Tag: Family

Image of the day – 85

This is the ‘Land’s End’ of the north – not a narrowing peninsula as in Cornwall, but here a long, straightish coast running east to west. A glorious, glorious place to stand and look and imagine.

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What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye.

I’m posting an image every two days (or as often as I can). A photo, an image from the internet, a diagram or a map. Whatever takes my fancy.

Click to enlarge

On the day after arriving at Portrush, we relaxed in the house, chatted, explored the town and its little harbour, and walked east along one of the beautiful beaches of golden sand. It was a chilly day, and cloudy, but I don’t think anyone wanted to go far after all the travelling of the previous day.

The land and seascapes here are glorious. A wide, long sandy beach is backed by dunes stabilised by vegetation as you can see from the image. This beach slopes down to the north until it meets the sea with the waves rolling in and breaking. A little way out in deeper water there’s a series of small barrier islands, some of them merely bare rocks. And beyond those, the open sea – the edge of the mighty North Atlantic.

On a clear day parts of Scotland are visible towards the east, while beyond the northern horizon there’s nothing but ocean until the cold Arctic waters east of Iceland. This is the ‘Land’s End’ of the north – not a narrowing peninsula as in Cornwall, but here a long, straightish coast running east to west. A glorious, glorious place to stand and look and imagine.

I have no hesitation in recommending Portrush as a holiday destination. It really does have something special for everyone – children, teens, adults young and old, nature lovers, for swimming, boating, walking – it’s all here within easy reach.

See also:

Images from our Irish holiday 2024

For convenience, here’s a list of all the Irish holiday images:

28th Jul – Welsh Botanic Garden, Robin, Fishguard
29th Jul – Wicklow Mts, Glendalough, Powerscourt, Rose, Greystones
30th Jul – Liffey, Temple Bar, St Patrick’s Cathedral
31st Jul – Newgrange, Battle of the Boyne
1st Aug – Monasterboice, Mourne, Thrift, Window
2nd Aug – Spelga Dam, Hydrangea, Pipework, Lough Neagh
3rd Aug – Coagh, Springhill, Portrush
4th Aug – Beach at Portrush
5th Aug – Giant’s Causeway, Carrick-a-Rede, Portrush

Themed image collections

The links below will take you to the first post in each collection

Cirencester, Favourites, Irish holiday 2024, Roman villa

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Image of the day – 84

It was good to have a whole week ahead of us. There would be places to see, plenty to do, great conversations, good food, and – as always on our family holidays – marvellous company!

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What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye.

I’m posting an image every two days (or as often as I can). A photo, an image from the internet, a diagram or a map. Whatever takes my fancy.

Click to enlarge

After exploring Springhill, we drove to Portrush on the north coast where we’d booked a large holiday house for a week. We were the last to arrive, and after the usual hellos and hugs we fell into chatting and laughing and organising our first meal together. It was great to gather round the table together, three generations of smiles and looking forward to our week relaxing together.

The photo shows all but two of us about to tuck into dinner, I’m behind the camera of course, and son-in-law Paz was behind me in the kitchen area, so you see a wife, two daughters, a son-in-law, and four grandchildren. The house was large enough for all of us, we need around six or seven bedrooms, a large dining table, plenty of cutlery, plates and mugs, and room for ten people to spread out. And we had that in spades!

Our first impression of Portrush was good, last time I was here was in the 1960s – almost a lifetime ago! It has changed a good deal, of course, and it’s grown much larger, but the harbour seems its old self, and the lovely sandy beach is just as I remember.

It was good to have a whole week ahead of us. There would be places to see, plenty to do, great conversations, good food, and – as always on our family holidays – marvellous company!

See also:

Images from our Irish holiday 2024

For convenience, here’s a list of all the Irish holiday images:

28th Jul – Welsh Botanic Garden, Robin, Fishguard
29th Jul – Wicklow Mts, Glendalough, Powerscourt, Rose, Greystones
30th Jul – Liffey, Temple Bar, St Patrick’s Cathedral
31st Jul – Newgrange, Battle of the Boyne
1st Aug – Monasterboice, Mourne, Thrift, Window
2nd Aug – Spelga Dam, Hydrangea, Pipework, Lough Neagh
3rd Aug – Coagh, Springhill, Portrush
4th Aug – Beach at Portrush
5th Aug – Giant’s Causeway, Carrick-a-Rede, Portrush

Themed image collections

The links below will take you to the first post in each collection

Cirencester, Favourites, Irish holiday 2024, Roman villa

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Useful? Interesting?

