Category: Food and drink

The Penmarc’h Lighthouse

At the end of April and the beginning of May of 2018, I visited the city of Quimper, almost certainly for the last time. The friends I have stayed there with several times are now living in the south of France, and their Quimper home is now someone else’s. So, farewell Quimper.

On May 4th, on my last full day in Quimper, my hostess drove me to see the superb lighthouse at Penmarc’h, which is on the south west tip of Brittany. And no, I don’t know how “Penmarc’h” is pronounced, and nor do I know what is really the correct name for this mighty edifice. It seems to have many names. But, it is a lighthouse, and it is in the town of Penmarc’h, so Penmarc’h Lightbouse it is.

Although she needed to get back in quite a hurry to prepare supper, she let me take the time to climb up the Lighthouse and savour the views of the town of Penmarc’h and of the Brittany coast. Which were spectacular, as was the weather that day:

The lighthouse I went up is the furthest from the sea of three structures, which would appear to have been doing, in succession, a similar job. As time went by, they got smaller, nearer to the sea, and more dependent upon electronic technology. Photo 3.1 shows the two smaller ones, as seen from the big one.

That same morning, I also checked out a huge and totally marvellous second hand shop in Quimper, and an equally huge and totally marvellous cheese factory, which was really more like a cheese refinery.

So, a really good day. One of my favourites of 2018. Except that the day after that day, in Paris, was probably even better.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Hippo bottle opener

Samizdata Supremo Perry de Havilland likes hippos. A rather disconcerting thing that happens to you from time to time if you are a Samizdata contributor is that if you do a posting, but forget to add categories to it, the default category that gets added automatically is: Hippos.

So, anyway, yes, Perry likes hippos, so a friend of his gave him a hippo for Christmas. It was presented to him at Chateau Samizdata on Christmas Eve, where I was also present.

I photoed it:

Trouble is, the hippo is all black, and my camera didn’t do very well. (The above result reminded me of this Samizdata posting that I did last year, about a very black sort of black.)

I tried lots of photo-editing, but I’m not sure that this was really much of an improvement:

But yes, this really is also a bottle opener. (I’m pretty sure it’s this one.) The friend who got it told me beforehand that it was a bottle opener also. Would Perry really want it, if the bottle opener turned out not to work very well. I said: if it’s a hippo, Perry will want it.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Stow-Away in Lower Marsh

Stow-Away is a recent arrival in Lower Marsh:

Stow-Away is a new sustainable and eco friendly apart hotel concept. Stow-Away Waterloo is our first London base made from 26 re-purposed shipping containers, stylishly designed to provide a snug comfortable Stow-Away sleeping experience.

Lots of people have tried to do architecture with old shipping containers, but personally I doubt if it makes much sense. But, if your task is to sell hotel rooms, then shipping containers are perhaps a good gimmick, for attracting attention and for giving guests something to talk about. “I slept in a shipping container.” Etc. I’ve never done this.

It got my attention:

I enjoy in particular the various reflections there.

All but the last of these photos were photoed in one burst, last September. The final photo was photoed more recently, in the evening.

I think this hotel is quite good fun, especially those strange looking shades, red on the inside, that are a feature of the front. But, I regret the trend of which this “apart hotel” is a part, which is the transformation of Lower Marsh from a fascinating and quite cheap thoroughfare, full of diverting shops and eateries, into a dreary and expensive thoroughfare, stripped of all those diverting shops and eateries.

This happens all the time. A street contains lots of lively and amusing stuff. Word of that liveliness spreads, and the rents then go through the roof. The liveliness is priced off to another part of town. Such is urban life.

What I am really saying is: RIP Gramex. Follow that link and you find “an important message to our much-valued customers”. That would be me. But this “important message” is dated 4th August 2017. I gave up hope at least a year ago.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

The original Sloane

Yesterday I found myself in Duke of York Square, which is just along the King’s Road from Sloane Square. So, what with the Duke of York being one of Britain’s most under-rated military leaders, at any rate according to this book, I thought that, this might be a statue of the Duke himself.

But a closer look at the plinth told me different:

Wikipedia tells us more about this, the original Sloane, from whom, of course, Sloane Square took its name, and because of whom Sloanes are called Sloanes. Sir Hans Sloane, it seems, was the collector of scientific specimens who first got the British Museum started. Plus, this:

He is credited with creating drinking chocolate.

