National Poetry Day

I doubt that you know this, but Thursday was National Poetry Day in the UK. While the necessity of giving poetry its own day is up for debate, I don’t want to pursue that path because frankly I don’t really know nor care about the answer. Instead I thought I’d share some of my own poetry. I’ve not done this before because most of the poetry I’ve written is pretty crap. However of late I’ve started writing some poems that I actually quite like.

The premise is that I start with a photo that I’ve taken on my travels around the world and use that photo as inspiration for a short poem. The theme is Man’s relationship with the natural world, but I’ve only been sticking to that pretty loosely so far. The reason I’ve started doing this is that I keep getting bouts of inspiration and desire to write something, but no idea what to write about. A photo provides a really good focal point for this inspiration and allows me to channel it into something tangible.

Below are three examples, the first of which is about Hiroshima. To get some of the references you might want to check out this Wikipedia article .

Grey Skies and Falling Rain

Across the river from the bombed out husk
Is the bell that will always be rang,
And the flame that will never go out.
Sombre monuments to our destructive
Nature.

Innocent white cherry blossoms bloom,
Stark contrast to the empty concrete.
The solemn grey reminder of the tragedy
Of human progress,
In the hands of the barbarous.

The grey skies and the falling rain
–Nature’s pathetic fallacy–
Punctuate the grim scene.

The rain will not extinguish the flame,
And the bell will keep sounding
For peace.

While bombs rain
And sky’s greyed
By mushroom clouds

The second is inspired by a photo taken when I was skiing in Austria back in 2008.

The Cable Car

Jagged white peaks carve the perfect blue sky,
The shadow of the mountain bathes half of the valley in darkness,
As the sun gleams off the snow.
Sprawling forests dirty the perfect white floor
With snow-speckled dark green carpet.
Defiant, shoulders of rock peak out from the snow,
Breakers of permanence swimming in the sea of white.

Through the valley floor a road carves and curves into the snow,
An earthworm of humanity against the mountain giant.
A car streams along the road, flying towards the town,
Nestled just out of sight,
Surrounded by trees and half shadowed by the mountains.

And the people in the cable car sit and watch,
As they fly over the mountain along cords of ingenuity.
Their glass castles swaying in the cool alpine air,
As they observe man’s wild and untamed
Dominion.

And the third is inspired by my recent trip to the Northern Territory.

To Steal the Soul of Death

In the swamps of North Australia
In the Billabongs and the rivers,
In the shady jungle at the water’s edge,
Floating just below the surface,
Of the serene, wind-rippled water,
Lives Death.

And from the boat we peer into the middle distance,
Straining our eyes to catch a glimpse.
Lifting our cameras to steal the soul of Death.
To capture the moment we were mere meters from him,
To immortalise our close encounter,
In mere pixels.

So we can go back to our homes in the cities
And boast to our friends that we were so close
And show them the pixels to prove it.
And relive our risk filled trip into the outback,
In fictional detail.

While in the swamps and the Billabongs,
The crocs keep ignoring the boats,
And the straining eyes
And the cameras.
And wait for dinner to enter the water.

Two other poems in this embryonic collection have recently been published in Downright Fiction, which I encourage you to check out, not only because it includes some more work by me, but also because there are some truly fantastic pieces of work by others.

Like self-indulgent butter spead too thinly over a peice of bread that is far too big

HAPPY NEW DECADE!!!!!

Well technically the new decade doesn’t start until next year, but if you’re pedantic enough to care then I feel sorry for you.

As is inevitable when a decade turns and I have too much free time on my hands, I have spend some time reflecting on the past 10 years, not just in my life (because let’s face it no-one cares) but also on the world in general. Obviously the most memorable (and not in a good way) event of the decade was the terrorist attack in the twin towers in New York in 2001, killing thousands and drastically changing the face of world politics. It was the catalyst for two controversial and politically damaging wars by America (with Britain tagging along in) against smaller powers as part of the uninformatively named War on Terror. Who knows maybe in the decade someone will tell us what that actually means.

9/11 was in many ways a turning point, but by no means a one off. Various other attacks throughout the decade, such as the 7/7 bombings on London and the Madrid train bombing are indicative of the dangers of the decade. The main enemy seems to be Islamic extremism, based largely in the Middle East. So far we’ve had little success in combating it.

