DAWN, 200715

A muted dawn, the sky a mackerel blanket,

Everywhere there's low, murmured chattering,

As if the birds are waiting

For a conductor's baton.

PINK SKY

Quickly! Quickly!
Pink sky! Pink sky!
And it's diagonal

SKYKU

My morning commute

Now has breathing space in it

To stop and to think

A moment to pause

Think about the day to come –

Reflect upon life

On most clear mornings

I park the car and take some

Pictures of the sky

Roadside observer

Waving a cameraphone –

Capturing glory

Random cloud sculptures

Ever-changing miracles

Over the valley

A second short pause

Catches clouds and the city

Stretching out below

I will stop once more

As I’m heading home again

Looking back and up

Such stimulation

Adds such quality to life -

Makes it worth living.

Martin A W Holmes, June 2015

TWIRLY

I leave the house far too early these days… or "twirly" as I might want to put it if I'm in the mood.

You see, the year may change, the days might get shorter, and the darkness of the night is reaching further and further into what was once the dominion of daylight, but my human schedule, based around a particular train departing from a particular place at a particular time, remains fairly fixed, meaning that that special moment when I drive up the hill to that favoured spot is becoming darker by the day, and the sun's arrival is getting later and later, so that the spectacular hues of a glorious sunrise quite regularly haven't actually happened yet.

I find myself cursing at being tied to a schedule as spectacular tints fill the sky as I pull up at traffic lights or speed along past bus lanes, and are hidden by office blocks and factories, and the most glorious sights are only to be glimpsed out of the corner of my peripheral vision, or open up before me as I sweep along the overpass in a "No Stopping" zone.

My own "photo opportunities" become full of slate greys that are full of promises and potential but find me in the right place at the wrong time, whilst spectacular reds, oranges and yellows remain the province of more patient or less time-laden lenses.

I was hoping for a full moon to sit suspended above an wide open cityscape, but instead was only greeted by the flat greys of a drizzly dawn, but then, ten minutes later, as I rounded a particularly tricky bend, a gap opened up in the sky revealing a glorious glowing moon just where I'd wanted it to be, but far too late for me to benefit from it, unfortunately, other than in the usual ways in which we all benefit from having the moon, of course.

And after months of snapping clouds with my teffalone and getting results which had varying degrees of success, a couple of nights ago, I was hurtling along the motorway towards a sunset which I can only describe as "epic" - one which kept on getting better and better - and all I could do was simply marvel at its beauty as there was nowhere that I could possibly stop and record its spectacular majesty.

Instead it joins my growing mental list of "the ones that got away" and I am left with mornings which grow, like my moods, ever darker...

THINKSPOT

As I have been doing quite regularly this summer, on my way to work I stopped again at my usual "thinkspot" the other morning to take a picture of what the sky is doing and try to order my thoughts before the working day ahead of me.

I have so many pictures now, all taken from more-or-less that same spot that it's starting to feel quite ridiculous… even though the sky keeps on surprising me with ever more exciting patterns to behold.

Once I noticed that there was a relatively safe spot to pull over at where I could see the sky and the clouds as they danced, it very quickly became something of a habit - probably a borderline compulsion - and I found myself stopping there almost every day unless my route or my schedule had to be altered for whatever reasons might have come up, or the sky was just too dull, drab, grey and featureless to make me want to drag the phone out of my pocket and record it.

Mind you, this pulling over at the side of the road on a narrow country lane is something which is becoming ever more precarious with the other cars whizzing by in the increasing gloom as the mornings get darker and darker each day and my timing schedule remains pretty much the same.

I wonder whether they'll see me parked there, or find my presence so unexpected that they won't quite know what to do, even though farm vehicles regularly pull up in the same kinds of spot to deal with whatever farm-based doings that they have to do.

On that particular day, I arrived at work just as it started to rain, I watched and listened as it bucketed down all day, and left in the rain, only for it to almost completely clear within a mile of the office, which makes me believe that the grey box next to the sewage works is situated underneath some kind of "Gloom Vortex" (which might be just down to me, of course…)

Meanwhile…

Other drivers, eh…?

What complete and utter c*cks they can be.

I mean, I know that I'm not perfect in that regard, but sometimes, when you're trying to overtake a row of parked cars, the person coming in the opposite direction really doesn't seem to understand the concept of stopping in order to allow you to complete your manoeuvre and just keeps on coming towards you, leaving you nowhere to go, and giving you the filthiest of looks for daring to be in their way…

And don't get me started about those people who believe that speeding is perfectly acceptable if you think that you're going to get away with it, and seem furious with me when they get behind me and my "I don't mind whether you want to risk your licence, but I'm buggered if you're going to cost me mine" attitude as I pootle along.

