HOLY WOOD OR HOLLYWOOD?

Do you remember, last year, my reporting the Miracle of the Marmite Messiah?

Well, Roger and Sheila on a recent peregrination came across another potentially miraculous manifestation...


R & S speculated that this might be a symbolic representation of Graham Sutherland's tapestry of Christ in Glory in Coventry Cathedral. I've turned Mr Sutherland's knitting on its side so - if you squint - you might just get the general idea, although I can't help wondering if R & S were gathering magic mushrooms at the time...


Or is it, they go on to ask, just Mary Poppins without her umbrella? I couldn't turn this one sideways, so you'll just have to work it out for yourself!


I'll leave you to judge. My money's on the contents of an unwanted Marmite sandwich!

Image of Graham Sutherland's Coventry tapestry by Cloudsoup's Photostream

PANNING OUT

Yesterday we caught the final day of the exhibition, Natural Wonders, at the Oxo Gallery: a collection of stunning panoramic photographs by Jaspal Jandu comprising an inspiring journey through some of the world's most breathtakingly beautiful landscapes.

Jandu, whom we met in the gallery, credits among his inspirations the legendary American photographer, Ansel Adams, as well as landscape artists such as Turner and Monet. He described his working process of long exposures (the image below took 15 minutes) as a result of which his pictures have an amazing depth of field that allows the eye to see every aspect of a scene, from pebbles or blades of grass in the foreground to the cracks and crevices of distant mountains with an almost supernatural sharpness of focus.

Click on images to enlarge

This highly gifted photographic artist not only captures those all-too transient moments of ravishing beauty as can, by chance, be glimpsed in a particular season or at a specific hour such as day-break or sunset, but - in his stunning compositions of earth, sky and water - embodies the spirit of landscape...

Click on images to enlarge

As can be seen from the artist's statement, above, he feels an obligation to record these wonders and if you ask him why he travels to often wildly inaccessible places in order to take a photograph, he will paraphrase George Mallory's famous answer on being asked why he wanted to climb Everest ("Because it's there!") and say: "Because it may not always be there."

Eschewing, by and large, the jumble and clamour of even beautiful cities (despite having a father who was an architect!) Jandu has developed an eye for recognising the beauty or majesty of nature - vague and mysterious or bold and dynamic, soft and yielding or harsh and resilient - and the knowledge that the rest of us happy snappers with our thousands of grabbed-but-never-looked-at-again digital pix forget (or have never acquired): that one image - the perfect image - can say it all.


Of his own signature image of Imperial Point in the Grand Canyon (above) he writes:

The viewpoint itself is the highest point on either rim of the Canyon and even during the harsh midday light commands majestic views of the Painted Desert to the east, Mount Hayden to the southeast and Saddle Mountain to the northeast.

Arising early, I had already noticed a thin ‘slit’ in the clouds which would allow the sun to shine through if the timing was right. However, the pre-dawn darkness did not allow me to fully appreciate the level of haze in the Canyon itself and as the sun eventually burst through, crepuscular rays (also known as ‘God rays’) began to flood the scene.

It was a once-in-a-lifetime moment of total focus and unbridled awe. I knew instantly that it would make a timeless image.

That is true of all the images in his 'Natural Wonders' exhibition and in the book of the same title - which is an armchair-passport to travel in company with a brilliantly gifted guide.

You can read more about Jandu's work on his blog and you can take a further journey through his world in this YouTube film...

"The landscapes of our world," says Jandu, "are truly wondrous places, inspiring each generation by their subtle forms and infinite moods. My aim is to bring that inspiration and wonder to a wider audience."

Look out for a further exhibition of his photographs at the Oxo Gallery in December and visit his website to view his work and for details of limited edition prints and his exquisitely produced book, Natural Wonders: A Panoramic Vision.

