‘Silence’ – Devon’s surprise prize-winning poem

We just opened the mail, and discovered – to our total surprise – that our little boy Devon has won a poetry competition, and is to have his poem published in a book.

To say we are proud – and moved – would be the understatement of the year. Here’s his sweet poem, called ‘Silence’:

Words by Devon. Created as an image by his very proud Andy Dad. To be published by Young Writers in Poetry Explorers 2009 – Lincolnshire.

Big Sky

Sometimes nature paints itself a picture, and all you have to do is take a snapshot:

Nikon D300, Nikon 24-70mm f 2.8 lens at 24mm, 1/320 at f 11, ISO 200, hand held no flash. I took this five minutes after getting home after a long week at work. I went to sit out back, with a cuppa, to relax and blow the cobwebs away. This was a just snapshot, one of three I took. I plan to make the three into a tryptich soon, onto a canvas to hang on a wall somewhere in our house. A single shot, taken in RAW, processed twice in Photoshop (-0.5, +0.5) and after a tiny little bit of HDR trickery in Photomatix…

Without getting too philosophical, it’s easy to miss the beauty that you can find in your own back yard.

Jasmine The Giraffe

 Having a baby includes – for some people – identifying an important set of colours. Marie, my wife, is one of those, and one day she brought home a small toy giraffe which she a) named Jasmine, and b) stated that Jasmine’s colours would be the colour of our baby’s room and all accessories. Naturally I agreed to this. What do you think I am, stupid? And here, photographed in all her green/pink/blue finery, is that very Jasmine: 

Nikon D300, Tamron SP AF 90mm f/2.8 Di Macro lens, 1/1000 at f 10, ISO 320, hand held no flash. I had this picture blown up onto canvas, and it now hangs on the baby’s bedroom wall. For this I used the pin-sharp Tamron 90mm macro lens, and took it up to our decking on a sunny evening. I kept it a secret from Marie until yesterday – she loved it and I am now spending the brownie points thus achieved by watching The Ashes and The Open Championship golf…

Andy’s Little Project

We’ve been in our house for nearly three years, and my little dream project – the one that struck me as soon as we saw this place – has finally been realised…

(No image details in this blog – it’s all about the building, not the photography)… This is the top end of our back garden – ‘Andy’s little project’ for the last three years. When we first viewed the house, this top area – we called it our secret garden – was neglected, overgrown with nettles and rubble. You had to fight your way up some rickety wooden steps at the bottom of the lawn, and through a tight gap in two huge laurel bushes to get there. But the reward for fighting your way through was literally breathtaking. We discovered a stunning western-facing level area sitting high above rolling fields which – we later found out – change colour spectacularly throughout the seasons. Breezy, refreshing, and a thoroughly uplifting place to be. To seal the deal, the sun sets directly in the middle of the picture above…we enjoy some of the best sunsets you can imagine while still being land-locked. In fact, as I’ve lived near to the coast through a fair portion of my life, I tend to get a little claustrophobic if I don’t have a decent horizon. This secret garden of ours provides a level of shoulder-room and grand scale of view that I never expected to find living in our little old English town (we live right on the north western edge of Stamford, which itself is right on the borders of five counties – Lincolnshire, Rutland, Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire and Leicestershire).  

At the end of this blog, I’ll show you what it looked like soon after we started. But below, the workers (in red, Marie’s brother Craig,  and in blue, her father John) have already arrived. The following images show the gradual progress of a family project which took over two years.

First job was to tame the terraced slope at the foot of the garden, give it a bit of structure. Note roped-off area, which is Andy’s anally-retentive attempt to preserve his grass (another little project, it was fairly cabbage-strewn when we moved in).

Once finished, we’d successfully turned three crumbling earth terraces into two firmer shelves – but we had a long way to go:

Above, we haven’t filled in the ends yet, nor have we gravelled the shelves. And spot the obvious (deliberate) flaw – no easy way to get up there.