The second major political theme of the decade has been climate change. Fears over what all that CO2 and other greenhouse gasses we’ve been pumping into the atmosphere for the last 150 years might do to the planet reached fever pitch this decade, culminating in the Copenhagen conference late last year, which certainly blogs completely failed to cover… Anyway I really don’t know what to think about climate change. I can see that the science has a point, but I’m not exactly sure to what extent the government can force businesses to change. Much has been done over the last 10 years to build up a strong case for climate change; I guess the actual action to stop us all drowning sometime this century will have to come from the bottom up, not the top down, in the next decade or so. Maybe if we stopped dropping so many bombs on innocent civilians that might help.

Politics aside, this decade has seen massive advances in technology; computers have become faster, smaller and more powerful. Technology such as music players, phones and camera have now become something that everyone carries around in their pockets, usually as part of the same piece of hardware. The internet has gown to become a huge part of everyone’s life, in a way that many would not have seemed imaginable in the year 2000. To many the fact that we don’t have AI and space exploration yet will be a disappointment, but to be honest we could do without Blade Runner style Cyborgs running around putting us all to shame and beating Han Solo up (if you don’t get it go watch Blade Runner).

With this massive improvement in the power of computers comes a massive improvement in CGI. This has expressed itself most in video games which have become bigger and more beautiful than ever. Even post-apocalypse Washington DC is looking pretty fine these days thanks to games like Fallout 3. The internet has also allowed people to play against each other across the globe and expose their wilful ignorance to more people than ever. Games like WoW and Modern Warfare have all but dropped the pretence (or dropped it entirely) of a story in favour of getting people to pay through the nose to play for hours online while getting nowhere.

To me this is a great shame. Video games provide a superb opportunity to tell a very unique story because it is much more immersive and involved than a film or a book. The story is no longer being told to you, an independent viewer entirely outside the action, you the player are actually part of the story; you interact with it and possibly even effect its direction. ‘Sandbox’ games like Fallout and, well the majority of games released recently, allow you to fully explore the setting and choose exactly what your character does and says, even what he looks like. The game leads you in a specific direction, but doesn’t dictate how the story flows or even how it ends. However often more linear games rely on cut scenes to tell the story, which is basically like playing a game for 30 minute to and hour, then turning it off to go watch TV for a couple of minutes. I’m sure with the complexity of games these days story telling could become even more immersive. Maybe in the next decade we will see games focusing on storytelling again, rather than simply dumping you in an environment and asking you to explore or even worse just dumping you online with hundreds of other idiots and telling you to go nuts. The technology is there, someone just needs to use a bit of imagination and not jump on the bandwagon of what makes money, which they have done recently (see previous post on motion sensing).

CGI and special effects in general have also served to make films much more visually complicated, allowing for frighteningly realistic animation and stunts. A recent example of just how far we’ve come is Avatar, which I really need to see. The decade has been dominated by high octane action thrillers, with impressive special effects and fun explosions. These have a tendency to get in the way however of what really matters to a film; the story and the characters. Sure a film may look nice now, but as CGI gets better and better, is starts to look a little dated and all you’re left with is outdated animation which fails to impress. Let’s take the Star Wars franchise as an example. The first three films (that’s the three that were made, not one ones that come first in the chronology) are amazing films, with a superb story and brilliant characters. The animation and stunts and all that were good when they were made, but pale in comparison to what is achieved these days. Even so the films still stand out as some of the best ever made because a good story is timeless, it doesn’t matter that it looks a bit shit compared to the more recent Star Wars films because what matters is the story, not the aesthetics. Compare this to the most recent Star Wars trilogy. Looked pretty impressive at the time, lovely choreography, lots of explosions capped with some truly cringworthy one liners. Looking back now however, especially in the light of a film like Avatar, it’s not actually all that impressive any more. It no longer looks that good and all we are left with are a crap story, spoon-deep characters and a bitter taste in the mouth. CGI and special effect cannot compensate for a lack of a decent story.

Of course the film industry is not all terrible films that rely in looking impressive with no depth, films like the Dark Knight, Brokeback Mountain, Gladiator, the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, Minority Report and I could go on and on are brilliant films that will continue to stand out even when all rest of the bilge has paled again the slightly better looking bilge of next decade. I’m sure the filming industry will continue to play on gimmicks like 3D and CGI and produce some truly god awful films, but I’m sure there will continue to be some gems as well.

