I spent most of the day tidying and gardening. I did go to the supermarket in the afternoon, though, and bought a box of 100 bulbs for bee and butterfly friendly flowers. I should have ordered indigenous flower species online, but it was easy because they were there. I just have to find the time to plant them now.
In the evening I mended one of my daughter’s shoes and read about flash photography.
It was photography day today, so I thought I’d crack on and photograph a church looked after by the Churches Conservation Trust. I chose St Mary’s at Chickney in Essex. It’s not far from Stansted Airport and about 40 mins drive from me.
The church is down a single-lane track that leads to a country mansion, and it is enclosed my trees. I parked by the gates to the mansion and had the church to myself all afternoon. The only visitor was the red-faced local toff, who I took to be the owner of the mansion. The first I knew was when two Labradors came bounding into the church. That was a shock. I’ve never seen dogs in a church before. They came sniffing around me in a friendly and excited way, and the toff came in after them with a cheery “Hello!” He strode down the the altar and back, looking up an down as if he’d lost something, when I think he was just checking nothing was damaged or missing.
“I’m just taking some photos,” I said. “If they work out, I thought about sending them to the Conservation Trust.”
“Oh, very good,” he said. He finished his quick scour around the church and departed with, “Well, I’ll leave you in peace, then.”
So the afternoon I could haul my tripod about and take pictures from different angles. The light was a challenge, since the sun was intense. The trees outside the church cast a camouflage pattern of shadows on the walls and tower, and inside intense streak of light crossed the floor and glimmered on the woodwork. It was horrible to deal with. I got one picture of the outside of the church when briefly the sun went in, and inside I put the camera on a 10 second timer, pressed the shutter and then rushed to the brightest window with a circular diffusing screen to soften the most intense light.
At the end of the afternoon, I walked round the north side of the church to see if there was something to photograph there. I heard this intermittent beeping, and wondered if I’d set off a burglar alarm. Then I realised it was a couple of metal detectorists in the field next to the church. The church dates from Anglo-Saxon times, so presumably they hoped to find something antique. I don’t think the church was ever in a village, though, so the likelihood was perhaps small.
Back home I went through the photos and edited them. Here are some things I learned:
Spend the early part of the morning cleaning the dishwasher, in preparation for the dishwasher repair man. He came round with his son (I presume), and after a few minutes the man said, “I’ve got bad news for you. There’s nothing wrong with it.” How many times had a switched it on and off and it failed every time? Yet when they turned it on it worked.
They charged me a £68 call-out charge and said, “You’d better just put it on a cleaning cycle. It was probably just a bit of gunk that got stuck in the pipes. What happens is, it sticks in the pipes then if you don’t use it for a while it dries out and shrinks, and the next time you turn it on it flushes out the pipes.” So, feeling crestfallen at having paid £68 for nothing, I put it on a cleaning cycle.
Just as they were going out the door the man stopped and listened. “It’s not working, ” he said. Apparently, if you want to know what’s wrong with dishwashers you have to learn how to listen to them. He noticed it was wrong, and sure enough the cleaning cycle had stopped. Each time they tried again it stopped. I felt relieved – that £68 was finally working for itself. “It could be the filter,” they said. “We’ll have to take it away and investigate. All the workings are in the bottom of these things, so you have to tip them upside down to get at them.”
Then to Newmarket to see PV, who was asking me what I’d done in the last month. It’s almost a month since the end of my contract. I said when I was working it was like I’d been spinning in a tornado, like Dorothy, and although I’d been dumped to the ground now I was still disorientated. It was a readjustment period, the first month. I’m still disappointed at how little I’ve done, though, despite PV telling me she thought I’d done a lot.
Then back home for my French lesson, where I wasn’t on form at all. There are some days when my brain just isn’t working, and this was one of them. I kept stopping to think of the word or tense, and my mind was blank. Sometimes it happens like that, and other days the words babble along like a stream in the Lakes, feeling perfectly loquacious.
Dropped the children off at school for 8am – the youngest was going on a school trip – then went printing. Today’s teacher was a bit dull and talked for the first hour. I struggled to pay attention, and rather wished I was at home in bed. The teacher kept changing her mind about what we were going to do, and instead of gathering us round for demonstrations, she just stood at the benches rolling ink and shouting instructions to us at the table. She did some of her own prints in the afternoon as well, rather than focussing on tutoring us.
