Unfinished business...

Another productive day’s photography; now I just need to find the time to edit, upload and keyword them. Bird life was similar to yesterday: kites aplenty and about a dozen swallows still flying around the tower of Woodnewton Church…

Lyveden New Build: not a ruin but a rather grand summerhouse. The building work stopped in 1605, on the death of the owner, and was never resumed…

Oundle...

Had a day in Oundle, with my camera and my memories. I remember my first few weeks there, having been assigned to a mentor one year older, who would ‘show me the ropes’. That wasn’t a matter of choice. He had to teach me everything I needed to know about school life, so I could pass a test. If I failed the test I’d be punished… and - a Machiavellian touch - he would be punished too. So I learned the housemaster’s nickname (‘Tit’ Thomas), all the prefects, the location of a particularly hard-to-find classroom (Room 101, or something), and all the arcane rules and regulations that created pointless distinctions between the new boys and the sixth-formers.

Oundle, half a century on, was not much changed, though padlocks stopped me wandering round the quadrangle, where, once or twice a term, someone would have a go at the jam doughnote eating record. The doughnuts were on sale in the quad during mid-morning break, so contestants had just thirty minutes to scoff as many doughnuts as they were able. The only other rule was keeping the doughnuts down; no vomiting allowed. If they beat the record - it was about 14, I think - they enhanced their reputation (and classmates would stump up for the cost of the doughnuts). If they failed, they had to pay. Either way, the boy would be as sick as a dog for days. I never had a go, but I watched a few contests. They tended to end badly.

I saw a pair of red kites circling over the town. More startling was about a dozen swallows which, by this time, should have been enjoying warmer weather in sub-Saharan Africa…

The Cube, Corby...

Back to school...

Busy editing and uploading pix, with five more days to take pix before I’m due back in Yorkshire. I’ve just checked out the weather forecast; the prognosis looks good for next week. In the East Midlands now, close to where I spent my schooldays…

The King Stone: one of the (rather unimpressive) Rollright Stones...

Reading a book...

Wound up in Daventry this evening, forgetting what a dump it is. I was sitting in a pub, reading a book, when a guy stopped and gawped. “What are you doing?”, he asked. I assured him I was reading a book. “What’s it about?” “It’s written by someone who escaped from Islam”. “What’s that, a prison?” “Yeah… kind of”. “Fair play to you”, he said, with a goofy grin, in West Midland wonderment, as though I was doing something truly extraordinary, like nailing my scrotum to the table, instead of just reading a book…

Thin, wild, mercury music...

Blimey… Bob’s gone and won the Nobel Prize for Literature! Pundits will be queueing up to complain that he doesn’t deserve it… but not me. Sara Danils, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, was fulsome in her praise. “Start with Blonde on Blonde”, she said… which is exactly what I did. I remember cycling from school to Corby to buy Blonde on Blonde, probably in 1966: not only my first album, but the first ever double album and the first gatefold sleeve. I cycled back, with the album taped to the crossbar of my bike.

For weeks this was the only record I owned, so it got quite a bashing on my Dansette record player. There were four sides to play, which helped. The music was fascinating, surreal, ambiguous, ambitious; it sounded like a man in full control of his powers. Bob knew exactly what he was doing. Other albums followed Blonde on Blonde into my record collection: Another Side of Bob Dylan, Bringing it All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited (which included the magisterial Like a Rolling Stone… the first rifle-crack of a drum-beat telling me that rock music had changed for ever).

Literature? Hmmm… His songs don’t always read well off the page. But that’s not the point. The words, the music, that voice: somehow it all gelled together to create something special. I ‘discovered’ Bob when I was 14; since then he’s been a constant musical presence in my life. Like all relationships, it’s had its low moments: Under the Red Sky, Bob? But what luck to have opened my music-buying account with a classic album like Blonde on Blonde (rather than an LP by the Black & White Minstrels, which was the dubious choice of one of my school-mates). Keep it rolling, Bob…

Cirencester...

Cirencester...

Taking pix in Cirencester today, before starting to creep northwards… slowly…

The river - and waterside mill - at Bradford-on-Avon: a scene that could almost be the other Bradford...

The other Bradford...

Spent a day photographing in Bradford-on-Avon, another handsome little town, divided in two by the River Avon. The old arched bridge still spans the river, but it’s very narrow. Pedestrians have to watch their step, or risk being whacked by the wing mirror of a passing vehicle. The traffic through the town is horrendous, not currently helped by some serpentine diversions. Bradford-on-Avon would really benefit from a by-pass…

Old coaching inn, Faringdon...