Things I've not seen before today

Boat bottom

2008-01-16T23:27:49+01:00

We went out for a walk on Sunday, across the river, and up towards the boat houses. Alongside the boat houses, almost all of them in fact, it seems the students have a habit of leaving boats they no longer want to use outside in the elements to decay and die. This is a close up of the worst we saw. Parts of it wer broken through and along the length of it the varnish was peeling off.
I really enjoyed this walk, and neither of us had ever walked this far along the bankside in front of the boat houses. The sky was quite grey, but it was blowy out, so a mild Sunday morning was made chill by the wind.
A really interesting sight to see, a boat, up turned as though to be repaired, in a place where I really wouldn't expect there's some one around who would be capable of repairing it. Anyway, it's not the sort of boat that a college would use to even train in, so I doubt it's waiting to be repaired. Maybe, years ago someone promised it a repair, and now they've moved on elsewhere and it's still waiting, never to be repaired. To the students it's just a cool ornament which reminds them of how they come to be racing boats out of that boat house. Reminding them of the boats that came before, the people that rowed in them and the people that built them. It was a pleasant walk on a Sunday morning, and this was just one of the interesting things I saw.

Comments

Gift

2008-01-13T01:01:00+01:00

This handmade book arrived from a friend of my parents today, for my little girl, it's amazing, such a cool little book, and all of it, hand made by some lady, I haven't seen in I don't know how long. I guess she made it for my parents more than they made it for my daughter. That part of being a good friend which means, even if you can't actually remember what the father of their grandchild looks like, you'll make a gift for the grandchild anyway, because that's what you do for your good friends. I'm touched by the fellow feeling displayed in the actions of my parents' friends, and they aren't the only friends who've done this. We've got things from people my girlfriend barely knows, people I didn't realise were actually my parents' friends, and not just their acquaintances. I love it already, whether it will ever get used I don't know, how could it possibly be robust enough for a small person to chew on and bash around? It's beautiful, hopefully we will be able to enjoy it for a long time.

Another thing I saw today was a place called Beef Lane in the city centre, it's off a side alley, and it's more like a square than a lane. It feels a little bit gowny in it's way, mostly because the buildings in it are old and built from sandstone, but it looks like a pretty place to be able to walk through everyday. I felt a little jealous of the people who work there, and when they walk into work in the morning, can think, what a nice place to work. In the afternoon they can look out of their office window and think, cool courtyard! Maybe it's because it's new to me that I'm that jealous, afterall, I have a view that looks out onto two enormous and beautiful trees, in the fore ground of a vast green space, which is nice to look out at too.

Comments

Archways in a wall

2008-01-12T01:16:26+01:00

Archways on the ends of buildings that have been bricked up, so now they are just walls. Then they've been painted over white, and I've been walking past them for a year now, and never noticed them. There's two in the end wall of a newsagents near to where I work, I've been inside the building before, it's all higgledy-piggledy three steps down, five up and you end up on the same level you were before, you walk down a corridor and only turn left once, but somehow end up where you were when you started - inside, it's that sort of place, so clearly nothing like the original warehouse or whatever it might have been to have these openings in the end wall. Weirdly the bottom of what would have been the opening is about five feet up in the air, so it's got to be some sort of loading bay, and arch at the top is about six feet above my head. I was walking to my bus this evening, having worked late on a Friday afternoon, a Friday afternoon, and morning for that matter,when I was meant to be on holiday. So, traipsing along as I was, at the end of my work day, when I had been looking forward earlier in the week to a day when I could get out and see something really interesting I hadn't seen before today, when I chanced to look up, and I noticed the tiniest shadow in the brick work and found myself looking up at a bricked up archway that I'd never seen before today! So a good end to not so hot a work day!

Comments

Square Pie Charts

2008-01-12T00:46:33+01:00

Weekdays are seriously depleted for new things to go around seeing, it's got shameful. But on Thursday I came across something utterly amazing, well, it's pretty amazing. It's amazing in terms of my day job, which really isn't that amazing. I was looking around for a way to carve up a square to represent the various different percentages I wanted to put in it. With my cursor in the search box, and my fingers hovering over the keyboard, I wasn't sure where I was going to plant my first finger, and after that the next one, and then I thought, what I needed was a square pie chart. I really didn't expect to find anything, and it isn't really so cool as you'd hope, it doesn't really divide up in a pie chart way, which is a big shame, but then excel really isn't that clever. Suffice it to say, I liked it, and had a good laugh at it, before it became useful to me. It was a marvel, and entirely new to me. So anyway, thans to the clever excel bloggers who helped me to achieve that, it something new, fun and interesting for a dull Thursday in the office.