What we can gleam from the last 4 paragraphs and 10 years of visual forms of story telling is that games and movies have not gotten any better in the last ten years, just a hell of a lot prettier. Hopefully the latter will continue to be the case and we continue to get some damn fine stuff mixed in with the inevitable dirge of complete crap.

The latter can also be said for the music industry. This decade has been characterised by some truly dreadful, manufactured abominations, mostly popped out by the X factor poptart making factory run by Simon Cowell. This decade has probably seen more talentless clones singing other people’s songs than any other. Thankfully there have been some genuinely talented musicians trying and in some cases (like Muse and Coldplay if you like that sort of thing) succeeding, but in most cases (like most of the bands I like) failing to get a look in. To be honest this has and will continue to happen for the same reason that crap films and crap games will continue to be released; people are morons. Yes I lost my faith in most people’s opinions long ago and it’s hardly surprising given how popular Twilight and Lady Gaga are between them

Right, so to wrap up the decade, we have only really progressed in that we have found better and more interesting ways of blowing people up and entertaining ourselves. We are no cleverer and our stories are no better. We make the same old mistakes and will continue to for as long as it takes for the ice caps to melt and us all to drown in a flood of stupidity and water.

Before you sigh in relief that this frightening mass of self-indulgent drivel has finally finished, I have a couple of announcements to make.

Because I have decided that I still have too much free time and I got some weird flashes of inspiration, I have decided that in the New Year I will be starting 2 new different but slightly linked projects.

The first is called Project 365, the idea being that you take at least one photo per day all year so that you have a pictorial record of the year. With any luck I will manage to keep it going for longer than a month. The second and more interesting one is inspired by something called ‘postsecrets’, whereby people write shameful secrets on postcard sized images and send them in anonymously. However because I am not nearly as depressed as the people who send in these things (seriously read them, they really heart wrenching), I have decided to do a similar things, just with little sound bites that I enjoy, either from me in my day to day life, or important, intelligent people who have something interesting to say. My first comes courtesy of Wil Wheaton’s twitter (the guy who played Wesley Crusher in Star Trek: The Next Generation)



I shall be putting them up on this photobucket account, the Postcards every Wednesday (roughly) and the daily photos whenever I can be bothered to make an update, probably every couple of days and at least every week with any luck.

More bloody holiday photos

If you didn't know, over the last week I have been in Mallorca. And true to form I am now going to show some photos from my holiday, because I have been completely detached from the world for the past weeks and have no news to comment on at all. So anyway, Mallorca has a decent amount of history, and as someone who really likes history, as in that's what I want to study at university, I made a point of visiting all the historical sites, or at least some of them. So in chronological order:

A pre-historical site made up of lots of rocks which formed the shape of rudimentary building. It was actually pretty dull because there was next to no information about it and pre-history actually kinda bores me... so, moving on.

Actually, there is something interesting about that. This fella up here is a slinger (well it's a statue of a slinger obviously). These slingers were famous throughout the Mediterranean for standing on a rock throwing rocks at people. Ok there's a little more to it that that, basically they were about to defend their islands right up until 123 BC. On the subject of...

There are Roman ruins. Now I'm interested. A place called Pol-lentia (yes that is a correct spelling), the Roman capital of The Balearic islands from about 123 BC, the year in which Consul Quintus Caecilius Metellus conquered the islands.

There are some houses, the remains of a forum and a theatre. It was pretty cool, if you're obsessed by ancient history like me. otherwise they're pretty cool rocks I guess.

The same town had some walls, some of which were Medieval. Not this section, but I don't think I got any decent photos of that. There was also this cool tower that seemed to serve no real purpose...

One feature of the island, being Christian and all, is churches, copious amounts of them, some of which were architecturally interesting. Here is one of them.

A much more interesting church was the cathedral in the capital, Palma. It is a really nice Gothic structure which you should all now admire. It is very cool despite the fact that it is a building constructed for the worship of idols. No! Stop! It is a valuable piece of architecture constructed for valuable religious and artistic reasons.

Also it has what is supposed to have the world's largest rose window, that round thing quite prominent on the end of that cathedral right there.