Images (top to bottom): Sacred Falls, England; 'Zen', Antelope Canyon, USA; 'First light', Mount Fuji, Japan; Matterhorn Reflection, Switzerland; Dunstanburg Castle, England; 'China Dawn', Yangshuo, China; 'Divine Light', Alaska, USA; Moeraki Boulders, New Zealand; 'Creation', Imperial Point, Grand Canyon, USA. Below: the photographer at work.

All images: © 2006-2009 Jaspal Jandu Photography.

MISSING THEM ALREADY

Just a few of the things I shall miss when, in a couple of days, we head for home...

Menu boards...


Jolly little tourist cars...


Exotic flowers...


Lazy cats...


Kalymnian Salads...


Sunlight through fig-leaves...


And fresh-baked figs...


The view from the beach...

Exquisite sunrises...


And glorious sunsets...


But, of course, they will remain as memories...


Images: Brian Sibley & David Weeks © 2007-8

FREE WILLY

Jacques Yves Cousteau once said...

No aquarium, no tank in a marine land, however spacious it may be, can begin to duplicate the conditions of the sea. And no dolphin who inhabits one of those aquariums or one of those marine lands can be considered normal.

And that must, I guess, also apply to a fountain - even if it is decorated with - er - dolphins...


Image: © Brian Sibley, 2008

CONKERING THE MARKET

A post-script to today's blog about the Anne Frank Tree: the person living next door to the house where the tree awaits execution is selling one of its horse-chestnut on ebay.

The bidding on this item of entrepreneurial opportunism currently stands, at the time of writing (with 10 hours 23 minutes to go), at $10,240...

That's one hell of an expensive conker.

WOODMAN, SPARE THAT TREE!

A court today will be considering an appeal for an injunction against the felling of a tree...

Not any tree, but a horse-chestnut tree in Amsterdam that is over a 150 years old and sick to its roots with a fungus infection that is making it unsafe. So, why is anyone anxious to save it?

Quite simply because it stands in the garden of a house in Keizersgracht that is overlooked by the secret annex where a Jewish family by the name of Frank hid from the Nazis for two years during WWII and where the family's youngest daughter, Anne, would write a diary that made her name famous throughout the world...


When we were in Amsterdam, we visited the Anne Frank House on Prinsengracht. I wasn't agile enough to climb the ladder-like stairs into the secret annexe, but it is impossible to be in the building - despite the somewhat sanitized, visitor-friendly feel which is inevitable for a public museum receiving thousands of visitors every day - without feeling the weight of true history: not the great dealings of rulers and dictators or the terrors of the battlefield, but the small, ordinary drama of human history as seen through the eyes of a young and gifted child.

On 18 April 1944
, Anne Frank wrote:

April is glorious, not too hot and not too cold, with occasional light showers. Our chestnut tree is in leaf, and here and there you can already see a few small blossoms.



In a speech given in 1968, Anne's father, Otto Frank, spoke of the thoughts that came to his mind when he read Anne’s diary for the first time:
 "How could I have suspected that it meant so much to Anne to see a patch of blue sky, to observe the gulls during their flight and how important the chestnut tree was to her, as I recall that she never took an interest in nature. But she longed for it during that time when she felt like a caged bird. She only found consolation in thinking about nature..."

As, indeed, she did. On 13 May 1944
, just three months before the family were betrayed and their hiding place was revealed to the Nazis, Anne wrote:

Our chestnut tree is in full blossom. It is covered with leaves and is even more beautiful than last year.

Now, if the injunction fails, the tree will be felled and a small, some might say insignificant, piece of history will be lost.

There are plans, if it has to fall, to plant a healthy graft from the tree to keep alive the notion of freedom that it represented to Anne and - it could only happen in our modern age - the Anne Frank House Museum has 'planted' a Virtual Tree...

But neither, of course, can ever replace the tree itself...

23 February 1944:


The two of us looked out at the blue sky, the bare chestnut tree glistening with dew, the seagulls and other birds glinting with silver as they swooped through the air, and we were so moved and entranced that we couldn’t speak.



