thirty one

new project for September

thirty

twenty nine

twenty three, four, five, six, seven and eight!

I'm cheating a little today and counting several days of August Break for these photos I took on Sunday of Postman's Park in London, another of my favourite places in the City. 

twenty two

The Prof has been sharing my camera a lot lately. To be honest, I am not sure who took this one, it may well have been him. Maybe he will remember! We need a camera each....

twenty one

I rather like this bunting idea!

eighteen, nineteen, twenty

Chilham, Kent

We've been away for ten days, house sitting for friends who live near Canterbury. You may have noticed the Kent bias to my photographs recently. We had a really nice relaxing time and now I am pretty much exhausted. How come a relaxing time doesn't leave me feeling relaxed?

We arrived home on Sunday, and I spent Monday unpacking and working my way through Mount Washmore. I am busy every day this week, never a good thing for me, I seem to need a day or two in between to recharge. I have a hair cut scheduled, a days cleaning for my Auntie, a WI coffee afternoon. I need to colour my hair, too - I am still planning to stop colouring it and see what colour I actually have underneath but for now I'm using semi-permanent instead of permanent. It has no ammonia, smells nicer and I don't notice a difference from the permanent dye. I have white roots in 10 days whatever I use. I am still mulling over how to tackle growing it out but it's my Dad's retirement do at his work this week and I'm not turning up to meet all his workmates looking like mad badger woman. 

I've been making progress with my £2013 in 2013 goal. My earnings each week from the bit of cleaning and ironing I am doing is going in the pot, along with any cashback we earn here and there when we buy things online. I still need to get going with ebay. I do have some things here I know I could sell, but working out how to do it all just seems overwhelming. We have so much decluttering to do and really, right now I feel like just taking everything down to the charity shop and being done with it. That won't get to me to my £2013 goal though, and neither will it pay for the house renovations we're planning.

This evening we're having a rare treat, the Young Philosopher wants to watch a film with us - Cloud Atlas, which he's seen already and loved. I'm making a sit-in-front-of-the-film pizza and salad dinner and I have to have it ready for the minute the Prof gets in from work as it's a three hour film and otherwise we'll be falling asleep. 

seventeen

 We strolled into Canterbury town centre from a different direction than usual, I'd not seen this building before and had to take a photo 

fourteen, fifteen, sixteen

 

The view from our friends' back gate

...and at night. We saw several shooting stars, but no photos. Did you see any?

Bunting in Rochester, against a lovely blue sky.  I think every town could be improved by a bit of bunting. And every house, but the Prof doesn't agree

thirteen

Spotted in a front garden near Lenham, Kent: the strangest garden ornaments I've ever seen

twelve

eight, nine, ten, eleven

My favourite Valerian, seeing it everywhere at the moment. 

Memorial in the church at Chilham, Kent. Apparently the only memorial in England to depict children's toys - a battledore and shuttlecock, and the book they are reading has a picture of the Babes in the Wood

The bees love the passion flower in our garden

Above the doorway of a lovely little shop in Chilham, reminding me I have Thoreau's Walden on my Kindle still to read

seven

A rest and a cool drink after foraging in the Oxfam shop. 

six

This year, Susannah has provided prompts for the August Break. I've been doing my own thing, but when I took this on Sunday in Hackney, it occurred to me how it would have fit the first three prompts in one: breakfast, circles and yellow.

Five

A much younger woman stopped alongside me to take photos of this unexpected splash of colour on the dingy wall behind the train station. We chatted for a few minutes. She said I'm new to  photography. I said oh, me too, I'd really love to do a course. We snapped away alongside each other for a couple of minutes. Good luck, she said over her shoulder as she walked away. You should go for it. 

Four

Boris Bikes. I'd like to ride one sometime, but I'm too scared to in the crazy London traffic.....

Three

I took this photograph while waiting for a bus one day last week. For once I took photographs of the other side of the street instead of the Tower of London, which was behind me. Here you can see the new  building under construction, which people are already calling the 'cheese grater' and in the background the 'gherkin', with other less iconic modern buildings surrounding them both. There is the end of a building which looks Georgian and was obviously bigger in the past, possibly a consequence of the bombing during World War Two, road building or dereliction. In the bottom right hand corner,  one of the remaining parts of the London wall, dating from Roman times.  One of the things I love about my city is this juxtaposition of the old and the new. 

Two

Today: thunder, lightning, hailstones, torrential rain, soaking jeans, squelchy sandals and the perfect excuse to use my favourite frilly umbrella.  

One

This garden belongs to a ruined church in London, two walls of which still stand. It is situated in a very busy street near St Paul's tube station and I pass it every time I go to Bart's hospital. I always think how charming it is, a little oasis of calm in the midst of the City, people and traffic rushing past and office blocks all around. Often when I go up to Bart's I stop on the way in a coffee shop for a drink and a snack. It was only yesterday as I passed, that I paused to take a few photographs and noticed the benches all around the garden, and I thought how lovely it would be to sit there in the garden for a while instead. I think usually the weather has been bad and I've been rushing by to get out of the wind/cold/rain but this time I stopped for a minute to look and thought to myself, next time.