Another grey morning in Sheffield but at least it's mild outside with a breeze from the south. Tomorrow will be the last day of October and we still haven't had a frost. Even so, putting the clocks back last weekend has made everyone very aware that winter is lurking just round the corner.
I have never been able to appreciate why we continue to mess about with time in this country. Spring forward, fall back and all that. What's the point of it? Very recently it was still broad daylight at 6.30pm but now it's pitch dark. I would rather ease gradually into winter's inevitable darkness than to have it foisted upon us so abruptly. It's so unnatural. Mr William Willett (1856-1915) has got a lot to answer for.
Time moving on. Day by day. Drip after drip. Till now those two spells I spent teaching in Thailand seem like history. They have lost their immediacy and my increasingly hazy memories could easily be from a film I once saw or from the story of someone else's life. But there is evidence in the form of digital pictures that I really was there and just now I spent a pleasant hour looking back through some of my photo folders from 2011.
Longterm visitors to this blog might recall that I spent a long weekend on a tiny island in the Andaman Sea. It is called Koh Poda and you can only arrive there by longtail boat. I was the sole guest at the little resort - a complex of some thirty basic wooden bungalows and a restaurant. Occasional boats from the mainland would bring day visitors but mostly I had the island to myself.
This is how it was:-
 |
| Resort bunglaows on Koh Poda |
 |
| Andaman sunrise from Koh Poda |
 |
| One day the American girls came - for a couple of hours |
 |
| View from my beach towel |
I don't know. Perhaps I need another faraway adventure before too long. Before I get old and cannot manage it any more. Maybe I should investigate the possibility of going out to see an Oxfam project as some shop volunteers have done. Mozambique...Guyana...The Philippines. I can feel the old hunger stirring and sometimes The Peak District will just not cut it.
Wow, what gorgeous photos. I might never have come back home!
ReplyDeleteSome people don't come home. I know of several middle-aged or retired British men who went to Thailand and stayed - often with much younger Thai brides.
DeleteThe sunset picture is breathakingly beautiful!
ReplyDeleteWhat were the American girls looking at? It is strange to see them all facing the same direction.
I've never been to any place like that, but much as I love summer and dislike cold, dark and damp winter days, I would miss the change of the seasons if I were to live somewhere else.
That's not a sunset Meike, it's a sunrise. I woke in darkness for no particular reason and when I stepped outside I noticed the first lightening of the day ahead so I grabbed my camera and wandered down to the shore, surprised to see a fishing boat already out on the water.
DeleteIn Thailand days are pretty much the same length the whole year through and yes - apart from monsoon rains each July/August, there is no real sense of changing seasons.
Why did you go to Thailand.? A place with no moral compass. Not just for a sunset picture. When I saw it we were just trawling for bodies and bagging them for ID later. We did get ashore but I didn't like the bar girls nor did I think I should encourage them. It's a hell hole on earth but photogenic, with cheap tarts. A bit like Hartlepool but warmer.
ReplyDeleteI went to Thailand to help out an international school that had a staffing problem. The children were all Thai and came from respectable families to whom the caricatures of their country are both an embarrassment and extremely inaccurate.
DeleteThank Goodness we don't have daylight saving here in Queensland. It was tried on trial back in the late 80s. I was living in the Cairns area at the time, in far north Queensland and it was a pain in the neck.
ReplyDeleteI hope it is never again applied here even though every year when the southern states change their clocks the usual suspects bring it all up again and the same old discussions go on and on repetitively.
And as for the curtains...they fade with all that extra sunshine!!!!!!!!! ;)
And your talents as a photographer again shine through in your photos. There was enough sunshine around that day!!
Altering the clocks seems to be a silly thing to do and it goes against the grain of human nature. Cavemen didn't change time and nor did Australia's aboriginals.
DeleteListen to what your heart is telling you Neil. The next adventure is out there waiting for you...and we're all longing to see the photographs and hear the tales you bring back. x
ReplyDeleteI will listen to my heart but it tends to go thump...thump...thump rather monotonously...like an engine.
DeleteI hate to ask what the American girls are doing in formation in view of your beach towel. I echo everyone else ~ embrace that next adventure. Some if us will never travel as widely and freely as you, so you are our eyes and legs to the world YP. Tending a goat farm in Africa might be a nice change from that northern Winter.
ReplyDeleteBizarrely The American girls got themselves in formation for an exercise routine. If they had been Aussie girls they would have joined me for a few tinnies higher up the beach.
DeleteFor sure about sharing a few tinnies with you on the foreshore! Ridgey-didge! You can bet your bottom dollar we would!! Fair Dinkum...there'd be no doubt about that!!!!
DeleteYou're really trying to fight winter by thinking back to your pleasant time in the tropics.
ReplyDeleteRed - you have got a job as my psycho-analyst!
Delete