August
Avebury
A long time ago – certainly years before the 2011 BBC series about the restoration – I saw a picture Avebury Manor somewhere. That side view of the top photo, framed to the oldest, original part of the building. In the picture, the lavender lining the path was still blooming, and it was beautiful. The sort of house I suddenly realised I have wanted to live in always. Alas, the National Trust got their hands into it first, and it’s gone forever (also, I’m still waiting for that Eurolotto win). What I didn’t realise until this summer is that Avebury is actually only about 35 miles from Oxford – a short train ride and a short bus ride – away, and so few days ago I went to visit it for the first time. The restoration of the house didn’t entirely convince me, but I was slightly spooked by how well the mental image of the place I had matched the real place. The walled kitchen garden, the church, the meadow left from the side door, they were all there. This place felt hugely personal and strangely bittersweet; a peculiar expression of what life would have been had I taken some arbitrary turn somewhere and ended up in a place completely different from where I’m now.
Rainy afternoon
It was the kind of August day that is more autumn than summer; rainy, melancholy, a perfect mist on the sea, the last of the summer flowers fading away, and I wanted to visit this old fishing port about 20km north of Oulu. I remember this place from my childhood – it was bopping back then, a whole fleet of boats going out every day to catch whitefish and Baltic herring and salmon, people like my grandparents buying the fish fresh from the fishermen in the morning. Fears of industrial pollution and cheap north Atlantic fish imports have all but killed the industry, and the moorings have filled with leisure boats. Another tiny piece of the world as it was crumbled away.
An arctic island and the cold light of day
Hailuoto is a largish island in the Bothnian Sea, just off the coast of Oulu – just about visible from the mainland, but far enough for the access being by a ferry only. Living on the island is a small community of locals, and an even smaller community of vacationers; tourists come and go. I imagine this not being too dissimilar from the island in Stephen King’s Colorado Kid; a place defined by it’s isolation, slow to give up its secrets. There are the kind of old farm buildings one rarely sees on the mainland anymore, wild nature, sand dunes and pines forests, heath and marsh. The wind is always blowing, shifting the sands, and there’s economic beauty on the plain landscape.
Cottage gardens
As a city dweller (first floor, with a view of traffic lights and a cemetery), I dream of the time when I can have my own garden – berries and apples, rhubarbs under bells, neat rows of vegetables and beets and herbs, sweet peas (which smell like heaven and don’t photograph at all well) and autumn dahlias. One day.
Lavender fields
I have always wanted to photograph a lavender field – there’s something glorious about the colour, the straight lines of the bushes, the overwhelming scale of purple stretching from horizon to horizon. We got to Hitching Lavender Farm on a hot early August Sunday; the fields were full of visitors like us, and so I didn’t quite get the wide-angle shot I had hoped for. The scent was ripe and heavy, the flowers full of bees, the air buzzing with them as they flew around, drunk on the nectar. It was a good day.
All photos have been scaled to 25% from original size with a batch processing software. Click images to see full size for best quality.
Material comforts
I first visited Blenheim Palace in my first year as undergraduate in Oxford. That was eight years ago, and I only went back few weeks ago now. It is an interesting place – the house is impossibly grand (think Downton Abbey, multiplied by six and then turbocharged), and by now it resembles an “English country house theme park” more than a private, lived-in house with its champagne bars and visitor centres. But leave the house to walk the park, and even in a bank holiday weekend, magic happens. Not many people venture into the far corners of the park, and we had a bench by the lake all for ourselves. We sat there for a long time watching the birds and listening to the slightly menacing noises of the woods. The whole park a marvel – it was redesigned by Capability Brown in the 1760s, who built the (by British standards) huge lake with its waterfalls and planted the enormous trees. There’s something uplifting about the idea that 250 years ago, he set out to create something he knew would not reach its peak until many generations after his death. I’m not sure if I’ll ever visit the house itself again, but I definitely want to go back and sit on that bench again.
Butterfly in the library 