If you enjoyed this or found it useful, please like, comment, and share below. My material is free to reuse (see conditions), but a coffee is always welcome!

Image of the day – 56

For this holiday, Dad (a keen photographer himself) helped me out by buying me a colour transparency film and I used it to take the photo you see here.

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What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye.

I’m posting an image every two days (or as often as I can). A photo, an image from the internet, a diagram or a map. Whatever takes my fancy.

One of my earliest colour photos

I’m going to take a break from the Irish holiday photos I’ve been working through. Instead, here’s one of my earliest colour shots, from 1962 when I was fourteen-years-old. This is a holiday photo as well, we were spending two weeks on the Welsh coast at the village of Aberporth, a little north of Cardigan. From left to right you see Dad, Mum, Chloe the dog, and my three sisters, Cindy, Ruth and Rachael.

Colour film was expensive so usually I took black and white negatives and had the films developed and printed by a local chemist in the town. Later I started making contact prints myself though these were very tiny. Later again I learned to develop the negatives myself, and print them using an enlarger at the place where I worked. But for this holiday Dad (a keen photographer himself) helped me out by buying me a colour transparency film and I used it to take the photo you see here.

I’ve always been fascinated by old photos and the way they capture something long since gone – and now even some of my own photos are old enough to have that effect!

For a while I plan to continue with a range of different images, but then I’ll return to our Irish holiday again.

Themed image collections

The links below will take you to the first post in each collection

Cirencester, Favourites, Irish holiday 2024, Roman villa

< Previous | Index | Next >

Useful? Interesting?

If you enjoyed this or found it useful, please like, comment, and share below. My material is free to reuse (see conditions), but a coffee is always welcome!

Family of three

There was a young man holding a baby just a few weeks old, and right opposite him a young woman, clearly the mother. The three of them were interacting so beautifully

Here’s a short story from a morning recently, here in Cirencester where I live. It involves the very briefest of interactions between me, a young man, a young woman, and their baby. Maybe we can learn several things from what happened, useful lessons about life, about ourselves, about politics, and about the nature of Love itself.

Three hands – father, mother and baby (Wikimedia)

I sat in Coffee#1 in Cirencester enjoying a white Americano, I’d walked into town and had a heavy load of shopping in my rucksack to take back home, a range of fruit from the market stall in the beautiful old Market Place, and a loaf of fresh bread from a traditional bakery. I fancied a break before setting off for home.

I put down the weighty rucksack and my hat on a chair at a vacant table, ordered the coffee and waited while it was prepared, then returned to the table, put in my earbuds, and caught up with some of the news following the previous night’s exciting General Election. While I was watching and listening, I couldn’t help noticing the people at the next table. There was a young man holding a baby just a few weeks old, and right opposite him a young woman, clearly the mother. The three of them were interacting so beautifully, the parents obviously very fond of one another and completely relaxed, the baby equally happy to be held by either of them, and both the adults alert to the needs of the little one. It was a triangle of love and of trust, a happy and peaceful grouping.

They were still there when I got up to leave and I had to pass their table to reach the door. I put on my rucksack and hat, stopped briefly at their table and said, ‘I just have to say that you three are such a lovely little family, and I want to wish you the very best going forward’. I received two huge smiles and headed out through the door to the street. As I passed the shop window, they were still beaming and the young man and I waved to one another, both smiling.

Why am I sharing this little story? Because it seemed notable to me. How many young families are there with difficulties and troubles? All of them! We all have problems during our lives, the important thing is not whether we have them, but how we will handle them. The threesome at Coffee#1 will likely grow to four (maybe more) but it seems to me that they’ll deal with any difficulty wisely and lovingly and will come through any troubles stronger than before. Love is such a powerful thing. There’s a lesson there for everyone.

Go through life pouring out love towards those you meet along the way, and you’ll fare better than if you approach life asking, ‘What can I get out of it? How can I profit? How can I become wealthier or more successful? How can I benefit by ignoring the needs of others?

This is not irrelevant to the politics of our day. For some time there has been a rather nasty drift towards selfish, arrogant, pushy, self-serving, uncaring attitudes from some quarters. It’s not too hard to find examples of this approach in Britain or America with some disturbing and growing trends towards noisy, yet empty politics. The old adage remains true, ‘Empty vessels make the most noise’. In Britain, the Labour victory may work to quell this for the next four or five years, and hopefully the electorate will appreciate the change and clearly understand the dangers, and not support parties or politicians that behave like that.

