Speedysnail

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.

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11 January 2022

New Year, Old Links

Happy new year (we hope). The theme this year is chains, as befitting this restricted time, from a set of photos of a giant rusty chain that I took in Shetland and hadn’t found a use for yet. Tune in every month for a new lump of iron.

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9 January 2022

Archives for 2021

The pandemic made this another tough year, especially in its early months of lockdown. A brief window of hope in the summer was ended by family Covid infections and periods of self-isolation in August/September and December. There were some new galleries at Detail, most of them of old photos because of the relative lack of new travel, and the usual links and random observation. Here’s the year and its category archives, and here’s a gallery of the banner source images.

January 2021February 2021March 2021April 2021May 2021June 2021July 2021August 2021September 2021October 2021November 2021December 2021

Environment · Events · Film · Infotech · Journal · Memory · Music · People · Politics · Site News · Television · Travel · UK Culture · Weblog

31 December 2021

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

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1 December 2021

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.

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28 November 2021

Begone

After last year’s non-holiday summer, everyone in our family was yearning this year to get out of Edinburgh for a proper summer holiday. With the Delta variant on the rise, international travel was off the cards, whatever the state of vaccinations, so like the rest of Britain we were looking closer to home. Luckily, school holidays in Scotland start earlier than in England, so we faced less competition for holiday homes in remote locations, and were able to book one without much trouble. It wasn’t cheap, but not as bad as some reports of costs down south.

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26 August 2021

Tasmaniac

A two-month gap in posting could do with some explanation, but the details wouldn’t make for the cheeriest entry, so I’ll skip lightly past them and turn to some photos I’ve been tinkering with off and on in the meantime.

Since my parents moved there in the mid-2000s I’ve added seven galleries of the Tasman Peninsula to Detail—eight including the one of Port Arthur—and here’s a ninth, going back to a camping trip in the mid-’90s and a day trip the following summer. The negatives had yellowed with age, so the scans needed work (some are from the original prints), but the results aren’t too bad. As with my other old photos of places I’ve visited many times, there are echoes of more recent ones, but they’re still worth a look.

Tasman 1995

9 June 2021 · 1 Comment

Past Coast

After a break of a few months, I scanned a few more old rolls of film recently, and have added another gallery to Detail with some of the results. In May 1994 I visited Tasmania for my brother’s graduation, and afterwards took a trip up the east coast with my parents—the last time I would see it until 2015. Some of the photos made their way into my very first gallery, but I’ve included them here as well to put them into context.

East Coast 1994

6 April 2021

Frozen

This is no time to neglect the blog, with covid cases rising steeply in the UK, the first visible impacts of Johnson’s hard Brexit, Trump rallying his thugs to storm the Capitol on the sixth, and the prospect of worse in the next nine days. America is playing out all of my fears of four years and two months ago, and like much of the world I’m holding my breath.

But a new lockdown in Scotland has meant that the kids didn’t return to school on the sixth and probably won’t for another month and a half at least, and four of us are trying to make this a workplace and a school and a studio and a cinema and a home and a refuge and an escape under the same modest roof again. January is always a busy month, with new courses coinciding with marking last semester’s, and this year I have additional management duties and less time in the day to manage them, so I don’t have much hope of doing much here. But I’m posting this anyway, to put in place this month’s sidebar of this morning’s frosty window and leave the door ajar in case I feel compelled to vent about the state of the world.

12 January 2021 · 1 Comment

Archives for 2020

It was another busy year at Speedysnail, with many new galleries at Detail and posts on Brexit, Trump, and the Covid-19 pandemic that dominated all our lives. Here’s the year and its category archives, and here’s a gallery of the banner source images.

January 2020February 2020March 2020April 2020May 2020June 2020July 2020August 2020September 2020October 2020November 2020December 2020

Comedy · Environment · Events · Film · Food · Infotech · Journal · Memory · Music · Net Culture · People · Politics · Site News · Television · Travel · UK Culture · Weblog · Whatever

31 December 2020