Everybody has a dodgy driving moment from time to time, but the regularity of it happening all around me does makes me begin to wonder whether it's actually me after all…

Which is another excuse for just pulling over at the side of the road for a bit of a think.

THOSE MOMENTS…

Because it’s me, I do tend to set myself fairly strict limitations when I wave my telephone in the vague direction of the sky during those “pull over to the side of the road and think” moments that I’ve recently been treating myself to during the morning’s commute.

There must be no cheating. When I pull up at that now oh-so-familiar viewpoint (and it’s usually the same viewpoint because that’s one of the rules), the resulting picture, if I choose to take one, must be pretty much of what I see right there and then.

There can be no hanging around to see if it gets “better…”

None of that.

What you see is what you get, or rather, what I see is what you get.

This morning, for example, I could, after all, have decided to hang around for another ten minutes or so in the hope that it all got far more spectacular, but I didn’t, despite the fact that the pink afterglow of the dawn and the cloud structure actually looked rather promising as the sun looked on the very brink of coming up.

Instead I pulled over to the side of the road, thought my thought, and pointed the camera at the sky to preserve what I could of the moment, before setting off once again to battle with the commute, and failing to take my second “pause” at the viewpoint over the big city which is sometimes my second option when option one proves to bland, murky, or disappointing to be recorded.

You see…? Despite all of the evidence to the contrary, I do sometimes choose not to take a sky photograph as I go about on my travels, especially if the “murk” factor is way, way too high.

To be honest, this morning, I did lurk a little longer than usual in order to watch the low lying clouds as they tumbled down the mountains across the valley from me, which is why I found myself pondering upon these self-inflicted “rules” of mine.

After all, if you can’t even be bothered to obey your own rules, what hope is there…?

MANCHESTER, EVENING - 150914

Manchester, evening - 150914

BAH!!!

I'm feeling just too damned miserable about absolutely everything to be bothered with any more blogging at the moment… so here's a picture of yesterday's sunrise over the Sett Valley taken at about 7.15am during a short pause in my journey to work to fill the gap…

There was a chap on the High Street as I drove past doing a "proper" job of photographing this, by the way, who'd obviously been there a while.

Then again, there was a chap sitting in the exact same spot yesterday evening sipping wine from a stem glass as darkness fell, so that's obviously the place to be at the moment to indulge in a bit of contemplation...

PAUSES FOR THOUGHT

These are a few of those recent "pull over during the commute and pause for thought" moments from August and September, 2014 which I've been posting on FizzBok on the mornings that I remember to.

You see, I am quite lucky.

I get to drive over a rather lovely hill as I drive to and from work and, since my employers have given me the use of a rather rinky-dinky teffalone, one which takes at least half-decent snapshots when I point it in the vague direction of the sky, I've found myself pulling over to the side of the road on morning after morning and trying to capture some of the more spectacular-looking of those moments.

Because...?

Well...

Sometimes, you just have to, don't you...?

Well, you do if you're me anyway...

However, we're getting towards that point of the year where Sun-up is getting later and later… and soon I will be driving through the darkness with the sunrise happening whilst I am already sipping at the first couple of mugs of coffee of the day, safely huddled in the grey box next to the sewage works.

Either that, or I might still be battling my way through the ice and snow and shivering in blind terror at the antics of the other road-users around me, whilst the clouds do their merry dance behind the concrete walls which conceal them from me.

So, in other words, there may not be too many more of these this year… but we'll still have these to look at and remember those brighter days by, which is probably why I stopped for those moments and took the pictures in the first place.

Anyway...

The thing about these pictures is that they might not be the most spectacular sky pictures you're ever likely to see, but I hope that you enjoy them despite that...

NOTHING

The clouds have been teasing me this summer.

Every time I think that I've seen them at the most spectacular that they're likely to offer, and I resolve to stop pulling up the car and running off yet more pictures, I spot another wondrous display and our merry dance continues for another day.

Then, of course, because I am who I am, it rapidly develops into a habit, and, before you know it, I'm getting disappointed when I pull up, look at the sky, and find that there's nothing being offered.

Okay, that's simply not true.

Even at its most mundane and overcast, the sky always has something miraculous to offer, but sometimes those little Brownian dances don't make for the most interesting of snapshots.

But that's okay, really.

