Seaside Man

Helen is 50 tomorrow. Lots of people find that hard to believe, but it's true. This is a recent portrait I took of her:

We are having a party tomorrow night to celebrate. Wahay - pardy pardy pardy! The guitars will be coming out, and with decent singers around too. I have a few songs prepared...

Cheers, Tom.

There’s a green that’s rarely seen
Where moisture clings with shiny sheen
Where mirror dewdrops rest on leaves
Like oil on watered asphalt.

Organic juice, sticky, wet
Glutton leaves suck up the sweat
Basking there in warm, wet air
Like fearlessness was normal

Fitful human ventures in
Moistened cotton stuck to skin
Tramping through the lazy grass
Like janitor in empty school

Tom.

I've been researching people selling photographs on The Net recently. Lots of photographers out there have sites for selling their pictures, and even more artists are trying to sell their paintings. The question I keep coming back to is the one in my title: How many do they sell? 10 a week, 1 a year?

Of all the photographers websites I’ve looked at recently, I just can’t tell if they make a living from it or not. You see prices ranging from about a fiver up to hundreds of quid, but how many do they sell?

One guy wanted a fiver for an A4 print that looked quite a lot like this one of mine. I bet he didn’t get many takers. And  for Rosie: I used the golden section in this picture for positioning the white stone top right:

Ebay seems to be rubbish for photographs apart from really cheap postcards and soft porn. I want to keep away from the bottom end of the market if I can. So, commissions are the way to go, at least initially.

Cheers, Tom.

How well do you know doggy behaviour?

Cheers, Tom.

P.S. click on the picture to enlarge it

The Square Festival in Borth ended well. The gnome mascot went on walkabout on Saturday night and hilariously appeared in Cafe Seren for a dance at about 3AM, and on Sunday night some lads tried to do the same again but were prevented by security. This is the Gnomie Homey:

As I mentioned yesterday, highlights of Saturday were 65daysofstatic and Skindred. A few more pics from Saturday are below, followed by a brief review of Sunday.

This girl might look like I've caught her in the middle of something but no - she was totally asleep. How she'd managed it in that position next to a devastatingly loud Drum and Bass tent I don't know but dead to the world she was:

Just around the corner from sleepy girl was a graffiti wall that included this rather excellent work:

And in a tent on the other side of the field we saw this lot:

They were pretending to be a polka band from Communist Russia, and the woman singer (who also played a mean snare drum) did a pretty convincing Russian accent, but it turns out they were from Sheffield. Excellent, great fun band. Unfortunately I don’t know what they were called.

Dance music was well represented at the festival and on Saturday we heard some amazing funky techno in the Kaos tent:

The same tent was the location for some incredibly dark and deep Dubstep on Sunday night. The afore-mentioned very welcoming cafe Seren was a great place after the official music finished, and we heard some great reggae in there late:

Not surprisingly, we got up late on Sunday morning. By the time Helen had walked the dog and I’d cooked a monster breakfast, it was time to go see our friends Syspender play. They did a good set that suffered two complete power outages (which the crowd waited patiently through) and an initial lack of sound in Jono’s Harmonica. By the end lots of people were dancing which is good going for a festival Sunday afternoon just after lunch. Several pictures of them are below.

After that we trundled off to the main stage and saw the excellent and funny Gideon Conn with his strange mixture of hip hop, folk and ska, followed by the stunning “The Anomalies” doing their lively, dancey hip hop in fine style. Since I was starving by this point I headed home to make some dinner and Helen joined me with the intention of heading back to see The Beat. Whilst cooking I heard the song “Stand Down Margaret” and I thought “hang on, is that The Beat”? It was - they were on stage an hour early. Helen ran off and I went a few minutes later. They were really very good indeed and have lost none of their edge.

All in all a great festival, and I hope it goes on again next year, although there is apparently some doubt about that because of “resistance from local businesses”. A most excellent weekend.

Cheers, Tom.

Just a quickie as we got up late and have to go out again soon. We saw some great music last night, but the highlights were 65 Days of Static and Skindred. Both were excellent in different ways. 65 Days make big walls of sound using heavy rock guitars, bass, drums and piano, and they throw themselves into it with great joy and abandon. They were truly excellent, and all done without any singing - they just piled onto stage and got stuck in. Here are two pictures of part of them:

Skindred are most interesting. They sound like Rage Against The Machine, but with a South-Walian ragga singer. He's an incredible front-man and pumped the crowd up tremendously, and they do their thing very well indeed. The crowd were in a frenzy by the end.

---

I'll make a better report and a lot more pictures tomorrow, but I have to rush off now. Sorry for not replying to comments - I'll have to catch up tomorrow.

Cheers, Tom.

It took me 65 minutes to queue up and get my wristband, and "health and safety" prevented people from entering the main arena until 7:30, when it should have been 5:00, but after that all was well. The stage is set for a good weekend now.

We had a great evening wandering round, talking to people and listening to music. I had intended to watch Supergrass, but I missed them. I did hear them, I just didn't see them, so no pictures unfortunately. They were good, and the crowd loved it.

This is Wes who was at my college last year:

This is the main stage seen across tents, with the church in the background (where there is an orchestra playing on Sunday):

This is inside the Drum and Bass tent:

This was a rather nice tepee with a campfire inside it that Helen and I had a rest in towards the end of the evening:

I’ll post some better pictures tomorrow - these are just a few openers to give the basic flavour. I’ll definitely be glued to the main stage for 65daysofstatic tonight and hopefully I’ll get a few pictures of them in action. I’ll be heading back there in an hour or so.

Cheers, Tom.

I was having trouble believing how fast this windsurfer was moving. The wind was outrageously strong yesterday, and I reckon he must have been doing about 40MPH along the coast. When he hit a big wave, the whole thing leapt high into the air, but I completely failed to get a photograph of that. This picture isn't particularly sharp as I was having trouble holding the camera steady in the wind with my 300mm lens fitted.

The surfers have been out in force for the last couple of days too.

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Today is the start of the Borth Square Festival. It's a small music festival (5000 people or so) that is now in it's third year. Pendulum and Alabama 3 played last year, but there is no-one so big this time although there should be a lot of good music. The lineup includes:

Supergrass
The Beat
Skindred
65daysofstatic

There are hundreds of other acts in a very broad spectrum of styles and it should be good. I will, of course, be doing my roving photographer act. I'm also considering taking my guitar down when the main music finishes for some campfire sing-song action. This is only possible as we live literally 5 minutes walk from the site. How cool is that - a festival on our doorstep!

Cheers, Tom.

There were quite a few young seagulls about today so I thought I'd get as close as I could and try and get their pictures. I got this one as it too flight:

Unfortunately, the mother wasn't too happy and buzzed me repeatedly:

Whoops!

Cheers, Tom.

P.S. The pics look better larger - click on them to bigify!

There was an unusually high tide last night. I've never seen it so high in summer before. It was projected to be a big one anyway, but the very strong onshore winds boosted it even further. It's projected to be even more tomorrow and if the wind doesn't abate it should be a monster.

So, at 9:30 tomorrow morning I'll be on the beach trying to improve on these pictures.

I had a lovely swim in the sea yesterday afternoon. I've always loved splashing about in a big sea, feeling the power of the waves and the exhilaration it brings. When I was a kid at Chapel St. Leonard's in Lincolnshire most of the male members of my family would be out in the big waves - uncles, cousins, my brother and my dad. Three of them are no longer with us.

My cousin Tim was murdered by the IRA a long time ago now, my Uncle Pete went a while back too, and last Friday was the 2nd anniversary of my dad's death. They'd all have loved the sea how it's been the last couple of days.

Tom.

Mike Skinner advised that you should "Make eye contact with the geezers so they know you ain't lightweight". Maybe, but too much eye contact is creepy or aggressive (or a come-on), too little eye contact is secretive or furtive. The right culturally sensitive balance is needed. Dead hard people don't like being looked at at all, hence my title which comes from a 1980 single by the band "The Salford Jets":

"Who You looking at
It better not be me"

It's said that in many Eastern cultures, lowering the eyes is a sign of respect whereas in Western ones it's a sign of guilt. That's not good for Asian people in front of Caucasian judges.

Cheers, Tom.

I did a lot of swimming when I was a child. I particularly remember the outdoor, unheated swimming pool at my school that we trained in up to October. We never had to break the ice, but it was sometimes bitingly cold. The one benefit was that it didn't matter if it was raining. I remember thinking it was funny that we were in the water swimming and the teacher had to stay on the side getting wet.

Cheers, Tom.

This black head makes a nice contrast to the white head in my previous post. I think it's a Jackdaw...

Cheers, Tom.

You can click that to make it even bigger, and the full size one is in my media here:

http://www.blog.co.uk/srv/media/media_zoom.php?item_ID=3703968&size=o

Scary! I was about 15 feet away from it with my zoom lens as it sized up 2 people eating chips!

Cheers, Tom.

I learned another lesson whilst photographing this swan.  It went to the other side of the river to keep as far away from Dan as possible, so I was on extreme zoom. And when you're zoomed like that, moving objects go out of shot very quickly indeed. I wanted to get as much of the swan in the shot as possible, so my time window was very small. Too early and the tail was cut off, too late and I lost the beak. Rush the photograph and it ended up blurred.The above is the best one I managed and it's still not right (click it to enlarge it).

So, the lesson was: when something is moving, don't try and fill the frame with it unless you will get lots of goes.

Cheers, Tom.

Helen and I just watched this charming film again. I wrote the review below when I first watched it, and it still sums up how I feel about it.

Tom.

------

The Science of Sleep

(Minor Spoilers Only)

Lots of people were astonished by Michel Gondry’s marvellous film “The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”. The Science of Sleep is his follow-up, and this time he wrote as well as directed. Gael Garcia Bernal plays Stephane, a young man who went to Mexico with his father when his parents split, and returns to France from Mexico to stay with his mother in his childhood bedroom because she has found him a job, and after his father has died of cancer. Unfortunately it is not the Graphic Design job he expects but a dull cut-and-paste job with tacky calendars.

He has great difficulty separating reality from his dreams and frequently mixes the two up, with sometimes hilarious results. It’s a quirky comedy and it will be too quirky for some people. The dream sequences are frequent and sometimes lengthy and it is often difficult to be sure if what we are seeing is reality or dream and therein lies some of the charm for me. Mingled in with the dreams are his real thoughts of love for his neighbour, Stephanie, played calmly and sensibly by Charlotte Gainsbourg.

Stephane has a naïve, child-like view of the world and his dreams are the same. Worlds constructed out of cloth, cardboard, cellophane and paper move using stop motion animation in the most lovely manner, and I found these sequences to be both charming and sweet and they really felt as if they had come from the mind of a child. Cloth horses, typewriting spiders, cellophane seas and a boat with paper sails all appear. It is deliberately amateurish, as if children really made the models. Stephane and Stephanie both make things with their hands and seem as if they would be a good match for each other.

There’s a tricky balancing act here. Some will no doubt think that the dream sequences get in the way of the beautifully told but non-reciprocated growing attraction that Stephane has for Stephanie as they work on models together, and some will think that real life intrudes too much on the dreams. I found the balance about right.

In addition to the Stephane/Stephanie interactions we also get to see Stephane at work and although he thinks his job is bad, he really doesn’t realise how lucky he is. His colleagues are funny and the office atmosphere is pleasant. Sometimes we must enjoy what we can and get on with life: things could surely be better but they could also be far worse.

There is also humour in the language mix-ups because Stephane speaks French only poorly, and both Spanish and English better (the film uses all three languages). At one point, Stephane says to Stephanie “I like your tit - I erect in my pants”, or something like that.

The further we get through the film, the more we realise that Stephane isn’t merely child-like in his attitude, he has mental problems, or at least great difficulty in determining what is reasonable behaviour and what isn’t. Completely out of the blue when they aren‘t even a couple, he asks Stephanie to marry him, and he even breaks into her flat while she is out. These are not the acts of a sane adult. Were it not for my growing realization of his poor mental state, no doubt related to his parents’ separation and his father‘s death, it is likely that I could have seen Stephane as an irritating man who needed a good hard slap rather than as touching and sweet. His childishness does sometimes irritate, and on several occasions I wanted to shout at him to get a grip. His mental illness should have been treated and it’s a failing in the film that this isn’t even mentioned. Someone with such a fleeting hold on reality must surely come a serious cropper at some point.

At heart, this is a very human film and it’s subject matter is love. The characters all feel like real people and they talk to each other in the way that real people do. This grounds the film in reality whilst the dream sequences gloriously soar to the heavens. A lovely, sweet and charming film.

I've been speaking to a very helpful woman at our local Job Centre recently about becoming self-employed. You tell them your idea for a business and if you get approved, they pay you some money each week to help with start-up and you get taken off the unemployment lists. All round-win. But, I was told that "Having a good business idea is no reason for qualification". Hmm. Very helpful staff, very silly system.

This is just one of their quirks. There are many, many others, all of which seem to conspire to make leaving the list either difficult or undesirable. For example, let's say a minimum wage part-time job becomes available for 10 hours a week. You work your 10 hours and get paid your £60. They then take that £60 off your benefit. So, you are effectively working 10 hours for nothing. So why bother? If you work enough hours, your council tax benefit gets axed, and that's £1000 per year. I calculated that the minimum number of hours per week it's worth leaving the list for is 30, which makes part-time work infeasible. And then there are NI payments too.

Anyway, my idea did get accepted and the cogs are turning slowly.

Cheers, Tom.

Walking around with a big camera round your neck draws attention. At the wedding party I was at recently, I was doing exactly that and the firework man asked me beforehand if I could get a picture of his display with his big tent in the picture as well. So I did and emailed him lots of pictures - the above are just two of them.

When on the beach a few days ago photographing the surfers, I was approached by the lifeguard who was worried that I might have been (pedo-style) taking pictures of children:

http://seasideman.blog.co.uk/2009/07/12/so-this-lifeguard-came-up-to-me-earlier-6500048/

Every other person on the beach probably had either a camera-phone or a compact camera and yet they were being ignored - my SLR camera got me the attention. The logic here is skewed: if I were intending to be secretive or surreptitious, would I really have the largest camera and lens on the beach? No. In the unlikely case of there being a pedo on that beach, he or she would have been trying not to draw attention to themselves. They certainly wouldn't have been wandering round as bold as brass with a 300mm lens.

If I get approached again, I shall take a stand for the rights of photographers. As far as the law is concerned, as long as you aren't "obstructing the public highway", "breaching the peace" or "invading privacy", taking photographs of anyone and anything is entirely legal, and I have the email from 10 Downing Street to say so. Apart from Police Officers.

Tom.

I posted this picture this morning and asked you to identify it:

It was - a black, shiny surfaced ceramic planter in a garden centre:

That's the fullest picture of it I have, unfortunately, but you can see the price of £59.99 in the top corner if you look carefully. Even Helen needed a few hints to get this one, so it must have been hard!

Cheers, Tom.

I haven't manipulated the image in any way, what you see is exactly what I photographed.

I'll post the answer later on.

This will be a difficult one to get exactly right, I think.

Cheers, Tom.

Trace Bundy, a huge natural talent for guitar playing, here playing all the parts of Sweet Child O Mine by Guns and Roses using just an acoustic guitar and a Boss LoopStation pedal. The pedal is very simple: you press it once and it starts recording; press it again and it stops recording and repeats what it recorded as a loop. You can then keep adding loops on top in the same way. If you mess up, you can undo the last loop. Trace Bundy doesn't mess up at all, and I can assure all non-musicians that the skill and control required to do this so accurately and perfectly is nothing short of mind-boggling.

Tom.

-- literally "small world".

Shingle beaches such as the one here at Borth provide a relatively unusual environment, which is why there are so many rare species of plants, insects and seabirds here. The sea water drains quickly through the stones and hence they are often described as "stony deserts". The stones act as natural storage heaters, warming up during the day and releasing the heat at night.

Because of the backwash, shingle beaches tend to have a fairly steep slope, which makes them work particularly well as a natural sea defence mechanism.

But there is a problem:

"industry, power stations, housing and coastal defences have encroached on the shingle, which is often also used for building material"

"English Nature says the greatest threats to the shingle are coastal defence works, sea-level rise ... and the invasion of alien plants escaping from dumped garden waste"

Even too much dog walking is supposed to be problematic, and offroad cars and motorcycling are large problems.

How typical is that - we have a perfect environment naturally suited for sea defence and home to specially adapted wildlife and we go and mess it up. Well done humans, well done.

Tom.

P.S. There is a lovely recording of the waves here:

http://sounds.bl.uk/View.aspx?item=022M-W1CDR0000635-3700V0.xml

Nice sunset colours in the sky tonight, but the sun obscured by clouds. So I went out and took about 100 pictures of it: all rubbish. I'm trying to work out why but haven't got an answer yet. The only picture I took that I liked was this one of seaweed and stones lit by the weird "sun just gone down" light:

Cheers, Tom.

You know that feeling when it's been dark and cloudy for a long time and you wonder if you'll ever see either the sun again or the light at the end of the tunnel? When the sun finally breaks through is a great moment.

Yesterday, I made the first step towards becoming a professional photographer rather than a committed amateur. If the next few steps go well, I'll be signing off the dole and will be self-employed within 2 weeks. I find this rather exciting!

Here is Tommy Emmanuel ("the best guitarist in the world") doing his famous Beatles medley, starting with Here Comes The Sun:

Cheers, Tom.

Forget this computer game malarky, give children a beach to play on and they can come up with this sort of thing:

I bet S/he had a great time doing that.

Cheers, Tom.

Zen is a variant of Buddhism and it's literal meaning is "meditation". It diminishes the importance of theory in favour of direct experience gained from meditation. It is believed by Zen Buddhists that the dharma (teachings of the Buddha) can be passed from teacher to student via meditation, entirely without words, and that a series of links from any student leads back, through all the intervening teachers, directly to the Buddha.

One important early practitioner of Zen was the monk Bodhidarma. Legend has it that he spent 9 years staring at a wall. He is said to have fallen asleep after 7 years and when he awoke was angry about his slip, so he cut off his own eyelids to prevent it happening again. It is thought that this story is one reason for the association of tea with Buddhism - the stimulants in the tea are likely to prevent sleep. Shaolin Kung-Fu is credited as being originated by Bodhidarma.

The basic idea of Zen is that the “nature” of the human mind is the nature of the Buddha and the aim is to uncover (or discover) this nature through meditation. Zen is not concerned with deep questions or dogma as these result in looking outwards rather than inwards. Introspection or “turning the eye inwards” is key. Zen is an atheistic religion.

Rather than trying to answer “deep“ questions, Zen recommends a quiet appreciation of simple moments and things, even if that simplicity is imperfect. The founding moment of Zen is said to be the “Flower Sermon” of the Buddha where he wordlessly held up a lotus flower like this one (not my photograph):

I fancy a cup of tea now!

Cheers, Tom.

(Click on the pictures to enlarge them)

In this long exposure of the sea, the waves have been smoothed to give an abstract effect:

The clouds look peculiar in this one because they moved during the lengthy exposure:

The lights in the distance are Barmouth (I think!).

Cheers, Tom.

I've been meaning to get out after the sun has gone down for a while now, but recently it's been too cloudy. Last night was my chance so I took it. The two best pictures are below - click them to enlarge them. Both were fairly long exposures.

I prefer this one because it's so simple:

Helen prefers this one because "there is more going on in it":

If you like either of these, which one do you prefer? I'd love to know why as well!

Cheers, Tom.

That sounds like the start of a joke, but it isn't. I'd been on the beach for about half an hour, taking pictures of the brightly coloured kayaks, the surfers and the seagulls. I started walking home again when he approached me:

"Excuse me sir, would you mind telling me what you've been taking pictures of"?

"Not at all, I live here and I've been photographing the surfers, the canoeists and the seagulls"

"It's part of the council's child protection policy to check up on this sort of thing, would you mind showing me the pictures in your camera"?

My first instinct was, on principle, to yell "No way buddy, I'll see you in court first!" but I didn't. I'm on the beach every day and so is he, so I showed him the 1st 20 or so pictures. They were of surfers, canoeists and seagulls and there was even one of him.

And that was that. But I have been left with a lingering bad feeling. I was being entirely legal and entirely moral yet because there were children on the beach (all accompanied I might add) I get asked to show my pictures. I could have refused, but then he'd probably have called the police and it wasn't worth the hassle.

I'm as much in favour of protecting children as anyone else, but isn't something wrong with this picture?

Tom.

P.S. I'm not happy with either of the two pictures above, so I'll be out tomorrow trying to improve on them!

Years ago, I remember this quote being attributed to the composer Clara Schumann in 1846. While trying to verify this, I came upon this fascinating article which shows that the Schumann accreditation is unlikely:

http://www.pacifier.com/~ascott/they/tamildaa.htm

So we may never know who said it first, but what exactly does it mean and is it true?

The obvious meaning is that music carries it's own message to the listener, and hence discussion on it is unlikely to add anything and hence is pointless...just like dancing can say nothing about architecture. However, it is not so hard to imagine a dance troupe doing a worthwhile piece with architecture as it's subject - it has even have been done as the article above shows. So, this would seem to imply that the quote is wrong and talking about music could indeed be fruitful.

The film director Stanley Kubrick was once asked to explain the meaning of his masterpiece "2001: A Space Odyssey". He replied: "If I could tell you what it meant, I wouldn't have had to make the film". He has a point, but there are a world of different opinions that people can have about art in all it's forms and the "Intentional Fallacy" shows that the author's intention is not necessarily any more valid than the viewer's.

So, let's all keep talking about art, music and films. Wouldn't it be dull if no-one was prepared to share their opinion!

Cheers, Tom.

It's amazing how the light changes how photographs appear. The two pictures above were taken at about the same time of day on consecutive days. The difference is that in the lower one the clouds are totally blocking the sun. As a result it's a longer exposure and the blue colours have come out. The top one is quite a short exposure because of the streak of sunlight, so the clouds and beach have gone very dark.

Cheers, Tom.

An eternity of nothing then forever in the grave
And in-between these two extremes the life that we all crave
Make the most of time you have for death is dark and cold
And you'll have lots of memories to treasure when you're old

For time is short and many things will press upon your mind
So worry not, think happy thoughts, and leave your cares behind
Try and make each moment full and cram your life with zest
And when it's time look back and say  with joy "I did my best"

-- Seaside Man, 11th July 2009

Sunny today,
Strange the way the season has been,
Never have we seen such cold and rain,
But now September’s here again,
And as can be the case,
Strong winds have chased the grey clouds away,
Leaving sunny days,
A final blast of summer weather,
And starry nights we can gaze at together,
Wherever we are.

-- Beryl Stockman

I found this graffiti on a rock on Borth bog yesterday. I looked up the words and to my surprise they were from a song sung by Johnny Cash in Folsom prison. The song is called "Greystone Chapel" and was written by Folsom inmate Glen Sherley who was “serving 5 to life for armed robbery“:

"There are men here that don't ever worship
There are men here who scoff at the ones who pray
But I've got down on my knees in that Greystone chapel
And I thank the Lord for helpin' me each day
Now there's Greystone chapel here at Folsom
It has a touch of God's hand on ever stone
It's a flower of light in a field of darkness and it's givin' me the strength to carry on
Inside the walls of prison my body may be, but my Lord has set my soul free"

Sherley had a brief music career when he came out of prison, until he faded into obscurity and eventually killed himself by shooting himself in the head in 1978.

It seems that the "strength to carry on" deserted him.

Tom.

I've been meaning to record this song for a while, so here it is:

Done in the back yard in one take. You can just make out Dan's legs behind the plant pot if you look carefully!

Cheers, Tom.

Those pesky gulls keep moving round when I'm trying to take their picture!

Cheers, Tom.

Life, like photography, is full of opportunities. Sometimes we see an opportunity and successfully take it, sometimes for whatever reason we choose not to. Sometimes we try and take it and it doesn't work out as we wanted, but at least we tried. I think the trying is important, but a little planning can greatly increase the chance of success. The above picture was an attempt which failed because of lack of planning.

I was on the beach "playing" with my new zoom lens when the clouds parted to reveal the sun just about to set, but I didn't have my tripod with me. So instead of a good picture I got this grainy mess. I have no excuse, I should have taken my tripod. This is a lesson I learned a while ago, but it seems I'd forgotten it. I hope I don't forget again.

Winston Churchill once said:

“Planning is essential, plans are useless”

I think he was right.

Cheers, Tom.

I give everyone fair warning that this is a pretty disgusting song, but it's also pretty damned funny. So without further comment, here it is:

Cheers, Tom.

At least I think it's a Tern. Taken yesterday with my new zoom lens. The picture gets larger if you click on it.

Cheers, Tom.

http://www.personneltoday.com/articles/2007/11/19/43309/government-to-transfer-jobcentre-plus-work-to-private-sector-in-welfare-reform-shake-up.html

"Government to transfer Job Centre Plus work to private sector in welfare reform shake up"

"Seven-year contracts for welfare-to-work providers, to allow long-term investment in services and staff training"

"welfare-to-work provision - among other public services - would be turned over to private providers on a previously unimagined scale"

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Have you Heard of a Company called A4e? Most of you probably haven't. They are one of the companies who the government will be paying to take those who have been unemployed for more than 12 months off the unemployment register:

http://www.docstoc.com/docs/6788626/A4e-New-Deal

It's called the FND (Flexible New deal). Under FND, "claimants out of work for 12 months or longer will be referred to private contractors who will be paid by results to find them work".

The reason this is being done is to save money, up to £1 billion in a year. So, a company will be making a profit and the government will still save £1 billion a year?  Call me stupid, but why can't the government just do exactly what those companies were going to do and save over £1 billion a year? This would of course keep accountability and monitoring in-house too.

Problems are already appearing: the FND is "facing demands from three times more applicants than first predicted", and funding is "inadequate". I predict here and now that this will quickly turn into a catastrophe and that the companies won't have to carry the can.

There is a huge worry: "... that contractors will be tempted to spend money getting people into jobs who are easier to place ... the challenge and the danger created by the most disadvantaged is that they'll get the least resources precisely because the provider has assumed they won't get a job".

This could be very bad news for the disabled, for example, as well as others.

---------

The news isn't good where other countries have tried this:

http://www.personneltoday.com/articles/2008/04/16/45432/the-hidden-dangers-of-outsourcing-welfare-reform.html

"... where other countries had implemented similar welfare reforms, their experiences had been mixed. It uncovered abuse of the system, with private providers defrauding government departments and deliberately keeping unemployed people out of work until they became worth more money to place in a job"

""There have been cases of 'creaming' and 'parking', where service providers concentrated on those jobseekers that were the easiest to deal with or delayed and sometimes even ignored the most challenging cases.

"In Australia, success fees were fraudulently paid to employers taking on jobseekers for a limited period"

Welcome to the future.

Cheers, Tom.

I might be misremembering things, but it seems to me that summer weather wasn't as erratic 30 years ago as it is now. There were downpours as you would expect and occasional washed out weeks, but it just seems so much more changeable now. Almost minute by minute the weather is different.

So is my memory faulty or is it Climate Change?

My new lens arrived yesterday so if it's not too rainy I'll be out and about to see what I can get!

Cheers, Tom.

I thought this was hilarious. Click the play button to hear it. Warning, there is a rude word at the end!

Cheers, Tom.

"So maybe this explains why the moron lunatic left is so depressed. They stay in their basements hiding behind keyboards, typing rambling incoherent tomes about conservatives and never get enough sunlight" -- United Conservatives of Virginia

Honestly, some people can twist anything! Classic bit of political insulting there, with I make 8 insults wrapped up in 2 sentences and some nice social stereotyping too. Well done Conservatives of Virginia, you have made yourselves look like morons.

Cheers, Tom.

This song was written by Neil Young after his rhythm guitarist Danny Whitten died of a heroin overdose and not long before his roadie Bruce Berry also died of one (his story is told in "Tonight's the Night"). Neil said:

"I am not a preacher, but drugs killed a lot of great men"

This is my attempt at the song:

I caught you knocking
at my cellar door
I love you, baby,
can I have some more
Ooh, ooh, the damage done.

I hit the city and
I lost my band
I watched the needle
take another man
Gone, gone, the damage done.

I sing the song
because I love the man
I know that some
of you don't understand
Milk blood
to keep from running out.

I've seen the needle
and the damage done
A little part of it in everyone
But every junkie's
like a setting sun.

I'm cheating a bit with the purple and blue, but I couldn't find any better versions of these colours in our garden!

Cheers, Tom.

I'll do Orange, Purple and Blue another time!

Cheers, Tom.

I just bought a new lens on ebay for a bargain price, woohoo! Now, I should be able to take shots like the above one (click it to enlarge it) without cropping.

Happy :-)

Cheers, Tom.

"Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens,
bright copper kettles and warm woollen mittens,
brown paper packages tied up with strings,
these are a few of my favourite things.

When the dog bites, when the bee stings,
when I'm feeling sad,
I simply remember my favourite things,
and then I don't feel so bad"

"Dancer in the dark" is a film by Lars Von Trier (Dogville). It was released in 2000 and stars Bjork as Selma, a Czech immigrant to the USA who suffers from congenital degenerative blindness. Her aim is to save up money whilst doing a horrible job in order to pay for an operation for her son to prevent him from going blind like she is. It's a musical, and she escapes from her drudging existence into song at several key points in the film.

I don't want to give too much of the story away, but I can say that it is a dark and harrowing journey through the American legal system and capitalism. Bjork is brilliant in it and she is quite believable as the simple woman who only wants one thing from her life, which is to save her son from the blindness that awaits her. Her blindness is a clear metaphor for the spiritual blindness of the society in which she finds herself. She acts entirely on emotion rather than logic - "listen to your heart" - and this results in a chain of events that lead to the dark conclusion.

This film is disturbing and harrowing and is one that will make you think. Like other Von Trier films, he has a female "heroine" who withstands terrible conditions in order for the film to make comments on society.

This is not a fun film, it is not "entertainment", but it is darkly brilliant and is guaranteed to move you. There is a good chance it will start an argument too, and that has to be a good thing. Bjork is great in the part and her on-screen emotion is perfectly rendered. It's interesting to note that she immersed herself so deeply in the part that it affected her life outside the film and she vowed to never act in a film again.

Tom.

I see a cloud gathering,
its black and full of rain.
When anarchy will rule the day,
and our very worth is measured in pain.

We wont have to worry about drought again.

Fascism,
Fraud,
Misappropriated funds,
Political Confusion,
White Elephants,
Mass Collusion
Capitalist Illusions,
Small greedy people,
Grand Delusions,
Split decisions,
Overcrowded prisons,
War and Rage,
Without direction, and no real reasons.

-- Kim C Price, 1994. Inspired by newspaper headlines.

This is a curious event. They block off the town centre and people come out onto the streets wearing mad outfits and drink themselves stupid whilst dancing to loud music. Great fun! Below is a small selection of pictures I took of people at this event last night.

Cheers, Tom.

Delia’s Gone by Johnny Cash was one of the first songs I recorded on youtube, over a year ago. That first performance was pretty poor, so I thought I’d do it again. Here it is:

Cheers, Tom.

The other day, Garden Girl commented that when visiting Aberystwyth, she and her husband had noticed seagulls apparently nesting on the roofs of houses and asked me if I'd seen this. I replied in the affirmative and then realised that I didn't have a picture, so the above is that. I couldn't actually see the nest, but presumably the chicks were close to it.

Wild Nature really does seem to be adapting to humanity. Rats were one of the first to adapt. When I lived in High Wycombe it was common to see rats in the streets in daylight, trotting down the pavement. At least they obeyed the Green Cross Code. Now, we get moles, foxes, all manner of birds and other creatures all happily subsisting off human detritus.

Seagulls are frequently found a long way inland now, feeding off discarded take-aways and chips (which are of course their natural seaside food). I used to see them in High Wycombe all the time, and that's quite a long way inland.

Give it another 100 years and we'll be fighting them for food.

Cheers, Tom.

...That's my dream. That's my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor, and surviving" - words spoken by Marlon Brando in "Apocalypse Now"

The horror, the horror...

Because of their thick slime, snails really can do that.

Cheers, Tom.

P.S. Click the picture to see the snails larger...

"Everyone is the Ploughman, Everyone is the Seed
Everyone is the harvest and everyone yields
In the garden of many fields there is no me no you
There is no up or down no right nor wrong
no black or white, everyone is the ploughman

Everyone is one with one love and one love is one with everyone

Stand and deliver!

We fight one another with borrowed philosophy
we fight one another with cultural change
we fight one another with god and country
we kill one another for someone else's pleasure and gain

Stand and Deliver!" -- Trans-Global Underground

Turn up LOUD!

Cheers, Tom.

On one of my earlier posts, I mentioned that I was hoping to find a single image to sum up the festival. I couldn't find one, but this one says quite a lot:

As with the previous days there was lots of wandering round, but luckily the ground had dried up so no wellies were needed. Fairly early on we saw a lot of Tom Jones' set on the Pyramid stage and he was really very good. I expect that will do his CD sales the world of good. Beth Rowley in the acoustic tent was also excellent, although she wasn't exactly acoustic. We also saw Roots Manuva who was great. It's nice to see some truly excellent British hip-hop. Bo Peep didn’t lose any of her sheep:

But I want to focus on the evening. There are many stages at Glastonbury and at about 10PM we had to choose between these acts who were all on at the same time:

The Prodigy, Black Eyed Peas, Blur, Echo & The Bunnymen, Gong, Peaches

I'd happily have watched any of them, but really I had to go see The Prodigy as I'd never seen them before and their live shows are legendary. Interestingly though, we did catch the last song by Steve Hillage and the 1st by Gong on the way to see The Prodigy, and both were excellent. I confess I didn't realise that Daevid Allen was still alive!

So, The Prodigy: they were good. Maxim and Keith were all over the stage with incredible energy whilst the music banged and boomed away in grand and epic style. They had the second deepest and heaviest bass I have ever heard, beaten only by Leftfield (and maybe Motorhead now I think about it). But there is a but. They were only on for 65 minutes - I timed them. For a Sunday night Glastonbury headline slot, that's outrageously short (Neil Young did 2 hours, Bruce Springsteen 2 hours 40 mins). They played their last song and then just abruptly disappeared, with no encore. Their were loud boos from all over the crowd. They have upset a lot of fans by doing this. Perhaps there was a valid reason for it, but we weren't told - they just left and that was it. Most disappointing. This is them on-stage, and I apologise for it being a bit blurred:

Straight after this we wandered up to the Stone Circle and I snapped this on the way:

I think that gives a pretty good feel for wandering round at night. About an hour later the heavens opened and the rain absolutely tipped down so we made our way slowly back to our tent. All in all, a great Glastonbury and we’ll most likely try to go again next year, if the great ticket god in the sky is willing!

Cheers, Tom.

 

Saturday was very hot and humid all day. Also, because the ground was still quite muddy in places wellies were required, so increasing the heat further. But, this didn't stop us from buzzing round the large site trying to take in as much as we could. Before anything though came tea:

Just what you need after crawling out of a steamy hot tent! And I don't mean "hot and steamy" in a good way - take a small tent with 2 people in it and blast the early morning sun onto it. After an hour or so of that you can't take any more, and it's probably only 8AM and you didn't go to bed until 5AM. Yes folks, lack of sleep is something to get used to if you go to this sort of festival! Official music finishes at midnight, but the official "quiet time" is 6AM until 11AM.

This was the scene in one of the more subdued dance tents at about mid-day. Not much going on yet, but I like the contrast between inside and outside:

I mentioned yesterday some of the strange, random things you see and this is one of them:

This was in the Jazz World field. The 2 blokes just appeared, boss with clipboard and worker and gradually erected the fence you can see before the worker stopped for a tea break. Last time I went, there was a bloke moving through the crowd throwing rubbish into a bin bag that had no bottom. He had "Shiteaway" written on the back of his jacket.

Later in the day the sun briefly slipped behind a cloud to reveal this serene scene:

... and then came out again to reveal this busy scene:

We saw lots of music today, including a lovely mellow techno set in the late afternoon and a folk ensemble who played the music from the film The Wicker Man. Consecutively in the Park field, we had the "Easy Star All Stars" playing the whole of Radiohead's OK Computer album in a reggae style, followed by a set from the great reggae singer Horace Andy, which included 2 Massive Attack songs. (which he sang on the records of).

Somewhere in the middle of the day, we saw an old hero of mine in the Cabaret tent - John Otway. He is still just as mad and brilliant as he always has been, and is still playing the same set and doing a brilliant job of it. If John Otway ever plays a gig near you, Go See Him and enjoy yourself!

When it was headliner time, it was a choice between Jarvis Cocker, Bruce Springsteen, Franz Ferdinand and Stereo MCs. Going to see Jarvis was an easy decision, far easier than Sunday's decision (which I will relate tomorrow). Jarvis was great and so was his band. The songs are all strong and he didn't play a single Pulp song. Very good performance, and he really knows how to get a crowd going.

One last picture. I took this one in the Stone Circle field just before the sun came up:

I like this one as it conveys the look and feel of the place at that time quite well. Lots of tired but happy people sitting and standing around just chilling out and chatting. Most pleasant.

Cheers, Tom.