it is either going to get built on or turned into a car park — eventually. The old vicarage is all being done up and the charming features of Spencer Brook close to the start of the Vicarage drive way have all been enhanced and cleared of vegetation — or something? I can’t ever remember the stream feature down there but this may be because it was so overgrown.
It’s a grey misty morning but pleasantly mild for a change and I’m in the process of recovering from yet another bout of really bad toothache. The dentist has put me on a course of extra strong antibiotics so that should sort things out. I am pleased to announce that I am now, at last, a non-smoker! Not a giver upper you understand, ‘giving up’ implies a temporary hiatus in an activity that one would rather continue to pursue, so I am officially a ‘NON SMOKER’ make no mistake.
I’m waiting for some appropriate lighting conditions to facilitate another round of local photography. I keep noticing little things (details) that I think are worth recording. My locality is full of trivial curiosities if one is open to such things, items like vintage 1960s bus stop signs nestling in hedges and those rather stylish 1960s design municipal bins inside a wooden frame. We did have an original one with the red bucket inside on a neat grass verge. I know it sounds trivial but I can make something of these things with photography and I think details like this are interesting to record for posterity.
This is going to get super geeky but I also noticed on a recent ride that a run of very old pylons near Bollington Cross had disappeared! I took a few snaps of the petite lattice towers about five years ago with a little PAS 2Mpx camera.
These were quite interesting, as they were very old dating back to the earliest days of the national grid infrastructure when the highest system voltage was around 135KV. Judging by the insulators this line was operating at about 30KV and the conductor gauge (which was large for a ‘feeder’ line) suggests a current capacity of around 500 amps which equates to easily enough power for a village the size of Prestbury but the line headed in the direction of Butley Town.
The cable catcher arms were a common feature on these older pylons where the wire span crossed a road.
Last minute update at 11:02pm, Just listening to last weeks excellent GP show literally at the last minute — well almost. It is the first Brownswood Basement show of 2009, always good for rarities and collectibles and also featuring a tribute to Blue Note with a vintage European psychedelic jazz trip coming up — I’m in heaven.
Roberta Flack “Feel Like Making Love”
Music of the moment includes a classic and much loved oldie from Roberta Flack. Giles just played the “I Can See the Sun in Late December” track off the Feel Like Making Love album from 1974. I had forgotten just how good and original sounding this song was until just now. Loads more obscure 70s deep R&B Jazz goodness to come.
Friday was another moderately eventful day for yours truly. This was my first active visit to the new dentist in Macclesfield, a state of the art practice if ever there was one that seems to be manned by a team of Asian dentists and all with doctorates so I assume I am in good hands. Unfortunately, I did have to have another tooth extracted. This time it was one quite near the front (adjacent to my right canine or eye-tooth) but fortunately, it has not had an adverse effect on my speech and I was more worried about that than anything else at the time. Now of course I have a rather fetchingly roguish gap to the far right (your left) of my smile, the tooth deficiency equivalent of a facial scar no less — how cool! I seem to remember that Tony Wilson had all of the teeth on his left upper jaw missing and it didn’t effect him adversely. I’m glad that it has gone though, my mouth now feels at lot more healthy and I am looking forward to some cosmetic treatment on my remaining good teeth — of which there are still quite a few I hasten to add.
The wait in the dentist’s surgery was probably the most painful thing of all in truth, as they had GMTV on the large LCD TV that was difficult to avoid. A pre-valentines day schmaltz fest for simpletons is probably the only way to describe GMTVs theme for the 13th. God, to think if the Daily Mail lobby got their way all of British media would resemble GMTV! I’m not so sure about Valentines Day this year, it has temporally joined the ranks of those pointless and annoying commercial festivals that I despise such as Halloween.
If Halloween is the commercial celebration of the kind of unscientific naffnes that only makes sense to histrionics with learning difficulties and gives ill mannered kids an excuse to throw eggs at their neighbours front doors. Then Valentines Day is an aid memoir for disingenuous lovers, a green light for creeps and another Christmas for insecure self-centred adoration seekers. Valentines Day actually causes more strife in relationships than it solves apparently and this day sees the largest number of break ups and bust ups than any other day in the year. Some people take this crap far too seriously — bar humbug!
Sometimes I feel that capitalism would not balk at the idea of mapping every event, feeling, and motive in our lives in terms of some stupid ‘day’ for the purchase of thematic trash. Is this all part of the consumer moron conspiracy to turn us into unthinking homogenised fashion victims that need to ‘purchase’ every aspect of our being and can only express self identity and the finer feelings through consumption of product and the giving of ‘gifts’?
On a lighter note, I went for a little local explore and decided to take myself off across a field that leads from London Rd over toward the railway. I have never been down there before, I always thought it was private land but there is indeed a foot path which leads up to a rather large over-bridge crossing the railway. It’s is quite an interesting vantage point and I intend to try a few photos around there soon. Both of the very old ‘pebble concrete’ crossing styles are still in place. These enabled walkers to surmount the old railway fence but freely walking across the main line to London (on a 100MPH stretch) is not advised so they had to build this very elaborate over bridge in the middle of empty fields to satisfy the foot path bylaws. Nobody ever uses it of course.
