James Clay Stuff - Bits and pieces, news, views, reviews and stuff

April 10, 2021

Back along walking down the seafront

Living in Weston-super-Mare and not being allowed to travel due to Covid-19 restrictions, we often make use of the seafront for our allowed exercise. It’s not as though we never walked there before, but now with limited choices, and only so many times you can walk around the area where we live, it’s nice to pop to the seafront. Its a short drive to the seafront from where we love and it was easy to park close to the seafront. This time we parked at Knightstone Island and popped some money in the meter.

I think for me one of the big changes over the last twelve months in the various lockdowns is how little I use cash now. Before the pandemic I would use cash for the parking at the station (though to be honest more often than not I would use phone parking). I would use cash for buying coffee or snacks. I would even use cash for larger purchases. However with the pandemic my use of cash declined dramatically as mainly I did less, bought less and moved much more to contactless payment.

It was a beautifully clear day, the sun was shining, and it wasn’t too cold. The tide was well in and even the ferry moored at the side of Knightstone Island was floating, something I don’t think I have ever seen happen before.

Generally we don’t see the sea, as the tidal range in Weston is so huge that for most of the day the sea is some distance away. Today as we walked along the seafront, it was high tide.

We walked all the way along the seafront to the old hospital and back again. When we turned back we had in the wind in our faces and it was hard going walking back and felt much much colder.

But soon we got back to the car and headed home for a coffee.

April 5, 2021March 29, 2021

Then and Now – Trinity Lane, Cambridge

This is a regular series of blogs about photographs of the same place taken years apart. I quite like those Then and Now comparison photographs that you see in books or on the Twitter or Facebook.

I always think I should give them a go. However what I have started to notice is that I have been doing Then and Now photographs unintentionally over the years and have been taking photographs of the same thing or place from the same view or perspective years apart. The first instance of this that came to my attention was last year in May when I went to Manchester.

It only really came to my attention that I was doing this a lot, when checking the Places function on the Apple Photos Mac App that I could see I had taken the same photograph of the same thing just years apart!

I grew up in Cambridge, but moved away when I went to university in York. I remember rarely visiting the University of Cambridge as a youngster, why would I? However I did do some specialist maths classes at Trinity College, so would walk down Trinity Lane.

When I was at a JISC RSC Eastern event in Cambridge back in 2009 I did take the time the day before to walk around the town and took this photograph of Trinity Lane in March 2009.

It was taken in the early evening with a Sony DSC-W53 camera, which to be honest struggled with the low light conditions.

I stayed over in Cambridge back in January 2020 and as on previous visits I had a walk around the city before heading to my hotel. I took this photograph of Trinity Lane. I hadn’t recalled I had take a similar photograph already, and it was only when reviewing some photographs that I recalled that I had taken two very similar photographs of Trinity Lane.

I took this with an iPhone 8 in late afternoon I did edit and enahnce the image with Snapseed, but the iPhone was able to deal with the low light conditions so much better.

March 29, 2021March 26, 2021

Then and Now – Moor Lane

This is a regular series of blogs about photographs of the same place taken years apart. I quite like those Then and Now comparison photographs that you see in books or on the Twitter or Facebook.

This series of photographs of Moor Lane though did contain some intentional similar shots. The first of which was taken in January 2010 when we had some of the worst snow for forty years. I had woken up to a deep blanket of snow on the ground, so myself and my son got all wrapped up and headed off to Morrisons to do some panic buying of milk and bread (as advised by the BBC, well I think that was what they were saying. I saw this view of Moor Lane in the snow and it reminded me so much of how I pictured Narnia.

This was taken with a Kodak Zi8 Pocket Video Camera which at the time was pretty good on taking photographs and video.

Back in the 1990s I use to drive down Moor Lane in attempts to avoid traffic getting out of Weston. However by the late 1990s Moor Lane was the heart of a new housing estate, which we moved to in late 2000. They turned it from a road into a footpath, however this section of Moor Lane is still available to vehicles.

We had snow again in December 2010, so I took a similar photograph. Though we had snow by the time I got to Moor Lane a lot of it had melted and turned to slush.

In March 2012 the sun

We had snow again in January 2013, so yes, I took the same photo.

In 2016 the Moor Lane Bridge was closed to traffic for six months and then permanently closed to traffic. This has obviously had an impact of traffic on this stretch of road.

In March 2018 we had the Beast from the East and so I took a similar photograph again of Moor Lane.

So there is a distinct snow theme with these photographs.

March 26, 2021March 26, 2021

M&S think it’s Christmas

So there I was at one of those “unexpected items in the bagging area” machines at M&S and next to it was the plastic bags.

These were Christmas bags….

It’s March! Oh you can’t get those shortbread tins either now…

Actually part of me thinks this is quite a good thing, means we were using less plastic bags when they thought we would use more, so had overstocked.

March 9, 2021March 9, 2021

Bowling

Impressive piece of filming, enjoyed that.

Incredible drone footage, perfectly sequenced bowling alley, wait till end.

by jaybyrdfilms https://t.co/EVxtJn70UM pic.twitter.com/vtrHTdKqvn

— Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang) March 9, 2021

February 22, 2021February 16, 2021

Then and Now – Bristol Airport

This is a regular series of blogs about photographs of the same place taken years apart.

I quite like those Then and Now comparison photographs that you see in books or on the Twitter or Facebook.

I took this view of Bristol Airport from the departures lounge on an early morning in August 2016.

I took a similar picture in February 2017.

Not quite the same shot, but pretty close.

February 18, 2021February 18, 2021

Walking down the seafront

Today it was beautifully clear day, the sun was shining, and it wasn’t too cold. However it was quite windy.

You could see clearly over to Brean Down and even further across to Cardiff and Newport in Wales.

There were kite surfers making the most of the strong winds and the high tide.

Generally we don’t see the sea, as the tidal range in Weston is so huge that for most of the day the sea is some distance away. Today as we walked along the seafront, it was high tide, combined with the winds there were waves crashing down onto the sand.

We walked all the way along the seafront to Knightstone Island and Marine Lake.

Then it was time to turn around and head back to the car to drive home.

February 7, 2021

Driftwood

We went for a walk along the seafront.

There was a large amount of driftwood on the beach, including this tree trunk.

No idea where it has drifted from, I did think it might have washed down from the River Severn following the flooding they’ve had recently.

February 1, 2021January 31, 2021

Then and Now – Snowing in Weston Village

This is a regular series of blogs about photographs of the same place taken years apart.

I quite like those Then and Now comparison photographs that you see in books or on the Twitter or Facebook.

However the following photographs were intentionally taken from the same location. I have over the years (when we had snow) taken a particular photograph so here is the 2018 version.

This with the wind and the cold was actually some of the worst weather I have seen down here, but as you can see it doesn’t look too bad…

This was how it looked in December 2010. Back then we had very heavy snow.

This was how it looked in eleven months earlier in January 2010, again heavy snow.

And here it is in February 2009. At this time this was some of the worst weather we had seen in twenty years. This was taken from the other side of the fence.