A year later, and a couple of outstanding friends called Paul (aka Lorryload Paul, a red haired Harrison Ford lookalike) and Michael (about whom more below) had built us some fantastic decking steps, and a back fence, and side fences too. Note our ex-stray cat Lucy to the left. Grass is coming on nicely too:

But we were still only half way there. That sorted the back end of the main garden, but what about the secret garden, and the big view? It remained untouched, and for almost a year we waited until the time felt right to get Paul and Michael back again, to do the second half of the job. Below, the boys are just a couple of days in to what became a superb, fast, and brilliantly-delivered piece of work:

Up on the top, the lovely bit of decking from picture at the start of this blog was taking shape. I’d always envisioned a platform jutting out like a ship’s prow above the overhang, and it was exciting to see it coming to life:

Finally, on June 27 2009, on the first anniversary of our wedding, we invited our families to come and see us at home, to celebrate our anniversary, to christen our new ’secret garden’, to look at the view, and to share a few drinks and a barbeque with us. Below are (from left) Michael, his partner Graham, Tracey (Mark’s wife), Mairi (my stepmum) and my big brother Mark. Michael – whom we now count as a trusted family friend – was the mastermind behind the decking and, along with our other good friend ‘Lorryload Paul’, built something which will provide lasting enjoyment for our family. Michael even built a small scale model to show us what it would look like, before we made the final creative decisions. That bannister, for example, is wider than usual – wide enough to balance a beer can on, for example (or for me, more likely, a mug of tea…). It was a peaceful evening, once the kids had calmed down, and I found that sitting up on the decking as the sun set, chatting to friends, was every bit as peaceful and rewarding as I imagined it would be:

So to finish, here’s the awful reality of our back garden before we began the two-year process of realising the dream:

And here it is this morning:

There’s plenty still to do – those laurel bushes need taming properly, we haven’t yet started to put any real colour into the garden or onto those gravelled shelves, and the rest of the fencing needs doing.  But it’s a relief to have the big stuff done, and I’m not ashamed to admit that I go up there, to my secret garden, often now, to blow away the cobwebs of the day, to watch the clouds skim along, and to reflect on things a little bit. It’s my haven.

The Deltic

Before we get into the big engine, here’s the idyllic scene a couple of days ago just outside the Wansford railway station, on the Nene Valley Railway near Peterborough:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm lens at 16mm, 1/250 at f 8, ISO 200, hand held no flash. That’s the River Nene. Idle snap with the wide angle Sigma, and rather heavily tweaked in Lightroom and Paint Shop pro to produce a very quick and simple HDR effect. But no amount of photo processing could adequately convey just how lovely a day it was. I’d managed to get away from the office a few hours early one Friday afternoon in July 2009, craving fresh air, sunshine and a warm breeze after a week’s heavy lifting of a few golf industry marketing plans. Leaving Marie and her parents happily (honestly) building baby bedroom furniture, I headed to the NVR where I’d heard our favourite train (me and my big brother – mild trainspotting tendencies having been covered elsewhere in this blog) was going to be running up and down the line for ‘enthusiasts’.

The Deltic was the biggest, most powerful diesel engine ever to run on British Rail. Only 22 were ever made, and they ran up and down the East Coast main line between London and Edinburgh, just the most mighty trains imaginable with distinctive, bulbous noses and making a throbbing, pulsating growl that got you in the chest like the noise of a thousand sub-woofers. Mark and I loved them as much for the how they sounded, as for how they looked. The Deltics were the closest we ever came, in Britain, to the giant freight-pulling monster engines they have in the USA. Seeing one up close, for a small boy, was one of the biggest thrills you could have in the pre-CGI, pre-internet, pre-video game late Sixties and Seventies.

Sadly, on this day, D9009 Alycidon failed to live up to the legend, and by the time I got there the enthusiasts had drifted away, thwarted by ‘operational difficulties’, which I took to mean that this notably temperamental beast had simply broken down a bit. Either that, or they didn’t sell enough tickets:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm lens at 10mm, 1/400 at f 8, ISO 200, hand held no flash. Brutalised slightly in Lightroom, to produce a slightly over the top HDR effect, but hey this is only a little photo blog and I like to make the pictures pop a bit. Here’s the Deltic anyway, parked in the crowded NVR marshalling yard, next to your actual Thomas The Tank Engine. The Deltic is so big and beefy, with such a huge snout, you have to get a fair way away from it if you’re taking pictures at ground level. I probably shouldn’t have been down in the dirt and cinders of the yard, but it was pretty much deserted so I took the photographer’s chance, and walked around unhindered.

Here’s the one from the footbridge:

Nikon D300, Nikon 24-70mm f 2.8 lens at 48mm, 1/200 at f 8, ISO 200, hand held no flash. Various colour channels de-saturated in Lightroom to pop the greens and yellows. There’s not an awful lot one can write about this picture – my brother Mark will probably appreciate why I took it, in fact why I was there at all. Like me, he will be wishing that they’d restored it in the Blue & Yellow livery, rather than the old British Rail green. But to us, this picture brings back many happy memories of a childhood now gone, but not forgotten.

