WAYS OF LOOKING

 

Today's walk. It was a long one : hot but enjoyable. The butterfly garden of 2026 was being cut down. I'm sure it will rise again next spring. The cycle of life.

Down Crossborough Hill and Eastrop Lane to St Mary's church. Gothic in style, but Georgian in period, from a time when Basingstoke was expanding eastward, in the general direction of London.

Eastrop Lane is lined with detached and Semi-detached houses of the interwar period. They vary in detail but share a common style. At the bottom of the hill there is an interesting close of Neo-Georgian houses with mansard roofs and pedimented entrance doors. I'm guessing they are late C20th. In the background the weird post-modern spire of festival place.

My route lay past this to the Bus station, where the no12 was waiting to take me home.

 

This is a Victorian makeover of questionable architectural merit, but some historic interest. Disraeli's "country seat" in an age when Prime Ministers had to have one. I suppose the entire city of Manchester now performs this function.

This pic was motivated by a visit by my son and grandchildren. I did a bit of Wikipedia research and pressed some AI buttons to simplify images. We used to call it "seeing the wood from the trees" and I'm finding the AI tools in Samsung gallery helpful in doing this.

Photographs seem to direct our attention to irrelevant detail in a way that viewing the world directly does not. Of course a really good photographer can get around this, which is why photography CAN be an art form. It's not about pretty pictures of sunsets of course, not even those heart-wrenching images of conflict zones. Art is a much more subtle quality.

Needless to say I'm not calling this Art. It's merely a tool to help me focus my attention on the essentials. Great workmanship here, but far too "eclectic" for my taste, or Pevsner's.

 

On my way to get milk, I pass through an area that is named after "yards" These have been converted into parking lots on the edge of the town centre. We used to park here when I was visiting from Dubai to see my son, and we were coming in to shop or to eat out.

I imagine that these were strips of land behind "high street" businesses where stables and workshops are located. When these strips were combined into car parks, the differences in level between properties had to be resolved.

This is how I interpret the raised, cobbled tree ring that I noticed properly today. They wanted to keep a mature tree which had been in a yard that stood higher than the new blended level. Maybe I will find an old map to flesh this story out at some point.

 

 

Images from yesterday evening. Days beginning to shorten, which is exciting for me after 45 years away and closer to the equator.

Bottom right is a conifer with large female cones and small males. My app says it's an Atlas Cedar. This one is a beautiful specimen on a small, flat hillock close to an octagonal gardener's hut. People love to sit underneath the shade here: feels like a magical place.

The other three squares are of a group of limes on the other side of the main field. Two versions of one of the shots: watercolour and oil. For once, the oil is "better" The watercolour AI seems to freak out at the number of separate leaves and just dash some splodges about. Better for showing the support structure though.

Top left is zoomed in further so the watercolour picks up the actual leaves quite well. I darkened the image and enhanced the contrast to better represent the sky peeping through leaves in shadow.