So, that’s it for another year, and the end of the road for this particular blog. There will be another, at a different WordPress address, coincident with the start of the Chinese New Year on 31 January 2014…
All that remains for me now though is to say thank you to a few loyal visitors to this site over the past twelve months, specifically to gpcox, Frivolous Monsters, and to my sister Chris…a very Happy New Year to you all :).
Excuse me, Dear Reader, there’s something I need to get off my chest, some detritus left there by gale force winds and torrential rain…
Ah, that feels better; that was some audio therapy from a Welsh band called Budgie, from their 1972 album, ‘Squawk’, the track being ‘Stranded’, and an epitome for the frustration of being marooned on Portsea Island over Christmas, when I should have been celebrating the festival with family in faraway Kent…
But never mind, let’s take some positives from it all; it at least provided me with an opportunity to watch a few films I otherwise wouldn’t have watched, including ‘The Bishop’s Wife’, ‘The Red Shoes’ and ‘Love Actually’, while today I wandered down to Canoe Lake in Southsea, and enjoyed a ramble along the seafront under beautiful blue skies, to Southsea Castle and the nearby D-Day Museum…
Southsea seafront near Canoe Lake…
Canoe Lake has plentiful swans, and here’s one of them…
And in homage to ‘The Red Shoes’, with Moira Shearer in all her Technicolor beauty, here are a couple of swans enacting pas de deux in ‘Le Lac des cygnes’… 😉
And here is one final photo of a swan on this photoblog, which now has less than a week to run…
Wandering westwards along the seafront, the wonderful South Parade Pier soon comes into view…
Promenading (and jogging) along the seafront is a popular activity among both locals and visitors…
There’s very obviously some lens flare here to the right of the pier, but I thought I’d post it nonetheless…
Wasn’t doing any business today, but it’s a lot more popular in the summer months
Nearing Southsea Castle, with its lighthouse, and visible in the distance are both the Naval War Memorial and at the extreme right, the Spinnaker Tower in Portsmouth Harbour…
The Castle Lighthouse, done in sepia…
In front of the D-Day Museum, near Southsea Castle, are a couple of restored Second World War tanks…
A British Churchill Crocodile tank …
A Canadian Sherman Grizzly tank…
From the D-Day Museum, I wandered up to Palmerston Road, for a pint in The Lord Palmerston (Wetherspoon’s) pub, before heading on to Debenhams, to have a look at the Boxing Day Sale items. I didn’t buy anything, but this rather appealed…
‘Nancy’ one of the ‘Pretty Ladies’ figurines in the Royal Doulton series…
As did this Christmas gift from my boss at work, which I drank this evening…Cheers!…and just two more posts to go :)…
A Lakeland Pale Ale, ‘Cocker Hoop’ from Jennings Brewery
Gerrard Street is the main street in London’s Chinatown, bustling with tourists and visitors most weekends of the year, so this solitary erhu player, photographed on Sunday afternoon of last week in Gerrard Street, is somewhat untypical, but here he is anyway, one of the very few erhu buskers on the streets of London…
Busking with an erhu, in Gerrard Street, Chinatown, London…
On Tuesday afternoon, I was down at Portsmouth Hard, supping a pint in The Lady Hamilton pub (where incidentally, I chanced upon Adam Ant in the bar around three years ago; he was staying in bed and breakfast there at the time) as I awaited a coach to London’s Victoria Coach station at half-four. Following is a photo of HMS Warrior I took that afternoon; it’s a ship that I never tire of looking at…
HMS Warrior, the world’s first ironclad warship, 1860, at Portsmouth Hard
The trip to London was to take me to a gig in the Purcell Room on South Bank, part of the London Jazz Festival this year, and specifically to a concert by Christine Tobin, singing The Songs of Leonard Cohen. I very rarely buy jazz records, but I’ve seen a lot of live jazz in London over the years, including a few years ago, gigs by both Christine Tobin and Huw Warren, who accompanied her on accordion (and piano) on Tuesday evening.
First up on Tuesday night in the Purcell Room though, as support act, was the Georgia Mancio Trio, who performed half a-dozen songs, including a version of David Bowie’s ‘Life on Mars’, sung with a Brazilian Portuguese lyric…and there was also a song by Simon and Garfunkel ;)…
Georgia Mancio Trio, with Gareth Lockrane on flute, and Geoff Gascoyne on bass
Christine Tobin’s set consisted almost entirely of covers of Leonard Cohen’s songs, material for an album she’s releasing next spring called ‘A Thousand Kisses Deep’. (The only exception to Cohen songs on Tuesday was a John Martyn song from the 1970s, ‘Go Down Easy’ which she did as an encore). It was interesting though to hear Leonard Cohen’s songs interpreted in a jazz context, and the highlight of the evening for me was her take on ‘Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye’ from Cohen’s 1967 album ‘The Songs of Leonard Cohen’.