Blog and learn. Here is a rather more artistic close-up of this same statue:

This statue is a recreation by Simon Smith of a statue carved in 1737 by John Rysbrack. Smith’s new statue was unveiled in 2007:

The original statue, now deteriorated, is housed in the British Museum, with a cast in the Chelsea Physic Garden. The sculptor, Simon Smith, said: “`I wanted the sculpture to show Sir Hans Sloane as a kind man with a sharp intellect and an enquiring mind. An approachable man of principle and logic, who’s morals and philanthropy are still of benefit to us today.”

The light yesterday was very dim, even early in the afternoon. But whereas buildings often respond well to bright sunlight, I find that statue photos are often deranged if sunlight is unimpeded, and better when the light is more spread around and is coming from lots of different directions, as happens under cloud. Less light, but of the right sort, does the job.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Crispmas is coming

Nothing says Christmas to me quite like Special Christmas Edition packs of Walkers Potato Crisps. And actually, I came across these in Sainsbury’s … it must have been nearly a fortnight ago now:

Photoing a shiny package, with information directly under the shininess, is somewhat above my photoing pay grade, what with my photoing pay grade being: zero without expenses. On the left there, we have Turkey & Stuffing, Brussels Sprout, and Pigs in Blankets. On the right, Glazed Ham, Turkey & Stuffing (again), and … well that’s not so clear.

So here’s another photo which explains that it is Cheese & Cranberry:

However, my favourite bit is this little disclaimer, concerning the Brussels Sprout crisps:

I love it. Guaranteed entirely made with artificial flavouring. No natural flavouring at all. Real turkey. Real stuffing. Real pigs. Real blankets. Real ham with real glaze, real cheese, real cranberry. But: fake sprouts.

I don’t always hate the twenty first century. Today, I love it.

One way to photo such packages as these more clearly is to empty them, and flatten them out, like they’ve done here, because that brings the light under control. At lest, I think that’s what they did. Those photos certainly look flat. But a package that is flat rather than curved stops looking like a package. Such photos literally take the crisps out of the picture. And who wants that?

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Old and cross

Photoed by me, on the same day that I most recently photoed Bartok:

As I get older, I find myself, every so often, getting crosser. Not all the time, you understand, just in occasional eruptions.

But I am not cross about this photo. That is exactly how it came out of the camera. No cropping or Photoshop(clone)ing. Just as was. I love that light, as I have been saying here for about a week now.

I love that effect when the light is very strong and almost exactly in line with the wall but not quite, at a just sufficient angle to light it up, and at the slightest excuse cover it in big shadows. If it didn’t say: “City of Westminster”, you’d think you could be in the South of France or some such sunlit place.

More about the Compton Cross.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

At the Grafton Arms (after recording a talk)

Recently I and Patrick Crozier visited the Grafton Arms. I rather like this pub. These guys also like this pub, because of the Goon Show. Apparently the Goons wrote some of their scripts there, in an upstairs room.

A fact commemorated by this mirror behind the bar, which I only noticed on this visit:

If you look carefully there, you can see me and my camera. Well, it is a mirror. I should have tried to include Patrick.

What took Patrick and me to the Grafton Arms was that we had just been doing one of our recorded conversations, and we needed refreshment. Tune in to the latest one, by going here.

My favourite of these conversations so far has been the one we did about WW1, concerning which Patrick is something of an expert. Our next, or so I hope, will be about transport, concerning which Patrick is also something of an expert.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

The performing horses of Warwick Castle (2): After the show

Remember those performing horses of Warwick Castle, galloping up and down on a thin rectangular arena, telling the story of the Wars of the Roses. Course you do. I showed you a spread of photos of them, but wasn’t that impressed with how those photos came out.

Well, after the show, all of us friends and family of one of the performers went backstage, so to speak, to shake hands with the guys in their armour and to say hello also to the horses.

And the photos I took of the horses seemed to me rather better:

It helped that the horses were standing still. It also helped that the background was much easier to choose and mostly looked quite different from the horses heads.

I also prefer the way horses look when they aren’t wearing complicated costumes. There’s nothing like quite like a horse, unclothed, in sunshine.

That hoods that a couple of the horses are wearing are not cruel. They’re to keep the flies off their eyes.

