Hastings and what you find in a typical British sea town

Seagull

I went for a photography meetup on Sunday and the trip went to Hasting. Hasting is a about 2 hours from London by train and while it is an ok place with cliffs, fishing boats and of course the sea, I still prefer Eastbourne (Beachy Head) and Brighton.

The weather was perfect (my face is still red) but somehow I wasn’t 100% motivated to take photos so they are not all great. But I am very happy with the above young seagull photo. I love the colours.

I think in the end the theme for me became taking photos of typical things on a British beach.

So we have seagulls, women in bikini (and I will leave it up to you if that is a good thing or not …), men putting up windscreens, deck chairs, swan water bikes and families with fish and chips (and the man wearing a t-shirt saying – “If found – return to the pub” ).

Surprisingly enough Hastings also has two Funiculars.

See all photos here.

Weirdest photo of the day must be this bear:

The saddest bear in the world

It looks incredibly sad and depressed. Understandable if you have a hole in your belly and are attached to a red tractor.

Cameras, cancelled moves and the coast

Just a small practical anouncement: I am not moving to Notting Hill. I removed the previous post, I am not getting into any details, it is just not going to happen. Not now anyway, I will keep my eyes open for other chances.

I bought a new pocket camera, a Panasonic T4. It replaces my Canon Ixus, a camera I have never been happy about. The Panasonic is small enough to fit in your pocket, has 10x zoom and I have been giving it a test drive the last couple of days.

Both in London, and today on a trip to the Eastbourne coast. It did remarkably well. The built in image stabilization really works well and I haven’t been able to get shaky pictures yet. That’s something new after the Canon. Click on the images for the full size!

St. James's Park
Daily morning tube station on my way to work

Umbrellas
And the new art work in front of the Channel 4 building. I like the colourful umbrellas. They had to repair it after a windy day, some of the umbrellas didn’t survive.

Tiny People
Low tide near Beachy Head with two tiny people walking around on the sand. Looks a bit like the fjords in Norway from here.

Beachy Head light house
Still one of my favourite lighthouses in the UK

Beachy Head light house
because of it’s great location

Beachy Head light house
in front of the white cliffs (Spot more tiny people on the top of the cliffs)

Beachy Head light house
and in the water.

Off to Ireland

My bag is packed and I am half in bed typing this. I will leave for Ireland tomorrow, flying from Heathrow to Cork where I will be picked up. From there we will drive to Coornagillagh (Kerry).

It is a very quiet area on the south west coast, 4 houses and a pub, that kind of quiet. There is no internet connection and there won’t be any computers near either (so no response to emails for a while). But there will be good company, two dogs, books, notebooks and pens and loads of rom-com DVD’s. Oh, and ScraBill.

I think it is going to be good. I will be back in London on Monday the 22nd of September.

Be good while I am gone.

42 (+ 2 days)

Devon Cream Tea in the Wayside Cafe

It’s really not bad to spend your 42nd birthday with your best friend in a cafe in Widecombe-In-The-Moor having a cream tea that looked as good as this and tasted as good too.

We also visited Princetown which is known for the prison. And if you have seen Lucky Break (which of course you have, as Bill is in it) then you might recognize the prison. Lucky Break has partly been shot in Dartmoor Prison.

In Princetown I had my first Knickerbocker Glory ever (good experience) in a cafe built in their old police station.

And we also visited Exmouth which is a lovely town on the coast. And Budleigh which is an even lovelier small town on the coast with a pebbled beach and red cliffs in stead of the white chalky ones. Most importantly here though is that they sell the best ice cream I have tasted in Britain so far.

My birthday was perfect, and my weekend was too.

Last year I was hoping that the year ahead would have me make my short film. I did not quite manage to pull that off but I am still quite confident that SweetArts will be shot in October this year.