Christine Tobin, in monochrome
Christine Tobin, in glorious redheaded colour
I got back to Portsmouth around midnight that evening (having endured the dubious pleasure of some inebriated teens or twenty-somethings, misbehaving on the homebound train, but mercifully they got out at Woking) and I took the following day off, to accompany my partner to couple of meetings she had in Portsmouth and Southsea that day. All the following photos were taken in Albert Road, Southsea on that Wednesday…
Indepedent Republic of Albert Road (Southsea)
‘Bored of Southsea’ is a shop on the other side of the street….
A row of shops on the south side of Albert Road
Above ‘The Vaults’ pub, on the north side of Albert Road
SoundZ record shop, on the south side of the street
One of several different Albert Road banners in the street…
One of the advantages of having a partner who runs her own shop, is that, in return for some shop-window advertising, she gets complimentary tickets for itinerant acts such as circuses that pitch up on Southsea Common during the summer months. So it was, we found ourselves in the Big Top of Gerry Cottle’s WOW! Circus this week, being entertained by clowns, illusionists, jugglers, trapeze artists and the like, and it was a very enjoyable way to spend a couple of hours. Alas, my camera batteries ran out very early on, so there are only a couple of photos from inside the Big Top :(. Never mind, I’ll make sure I’m better prepared next time ;).
First though here, I want to post up a few pictures from the ‘Lions Heart Mural 2007, In memory of Rachel Lyons’, on an electricity substation building on Southsea Common…
Rachel Lyons died in December 2006…
…unexpectedly at the age of 26…
…and was an amateur artist who helped design this mural, and hence its subsequent dedication to her…
And so, on to the Circus…:)
Entry wasn’t entirely free for the pair of us; we were obliged to buy a programme each, at three quid a time…
There were a nominal 50 acts performed in 100 minutes…
There was a fifteen minute interval, during which my partner nipped off, with a child-like spontaniety, to buy us some candy floss…must have been the influence of all those excited kids around us 😉
The final act was the Hegyi Brothers from Hungary, performing stunts on the rotating Wheel of Death…scary stuff…
Yes, we agreed it was a great couple of hours’ entertainment, as we wandered home together beneath the evening’s full moon :).
I’m not really into cars…but occasionally one catches my eye…like this one in North Finchley High Road last Saturday morning…
A figurine and keying…Southsea yesterday
A friendly horse in Cartwright Drive, Titchfield, at lunchtime today…
Looking towards Gosport High Street, contre-jour, early evening today…
In a Gosport flowerbed, by the waterfront…
Gosport waterfront, with Portsmouth beyond…
Another view, with the Gosport Ferry, ‘Queen of Portsmouth’ crossing the water…
By Haslar Marina, Gosport, with a very relaxed fisherman ;)…
HMS Haslar, in Haslar Marina
Touching tribute… on a waterfront bench near Haslar Marina
‘The Gosport Queen’…after 6.30 pm, only one ferry is used for the crossing to Portsmouth, four trips an hour. During the day, it’s two ferries, and eight trips an hour…
All the above were taken in the past week in Titchfield in Hampshire, during lunchtime walks to get some fresh air…whereas all of the following were taken today in Portsmouth/Southsea and London. The first is of Guildhall Square in Portsmouth at midday, with the Guildhall being watched over by Queen Victoria…
Portsmouth Guildhall, looking resplendent in the late spring sunshine…
The next is of a book I bought in the Adelphi second-hand bookshop in Albert Road in Southsea early this afternoon. It cost me two pounds fifty, and is a 1938 reprint of a book originally published in 1937. It is the narrative, with paintings and poetry, of a Chinese artist living in London in the 1930s, recording an expedition to the English Lake District, taken in part to escape the London fogs, and also to reconnect with landscapes reminiscent of his home in China…
The Silent Traveller: A Chinese Artist in Lakeland, by Chiang Yee.
From Albert Road, I wandered down to Canoe Lake on Southsea seafront, aware that a procession of naked cyclists would be making its way from the naturist beach at nearby Eastney, along Southsea seafront and beyond. It was one of a series of World Naked Bike Rides taking place at various venues this summer, and it seemed like an event worth recording for posterity here (That said, I’m being very discreet in tagging these photos, restricting the tags to one only, ‘naturism’ ;)). Anyway, here they are, and if nothing else, it was at least a lovely day for such an event…
So here they come, along the seafront road from Eastney…
Unsurprisingly maybe, there were a minority of women cyclists participating, but there were some brave enough to take part…:)
Methinks the character in red here looks distinctly over-dressed ;)…
At nearby Canoe Lake in Southsea, among the attractions is ‘water walking’, a bit of a misnomer, but that’s what it’s called…
And this is what it means…
Further attractions in Southsea this summer…
German fans in Trafalgar Square, prior to this evening’s Champions League Final at Wembley…and a great match it was too :)…
A living statue, north of Trafalgar Square…
Union Flags in Leicester Square…
Finally, close to home, a couple of pictures taken in Whetstone, London N20…
A Weekend Diary 