Sometimes I've got nothing to offer myself, either, when I ought to have something, and that's kind of weird, too…

Soon, I'll be driving to work in the dark, and the cold, and the ice, and the sky will be little more than a dark backdrop to the dreariness of the commute, and a counterpoint to the wintry audiobooks of choice, and I will probably forget all about my daily free-show of being able to watch the sky dancing, and look in my files and wonder why on earth I was taking all of those pictures of nothing but those flippin' clouds.

Which is why I need to try and remember…

Remember how damned impressive they were.

Remember why they made me stop and look in the first place.

Remember how they changed in an instant into something even more wonderful.

Remember that each of these moments was unique and will never occur again in quite the same way until the end of time, and had never happened before in all of the billions of years that this planet has been spinning around our tiny yellow sun.

Remember I was there the see them, in that spot, at that very moment, and that moment only belonged to me...

BRAVE NEW WORLDS

The clouds over Manchester were a little dull this morning, and this might just be the first indication that “Commuter Cloud Season” (I’ve been posting a lot of cloud pictures in FizzBok recently, about which I shall probably write much more another time) might be drawing to a close as the gloom of the dawn becomes impenetrable until far after I’ve passed through it on my way towards the grey box next to the sewage works.

But I decided to post this rather dull picture anyway because I had been wondering just exactly what it might feel like to know that you’re going to bed on your last night as a resident in one country, knowing that perhaps all of your future ones will be lived under another sky in another life, and wondering also what it must be like to wake up knowing that today is the proverbial “it” and you’re off, and a bland, grey old morning is the best that the old country can offer you to see you off with.

To be honest, it’s possibly the very first time I’ve ever really thought about this at any length and with any sense of reality. I know that Nick went a few years ago, but that kind of passed me by, and I didn’t even know he was going until he’d already been gone for a year or so.

I’m just so very impressed by people who can do this… All the more so because I can have a culture shock meltdown simply because the light-switches in a hotel room work in a slightly different way to those I am used to.

Brave people.

Brave new worlds.

YET ANOTHER CLOUD PICTURE

ANOTHER CLOUD PICTURE

Sunburst...

Silver linings...?

MACKEREL SKY

HOLES IN THE SKY

There have been some rather beautiful skies this year, especially during those rain-soaked days which immediately preceded the recent hot, dry spell, and I suppose that I've been far more aware of them this year than in previous years simply because I've been out and about a lot more than I usually would because of my seemingly endless hospital visiting.

A couple of weeks ago, as I headed out of the hills, I spotted a hole in an otherwise slate grey sky over the town in which I grew up, which was producing one of those "Spotlight of God" moments,  where visible beams of light beam down from a tiny gap when the sun bursts through.

It was the sort of thing that was, as the saying goes, "heavenly" and you can imagine that it would be just the sort of thing that might have convinced earlier, more primitive and unenlightened minds to believe in some kind of greater power living above the skies.

Of course, nowadays we know better, but, in the learning of it, perhaps we've lost a lot of our capacity for awe and wonder, too.

Certainly, as I pulled into the less than awesome surroundings of a hospital car park a few minutes later, some of my thoughts were far less wonderful than they had been, but I was able to pull my telephone from out of my pocket and get a quick snap of what was still a fairly impressive sky, and, although its magnificence was already waning, and the technology at my disposal was less than wonderful, I think you still get a slight impression of a fairly dramatic moment.

GONE

Gone...

Like a summer cloud...

CLOUDBURST

Other people have mentioned how spectacular the clouds were across Great Britain last Friday, and this was also true of where we were, tucked away just off the north-west corner of Wales. As we strolled around on what was finally a spectacular summer’s day,  it was hard not to notice that the cloud sculptures that were forming and dancing around in the skies above our heads were beginning to resemble something from a renaissance painting.

They were so picturesque, in fact that it became necessary to start pointing the camera at the sky instead of at the scenery and blast off a burst of shots which couldn’t hope to do justice to this amazing natural wonder, but which do, hopefully, at least give a sense of the artistic genius that was being painted in the skies that day.

The first was taken in a car park in Beaumaris, the “car park” aspect of which doesn’t sound quite like the kind of scene that would have inspired any renaissance masterpieces, but then I don’t suppose that car parks were much of a feature of the landscape back in those days.

The other three were taken from another car park (such is their ubiquity now), at Penmon, pointing the lens north, south (towards the lighthouse) and west over the island.

A lovely day and some astonishing cloudscapes. I hope that, perhaps, you will get at least some small sense of how wonderful they were from these unworthy snapshots, which really cannot hope to give you more than just the merest notion of that spectacular show which was happening in the skies that day, but will, I hope, at least, show you some of it.

Beaumaris 270712

Penmon 270712

Penmon 270712

Penmon 270712