Heatwave was back, so it was time to go to the beach again.
Shot taken from the pier.
Light above the pier.
Sun reflecting on the water.
My foot in the water.
Something to eat.
Followed by an ice cream, of course.
Place to have some fun times. (I think. I haven’t been there.)
Shops on the street are also sort of typical of the seaside town.
Sun starts setting on the seaside, rides are closing.
Bye-Bye!
All tired out from the day, you make your way to the station, only to be faced with the reality of the train to Manchester being cancelled. The next one would not depart until an hour after the cancelled one.
Distrust in the railway company, coupled with your ever present anxiety, forces you to seek another solution.
You board the next train to Liverpool and return to Manchester via Liverpool South Parkway. You get home at about the same time you would if you had taken the train after the cancelled one.
What a journey!
For the Weekly Prompts Weekend Challenge – Journey.
In case you want to know, I didn’t have to buy another ticket, the one I had was valid for the alternative journey.
Like majority of people in this social media age, I’m not immune from taking pictures of my orders at restaurants or coffee shops, although I almost never share them–I usually do this so that I can post them to Google Maps (I have just reached Level 7 Local Guide). With such images, I don’t focus on quality or aesthetics. This one, however, came out looking so good that I can’t just keep it to myself!
This is a pie meal from Silcock’s Pier Family Restaurant in Southport, a popular seaside resort in the north of England. The pie is chicken and mushroom (a drink is also a part of the meal but is not pictured). The only way this could be more English is if it was fish and chips. I don’t think I’ve ever ordered a fish and chips in my nineteen years of living here, but that might also be because I rarely frequent that type of takeouts–it’s all burgers and fried chicken and kebabs in my neighbourhood. I admit have a junk food problem.
English food gets a lot of trashing, but I don’t think it’s fair. I think it’s just one of those myths that people perpetuate without really thinking about it.
It’s time to honour the Queen again, the real queen of crime and books and storytelling, still one of the best selling writers in history, Agatha Christie. I finally managed to make still life photographs that I’m happy with–the trick was using one particular table I bought in December (and thought I would end up not needing for anything) as a background. Also Mr Kipling’s French Fancies.
I went with Miss Marple this time, as she tends to get outshined by Hercule Poirot. That’s understandable–there are more Poirot books than Marple books. Miss Jane Marple first appears in The Murder at the Vicarage, released in 1930. She’s lived her whole life in a little fictional village of St Mary Mead. At first glance, she appears a very unremarkable old spinster who knits, gardens and takes part in church activities. Then she blows everyone’s minds by solving the murder.
Living in a village gives Miss Marple an opportunity to observe people and study human nature. And, as she always reminds her nephew, Raymond West, human nature is the same everywhere, village or city.
This edition of The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side featured in my previous post, Agatha Christie Paperbacks with (maybe) Tom Adams Covers. What I didn’t realise at the time was that this cover is taken from John William Waterhouse painting The Lady of Shalott Looking at Lancelot. The book title is a line from Tennyson’s poem The Lady of Shalott, which also inspired Waterhouse’s painting. Without giving too much away, the mystery has nothing to do with Arthurian myth, it refers to a look on the face of one of characters, Marina Gregg. Miss Marple, who wasn’t even present when Marina had that look and is merely told about it by a friend, uses this tiny detail to crack the mystery.
The Moving Finger is one of my favourites. It features my favourite couple of all Agatha books, Jerry and Megan, and Megan is also one of my favourite characters. She’s got no job, is not in education and has a stepfather whom she dislikes. The early 20s me could relate to this a lot. Unlike the other two, The Moving Finger does not take place at St Mary Mead but a different village. Miss Marple is there on a visit–luckily for the residents, she’s able to catch the culprit.
Miss Marple knows that it’s a wicked world with very wicked people in it and she expects the worst from everyone, but she still keeps a kind heart. And that’s what makes her so great.
The topic of this week’s Weekly Prompt Weekend Challenge is Sharing. I scrolled down Google Photos on my phone to see if I had anything. The thing I find with prompts is that if I don’t find a suitable picture for a challenge within a minute, I don’t bother. It has to feel real, from the heart, not forced. You get me.
So here is my contribution. What is better to share than chocolate?
Lindt are my favourites–when an occasion comes, I visit the Lindt shop and fill a box with their chocolates. This particular selection was for my birthday, which was recently. As you can see, it already includes a Christmas bear.
You can’t go wrong with Ferrero Rocher–and they look so aesthetically pleasing! Picture is dated January 2021, but honestly I tell you, my friends, I don’t remember buying them at all. Presumably I ate them too, and I probably enjoyed them.
I bought this loaf and when I put it on the wooden chopping board, it looked so nice I had to take a picture. But my white kitchen top made too harsh a background, so I later bought another loaf of bloomer and did it again using a kitchen towel for a background.
Bread is one of the oldest man-made foods and is culturally and religiously significant. It’s also often used as a metaphor for sustenance. The Lord’s Prayer, for example, features the line “give us today our daily bread”. Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre says to (that bastard) Rochester: “Do you think I am an automaton? — a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup?” Bread-winner is used to describe the member of the household who earns the largest chunk of the income.
Today’s post is another attempt of mine at still-life photography. It also combines some of the things I like: coffee, croissant, Star Trek, and, well, since I titled it A Saturday Morning, weekend.
If you look closely, if you can see it, you’ll notice the magazine is an April 2018 issue, which would make it a year old. I confess I’ve not actually read any of it, I only bought it because I loved the cover so much. Naomi Campbell and Skepta just look so gorgeous on it. It was the magazine that first gave me an idea of a photoshoot like this, but it took me a whole year to actually do it. For some reason I decided I must have a croissant there and the problem with me and croissants is that anytime I buy some, I have to eat them immediately, so by the time I remembered to take out my camera, they were gone.
I’m quite pleased with how the shot turned out in the end.
These ones are filled with chocolate, I bought them frozen from Tesco. They just looked so nice in the glass oven-proof dish, I had to take the pictures!
Like somebody once said “churros are pieces of heaven that us mere mortals don’t deserve”. Actually, I saw the first part of it somewhere on Yahoo Answers years ago and made up the rest. At least something nice came out of that god-awful site. Lol!
I bought a bar of chocolate once and was eating it, when I saw how nice the chocolate looked against the white wrapper. So I took a pic of it with my smartphone.
This is some dark chocolate from Aldi (a discount supermarket, for those who don’t know). It’s dead cheap and very, very tasty. And it doesn’t look bad on photographs either!
Some Photoblog 