Image: Peter Dejong/AP Photo

__________________________________________________

Today is Closing Day for entries to our
CAPTION COMPETITION

AUTUMN IN AMSTERDAM

In Amsterdam the water is the mistress and the land the vassal. Throughout the city there are as many canals and drawbridges as bracelets on a Gypsy's bronzed arms.

- Felix Marti-Ibanez

Amsterdam is an embracingly friendly city: its tall, elegant, narrow houses could easily choose to look grand and austere but, instead, they lean very slightly forward in a quizzically humorous way and peer with many-windowed eyes across the canals at similarly attractive houses or, below, at the passerby on foot, bike and boat.

With autumn, the leaves on the trees along the canal banks are now turning yellow-gold, adding splashes of radiant light in defiance of occasional grey skies...



Travelling on the canals, you pass not only beneath the inquisitive gaze of those towering houses but also alongside the houseboats which line almost every meter of the waterways...


Here a child on a houseboat feeds a pair of swans, while his sister sits reading the diary of one of Amsterdam's iconic figures - Anne Frank...


And, finally, here's another, earlier, shot of that golden sunset I posted the other day - less dramatic, I admit, but more idyllic; perhaps, more Amsterdam...


Images: © Brian Sibley & David Weeks, 2007

OCTOBER COUNTRY

One of the most enticing opening passages of any novel in the library is that with which RAY BRADBURY begins his classic, Something Wicked This Way Comes...

First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys. Not that all months aren't rare. But there be good and bad, as the pirates say. Take September, a bad month: school begins. Consider August, a good month: school hasn't begun yet. July, well, July's really fine: there's no chance in the world for school. June, no doubting it, June's best of all, for the school doors spring wide and September's a billion years away.

But you take October, now. School's been on a month and you're riding easier in the reins, jogging along. You got time to think of the garbage you'll dump on old man Prickett's porch, or the hairy ape costume you'll wear to the YMCA on the last night of the month. And if it's around October twentieth and everything smoky-smelling and the sky orange and ash gray at twilight, it seems Halloween will never come in a fall of broomsticks and a soft flap of bedsheets around corners...

And here are some more words and pictures in praise of the season of autumn and, in particular, this rare month that has already amost blown away with the fallen leaves...

Bittersweet October. The mellow, messy, leaf-kicking, perfect pause between the opposing miseries of summer and winter.

- Carol Bishop Hipps

There is no season when such pleasant and sunny spots may be lighted on, and produce so pleasant an effect on the feelings, as now in October.

- Nathaniel Hawthorne

You ought to know that October is the first Spring month.

- Karel Capek

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.

- George Eliot

It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.

- P D James

Images: © Brian Sibley, 2007

OSTRICH-EYESED

Here's an Ostrich that we happened to encounter at a farm shop in Cambridge the other day...

Click on image to enlarge

Which prompts me to offer my readers a second chance to relish a salutary tale of mine about...

THE OSTRICH
WHO KEPT HIS HEAD DOWN

There was an Ostrich who was, perhaps, the most nervous creature of its kind. At the least provocation, the merest hint of alarm and the flimsiest cause for concern, he would thrust his head into the sand and stay there until he was sure, beyond any doubt that the coast was clear and the danger past.

He could often be seen - his neck, body and legs very much in evidence, but his head well and truly out of sight - long after the wildebeest stampede had galloped away in a cloud of dust or the big game hunters’ jeep had rattled off into the distance.

“Why do wait so long before showing your face?” asked one of the other ostriches.

“Well,” said the Ostrich who kept his head down, “one really cannot be too careful…”

“But---” began the Other Ostrich and then stopped short on hearing a low snarly-roar that suggested that a large predator was lurking nearby.

Instantly, the Other Ostrich made a dash for safety, knowing that, with a head start, he could out-run anything on four paws.

