Coasting
Time to wind back the clock again to pick up the thread of our trip around the world that started in New Zealand in 1997. At the end of November that year we flew out of Auckland to Honolulu for a brief stroll along Waikiki Beach, and then on to San Francisco, to start a trip up the west coast to Canada to reach Alberta by Christmas.
The Kingdom of the Gaels
I first visited Argyll, the heart of the ancient kingdom of Dál Riata, in 1992 with my parents, but got to know it better after J. and I moved to Edinburgh in 2001. Over the next few years we took a few different visiting relatives there, and in between the inevitable family photos I took quite a few of the surroundings, only some of which have appeared before on this site. Two decades on, I’ve gathered them together to make a more substantial gallery, divided into four sections.
Bigger Than Texas
In the early years of posting galleries here and in Detail I put up a lot of photos of Edinburgh and the rest of Scotland, but hardly any of its biggest city. Although I visited Glasgow plenty of times for work and leisure, I never got around to collating my random snaps into something more substantial, even though several times I was photographing the city and its attractions intensively with eventual galleries in mind.
Notts Landing
The gallery-building has had to go on the back-burner for a while, but a few weeks ago I managed to put together a small selection of photos of a city we’ve visited off and on since moving to the UK, thanks to having some friends there. Most of my photos from Nottingham are of them and their home and garden, but a handful capture the city and surrounding Nottinghamshire, although when I look at them now they’re all pretty overcast and significantly lacking in sheriffs. Our friends moved a few years ago, so I’m not sure when or if we’ll be back, but in case not, here’s a reminder to myself.
Long White Shadow
I spent the final few months of last year gradually working my way through my negatives from late 1997, when I was a visiting scholar at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand—one of the happiest periods of my life, which made revisiting it in 2021 a poignant exercise. J. and I spent our weekends exploring the city and its South Island surrounds, making trips west to Greymouth, south to Dunedin and north to Hanmer Springs and the Marlborough Sounds, discovering for ourselves one of the most beautiful places on earth a few years before Peter Jackson showed it off to the world in The Fellowship of the Ring.
Past Surrounds
Although I visited Tasmania off and on throughout the 1990s, I spent most of it in Canberra, with trips to surrounding areas of New South Wales. As part of sorting out my old negatives, I’ve collected those trips into a few representative galleries at Detail…
Old Hobart Town
The slow march through my old 35mm negatives continues, and has yielded a few more galleries for Detail of Tasmania in the mid-1990s.
10 REM RIP
Sir Clive Sinclair, who launched countless programming careers, has died at the age of (ZX) 81.
No one in Australia would remember him for his failed C5 electric trike (we never saw them, except on news reports), but a mate in high school had a ZX81, and I still remember pressing my fingertips firmly on its flat plastic keyboard. Even though it couldn’t do much, it looked great, with its sharp black corners and red lettered logo, like KITT from Knight Rider. In rural Tasmania in the early 1980s, it was pretty cutting-edge.
I can’t think of too many of the personal computers of the time that were so closely associated with a single individual. None of us knew who’d founded Acorn, or who the Vic was behind the VIC-20. Even Apple had two Steves, not one. Clive was one of a kind.
It Was Twenty Years Ago Today
View from Jurys Inn, Edinburgh, 31 July 2001.