Snaps and Snippets

from 2013: the things you hear and the things you see.
By the way, the film The Gunman that was being filmed on Tower Bridge?
It was all a lie! When the 50th anniversary episode of Doctor Who aired I saw the helicopter flying around the bridge, carrying a superimposed Tardis. “I was there!” this Whovian exclaimed. All cloak and dagger stuff.

City Jackdaw

Well I had an idea about a post I was going to do on here about my recent trip to London. But everything has gone pear shaped due to me losing most of the photographs that I had taken on my phone.

Damn Gremlins.

Deep breaths.

Nostalgic thoughts of Polaroids.

So, instead, from what I have salvaged, I will just post the shots that I do have along with snippets of conversation heard along the way.

Boudica hopping on.

Buckingham Palace

“Hi Millie, it’s Dad. I got that photograph of the Queen’s house for you.Was she there?No, she was putting her wheelie bins out around the back”. 

“King Charles had a crane with a wooden leg“.

“If you don’t like your personal space being invaded, do not go on the tube“.

From St.Paul’s Cathedral

“If you don’t like heights…

View original post 339 more words

Montages Of Memory

I love these ‘then and now’ montages, showing the ghosts of East End London.

The footsteps we step in; the breath that we breathe.

The Ghosts Of East End Children

Taken in the early 1880’s, this is one of the earliest images of the East End of London.

I love the way the children appear insubstantial and ghost-like, which in effect they are. Lingering echoes of lives long lost, wandering along now vanished streets.

Currently Watching This:One Love Manchester

Ariana Grande has returned to Manchester for the first time since the concert in which twenty two people lost their lives. After visiting the injured children in hospital she is now appearing in a hastily arranged concert featuring herself and many guest stars. People who attended that first, ill-fated concert have been allowed to attend this one for free.

The entire concert is being screened live on television. It appears everyone on my FB friends list are either attending in person or watching from their own homes. Very emotional, the message One Love Manchester is also transcending my city’s borders, being sent down south to those who suffered just last night in London. 

Music brings people together. And, as Ariana has just said, the kind of love being displayed here is the medicine that the world needs right now. I hope it is addictive. 

Alternative World

 Sometimes it helps to escape a while.

My Kids In The Shard: Perspective

How often the imagination compensates for the limited world view of the young.

Town borders; forest edges; the last stop before the motorway slip road. These are the limits of their everyday world.

But then they are elevated high, and their vision expands, the world opens up and they feel themselves diminishing.

Look there, on the horizon: it’s the future; it’s the unknown.

Go explore.

Thames

Thames

they sail the 
Thames
 
a convoy of 
geese

gliding in from 
the sea

borders breached 
in the 
capital

skein of feather 
and 
doubtful origin

maybe Scandinavian
avian

a European
paean
 
to open 
waters



©Andrew James Murray

Last Night Walk

You can’t help but walk around craning your neck as you look high. It’s the unusual juxtaposition of these monoliths of light framed against the night sky. They draw your vision skyward, dwarfed by our own creations.

With a view to remembering, I had set off on my final night’s walk, crossing the bridge behind my hotel, at dusk.

I took the same route as last time, but this day being a Sunday meant the atmosphere was more subdued, the army of office workers gone, leaving behind a vacuum for nature and a wandering Manc to fill.

I had this familiar, definite trail in mind, but, as often happens, it was birds that led me astray.

As darkness fell, I heard gulls somewhere overhead. Studying the night sky, I could make out their aerial skirmishes beneath the towering cranes.

I began to walk towards the direction the birds had flown in, now aware that I could hear the carcophonous shrieking of many others somewhere up ahead. And so they led me from my safe and ordered plan.

They took me to a point called Limehouse Lock, a part of Canary Wharf I hadn’t been to before. I stood there, against iron railings, peering out to locate the gliding forms.

There were hundreds of gulls-skimming above the dark waters of the Thames. Some low, just above the surface, some higher, all moving as one great flock.

Don’t gulls sleep at night, even in a city that doesn’t sleep?

At night it is always dark water. I could remember looking out over the Saltsjön one evening in Stockholm, regarding the depths there as black water. Expansive and ominous, deep and threatening, I thought of Lindqvist’s book Harbour. In that novel, the writer made an evil entity out of the whole body of water, no doubt influenced by the death of his own father who was lost at sea.

I could imagine it, this great mass, untameable and omnipresent, claiming all who are foolish enough to try to master it.

I stayed for a while. Away from the bright lights of the city, here was the greater thrill: being led to somewhere different, somewhere new, by these feathered guides. Watching them move uninhibited en masse over the masking shadows of the Thames.

Use The Farce

I saw Yoda today in Trafalger Square. He looked taller than the last time I saw him-he must have been eating his greens.

First Night Walk

Okay, so you thought you’d seen the last of me for a few days.

But, for the first time, I took my iPad away with me as my antique phone is playing up. So I decided to use it for a few photographs and the odd update. Just in case I should disappear off the map.

 

Canary Wharf: feeling small. A poor man’s Stonehenge. How far have we come from the Neolithic?

In the midst of city life, there were some coots nesting in the water to the side of me, the calling chicks catching the attention of some cooing, slightly tipsy women. Alas, it was too dark for me to capture them. The chicks, I mean. The women continued to dance beneath neon lights.

Above the monoliths. Looking down; looking up.

In the distance: the Shard. I resisted its call.

The DLR crosses the bridge. Driverless trains- would you feel safe?

 

How many Jackdaw Andy’s can you cope with? Using my iPad that way it looks like I’m waving a hymn book about, threatening to break into song. And these unforgivable angles show just how much I’m beginning to thin on top. Damn wife; damn kids; damn time!

Did I leave anything out ? Maybe a smile?