Weymouth, Portland Bill, Durdle Door

Dogs in the rain
The view from my B&B room in Weymouth Saturday morning around 8am (yes zoom lens and a room with sea view very close to the beach). It didn’t look very promising so we headed to a cafe for a coffee and the Saturday Guardian. I think the dogs are more depressed because of the ridiculous jackets they are wearing than because of the rain.

A couple of hours later …

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Fess up Friday and 4 more

  • It’s popping up everywhere now, and it is intriguing. Feed your feed (or just a stack of words) into Wordle and see how beautiful words can be. (Unfortunately the page won’t let you save it as an image, but you can save it as PDF and blow it up and put it on a t-shirt. Or something. Actually I might go and do that. Or on moo cards.

    The words above are words from my feed, which means that these are recently written words on this weblog.

  • Let’s get the fessing out of the way then. I have not written anything this week. But I have worked hard and serious and determined on the pre production of my short film. More about that later, but I now know that it will take about 5 days to shoot. Which is a lot!
  • The weekend will again be a coastal one. At 5.30pm I will take the train from Waterloo to Weymouth where I will stay the weekend.

    Tomorrow I will be joined by a good friend and we will go and admire the long legged lanky grooviness of Bill. Portland Bill. We will also play frisbee!

    Extra bonus information: Weymouth is also the location where they have shot a lot of the exterior scenes for The Boat That Rocked.

  • I want an iPhone when it is able to send an MMS. I am actually someone who uses that quite a lot! How can they launch v2 of the iPhone and still not have this function (all other phones can do it!) implemented? I don’t get it.
  • May your weekend be sunny.

UK Coast: Bognor Regis

I went to Bognor Regis, and I had a good day.

Bognor Regis is much smaller and therefore much less touristy than Brighton. The weather was marvellous, and I haven’t done much more than walk to a nearly empty piece of the pebbled beach, sit/lay down, stare over the beautiful blue sea, sniffed up the fresh sea air, waved at Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, and read my book.

Bognor Regis is typical example of a British beach site: a long promenade, several fish and chips shops, ice cream, a (not very interesting) pier, and lots of pebbles.

Pebbled beaches are so convenient. You have to wiggle a bit to find a comfortable place to sit/lay down but: no sand in your shoes, bag, book or socks!

On my way home from the nearly empty train I spotted:
42 cows
149 bunnies!
2 foxes

But no sheep. The sheep on the picture are walking around on the Isle of Man. I took several photos of the sheep there, and funny enough, on nearly every single one of them there is one sheep looking directly into the camera, as if to say:

“What are you looking at?”

Or “You are wearing such a weird coat!”
Or “Why do you have only 2 legs?”
Or maybe “Why are you not eating grass?”

If the weather stays like this next weekend, I’ll be off again. Littlehampton, Rye, Portsmouth and many more places are waiting out there. It’s good to live on an island.

The Isle of Man – the isle of incredible beauty

Tea on the Isle of Man

The older man walked up to me for a little chat.
“This is the best view of the island” he said to me.
“I believe you right away” I smiled at him. (and the picture doesn’t truly show it)
“So where are you from?”
“London”
“Ah” he said, and he didn’t need to say more, I got what he meant.
“First time here?”
“Yes” I said.
“And?”
“Definitely not the last time”
“I know that” he smiled.

I know that too.

I am back in London, but I am far from back.

Pause a while and muse

Love never ends

A train at 9.47am on a Sunday morning – after a short night and weather that could not be more depressing – demanded a lot of willpower. But I had my book and the prospect of a train trip, and even if it was going to be rain all day, that was enough to have me leave my bed and hop on board to Eastbourne. The BBC promised heavy showers all day.

While approaching Eastbourne it magically cleared up and the grey clouds turned into sunshine and while setting a first few steps on a very steep hill in the direction of Beachy Head I discovered a couple of things:

I really need to work on my condition
Love never ends
and most importantly
I live in one of the most beautiful countries in the world.

Warning: Lots of pictures in this post.

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