Andy Wears A Dress

And then I was born, not in a hospital, but in a bungalow in Somerset. My Dad was managing an oil terminal near Bridgwater, and my Mum was a schoolteacher in the village of Pawlett. We lived in Puriton where, in 6 Newlyn Crescent, little Andy arrived. I quickly set about changing the fashion rules of contemporary society, and here – aged around three – I’m wearing the iconic first ‘hoodie’:

Big brother Mark – a year older – sports a rather gay cardigan, and I’m glad to report that currently, at the age of 46, he is beginning to favour cardigans once again. I, on the other hand, have a 9-year old boy whom, I’m very much afraid, will wear hoodies throughout the next ten years merely to cover his face in the act of committing crimes. It’s my own fault for starting the hoodie craze in the first place.

Below, a flash back even further. I’m about eight months here, wearing a woolly cardie (as is Mark), and definitely also wearing a dress. In my defence, I was young, I was trying new things, and it was the weekend. Mark is showing the curl of hair that has plagued his forehead throughout his life – it’s there to this day. Get it cut short Mark, use a bit of my American Crew fibre, spike it up a bit. Here he shows his Mexican bandit hat, probably because he was having another bad hair day:

Who would have known that those legs of mine, twenty five years later, would have become two of the most prized assets of not one, but two pub football teams in the Jewsons East Kent Sunday League, Division Five.

Oh You Cow

 I’d spent an unsuccessful day, on balance, trying to find the patience and the finesse to take landscape style photographs on a day-long jaunt into our neighbouring counties, Northants and Leicestershire. This was a rare day off work, and I had all the kit with me. Trouble was, although it was all very relaxing, I wasn’t getting anything to really go crackers about. But on my way back I found a lovely big lake by surprise, called Eyebrook Reservoir, and spotted some cows on the far side. No harm, I reasoned, in switching to Wildlife photography mode. After all, I can take a great picture of a domestic cat. In fact , all things considered, I could see no udder alternative.

I bravely got very close indeed to capture these magnificent beasts in their prime. Now that’s what I call a cow picture: 

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm lens at 10mm, 1/160 at f 10, ISO 200, hand held with flash. I found Cow Number 401181 to have the right combination of looks, personality and susceptibility to bribery – in the case of the pic above, by a bit of bush dangled by yours truly just out of shot. Don’t worry, the cow got to eat the bush.

I did not trespass, because 401181 and her butch friend had a slightly petulant look about them: 

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm lens at 18mm, 1/500 at f 5.3, ISO 200, hand held no flash. Close enough thank you ladies.  A word about the Sigma wide-angle 10-20mm lens at this point if I may. As I’ve said before in this blog, from time to time this lens produces just remarkable quality pictures. The high-res version of both this pic and the one above are just packed with detail.

At the gate, 401181 signalled the herd, and the sisters began to gather: 

 Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm lens at 10mm, 1/160 at f 10 ISO 200, hand held no flash. I am aware that it’s not cool to take photographs of cows, but I have never claimed to be out to impress in any way with this blog.

As the rain clouds gathered, the light got more interesting, and the cows got more demanding. There just wasn’t enough bush to feed the stampede, and shortly after this I made my excuses and left:

 

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm lens at 18mm, 1/500 at f 5.3, ISO 200, hand held no flash. Note shadow of self, holding camera in the air to get this aerial view. A decent bit of Photoshop work and I could have removed that shadow, but as I have said before, this isn’t art. I wonder how many of these cows have appeared in McDonalds by now, or perhaps on a barbeque. Come to think of it, we had one the other day. Oh, Cow Number 401181, I hope you were what they call a right old milker…

Mum To Be

The baby’s due in 9 weeks, and here’s what Marie’s Mum and Dad have been doing for us this weekend:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm lens at 10mm, 1/25 at f 5, ISO 400, hand held no flash. One beautifully-decorated baby girl’s bedroom, courtesy of J&B Decorators (John and Bev).

The cot was bought by my own Dad and Mairi – thanks to the extended baby support team, Scottish division. Yet to appear: the wardrobe and dresser, the edging to the new wooden floor, and the baby’s mattress. We are, as they say, getting there. Doesn’t she look happy? This pic is straight out of the camera, no tweaks at all.

