Photography
Just a little snow in London, hardly enough to cover the garden and not enough for snowball fights in the streets; but quite enough to cause long delays on the M25 and to slow down the tube and Heathrow.
Cours Julien, Marseille thinks of itself as the “Creative Quarter” of Marseille. There are several colleges plus numerous small bars and restaurants around the fountains (that are hardly ever running). The graffiti is agit prop art more than tag and usually the politics of opposition and revolution. People socialise at lunchtime and at the end of the working day. A place for a quiet dinner for two, lost in the crowd or for a game of cards.
This last Saturday the band Success played a free concert in Cours Julien: here are some photos. The rival attraction, that Eurovision Song Contest in a spectacular staging from Düsseldorf, seemed to hold its audience until the French performance, then the crowds came out for the local event, which was just starting.
3½ miles run, jog and walk around London's Battersea Park with a field of 13,000 entrants from over 300 companies. Just over 5.5km. Although it's the taking part that matters so the time is not the thing, of course it is, particularly in a field of highly competitive corporate employees! That said, my official time was 34 mins 42 secs.
Interesting technique challenge to run with my camera and take pictures on the hoof.
I've a birthday coming up so I enjoyed a finisher's swig of Cava, kindly provided by my employer.
(Group photo of my colleagues deliberately blurred to respect confidentiality)
Souvenir of a quick walk around Liverpool waterside and commercial districts following an Aunt's 95th birthday party at suburban Maghull. We used to visit grandparents in Liverpool regularly when I was a child; in 1958, our family embarked from Liverpool docks on the Carmania, a liner of the Cunard Line, bound for Montreal and the USA. We came back on Cunard's Queen Elizabeth and then did another transatlantic trip a few years later on one of the last voyages of the Queen Mary.
I've not been around Liverpool for many years now; I find it's now cleaner and the trains don't run on the roads (meaning that the trams have gone). But Liverpool's historic origins are still prominent, a quintessentially English blend of showy civic monuments, commercial architectural exhibitionism and enduring philanthropic gestures.