For those of you who do not like history or architecture then here are some nice photos of some other stuff.

Proper blog next week!!!

Holiday Schnapps

Oh look a late blog...

Yes it's that time again. Having returned from yet another holiday, that third I think since I stared this thing, almost a year ago actually which is pretty mind boggling, it's time for more holiday snaps. And yes this is late because I have better things to do in the last few days of my holiday that compile a blog of photos.

This time my destination was Madeira, a small Portuguese island off the west coast of Africa. It's not particularly exciting to be honest, but my parent like it enough to keep going back so there we go. Anyway, without further ado, some photos.We went to some botanical gardens, which were actually pretty nice. My camera can take the credit for this next one though, I really was not expecting this one to come out as well as it did.

Oh look, a nice house with a lake and a waterfall and some other random stuff... well I liked it

I don't know why these guys were even here to be honest, maybe they got lost on the way to the British Museum. They're terracotta warriors, from the tomb of the First Chinese Emperor; the British Museum did an exhibition of them a while ago, in case you didn’t get that joke. Obviously these guys aren't the real thing, just mock-ups, pretty well done though. I'm still unsure as to what they were doing in a botanical garden in Madeira

More nice flowers, well done again to my camera, I really can't take the credit for it.

My parents really like walking and they dragged me along on a couple of them.

unfortunately it was pretty hard to tkae photos becuase of the haze and the shadows making for very uneaven light and washed out photos. Nevertheless I think I got some decent photos to give you an idea of the truely amazing scenery.

As i'm sure you can see we were above the level of the clouds, which made for some pretty spectacular views.

Unfortunately the clounds closed in on the second walk, so I couldn't get many good photos, which was a shame because I'm sure the view would have been lovely.

Well that's about all I can be bothered for now, next Saturday, normal services resume, probably.

I don't think I'm turning Japanese

Well I’m back from Japan, as I’m sure you can tell, and it was incredibly awesome. The reason I was there (if you didn’t already know) was a rugby tour with my school. We were the first school from England to tour the country, so it was a pretty unique experience. We stopped off in Dubai for three days before flying to Osaka. We stayed there for a few more days, and then spend some time with some host families in Kyoto before moving on to Tokyo. We did a couple of excursions, one to Himeji Castle and one to Hiroshima, which was fucking depressing. Anyway it was a fantastic trip and I promised some photos, so here goes.

Our first destination was Dubai, which is horribly overrated. It just feels so fake. The city was just build from nothing in the middle of a desert and it feels like it. The city has no history, no culture. A city is more that just a collection of buildings, built in the space of a few decades by oil magnates with nothing more to do that build 7 star hotels and indoor ski slopes in the middle of a desert. It has no history, no culture and hence no character. It felt like any generic western city with no defining features apart from its sheer scale. The only thing that makes it different from any other city is the fact that it is bigger and more excessive; it has the biggest building in the world, the best hotel, the biggest indoor ski slope, the biggest ego, and it’s not even finished yet. The place is half building site half city and neither is all that pleasant. If the entire city were to disappear overnight, leaving only the desert on which it is built the world would not loose much of note.

Sorry I got distracted for a minute there; I didn’t like Dubai very much. Here’s a photo of the 7 star hotel.

Our next stop was Osaka, which was nice enough I guess. The main highlight of this city was the day trip to Himeji Castle, which is one of the biggest and most well preserved castles on Japan. As a historian it was really interesting to compare is with European castles, but I won’t bore you with the specifics.

Anyway here's the castle. It was pretty large as you can see and these photo's speak for themselves a bit but a feel obliged to write something here so I'll just ramble.

And a close up of the main keep which was about 6 stories high or something, and very hard to move around in because it was built for small Japanese people not large rugby players, but we managed.

It's a big bird, it looked cool. I have nothing else to say.
Castle enthusiasts should be jizzing in their underwear at this next one. The rest of you can just admire the stonework or something.

I don't have so say why I put this next one in; it's a fucking zombie samurai.

Ok so that was Himeji Castle, The next place we visited was Kyoto, which was my favourite city of the ones we visited. My host family took me to a temple in the hills above Kyoto which was really interesting.

I didn't get many good photos of this place as i was running low on battery life at the time.