[UPDATE ONE WEEK LATER]

And here’s the finished article, this morning:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm lens at 10mm, 1/60 at f 9, ISO 200, hand held no flash. Note butterflies on curtains. Humphrey the new elephant at extreme top left. Jasmine the giraffe’s new alter-ego, Jasmine 2, on the (sloping) book shelf top right. We’re going to redo the shelves. As I’ve said before, she’d better be a girl…

When I’m Seventeen

Devon has eight years to wait until he can legally drive a car. But that doesn’t stop a boy thinking ahead. The trouble is, when you’re nine and obviously a very cool dude, do you go for the Dodge, or the Chevy?

Nikon D300, Nikon 24-70mm f 2.8 lens at 24mm, 1/320 at f 3.5, ISO 200, hand held no flash. Tweaked in Lightroom to give some warmth to the greens, yellows, oranges… Honestly, when you’re looking at some of the coolest cars in…Doncaster…just how do you choose?

Especially when the Chevy has a trunk large enough to basically live in:

Nikon D300, Nikon 24-70mm f 2.8 lens at 26mm, 1/60 at f 3.5, ISO 200, hand held no flash. Took away the greens to colour-pop this one, just for fun. He looks pretty grown-up here. But will you just look at that car? It’ll look even cooler in 2017, when he can drive the thing.

No, we didn’t buy anything. This evening was one of my family experiments – I took Marie and Devon to Doncaster, where we met up with my good old friend James Haigh (who I met when I was 11), to watch a presentation on Project Bloodhound - the forthcoming 1,000mph World Land Speed Record car – given by one of my true heroes, Richard Noble.  Noble is the former WLSR holder, and just two weeks before Devon and I watched the excellent two-part documentary about Thrust SSC, which Noble created and which was driven by Andy Green, from our nearby air force base at RAF Wittering. I’m a bit of a land speed record nut, and thought it’d be cool to take everyone to see what was sure to be a riveting presentation.

Well, it was – if you’re a petrolhead. I’m semi-petrolhead, as is James, so we’d happily have sat thru the whole thing (it’s an amazing story – watch out for it), but Marie and Devon had spent more exciting evenings watching paint dry, so to save the occasion I did what all Dads have to do, frequently: namely, give up your passion, a little bit, and go the way of the majority. Still, I enjoyed what I saw, as did my good buddy James, whose own story – including emigrating to Sweden, and driving a succession of ‘unfortunate’ cars – may be told another time.

Being Lazy

Who doesn’t love those days when you realise you just have nothing to do, but you’re not bored by that? So you just take it easy, do what you feel like, and all the better if it’s a sunny one. Here’s my wife’s constantly-moving feet drumming away on the warm conservatory floor while she reads her baby book:

Nikon D300, Nikon 24-70mm f 2.8 lens at 70mm, 1/200 at f 2.8, ISO 100, hand held with flash. Because we love our time at home so much, quite a lot of this photo blog illustrates the little domestic details of life…we don’t have many big stories to tell, I work very hard and that’s in the public domain widely enough, so it’s nice to put things onto these pages that are the small grace notes of our real life, behind closed doors. Marie’s heels gently tapping on the floor being one of those grace notes…

And as always our cat – who frequently inhabits this blog – was nearby, finding somewhere new to get comfortable:

Nikon D300, Nikon 24-70mm f 2.8 lens at 24mm, 1/400 at f 4.5, ISO 100, hand held with flash. It’s a battered old magazine box, one of c.200 places Jesse knows, within these four walls, which provides safe haven from people.

By now he’s used to his geeky Dad zooming in and trying to take pictures which show every tiny hair on his face:

Nikon D300, Nikon 24-70mm f 2.8 lens at 24mm, 1/200 at f 2.8, ISO 100, hand held with flash. Such a peaceful day. As I write this, Marie and her Mum Bev are wrestling with some dodgy bolts as they build the baby’s new cot, which arrived flat-packed from Mamas and Papas. By way of contrast with the harmonious scenes shown in this blog, the bad language coming from the other end of the room … “these ******* allen keys were designed by a *****!” … is pretty spectacular. Good work, girls, I’ll do the blog, you build the furniture. Today my role is to stay out of the way and boil frequent kettles. Upstairs, dad in law John is laying the wooden floor in the extremely, extremely pink baby’s bedroom. If that child is born with a widgey, instead of a hamburger, then we’re not changing it and he’ll just have to grow up in pink, widgey or no widgey.