Like the cardboard printing technique, I didn’t understand quickly what mono printing was best suited to. She demonstrated a technique where she rolled the ink over Japanese paper with flat objects underneath, like leaves and card cutouts. I liked the images she got, but she said, “Well, let’s start. I don’t think we need to do that Japanese paper technique. Let’s just get on with the other monoprints.”
I had a go at the Japanese paper technique anyway, but learned you need to have simple objects with a clear shape. I put lots of objects with subtle textures under my first effort, like strips of linen and dried moss and a feather. It turned out an inky mush. The second effort wasn’t much better, but I liked some of the marks and feel I could have carried on with this technique
I started with a doodle, as the teacher instructed, but I’m not comfortable drawing from my head, unless it’s abstract. I’m just not good at it. I did a cup of tea, because that’s what I felt like I needed at the time. Not a motivation for great art. I battled away to get a decent image, and these were the best:
Then I started on what I understand to be monoprints, where you place objects on paper and print. These worked better:
All this is not very art school, where you choose a topic you’re interested, like ageing or nature conservation or whatever, and explore ways to express what you want to say about it. Here it was, “Throw a few things together and see if you can make them look pretty.” When you do that, you produce an output that you can pay as little attention to as a graphic design. It’s just a “Oh, that looks nice”, then move on.
Incessant rain all day. Spent the morning catching up on this journal then finished off the re-install of Windows. I wanted to go out and try Haverhill Library, to see if it was better than Cambridge, but instead had a think about how the first three weeks have gone. Here are a few notes:
Went for a run in the evening. It’s so important to keep up exercise, to boost the ebergy levels.
Another trip to the Job Centre today. It was much busier this time, with most of the desks occupied and a hubbub of voices. I sat on a sofa near my job coach Penny. It smelled of disinfectant and I could hear little phrases from the conversations: : “What I’ll do…so actually…Wednesday? Are you able to make that?…then just attach it to an email and send it to my by Friday…yes, Thursday you’re at college.”
A man came out of the interview office in front of me. He had a shaved head and tattoos round his neck. “Have a lovely day,” he said to his coach.
“And you, my love. I’ll keep my eye out and see you in a couple of weeks.”
My coach was running fifteen minutes late. She was talking quietly to the young man in front of her. “You’re not living by your own agenda,” I heard her say. I wondered what that meant.
A child cried out, “There’s a spider! Look, mummy, there’s a spider! A big spider!”
Then it was my turn.
“Sorry about that,” said Penny. “He wanted to talk to someone.”
We chatted about the weather (it’s awful) and the traffic on the M11, whilst she put the stamp on my letter and organised the next appointment.
Now it was time to try places to work in Cambridge. First up it was Waterstones. It was pretty quiet but the internet was patchy and a woman had struck up a conversation with a couple of South African men on a table across from her. They were all talking loudly, so I thought, “Let’s try the library. The internet will be better anyway.”
So I tried the “quiet floor” first, and sat between two book stacks, where there was a plug socket for my laptop. I started downloading and extracting Grav and noticed the escalator was just behind me, and was actually pretty load. It was like sitting next to a factory machine. A man plonked himself in a chair in the next row of stacks and started chatting on his phone, then a phone rang in the stack on the other side. The second man seemed more self-conscious and only talked a couple of minutes. In a language I didn’t recognise, the first man just get rabbiting on and taking swigs out of his bottle of pop.
I thought, “Sod this! Maybe it’s quieter upstairs.”
Upstairs there were more tables that were mostly occupied by young students, maybe sixth-formers, who were just chatting to each other. An American chap was talking loudly and unselfconsciously so the whole floor could hear him. I found a desk at the far end and carried on my download. I felt rattled, though. Since when do people just chat and eat and drink in a library?
Then a couple sat at the table behind me and began talking as loudly and carefree as if they were sitting in a park. There was a funny smell, too, so I though, “Forget it – I’ll move on.” When I got up I realised the couple were eating chicken nuggets and chips. Thus the smell. I felt shaken. Is this is what the country has come to: you go to a library to eat chicken and chips and chat?
