Last weekend another visit to far off lands. This time to visit James' auld mither an faither.
Read more...Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Friday, August 27, 2010
Maximum Entropy day was yesterday. It is fortunate then that the least important part of making a pilgrimage to Lourdes is the actual cricket.
Read more...Wednesday, August 25, 2010
More about the program; this morning is all about tipping punts. Sorry..I mean Timmy points. Timmy himself gave a fun overview talk about them on Monday, but now its gone all nitty gritty. Still - must soldier on - the workshop dinner is tonight.
Read more...Tuesday, August 24, 2010
All getting very Britishy now...we don't get these back home. I suppose this might be a young robin coming into adult plumage, since it has a brown speckled head... probably blog readers know better and I looked forward to being corrected.
Having said that about the Britishness, this was shot in Kent, which is a bit of a rum place. While it seems to be about the only place in the UK which actually enjoys the kind of summers assumed in English children's books (that is the kind that is full of ripe forest fruits and golden meadows, and during which one may venture outdoors without a big jumper and a raincoat), Kent also has fleets of parakeets and big snakes!
Monday, August 23, 2010
Anonymous suggests we blog the program. So here it is.
Prom 50, 22nd August 2010:
Mozart: The Magic Flute - Overture
Bartók: Piano Concerto No.3
Bartók: Cantata profana
Haydn: Symphony No.102 in B flat major
Kamakura is an hour on the train from Tokyo, Cambridge the same from London, and just like at home, the train whizzed us effortless home from the night-time fun in the big city - well, not quite as comfortably, but it was on time.
Friday, August 20, 2010
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Nick Barnes is to be congratulated for working out that we are in Cambridge.
Now that's out of the way perhaps I can post some nice photos of Cambers. Here's a bauble wot some old mate of my father-in-law recently stuck up outside Corpus Christi College, which, coincidentally is also where I did my PhD. The bauble is part of a clock which has a beetle on the top of if that is almost as large as some of the ones we get in Japan, but the glass in front of the clock is very reflective so multiple reflections seemed the way to go photographically. That's the front of King's College that you can see behind James.
Monday, August 16, 2010
How to Punt Cleverly
[People with slow internets may find this difficult to see. I find that once the animated gif has done one run through it speeds up to the intended speed.]
While James can add up adequately, he can actually punt cleverly, although I am not sure if he can do both at the same time! The real reason for adopting this style is, of course, so one can drink Pimms at the same time, but it was only 10am, and we are old and not strong at alcohol...
After a stopover in London we headed to the land of the Tesco Mega Temple. Wow. Having said that, I have seen better beer selections...
Read more...Saturday, August 14, 2010
There's a traditional oven in our apartment*! Furthermore, cake ingredients are not only readily available but are cheap at the local Tescos mega temple.
Weeeirdd! These yellow butterish products said only what they are not. For baking, I had to be sure it was margarine, so I avoided this array of dubiousness and eventually found a slab of something called "Stork, Perfect for pastry", which said it was 75% vegetable fat. Is that enough? Brownies look OK, fortunately. But what happened to good old margarine?!
*In Japan our only oven is a combi microwave that we brought over from the UK with us. Mostly only rich people have real ovens in Japan.
As soon as we arrived James tried to blend in with some local culture. Unfortunately, despite his adopting the right attitude, people kept staring. Then we noticed, that although the streets were an array of diversity amazing to someone from the Kanto plain, inside the pub the dress code was blue jeans or else.
Thanks for complimenting London by thinking it was Paris! The other thing that is amazing to someone from the Kanto plain is the beautiful architecture, but I didn't have time to photograph any properly.
Friday, August 13, 2010
James in transit. There's a tandem called Garth in them there boxes and the double-reflection in the double-glazed windows is proof we are far from home.
I tend to recognise Japan-ness in the smallest details of photographs, so this must be a dead giveaway.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
On the road again... but where to?
At time of ticket purchase, Virgin's Premium Economy beat standard Economy prices for the other airlines, so no illegal stress positions for us this time!
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
The high alpine flowers on the rocky ridges tend to be of the blue-dot, white-dot or yellow-dot variety, which makes the orange lillies found in the lower flower meadows all the more striking.
The giant hogweed are pretty good too, but they were not yet out on our latest trip. Click here for a photo of that taken last year.
Monday, August 9, 2010
A country bumpkin from north west England, where it is very dark and matt, I considered the images of self that I found reflected on the city of London morally indecent, given their likelihood of encouraging vanity and obsession with appearance. It turns out that London has nothing on Japan where cleanliness is practised with great attention to detail, meaning that every surface that might possibly be reflective, is.
Just last week I read an ebook about photographing reflections, and realised that there was lots of reflective fun to be had, that entirely excluded vanity.
[Motomachi is a posh shopping street in Yokohama. Located in the foreign ghettos, it has quite a lot of western-style shops, although if you are over a size 12 UK woman you would have great trouble finding any clothes big enough]
Saturday, August 7, 2010
alpine flowers (anaphalis lactea f. alpicola) and the gendarmes, originally uploaded by julesberry2001.
3000m flowers are pretty small, and you have to grovel on the ground to take photos like this.
Read more...Friday, August 6, 2010
At this time of year the Japanese Alps are covered in flowers. The flowers get smaller as you get higher. This one is from around 2600m.
P.S. The flower is a Pedicularis chamissonis var.Japonica
Read more...Wednesday, August 4, 2010
After a relatively lonely walk for several days, when we came to the Yari ridge it became a game of dodging the hoards of grockles. This turned out surprisingly well thanks to James' superior planning, and only our last night was spent at a busy hut. Unusually we were also not the only gaijin in the village.To prove it, here is one, just about to dive off down the Daikiretto.
Read more...Tuesday, August 3, 2010
There is an infamous deep cut (daikiretto) towards the left of the famous Kita Alps ridge. It is about 300m deep, and is quite a narrow ridge with big drops all around. We have done it before but this time we did it the easier way from North to South (right to left on yesterday's panorama). Having been fortunate enough to survive the first time, I was a bit apprehensive about doing it again. Turned out it was really easy. Does that look scary to you? It is true that if you jumped off hard enough, you'd be falling for 100s of meters, but why would you do that?
Click here for an alternative take. It wasn't icy when we did it, of course, which would make it much more difficult. On an earlier trip this year we viewed the daikiretto from the south (north end of it visible here), and the path in the snow squiggling down the ridge was quite worrying.
Monday, August 2, 2010
The sun strikes the most famous Kita Alps ridge at just before raw egg o'clock.
The original, 14148 pixels across, is a panorama made up from about 7 photos from James' LX3. I think that interwebs do it no justice and intend to print it out several feet across and stick to to a wall somewhere. You can too! Here it is on SmugMug (split in two for reasons of economy).
Sunday, August 1, 2010
Good eating on a raicho (basically a ptarmigan) I reckon, but unfortunately it too is off the menu in Japan, due to being a cute and treasured symbol of the mountains. So whenever we see one we exact revenge on any Japanese within earshot by exclaiming the same phrase they use when looking at horrible sea monsters at the aquarium .. "oishiiiii sou"... (It looks delicious).
Enjoy the grouse season everyone...
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