I’ve been meaning to overhaul some of the older corners of this site for a while, and the other day got started with the oldest: Pacific Islands Politics and the Cartoon Lounge. As well as bringing them into line with the overall look of Speedysnail since 2016, I’ve cleaned up a few minor glitches and have improved their print style sheets. Still some incremental tweaks to come, but worth noting here in case I forget to later.
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10 August 2022 · 2 Comments
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.
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5 August 2022
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.
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22 June 2022
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.
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21 June 2022
I’ve posted a few photos of sunsets here over the years, especially since moving into a top-floor flat with a view to the west out of the kitchen window, but they’ve represented only a fraction of the many I’ve taken. Here, then, is a whole gallery of them, in extra-large size to enjoy every shade and hue.
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17 June 2022
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.
28 March 2022
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
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