I found a quieter area further along, where I looked at some local history books that were on sale for a pound each. There were lots of memoires of local people. It’s sad that this knowledge will be lost, because I’ve no doubt they’re out of print, but I can’t store any more books. I hope they’re on the internet archive.
A woman brought her two children in specifically so they could sit down and eat sandwiches. They were quiet, well-behaved children, though.
I went back to the quiet floor where I did find a quiet table, but by now I was unsettled. Even people on the quiet floor were drinking (despite the signs forbidding it). I read a few letters by Noel Coward then headed back home.
I tried to make up for lost time by getting a local Grav install to work. I wanted to use Visual Studio Code with it’s PHP server plugins, but none would serve the site properly, then I tried XAMMP, EasyPHP and finally Docker. I wanted to set up Grav on a virtual host in a local server, but I kept running into permissions issues. In the end, late at night, I’d installed so much software that I thought it was easier to clean the PC by resetting it. I left it going overnight and went to bed demoralised.
Spent most of the day dismantling a sofa to take to the tip. We offered it for free on Freecycle and the local Facebook, but no-one wanted it. We can’t take it to the charity shop because it doesn’t meet modern fire safety requirements. So I thought I’d do my bit for recycling and take it apart so I could recycle the wood, metal and fabric. What a horrible job.
It was glued and stapled together with a million staples – really, one every couple of centimetres. At first I started pulling the staples out but then I just started cutting the cloth off them. Finally, I just got an electric saw and cut through the main cross pieces and bundled wood, cloth and staples all together for the tip. I did manage to separate the springs and a few squares of cloth, so I can recycle those. Next time I need to get rid of a sofa I’ll just get a chainsaw and saw it in half and take it to the tip.
Things aren’t built for recycling, that’s the problem. No-one thinks, “What will happen to this once it’s reached end of life? How will people reuse it or recycle it?” I’m sure they could have used screws instead of staples: screws through a toothed bar to fix the cloth on the wood frame, and screws though clips to keep the bed of springs to the frame. Then you could have just whizzed round with an electric screwdriver to take the thing apart. As it was, hands were covered in cuts from the half pulled out staples, and I don’t want to try recycling a sofa again!
In the lining of the sofa I found fragments that had fallen down there over the years: a two-pence piece, a twenty-pence piece, some red paper clips, a fridge magnet of a cartoon character and a small green stalk that I think used to be the trunk of a palm tree. It came with a little doll who was sitting in a tropical garden, I think with a fountain and a sun lounger. I don’t remember the details of it, but IO felt sad. This was the sofa we held the children on as babies, that we read them stories on when they were older, and now I was sawing it up. It was heartbreaking, really, realising how quickly time goes, and how quickly age and death are approaching.
So how did the third week go anyway?
So let’s see. A big theme is how much time I’ve spent getting computers and software to work. Imagine if I’d spent all that time drawing – I’d be brilliant by now! I definitely need to cut down on the laptop time, and choose more robust web technologies.
I was anxious to finish this Little Thurlow project off so I drove over there in the hope it would be open and empty. A car was parked and a woman was in the churchyard, though. She was heading back to get something out of the boot of her car. I guessed she was a local who was decorating the church so I wandered up the paths nearby to see if I could get a photo of the church in its landscape, which I couldn’t. The trees and big hedges blocked the view from all angles.
When I got back to the car, I found the woman was still there with the boot open. She was with a man and there were having a drink from a flask. I thought this was a bit odd if they were locals but decided to move on to Great Bradley until they had gone. I assumed they were doing something in the church.
Great Bradley was quiet so I took some photos from the outside. I’d taken my 550D with it’s 10-18mm lens, which allowed me to get a full view of the church even when space was restricted, in this case by a barn wall. Then I went inside and had just got my tripod set up when there was a rattling at the door nearest the road. Someone was trying to get in, and would be round the porch side in a minute. I hurried put my stuff back and in came the couple I’d just seen in Thurlow.
They’d come from an Essex coastal town (I forget which) and said they like coming to Suffolk because the churches are open. “In Essex they’re always closed,” the woman said. “It’s the insurance.”
