Straight Outta Compton (Lock)

I'm continuing to look into the blog-emailing conundrum, but I'll soon have some useful things to report, I hope. I'm still trying to figure out how many of the 685 email subscriptions listed in the Feedburner "gadget" are actually genuine. About a tenth at most, would be my current estimate, and from the lack of concern expressed so far, I'd guess rather fewer than that are active. Who knows? There may yet be opportunity for my favourite "both of them" quip. Heh...

I can only assume that this unasked-for inflation is intended to boost my standing with potential advertisers – it's hard to see any other angle or interest that it would serve – which, if true, seems like another example of our contemporary culture of hype and bare-faced lies. Like crypto-currencies, the endorsements of "influencers" on social media, or absurdly-priced makeovers on Prime-Ministerial lodgings, it's just more fake value conjured out of a bottomless pit of self-willed credulity. See how many readers I can claim to have? Now give me money to advertise stuff nobody wants or needs!

In the meantime, I've been thinking about the photographic benefits of behaving like that questing vole I described in a recent post. I have long been in the habit of repetitively walking certain routes, and photographing whatever tasty scraps happened to attract my attention along the way. This custom began while I was at work: what better way to spend a lunch hour than to step out of the office into the fresh air, and inspect what the weather, time, and chance have wrought along a familiar path, like a trapper checking his traplines? Usually nothing much but, often enough, something. This is exactly how several of my first consciously-made exhibitions and book-sequences came about, most notably, perhaps, Pentagonal Pool, Elevation, and Curriculum. Retirement has simply meant that my traplines have been laid out within walking distance of our front door.

During the week my walks are mainly local and solo, but at weekends we tend to venture out together and to go a little further afield, but usually following the same approach: there are a number of circuits we do from various starting points within easy driving distance, all of which include a variety of reliable points of interest. One of these is the curious body of water known as Compton Lock on the Itchen Navigation canal, near Winchester. It's no longer a lock, in the technical sense of a place where canal traffic could be raised or lowered by flooding or draining an enclosed chamber, just a stretch of clear, fast-flowing water that cascades through a single remaining sluice, and which has spread out into a circular pool over the years. In summer it's a popular spot for bathing and picnics; in winter, not so much.

A couple of shots of Compton Lock appeared in my England and Nowhere book, which was itself the result of these vole-like perambulations (volambulations?) through the area surrounding St. Catherine's Hill:

Seven Blues, One Red

The Headless Man

Last Sunday the weather was wet and far from sunny (it was a bank holiday weekend, after all), so we expected to find Compton Lock empty. Instead, we found a local Fire & Rescue team practising, well, we weren't entirely sure what they were practising. It looked like some sort of witch-trial by water. We did ask, but the poor guy who had just been "rescued" from the bone-chilling water was barely able to speak.