Sunday Thoughts

Sunday morning thoughts.

Next door’s noisy washing machine has been going at it for several days now. All day, every day. Or so it seems. Two hypotheses here. Either they’re cleaning up a murder scene or they’ve opened a commercial laundry. I’m not actually sure which is worse (from a noisy back garden point of view, I mean).

On the other side, they’re chopping down trees. Big, healthy trees.
“Leafy” and “green” are adjectives often applied to living in a nice area: people pay premium prices for mature trees. And yet…
Next door 50 years of slow, hard work, gone in a couple of hours of noise (only just louder than the laundry).

On the Afrikaans side of my social media there’s a fierce* debate as to whether Neil Young or Steve Hofmeyr would provide the better soundtrack for the drive on the R319 between Bredasdorp and Swellendam. It’s getting quite heated.
I think I’d probably cancel the trip. Not least because whatever you have to listen to on the journey, you end up in Swellendam.

Oh, and obviously, since reading this, I can’t really get it out of my mind…

If I’d done a “Saturday thoughts” or “Friday thoughts” or whatever, this would also be in there. And in all likelihood, when I do my next ” ___day thoughts”, it will still be there.
Of course it will.

Freak Moose Antler Incident are in session for Marc Riley this Wednesday.

* Initially, I mistyped this word and WordPress tried to correct it to “faeces”. Did it perhaps read the musical options which followed? AI is amazing.

Winter skeletons

Trees in Wynberg Park on the weekend.

Maybe it’s always been a Cape Town/South African thing, but I’ve suddenly noticed that the daytime light this winter is horrible for taking photos in. Low, vivid (but not in a good way); harsh and devoid of warmth. It could just be that we’re having a very Joburg-esque winter this year: bright and cold. Or maybe it’s just that I’m taking more photos – and from a different perspective.

Either way, I’m struggling. Bring on summer.

Summer is coming

Not for us, of course. Winter is on its way for us, as indicated by the cooler evenings and later sunrises (which are already sitting at 0645, meaning that we get up very much in the dark). No, I’m obviously referring to the Northern hemisphere, which has been struggling with snow, ice, cold days and colder nights for the past few months.

A time for happiness, then?

Well, not for everyone, no. Because, as we’ve covered before, summer brings leaves to the trees and leaves on the trees block those views which you want(ed) to photograph.

But never has the displeasure at the approaching onset of foliage been expressed quite like this:

I think I see some leaves, even in this photo, evergreen leaves, attached to the tree on the right as we look. But there was, today, nothing like the visual ruination that will engulf everything in a few months time, turning intricately pleasing urban-rural counterpoint into a big old smudge of rural tedium.

There will be photographers of the pastoral persuasion who will have precisely the opposite opinion to this. But they can keep on taking photos of trees with leaves, without anything beyond being masked, obscured or hidden. No-one is stopping them. But in just a few weeks, Brian and his fellow (Northern) city-based ‘toggers will, once again, have to seek out new tree-free spots in order to fill their quota of images of entirely visible skyscrapers.