Last nights Bollipot Loop ride (Prestbury, Bollington, Pott Shrigley, Bollington, Prestbury) did not go quite to plan though this ‘perturbation’ shall we say, constituted one of those events that helps to restore my faith in human nature. It was a lovely clear but temperate night with a gorgeous unclouded sky, Venus shining out in the East quite magnificently, I just knew that I had to head out to the ‘Hills’.
The Bollipot Loop ride usually consists of a stop at the top end of Bollington for chips, before the climb up to the highest point then dropping down into Pott Shrig. At this point I decided to put fresh batteries in my rear light but unfortunately put them in the wrong way round in the dark and must have blown all of the LED’s in the unit. No rear light on this particular ride can be almost suicidal, as one has to traverse a number of pitch-black hilly lanes that are frequented by mad drivers and country boy racers in vans, 4x4s, and large tractor trailer combos etc and even after dark. At this point I had to abandon the rest of the trip up top and headed back down into Bolli where I met a very nice lady walking her dog and asked her if there was a garage near by that may sell bike lights? Nearest is in Tytherington, a long dark lanes ride away. Jane invited me back to her house where she was able to lend me one of her daughters bike lights. So, I managed to get home without incident. Only in Bollington will this kind of thing happen, in fact other people have asked me if I am alright on other occasions when I have had to stop with bike problems, or just chat about the general minutia of my trip.
So there we are, not much in the way of news but my spirit is replenished and I’m finding that basic satisfaction in my environment and the sense of just being out and observing. It is great when otherwise familiar settings seem to take on a whole new life of fascination, this is when you start to notice details and certain qualities that are conducive to photographic work. I’m still trying to perfect my night time photography and find a certain group on flickr to be particularly fascinating. It is for nocturnal photography with no artificial light.
Mark (our man in London) is attending the Festival of Sins in Camden tomorrow night and he has provided a photo of his make up for the night, actually this was just a test run.
I really do need to get my act together with regard to trip down to the big smoke to meet up with some of my old chums.
I’m still quite enjoying the abundance of free time and the sense of not having to rush along with things or avoid certain things altogether because of a need to adhere to a certain hierarchy of events / chores / activities through the weekend. I spent most of the afternoon lazily returning from a trip to Macc. This time cycling back along the Bollin Valley Way but taking all sorts of exploratory detours and looking for photo opportunities. I really do need to record more of my experiences with my camera.
Last week was a particularly difficult time for me both emotionally and physically. My new-found loneliness is not getting any easier and I do miss Gill and the boys such a lot. Sometimes I find it hard to get motivated or inspired to be creative. I was also struck down for the fourth time with the most appalling acute toothache resulting from yet another smoking and stress related abscess. The situation could have been a lot worse when I discovered that my local dentist had ‘struck me off’ due to missing a couple of previous appointments. That was back in the days when I used to feel such a strong commitment to my employer that I would even go all the way into Manchester with chronic tooth pain just so that I could make sure certain ‘clients’ where up to date. Of course, it’s not clever, or heroic, and I feel a return to the days of union lead contempt for this kind of corporate sycophancy is long over due. Fortunately, I did manage to get treated by the NHS emergency centre in Macclesfield. Then re-register with another practice in Macc and hey presto, my new dentist said that he can treat and restore the tooth that others said would have to be ripped out and all at a very reasonable NHS cost, viva the NHS! Yet another smoking cessation is one of the more positive side benefits of the recent dental malaise and this abstinence appears to be ongoing. I’m really going to quit once and for all this time!
I managed to miss all of the local snow bound photo opportunities due to the general discomfort of the last few days not to mention the groggy side effects of painkillers and antibiotics. I had in mind a few shots up in the fields in virgin snowfall conditions, my solitary footprints disappearing into the distance, that sort of thing, existentialism in the English landscapes no less! These would then be infra red processed in B&W. It may still be possible to do this as yet more snow is forecast.
One of the highlights of last week was helping my friend Rob with a bonfire in the Churchyard on a rather beautiful winter day. Rob is the village’s entertaining and erudite odd job man, an ex merchant seaman with allegiances to the beat generation and early counter culture ideology who never really sold out! I always think of Rob as a sort of legacy of the 70s heyday of Cheshire (country) living fashion when places like Prestbury would not have been completely devoid of creative bohemians, youthful eccentrics and other colourful characters with maverick anti conservative values. It is these little moments with Rob that help to keep me sane in Prestbury. It is the meeting of minds, the joy of simple pleasures and the shared love of the environment. This is always combined with a healthy dose of often comedic bourgeois bashing and the deconstruction of consumer capitalism (consumer moron culture) with plenty of Jazz and situationist detours not to mention a healthy dose of pythonesque self mockery.