Comments

wrestling further with new, interesting, and not seen before

2008-01-10T01:37:39+01:00

Definitely my laziest day this one, and I realise that it's not actually that easy to see anything, let alone something new, when you've got about one hour of daylight outside of the office. Anyway, not interesting at all, but I just like the principle of it, this is the back of a building I walk past on the way from my bus stop to my office each day. As far as the back of a building goes, it's pretty dull, just some satelite dishes and some vents, you'd hope for a fire escape as well. But I've never really paid any attention to the building previously, so I thought I'd have a bit more of a look at it today, and here it is.
It certainly qualifies as something I've not seen before, though it completely fails on the interesting front. I think what it does show is that since I've started to do this I look at more things to see if they are new, so whether I'm actually seeing anything that's interesting, I'm certainly taking more interest. If I didn't the commute, morning and evening would be very very dull. So, sorry a sad picture, a sad view, but an interesting thought on looking around about you as you go.

Comments

Clay soldier

2008-01-09T02:28:09+01:00

A friend of mine lent this to me today so I could write something about it. It happened to be that I'd never seen it before, so it qualifies for the blog. So, I thought hard about what the little man was, what he represented, and I got inside him, felt his hollow clayness, wondered whether the character was the soldier or the clay, and thought about how the clay must feel having an identity imposed upon it, in an attempt to make the "divine spring" as Katherine Mansfield would have it:

On the train home I can hear them talking about the day. There's a nervous pitch to their discussion, which I haven't heard before.
"I really enjoyed the great hall"
"Yes, the ceiling, the vaulting I mean, is amazing, and the cupola, it was just beautiful, but a shame about the gate way."
The carriage lurched as it picked up speed and stopped her answering momentarily.
"Yes, it was meant to be Portland, but the contractor bought it on the cheap from France."
"Brittany, actually" I picture his face as I first saw it from the shelf, with the seriousness blanking all his features. Inside my white paper bag, carefully creased, I would laugh if I could.
On the crowded train they aren't able to do te one thing I've noticed they love to do since they first picked me off the shelf; talk about other people. Their inane banter continues for some minutes as they discuss the dull niceties of the sights of the day. Long before exhaustion could set in they lapse in to silence.
I begin to suspect I am a mere token artifact of their day. It wasn't about the museum trip. To them tourism is a tea shop and toilets, somewhere they can watch the crowds.
"It's the one after this," he whispers to her as the train slows.
"Thank goodness he's getting off," she murmurs, "I don't like his shirt."

Comments

The good old days

2008-01-08T00:37:29+01:00

This is something I must have walked past nearly a hundred times and yet never noticed. It's the sign over a shop in the covered market. It's actually hidden away, high up on the wall. From the alleyway the brown boards below announce the name of the shop, being in a position of precedence no passer-by is going to notice the black and white sign above it.
I happened to be sat in a booth in a cafe across the alleyway when I saw it, a booth I'd never sat in before, but had actually seen, so according to the rules of this thing, I couldn't take a photograph and record it here. I think, if I hadn't sat in the booth, I would never have seen the sign. If it wasn't for my girlfriend sitting in the booth, with her back to the window, so I sat staring at it, and that's how I happened to notice it. With out that set of circumstances I don't think I would have seen this sign over the current shop, that could be described as disused. The actual name of the shop is J. Lindsey and Son, so the black and white sign is disused and out of date. What would be interesting to know is when the black and white sign became disused. Did it only cease to be the main sign when it became and son, or was the decision taken before that. Looking at it in the photograph, the paint appears well touched up, perhaps it's not being left to fade away.
This is one of the things I like about trying to see the world in this way: looking out for things I've not seen before, it seems as though it is getting a little bit easier to recognise them and as they get easier to recognise, I hope they get more interesting.

Comments

A tree protest!

2008-01-07T21:57:50+01:00

Saw this on Sunday. I think it started on Thursday or perhaps a little earlier, shows how often I get into the city centre. Whilst demanding the preservation of the tree is entirely worthwhile and something I'd support, there is a a small sense of disappointment at the delay to the refurbishment of Bonn Ssquare. On the other hand as the coucil is bound to botch the renovations in some part, it's a good thing that people are making a noise about it.
What's really cool though is that it's a tree protest. I've never seen a tree protest in the flesh, and I think it's years since there was a really good tree protest. I don't expect this will quite make the news in the same way as the Newbury bypass did over a decade ago, or the Heathrow protests last summer, but it's a nice distraction from the dull shops in the city centre. It's good to be able to walk through the city and see that people really do care: I wasn't the only person taking pictures; I also overheard a number of passers-by discussing the protest to their friends and family.
Much as I love trees, as can be seen by my first entry, and what it has/ hopefully will inspire, I don't think I would willingly give up my bed and live under a tarpaulin in order to protect one. Apparently there are plans to transplant half a dozen or so mature trees to the site.