We now have a chance for more well-considered sanity in our politics, and less mis- and dis-information, or so I fervently hope. We need debate that is less like the destructive accusations and anger inevitable in broken families, and more like the love and gentleness and hope for the future of that young family in Coffee#1.

I like what Paul wrote about love in 1 Corinthians 13, here’s an extract:

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonour others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails.

Such love was abundantly present in those parents in Coffee#1. They clearly cared for one another, and they trusted one another completely in caring for the little one. Babies are vulnerable and helpless, it takes parental love to keep them safe and to guide them well as they grow. And the examples provided by two good parents will give a child the best possible chance to develop the same sort of love themselves as they grow and mature.

Paul, as he wrote about love, was thinking of the love of the Creator King acting as Parent, Offspring and life-giving Breath, showing love and care for us all; and the love that we have for one another, for the world, and even for our enemies as we do our best to follow his lead. Paul expresses this clearly, but he was also thinking about the nature and attributes of love itself.

The Victorian teacher and writer, Henry Drummond, had some wonderfiul perspectives on John’s words to the believers in Corinth; he, too, draws out deep truths about love.

See also:

Henry Drummond’s essay on love – Journeys of heart and mind

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If you enjoyed this or found it useful, please like, comment, and share below. My material is free to reuse (see conditions), but a coffee is always welcome!

Walking the Swiss bisses

We were constantly surprised by the next unexpected vista

Every summer we go away somewhere different for a week – Donna and me along with two daughters, their husbands, and our four grandchildren. This year we stayed in a ski chalet in Haute-Nendaz in western Switzerland, just over the border from France.

Although prices are high in Switzerland, there are many wonderful compensations in terms of mountain scenery, clean streets and clean air, friendly people, and the walks. I had expected walks with big and tiring changes in elevation – and we certainly did our share of walks of that sort. But the bisses: what a wonderful experience!

Looking at a bisse
Looking at a bisse

I must admit, I had no idea what a bisse was when we drove from Geneva Airport, around Lake Geneva, and then south-west to Nendaz. I hadn’t even come across the word ‘bisse’. But we soon found a leaflet of local walks and discovered that several of them followed the local bisses. A bisse is an irrigation stream running gently downhill, almost following the contours of the mountains and hills. As a result the bisse paths are gentle and easy walking for the most part, and they wind around the slopes through woodland and meadow. The views of the mountains and valleys are spectacular; following the path through woodland and then coming out into the open again we were constantly surprised by the next unexpected vista.

The view from a bisse
The view from a bisse

All the way, the path is accompanied by the sparkling water hurrying  down its channel, sometimes shallow, sometimes deep, and sometimes disappearing into a large pipe and reappearing beside the path again a little further on. Some of these paths follow one bisse gently uphill and then pick up a different one for the return, making a lovely, circular tour through the countryside.

Further reading

The Fly Line

A private railway built to transport coal from the local pits…

Visiting my daughter and her family in York recently, we walked near Aberford just outside Leeds. This was my son-in-law’s suggestion, he does a lot of walking and is interested in wildlife, footpaths, history, good walks and a whole lot more. Parking in Aberford, we followed a bridleway west along the bed of an old railway line.

Railway

The Fly Line was a private railway built to transport coal from the local pits to the nearby Leeds and Selby Railway Apart from the removal of the tracks, the old line is remarkably well preserved. We walked under the bridge shown in the photo above, and through a rather muddy tunnel. The Ordnance Survey One Inch map for 1885-1900 shows the line (marked as a mineral line) and the Six Inch map for 1842 to 1952 shows it in more detail, as well as the the coal pits along the line. But it fell out of use in 1924 and is not seen on later maps. The line passes through delightful woodland and I’d recommend it as an easy and enjoyable walk for anyone.

The railway was built by the Gascoigne family who also owned the coal mines and lived in the nearby Parlington Hall. (There’s more detail about Parlington Hall and its railway on a dedicated website.) Most of the old house has been demolished, and although we didn’t visit the remaining wing, we did get a distant view of the triumphal arch, built to commemorate the American victory in the War of Independence.

TreeAlong the way we came across a great example of two (or possibly three) trees, cross grafted as saplings. Someone had clearly tied them together tightly, possibly after removing a slice from each and lining up the cambial zones carefully so that they would heal and grow as one. That must have been decades ago and the result today is most striking.

On the whole, a fine day out and a great way to break our journey back to Cirencester from York.