The Ostrich who kept his head down, on the other hand, poked his head in the sand and pretended that, since he could see nothing, he could not be seen.

The Jaguar, for that is who was doing the stalking, sat for some time washing his paws and looking at the exposed haunches of the Ostrich. Eventually, however, he decided that, without the chase, the kill would be boring, so he wandered off to look for an antelope or two.

The Ostrich who kept his head down, kept his head down for several hours, congratulating himself on having eluded certain death.

As a result, he failed to notice great banks of black storm clouds rolling in across the veldt or hear the rumble of approaching thunder. In fact, he knew nothing about anything until - with a single dazzlingly searing flash - he was struck by lightning and fried to a crisp.

MORAL: The person who said, “What you don’t know can’t hurt you,” was another idiot who got struck by lightning.

Images: Brian Sibley & David Weeks, © 2007

You will find other, similarly disturbing tales (for which I am inexplicably unable to find a publisher!), on my blog-site, Likely Stories.

________________________________________________

LATE BULLETIN: ANGIOGRAM UPDATE!

Yesterday's hospital visit turned out to be a bit of a fiasco since they didn't succeed in getting the catheter in through the wrist... Two doctors tried valiantly, but the artery kept going into spasms and they ultimately failed. It was a bit traumatic and really very painful and, after eight hours in King's Hospital, I'm unfortunately no further advanced --- other than having a bruised and aching arm...

Also, I now have to reschedule the procedure and next time they will attempt to go in through the groin... :-(

However, thanks for all the various expressions of concern and good wishes - I'll let you know when you can express then again!! :-)

BUGGED!

Every now again, somebody tells you something that suddenly puts your own woes and sorrows into perpective and you say, "Well, at least I'm not as badly off as X!" or, in my case, at least I'm not as badly off as my Guest Blogger today, Glasgow-based journalist and writer, SHARON MAIL, who recounts a tale with, unfortunately, a bit of bite in it...

"FLEAS RELEASE ME, LET ME GO..."

"Britain is in the grip of a record outbreak of ticks and fleas – and the wet summer and recent mild weather is to blame." Metro, Sunday Oct 14, 2007

IT'S NICE TO BE POPULAR and I generally get on well with people. However, my popularity has reached epidemic proportions and I’m far from happy with it.

A few weeks ago, following a working visit to Auschwitz, I got what I thought was a cluster of midge bites on my leg. The following week, another small group on an arm. Two weeks later, they were still itching and suddenly I found myself with a couple of dozen new ones on my legs. The next morning, about the same number again appeared on the top half of my body and many of the ones on my legs had turned to blisters. "Go to the doctor," everyone said.

So I did. And what did the locum medic say? "Gosh, I know it’s not much help to you, but this looks really interesting." After much humming and hawing he ruled out bites or shingles (because of the volume and spread) and chickenpox – which I’ve already had twice, thanks very much. His gut feeling was that they were the manifestation of a viral infection.

That night, after clocking the latest crop of red blotches to appear, I saw a tiny black speck – shaped like a grain of rice – on the white blouse I’d just taken off. Suddenly it started to move …. and then it hopped! I lost it – and then found it elsewhere on the blouse – or perhaps it was another of the blessed little blighters. I grabbed a tissue and squeezed for dear life – it kept moving. I squeezed harder – it tried to escape. I managed to flush it down the loo.
The truth had at last dawned on me – I wasn’t suffering from some peculiar manifestation of an infection. No, I had fleabitis!

I’ve bunged the bed linen on a high temperature wash and hoovered and sprayed my bedroom. Let us spray that I’ve exterminated the little sods – but somehow I doubt it.

I don’t know where they came from – we’ve got a chinchilla, but they don’t get fleas. Perhaps it was when I was in London recently at the Gielgud Theatre watching the Scottish play. When Banquo uttered his last words, "Fly, good Fleance, fly, fly, fly!" some little darlings may have misheard and - thinking the instruction was "Fly, good fleas and fly, fly, fly!" - managed to hop onto me!

