It doesn’t often look like this at Hutchison. For a very brief instant, things were cinematic. And then it was gone just as a beaten-up Ford Mondeo staggered into frame. This was my ‘Decisive Moment’.
Category Archives: Photography
Sainsbury’s, Meadowbank.
I have been in this store more times than any other building in the history of my life. I have visited this shop on so many occasions that I could win a rebooted version of Supermarket Sweep blindfolded in record time; I know the location of every item and can blitz a £60 shop in under three minutes. I’ve conducted some cursory calculations and my conclusion is that I’ve graced the self-scan machines with my presence at least 3,500 times, which *must* be unique, unless I’m so solipsistic I’ve overlooked the fact that local working-class fanny magnet Fred (or whoever) has lived over the road for 40-odd years and ventures inside merely for chats.
Anyway, yesterday I saw a midget outside kick the fuck out of a trolley because ‘it’ stole his £1 coin. Scenes. He looked like Verne Troyer on steroids.
The Falkirk Wheel has blown my mind and I haven’t even seen the thing and for 17 years thought it was a ferris wheel.
Once upon a time, I went to Falkirk for a ‘night out’. I can’t remember a distinguishing characteristic about the place save that it was dodgy; it had a Chernobyl feel to it and the bar staff were more difficult to understand than a Klingon speaking in their native tongue. The wheel, however, was something I was convinced I knew well. I always thought it was a sort of Central Lowlands version of a vintage ferris wheel à la The Third Man (1949). I only found out the other day that it’s not a wheel as in a ferris wheel, but something functional and once again … not at all a ferris wheel.
It is in fact a boat lift which connects the Forth and Clyde Canal with the Union Canal, and it’s quite the impressive achievement both aesthetically and from a purely engineering perspective. How I didn’t know this I … don’t know. I figure I was just lost in semantic confusion.
I might visit one day, and I now understand why Falkirk experiences a little bit of tourism. I would not, though, recommend its pubs to even Francis Begbie in his pomp.
Further reading/viewing:
https://www.scottishcanals.co.uk/falkirk-wheel/plan-your-visit/
http://www.visitfalkirk.com/things-to-do/family-days-out/the-falkirk-wheel/
Thai road-trippin’.
Time flies. This was six years ago today, and what a silly wee adventure it was, Bangkok to Rayong to Pattaya to Ayutthaya. The piece-of-shite motorbike I purchased off a Burmese borderline dwarf exploded about two hours into the journey to Rayong so I had to sit on a rotten minibus like a tinned sardine for half the day. But Fleetwood Mac got me through proceedings. I hate to appropriate the word ‘epic’ but this sojourn really was because it had everything; it was The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) but without Velcro dartboards to launch midgets at.
Good times.
Dalry Road, Edinburgh.
Arty-farty pretensions with this snap from Monday. Interestingly, there’s a graveyard coming up on the left there and I once saw a (presumably hammered) woman clutching a bottle of budget cider wander inside and take a shite in a bush.
All very Edinburgh.
Newcastle – in search of Jack Carter.
I was in Newcastle this week. The city is a bit of a toilet and their football fans quite possibly the most delusional on the planet. I fondly recall Michael Caine’s Jack Carter uttering the immortal line, “Listen, the only reason I came back to this crap house – was to find out who did it. And I’m not leaving until I do.” That’s Newcastle in a sentence.
It has its wee charming attributes, though, as do most post-industrial northern dwellings. It’s Hovis advert territory but with tracksuits. I spent my time here wandering about like a wee numpty in search of locations featured in the movie. I didn’t find any, although I did locate a hostel kitchen that had no sink.
Further reading/viewing:
https://www.movie-locations.com/movies/g/Get-Carter-1971.php
https://www.getcarter.xyz/locations/arriving-in-newcastle/
https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/former-get-carter-pub-re-opens-8285847
Crawling about Leith.
As a scion of Gorgie, it is with great reluctance that I have ventured a lot more into Leith these days, and I for a brief moment feared I had gone Full-Anthropologist. It’s not as mingin’ as I initially thought. In fact, some of it is quite lovely.
No junkies were harmed in the taking of this photograph.
The Waverley – never forget.
The Shangri-La.
I try to avoid my former place of work these days because the experiences – which belong to what I refer to as the East Coast Epoch 2010-2012 – were so epic. Not epic like a Wagner-infused helicopter attack in Apocalypse Now (1979), but something a little bit more transcendent – the comedy and the banter. And I’ve never seen so many fruitcakes in all my life. Public spaces involving transport are microcosms of society. People are nuts.
My fondness for The Waverley is probably nostalgia, pretending in retrospect it was more enjoyable than it was. But it’s like that with most memories; time adds gloss to the mundane. I do, however, know more about trains than any topic aside from the drug and dietary habits of Adolf Hitler. So there’s always that.
Russell A. Kirsch and the first digital image.
This is the first digital image ever made or seen. The bloke Kirsch, a computer scientist, converted a photo of his child into binary form with some kind of scanner.
It’s a terrifying image. The whole affair reminds me of that baby at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
Further reading:
https://petapixel.com/2010/11/04/first-digital-photograph-ever-made/
Edinburgh – summer in the city.
Elm Row.
Abbeyhill.
One day you need a Thunder Buddy, the next you’re in the throes of a heatwave. Welcome to Edinburgh, the bipolar, chav-strewn Athens of the North.
It was so scorching in Abbeyhill this afternoon that the newsagents were for once selling more bottles of water than fags. A day to remember.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 