Travel

Paris has a lot going for it. We got to spend three days there. Three full days taking in the great city of light.

Mostly spent walking around eating and drinking. Which isn’t a bad way to spend your time anywhere.

We spent the first night with my Cousin who had he comfiest sofa bed in Europe. Then we went off to our flat we had rented. A small dusty studio flat with unvarnished wooden floors and french windows opened up over the rooftops. If you pressed your face to the wall you could just get a view of the Sacre-Coeur.

We cracked a cheap bottle of wine, tore a crust off a baguette and got excited for the things to come.

Luton: Revoloutions

Luton is Luton.

You can scrub the dirt off a potato, but its still a dirt apple.

A Pomme de Terre for you Francophiles.

But a big fat chunk of my extended family lives there because of many reasons. All the family living there is probably number 1 on the list of reasons. Being born there, another reason. A slight shrug could be the third reason…

Maybe there aren’t so many reasons at all.

So, anyway, Dad lives there, thats his toolshed at the top. Dad loves hammers.

We had a party because he had been around the sun many, many times. It was quite a big deal. All the various generations of family assembled in a hall and had a big party, with a few impromptu parties thrown in. It was nice.

Between all that I showed my partner the center of town and a couple of Pubs. I felt terrible because this city was her introduction to Europe. She was polite and was overly positive about the town and my Family who can be a bit full on.

On our last day a fat homeless man passed out in the bushes outside a pub we were drinking in and Paramedics had to revive him and take him away. He was so overweight that they had to use a special stretcher apparently.

It was a really lovely day.

Return to Seal Rocks

Shit the water was freezing. Fucking freezing. Howling Nor-easters had whipped up the cold currents. Thats the Coriolis effect at play. Winds pushing directly against the Counter clockwise currents bring up the deep, bitter, cold, cold water for unprepared surfers like myself to suffer in as we paddle about in boardshorts whilst everyone else rocks thick wetsuits at the start of Summer.

Lips getting a nice shade of blue.

Campsite had heated showers though, so that was nice.

And I got to borrow a Wetsuit in the end.

So it was all pretty good.

Heavy on the Grain

An old roll of film, almost expired by 30 years. Labs could only scan in the images one at a time supposedly. The negatives sat on the shelf for months as i shot a few more rolls and ran into the same problem once they were developed.

So I shelled out for a cheap negative scanner.

Results are OK. Dust is my enemy. I can clear up minor stuff though I occasionally get an image with a rude squiggly line on it. I crunched a few of these shots to pull out the image, also pulling out the grain and hues from the cross processing.

I think the grain and flatness of the images actually captures what this day felt like. With the looming storm threatening to hit us on the steep slippery granite. And the patches of sunlight offering glimmers of hope that we would dodge the rain. .