The actual war horses that fought the Wars of the Roses would have been a lot stockier and heavier than these horses. These ones are retired race horses. Which is okay, because they are actors.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Two faces of Bruce the Real Photographer

Last week Bruce the Real Photographer (regular name: Bruce Nicoll) dropped by and we went out for a coffee. While we coffeed, we got onto the subject of how faces look different depending on how far away the camera is. By which I mean: Bruce the Real Photographer told me about this. (He mentioned this famous photo, on the right here, to illustrate what he was talking about.)

Inspired by this portraiture lesson, I at once took a very close up photo of Bruce the Real Photographer, which looked like this …:

…, and then I walked away and took this next photo, with lots of zoom, so that his face occupied most of the photo in the same way as it did in the above close-up:

The contrast is remarkable. His face is a whole different shape, depending. And look what happens to the background.

I sort of knew all this. But sort of knowing something and knowing it for sure are two distinct things. Knowing it and really seeing it are also two distinct things.

I photo a lot of buildings, close-up, and from a distance with lots of zoom. But these tend not to be the exact same buildings from one moment to the next, and the above contrast very seldom jumps out at me.

Mostly, what I see is another equally clear contrast but what looks like a very different one. I see extreme angle differences, like when verticals converge, or not, depending on how far away you are. I mentioned in passing, yesterday, how buildings do less of this when you are further away. When you are far away, you can get exact horizontals and exact verticals, the way you don’t when you are close-up. See the first photo below, which was done with lots of zoom from far away.

It all makes perfect sense. When you work it out, it becomes obvious. It is obvious that, if you are far away from someone who is wearing glasses and he is looking straight at you, you are more likely to see his face through those glasses and less likely to see the background beyond his face through his glasses. It’s all a question of angles.

It is obvious that if you are close up, you see only the front of his face. Further away, and you also see the sides of his face.

And it’s obvious that if you are far away from a rectangle that is at a slightly higher level than you are, it looks more exactly rectangular the further away from the rectangle you get. Again, the angle changes.

But that’s what knowledge is. When it becomes “obvious”, that means that you know it.

Here is another photo of Bruce the Real Photographer, which I took immediately after taking the second of two above, but this time with no zoom:

This shows that I was never actually that far away from Bruce the Real Photographer. It’s merely the difference between very close and not so close, two places which are only a second apart from each other. With buildings, you need to get a lot further away to make much difference.

To show you just how Real a Photographer Bruce the Real Photographer is, go to this long ago posting here (LINK TO THE OLD BLOG), which has a whole clutch of some of his best looking stuff, but small enough to fit on this blog and not to be worth anyone serious about copying to copy.

The first photo there is a particularly good one of the actor Dudley Sutton, who nrecently died, causing much lamentation in the antiques trade.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

A Brunel bridge seat and the Brunel museum

So I went looking for interesting new bridges, as I do from time to time, but found nothing interesting that I didn’t know about. Like I say, the bridge news these days is when they collapse.

So I gave up on bridges, and instead thought about doing a posting about the Brunel Museum, which I visited on Saturday. There is, of course, a website. But there is also a Wikipedia entry. And look what I found there. That’s right, it’s the Royal Albert Bridge, Saltash, made smaller and sittable upon, with a train:

I’m pretty sure that, while waiting to be told about the nearby Brunel tunnel under the Thames (set in motion by Brunel’s dad Marc), I and my two pals were sitting sipping our drinks within a few feet of this bridge-bench. But it was dark, and I only found out about it just now.

Here are two things I did see:

On the left, a bust of Marc Brunel, in the little museum. On the right, a photo of son Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the famous photo with the huge chains behind him, projected onto the extremely grubby and deranged wall of the place where we listened to a lecture about the tunnel. The guy is saying: “Well, you just can’t get the walls these days.”

No, he wasn’t. He was saying something I didn’t catch because I wasn’t concentrating hard enough to make it out. That being because the acoustics of this strange vertical cylinder in the ground were about as reverberationally bad as acoustics are able to be, and I could only make out about one in three of the words spoken by the guy, despite him being an actor who enunciated very clearly, and despite him standing about four yards from where we were sitting.

But despite all of the above, it was a fun evening. Basically (a) because of the company, and (b) because now, when people ask me if I know anything about the Brunel Museum in Bermondsey, I can now say: Yes. I’ve been there. And because I had fun photoing.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog