favourite photos: summer 2018

The title of this post may seem slightly odd, given that it’s November already, but for the past two years I’ve published a collection of photographs to coincide with my annual sojourn in the UK, and I’ve had to delay my departure for Hong Kong by four weeks this year. There is another difference this year: previous collections have focused exclusively on my time in Penrith, but this year I’ve included photos from visits to Cologne and Manchester in June. As usual, the photos are presented in chronological order.

I’ll start with two photos that I took in a park near our hotel in Cologne:

Nothing out of the ordinary; I just like the reflections.

Paula took this photo of a stone toad in the same park:

The next photo is of the cast iron side door of a church in Cologne. It depicts episodes from the Bible:

Starting at the bottom and working up, left to right, this is what I think these images represent:

Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden / Noah’s Ark / Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego being cast into the fiery furnace / Cain and Abel / Moses and the Ten Commandments / baptism of Jesus / ? /the Last Supper / birth of Jesus…

I have no idea what the two images in the top right panel depict. Do you agree with my interpretation of the others?

I’ve included the next photo because I like the juxtaposition of secular and sacred. The exotic building in the background is Groß St Martin, one of the twelve Romanesque churches to be seen in the mediæval part of Cologne. The latest date for its construction is circa AD 1250.

My final photo from Cologne presents something of a mystery. The original image was a fairly unremarkable piece of street art, but why has someone spray-painted ‘HACF LTN’ over the key section of the image? I can only guess, but it seems likely that some kind of encroachment by the original artist on someone else’s turf is involved. Whatever the truth, the addition is as obvious a piece of vandalism as you’re ever likely to see:

You may have some difficulty interpreting my first photo from Manchester:

It shows reflections in a glass-walled building in the city centre.

The subject of the next photo is more obvious. It’s a Victorian railway bridge spanning the Rochdale Canal:

I didn’t have time to take a closer look at Manchester Cathedral, but these photos, taken from a distance, are a reminder that I should rectify this omission the next time I’m in the city:

This is another photo of a section of the Rochdale Canal:

I did think of turning this one upside down. Or is it already upside down? Note the graffiti along the towpath.

My final photo from Manchester is of an unusual modern building—unusual in that this is a city where most of the interesting buildings date from the nineteenth century.

A few years ago, I wrote about my discovery of caterpillars of the cinnabar moth on a clump of ragwort, and ever since I’ve been looking to see whether I could find more, without success. Until this summer. I took the following photo in my next-door neighbour’s garden:

I rarely photograph oil/petrol spills nowadays, but this one was so intense that I took several shots. Here are two:

Although such pollution incidents can be spectacularly colourful, it’s important to bear in mind that the pollutants will eventually end up in the sea!

I always seem to find at least one interesting scene to record in the Thacka Beck Nature Reserve, and this year has been no exception:

These are organically reared longhorn cattle that are brought in to graze the central marshy area during the summer months.

I don’t often walk past the location of the next image, but I swear that I’d never seen this statue of a bear before this year:

The odd thing is that it appears to have been carved from a tree trunk that is still rooted in the ground!

I rarely get a chance to photograph sunsets, but I took this photo on my way home from the pub one Sunday afternoon:

It would probably have made for a better photo 15–20 minutes earlier.

Finally, I include a couple of autumnal photos. I’m usually back in Hong Kong by the time leaves start to drop off the trees in earnest:

The first photo is a view of the avenue of trees in Castle Park leading down to the main entrance, which is also Penrith’s memorial to the two world wars of the twentieth century (the memorial to the Boer War is located behind the camera). The second photo is a view of Penrith’s Methodist church from the grounds of Christ Church.