Photography
Chatting to a school friend last night we got on to this new and unwelcome vocabulary that we are learning. Furlough, co-morbidities, herd immunity, lockdown, social distancing and so on. I went looking for the word ‘furlough’ in “Men Who March Away”, an anthology of poetry from World War One that they got us to read at school: Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen and many others. I couldn’t find the word. Simon tells me that the OED lists the first use of ‘furlough’ as by Ben Jonson in 1625. Those poems are not easy to read - I last consulted that anthology in the 1980s when the AIDS epidemic was taking all those good friends and playmates from us.
Doing my gym at home this morning, a funeral cortege draws up at the church opposite; it happens but seeing one at this moment makes you take stock just as the clouds seem to be gathering yet again. John Donne’s words still ring clear, written amidst the plagues of the 17th century; he even mentions Europe!
Happily, the present deceased got a fine day and a good crowd for it.
Waterloo Bridge roundabout
Waterloo Road
View from the steps of Waterloo railway station, London SE1
Wide-eyed in Waterloo: I find there’s a skyscraper or a railway arch at the end of almost every street. Down Waterloo Road from the railway station and passing The Hole in the Wall pub and the LCC fire station to revisit Lower Marsh market, La Barca restaurant and the Ian Allen Book & Model shop. The army surplus shop is still going too, along The Cut between the Old Vic and the New Vic theatres. All places that I first explored on my meal breaks from working at London Weekend Television on the South Bank.
More photos: Waterloo - a skyscraper at the end of every street
My photographs of and around Ullswater from a sunny September weekend based in Glenridding in the Lake District National Park
A walk around the front gardens in Preston Park, Brighton. Such variety and imagination on show from these dedicated gardeners, the result of their hard work.
Prospect Cottage and garden, Dungeness, by Derek Jarman (1942-1994)
My walk around the cottages, shacks and industrial relics on the shingle beach which create the ambience of this apparently remote corner of Kent.
