June in July

Spearywell Wood, near Mottisfont

Here we are in July, suffering what passes for a heatwave in Britain [1], and I've still got some stuff I wanted to share from June. The simplest thing, I think, is to put up a gallery of a few photographs with commentary. So here we go:

In an earlier June heat wavelet that lasted just a couple of days we were in Bristol, and I took a walk down through so-called Goat Gully, a precipitous and rocky defile that drops down from Clifton Downs into the Avon Gorge. The cute mini castle you see here is in fact a ventilation shaft for the light railway tunnel that runs beneath. The shade-hogging goats are the inhabitants who give the gulley its name, obviously, and are best given a fairly wide berth. Occasionally some idiot will let their dog off the lead in the gully, and dogs seem to make the fatal error of mistaking truculent goats for easily-bullied sheep. According to the warning notice for dog owners, the score so far is dead goats 1, dead dogs 3.

As seems increasingly the case, part of Clifton Downs was being given over to some festival. I suppose it does generate income for the Council. The flare in the shot of the bins reminds me that (a) all of the photos in this post were taken with my iPhone 12 mini, and (b) I must figure out a way to fit it with a lens hood. If I could fix that, the quality and reliability of the photographs (using the Halide app), coupled with the portability and constant, unobtrusive presence in my pocket of the phone is a winning combination for me, and more than good enough for my everyday purposes. I'm especially impressed with its performance in difficult light conditions, such as dimly-lit galleries.

In the newly refurbished gallery rooms of the Royal West of England Academy, also in Bristol, there was a fine exhibition of artists' self-portraits. Of the contemporary items, I think my favourites were these two, an extremely simple but bold pen-and-ink drawing on a sheet of deckle-edged paper by sculptor Peter Randall-Page, very reminiscent of Van Gogh, and a hilariously "un-woke" rack of ten plates by Lisa Cheung with the title "I Want to be More Chinese". Of the older works, it was good to see a favourite picture I'd only ever seen reproduced before, William Orpen's WW1 painting titled "Ready To Start" [2]; its permanent home is the Imperial War Museum in London, which for some reason I have never yet got around to visiting. There was also a very striking self-portrait by Mary Somerville (1780-1872). They don't make frames like that any more, do they?

Meanwhile, back in Southampton, my customary walks through the nearby Sports Centre in June were enlivened, visually, by the effects of light and shade on full summer foliage, and the beautiful cloud formations that build up in warm weather near the coast. That was in June: this week, it's just too bright and too hot to do anything much outdoors (low 30s Centigrade, building to a possible record temperature over the weekend). Sure, that's far from unbearable by world standards – The highest temperature so far recorded in the UK was 38.7°C on 25 July 2019 in Cambridge – but if you're used to summer temperatures around 20°C it's exhausting and, for some, dangerous and even life-threatening. Those shade-seeking green and blue bollards clustered under a tree in the photo below have got the right idea, and seem considerably less intimidating than the gulley goats.

1. In the UK a heatwave is defined as "a period of at least three consecutive days with daily maximum temperatures meeting or exceeding the heatwave temperature threshold". That temperature threshold varies by county; way down south here in Hampshire, it was recently raised to 27°C. 

2. Ready to start as a War Artist, that is. Orpen was a well-connected society portraitist and ruthless string-puller, as you will discover if you read his Wikipedia article, but he also delivered some of the more shocking works by any War Artist. He needed to pull some serious strings to get them seen.

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