All I would like is for them to stop treating me like a gourmet meal (I must now be listed in the Fleagon Ronay Guide) but I’ve no desire to enter The Guinness Book of Records for flea bites and blisters obtained!


Rotten luck, Sharon! And, from latest news received, I gather the search and the struggle go on... Keep up the fight and may cleanliness ultimately prevail! Any helpful hints from readers will doubtless be appreciated...

Meanwhile, Sharon will just have to take comfort from the fact that many others have suffered before her - including at least one of our great poets...

THE FLEA

by
John Donne

MARK but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is;
It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.
Thou know'st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead;
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pamper'd swells with one blood made of two;
And this, alas! is more than we would do.

O stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where we almost, yea, more than married are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is.
Though parents grudge, and you, we're met,
And cloister'd in these living walls of jet.
Though use make you apt to kill me,
Let not to that self-murder added be,
And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.

Cruel and sudden, hast thou since
Purpled thy nail in blood of innocence?
Wherein could this flea guilty be,
Except in that drop which it suck'd from thee?
Yet thou triumph'st, and say'st that thou
Find'st not thyself nor me the weaker now.
'Tis true; then learn how false fears be;
Just so much honour, when thou yield'st to me,
Will waste, as this flea's death took life from thee.

And if, dear reader, you still not feling even slightly ITCHY, then maybe you should read my tale of The Ambitious Flea.

TRUE or FALSE?

It's always hard to know with the Internet, isn't? Fascinating fact of foolish fallacy?

Every day, in addition to our regular diet of spam, we receive funny stories, touching messages, and incredible photographs many of which, we are told, are absolutely genuine and, what's more, carry with them special bonuses in the way of unspecified luck or unidentified miracles --- providing we forward them to at least 10 of our friends within the next five seconds in order to similarly clutter up their mail boxes!

Two recent - equally dubious - images have come my way...

The first, which came as part of a Microsoft PowerPoint slideshow, depicted a lakeside rock formation that - with the mirror reflection in the water - looked like a mother and child at prayer....


According to the accompanying text...

This picture shows a rock on a sea in Birmania, it is only possible to see this once a year with a special angle of the sun and special light conditions. Bend you head to the left to see how spectacular it is.

Hmmm, I thought, even before I started receiving e-mails with variant texts that either question or endorsed the picture's authenticity.

So, the truth?

Well, not too surprisingly, it turns out to be a piece of art: the work of the Korean illustrator, Kim Jae-hong...



So, next time you get a copy of this image, you can only send it on to ten or more other people if you also promise to tell them the truth about it! Otherwise, something terrible will happen to you! I won't say what, but just remember Pinocchio...

Now, here's another photograph that, this time, at least looked like a photograph...


However, it also looked like a photograph that had undergone a serious amount of Adobe Photoshoping. Allegedly taken in Montana, the supposition is that the eagle swoops in, grabs the fox in middle of its having a snack and carries him off for a real dinner!

The truth?

The picture was snapped in South Finland by Finnish photographer, Pekka Komi, as part of a genuinely amazing series of shots in which the fox and the eagle haggle over who's getting lunch...


And - as the final shot reveals - the fox actually lived to feast another day.


Pekka Komi's pictures can be viewed here.

Interestingly, on one blog-site, Field Notes, where the photo was being discussed, many people continued to maintain that it had been 'doctored' even after the sequence shown above had been referenced. Here's a typical response...

Looks fake as hell to me... and any old web sight cant conferm [sic x 3] it either... The position of the fox... the eagle... size relation... it seems pretty sketchy to me...

"WHAT is Truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer," wrote Francis Bacon in his essay On Truth...

Nowadays, of course, one would simple tell Pilate that the first thing he should do is check out Hoax Slayer: my source for the verifications above and a regular and invaluable port of call when surfing the dangerous waters of the www...