I have a few galleries at Detail I have yet to write about here, but before I get to those, here’s a collection of photos from the National Museum of Flight at East Fortune Airfield east of Edinburgh, where we used to take the kids when they were little (and once went to an airshow). It’s the resting place of Concorde, which features in half of these shots, taken between 2011 and 2019.
My two weeks on the Tasman Peninsula over Christmas was the longest I’d spent there in years, particularly in the southern summer. It yielded twice the usual number of photos, which means it’s time for not one but three new galleries at Detail.
Although the pandemic was declared over in the West, this year had more horrors in store. It began with a bang—one that was audible across oceans—as Tonga suffered a devastating volcanic eruption; followed by months of bangs when Russia invaded Ukraine and found it wasn’t a pushover. Along the way, Britain saw three prime ministers and two monarchs, a near miss at Eurovision, and rocketing inflation and interest rates. Some of it is reflected here, along with the usual mix of new galleries at Detail, posts of links, and occasional glimpses into everyday life. Here’s the year and its category archives, and here’s a gallery of the banner source images.
Art · Books · Comedy · Environment · Events · Infotech · Journal · Memory · Music · Net Culture · People · Politics · Site News · Television · Travel · UK Culture · Weblog · Whatever
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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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