Comments

Each week this is different

2008-01-06T00:39:05+01:00

I subscribe to this magazine annually. Most weeks a copy of it comes through my door, most weeks, it can depend on whether it's a double issue, or what the post is doing. The journalism is so diverse they make me feel slightly dumb. Each week it contains articles, some of which inevitably leave me feeling really quite stupid as they are either far beyond my comprehension, or they are so esoteric I can't manage to muster up the interest to read them. Some times they are completely US centric and sometimes they are about things that happen around the world. Either is as interesting and worth reading as the other, and it's nothing to do with whether they are an article about trains that run between Texan power stations or persecuted journalists working in a poor country with a terrible repressive government. I like that the stories are always new to me, what this magazine deems news is invariably more interesting than what's available to be read in a comparable magazine in the UK. Plus it has dozens of great cartoons every issue, something few other publications in the world can boast to, regardless of where they are printed. It's often worth a read.

Comments

Papaya - actually something cool!

2008-01-04T21:04:19+01:00

A bunch of papaya I saw in my supermarket today. Super exotic fruit from the other side of the world, in a supermarket which claims to be ultra ethical. I think if it's come a long way it's important to weigh that up against whether a product is organic or not. What is the fuel usage per product mile of shipping tonnes and tonnes of fruit from Africa to the UK as compared to driving fifteen miles to a market with two crates of apples.
I love the colours, the yellow is amazing, a kind of lemon-banana colour, it reminds me of the colour of the yellow starburst and what imaginative soul thought to pack them on a lurid green crate that actually doesn't create a colour clash?
I am sure I've eaten papaya in yoghurt before, but yoghurt is one of those things which really only tastes like the colour, there are about three flavours of yoghurt, with a few variations, red, yellow and green, with small distinctions between red and purple and yellow and orange. Another thing today, which totally blew my socks off, was hearing Stevie Wonder's Higher Ground.

Comments

Jan 3rd

2008-01-03T22:23:30+01:00

On my third day I appear to have run out of spontaneous ideas. It’s actually a lot hard than you’d think. I see something and I think to myself, well, there’s nothing new there, as I walk past that building, sign-post, or shop front every day. So today I’ve been a little unimaginative, and I’ve taken a picture of my bus ticket. I get a new one every ten trips, I don’t get one for a longer period because I don’t always take the bus, I have other means of transport, and so I’m not convinced that in a single month I’d use the bus enough to make it value for money. The bus journey is the very opposite of an experience I’ve never had before, I see the same people every time I ride the bus, and on odd days, like today, a Thursday, for example, the woman with the two kids who don’t behave themselves gets the bus. When I take the bus on Thursdays I feel uneasy. If the bus driver has to break heavily, which can happen to a bus driver every so often, then her sons often end up crying when they bang their heads on the seat, or their mouths on the metal handles on the back of the seats. It's sad when the mother then shouts at the bus driver for breaking heavily and causing her son to injure himself. But it’s not the driver’s fault. A strange sequence of events I've seen on more than one occasion.
Anyway, this is my new bus ticket, which for twenty quid a week, will get me to work and back. I’m not sure how that relates to the cost of petrol in my car, but I don’t have to drive and i can stare out the window, at new things: I don’t mind the trip too much.

Comments

January 2nd

2008-01-03T22:22:15+01:00

So this was the dilemma on my second day, and you’ll notice it also in my third day. I wasn’t really sure what to take a picture of, what constituted something I’d never seen before, and how I could calculate what was new. So here are some daffs I saw outside a florists on 2nd January. As a whole the experience was a new one, even though none of the component parts (daffs, 2nd Jan, that specific florist) were. I’ve never seen daffs outside a florist on 2nd Jan before. I thought they looked nice also.
I haven’t really yet decided whether I should talk about the new things I see. I’m no great authority on the many things I might put in here. For instance I’m sure that in antiquity flowers were symbols of newness in dozens of ways, but I’m not about to look them up and pretend I know about them.
I don’t really care much about flowers, I like buying them for my girlfriend, mostly because it shows I care, and I know she likes them. And she really does like them, properly, she’s a fan, like people are fans of books, music or paintings.
I reckon I walk within about 20 metres of this florist’s front door on a daily basis, sometimes I don’t quite walk past, other times I do, but it’s typically on my horizon every day. So it was nice to see something new outside it. Where as previously I wouldn’t have taken any notice of their shop front, today I took a greater interest because I was looking for new things.

Comments

Things I've not seen before, a germ

2008-01-03T22:14:18+01:00

On New Year's Day I saw this tree, it?s in Christ Church Meadow in Oxford, my home town. As I walked past it pushing my month old daughter it occurred to me that I'd never seen the tree before, and that I should take a picture of this new experience. Whilst I was thinking about this I decided I wanted to record something I experienced or saw each day which I hadn't seen before that day.
So on new year's day it was this tree with the crazy pollarding, which caught my eye. I like the way the trunk splits but continues to grow in the same direction. It's old and hasn't been pollarded in generations. In spite of the attentions of some long past grounds man the tree has found away to grow as it would.
I had some thoughts about how to structure this idea, the key thing being that the photos I take should be of something I'd not seen before that day. I thought about what camera I should use; as normally I only have a mobile phone on me, but I aim to use various cameras over the year and capture the differences between experiences.

Comments