They’re members of the Church Conservation Trust and their hobby is “church hopping”. They told me that’s the correct term, though they also take in garden centres along the way. We talked for quite a while about old churches, garden centres and schools (they have grandchildren), and the man showed me his Google Map with all the churches on they haven’t visited. As they visit a church, they take it off the map. These people are professionals.
I felt I should leave them to it, so I headed back to Little Thurlow and took some extra pictures there.
I edited them when I got back home, and sent them to the Church Roof Repair Fund. It was interesting to compare the pictures taken by the 6D and the 550D. The 550D is a lower-end and older camera. The difference in image is subtle but noticeable.
I won’t dump all the pictures here, but here are a couple:
Friday is photography day, which reminds me I didn’t mention some exciting news from this week. I sent some of my photos of Little Thurlow church to their roof repair fund people. I said if they were any use for awareness or fundraising, they were welcome to use them. I didn’t want any money or credit.
The lower roof along the side of the church is covered in plastic sheets because someone stole the lead from it. Don’t even ask me what needs to go through your mind to do a thing like that. What do these people value in life? Anyway, it’s going to cost a lot to repair (£22,000), so I donated online and sent that email to them.
I got a reply saying they thought the pictures were “superb” and that they did have some pictures, but not of that quality. This was flattering, and made me think about how I could do something useful with these pictures. I went onto the Churches Conservation Trust website, and noticed most of the pictures of the churches there were poor quality. What a wheeze that could be: going from deserted church to deserted church and taking pictures of them! I looked up some of the nearest churches, and will take photos of a couple to send to the Trust. Let’s see if they will be interested.
Meanwhile, I also remembered I had a book I bought years ago in a second-hand bookshop: “Photographing Historic Buildings”, published in 1983. I started reading that.
In the afternoon I went to St Peter’s at Little Thurlow again, so I could take some more pictures to send to them. I just felt I could improve the quality of my first set. Anyway, the church was locked, so I looked at my map and drove on to Great Bradley church.
This is down a lane outside the village, and from the outside looks dismal. The walls are rendered, and the render has browned and cracked. I wasn’t hopeful of a pretty church inside, but was surprised. Firstly, the entrance porch is on the opposite side to the road, and it’s a pretty red brick Tudor porch with lost of recesses like a dovecote. Then the doorway into the church is Norman, with spiralling pillars and sculptures of heads on top. Inside, the church is plain, pretty and very quiet. At the back there is a fireplace where the bread for Communion used to be baked, which now has moss in it and a crack that accommodates a small frog.
Then I carried on down the lane to St Margaret of Antioch church, which I must say is remote. It’s such an obscure, single-track road. If you’d been brought up in London, you’d never think such places existed. The church was locked, so I’ll try another day.
In the evening, I did an experiment to see which produced most noise in an image: a long shutter speed or a high ISO. I tried with both my Canon 6D and 550D. In both cases, it’s the ISO. If I keep the ISO at 200 I can have a shutter speed of a few seconds and not see any noise.
French lesson this morning and my teacher says I should write a damning review for that laptop seller. I still feel uneasy about it, but I guess she’s right.
Then to Hinxton to meet up with VWD, but unfortunately we only had 45 minutes because someone had put a meeting in her calendar for 1pm and we met at 12:15. Things seemed to be going well, and we’ll meet another time.
Then at 2pm it was a long meeting with HP, when we discussed how she might make the website for her travel agency. I think we concluded that Grav plus shared hosting was the best option. I set up Grav on a live server for her to play around with, and decide if she likes. It took a while for me to configure the admin plugin so the text wasn’t grey against a grey background! It’s amazing that so many developers seem oblivious to accessibility. I might create an issue about it in the Grav GitHub repo.
The timetable is not going so well: I didn’t do any art on Tuesday (laptop problems), and I didn’t do writing today (socialising and websites). Still, I like the idea of having a guide of what to focus on each day, even if I need to go off-piste.
Incessant and heavy rain this evening. When I picked the children up, the road was a continuous flood between Balsham and Horseheath. I had my windscreen wipers on their fastest setting and was driving at 30mph.