Easily the most depressing place we visited was Hiroshima. This one of the buildings in the city which remained standing after the blast and has been repeatedly restored as a reminder to everyone (as if we need it).

This is called the 'peace bell' it has a map of the world and some writing in Japanese, Greek and Sanskrit engraved on it.

Here's the bell with the dome behind it. How profound of me to take that photo.

Similarly for this one. The flame that is between the arch and the dome (in the middle distance) is only supposed to go out when we have full nuclear disarmament, which will probably be never.

This rock has been turned black by the nuclear radiation, I assume.

That was the last of the excursions that we did. i have a few more general photos, such as these cherry blossoms which the Japanese have an obsession with which borders on the fetishistic. Seriously, they'll just stand there and stare at them for no apparent reason.

We also went to Disneyland Tokyo which was a uniquely Japanese experience, ha ha irony.

The Tokyo skyline... at night.

And some hilarious innuendo to finish off.

That's all folks! I'll be back next week with fewer photos.

Skiing in a winter wonderland

Well that was a fun holiday! Maybe the best Christmas ever, just beating last year’s trip to New Zealand, sorry I’m just showing off now. As usual I have a few complaints… firstly, the weather was pretty terrible for most of the week: driving wind, snow, bloody cold, terrible visibility. You literally could not see a thing for the first three days, which sucked a bit. It also made skiing pretty hard because, as anyone who has skied before can attest to, when there is no direct sunlight you can't see where the snow is piled up so things can get a bit tricky. It does however make for some pretty hilarious crashes though, so it's not all bad. Fortunately the sun did come out all day on Friday so I was able to get some very nice photos, which I’ll show you later.

It would probably be a good idea to tell you where I went now. We were based in a place called Obertauern in Austria, just south of Salzburg. It is a massive skiing area, with about 100km of ski runs. Plenty of easy runs for the physically inept, my mum for example, and plenty of much harder ones for the rest of us. It was my 3rd week skiing, so I’m pretty good without being amazing and there was more then enough skiing at about my standard. In fact I managed to do quite a few black sloped during the week, which was fun although very tiring, so tiring in fact that they made my older brother, who is build like a brick shithouse, start feeling it. Pussy.

While it was a really good holiday, there were a few things that got a little annoying; our hotel was really far away from the main town – about a kilometre, which believe me is pretty far when it’s cold and snowing, so we didn’t really go up into town in the evenings and do ‘après-ski’, which is the most ridiculous sounding thing ever. For the uninitiated, it’s when everyone gets together after a day of skiing and gets drunk, well there’s a little more to it than that obviously or else I wouldn’t be ruing the fact that we didn’t do it very much.

Although we were over there over Christmas, , they didn’t really make anything of itapart from Christmas Eve; there were a few decorations and the odd Christmas song in the restaurants, but apart from that it could’ve been any time of the year. This isn’t really a compliant though given that I get sick of all the hype of Christmas, in fact it was quite refreshing. On Christmas Eve however they did kinda go all out. In the evening we had a meal that was about 8 courses and lasted for several hours, after which we were not as full as you might think due to the fact that each course could easily have fitted onto the palm of a new born babies hand.

Along with writing, reading, playing rugby, being cynical and surfing endlessly around half-dead Internet forums, I quite enjoy photography. As will all the other things I’m not exactly good at it, apart from reading obviously, because any retard with one functional eye and half a brain could read competently. Anyway, I’d like to think some of the photos I took in Austria are actually half decent.

I know you're probably wondering why the sky is blue when a minute ago I was complaining that the weather was crap, well I took these on the one day that there was nice weather. Anyway, this was our winter wonderland for the week, pretty nice huh?

This one is of Obertauern, it's not all that big as you can see and it's pretty much just hotels, bars and ski schools. Suffice to say that, were it not for the skiing, it would be little more than a few ramshackle buildings, if that.

I quite like this one with the cable car in the foreground. It was taken coming down from one of the highest points in the area and as you can see the mountain range stretched back for a good long way, as you'd expect given that it's the alps. Just look at the photo damnit!

I think it was one of the most beautiful places I have ever been to in my live, some of the views were truly stunning.

this one I'm particularly proud of because what you can see in the top of the photo is the sun. Any of you who've tried photography will know that it is generally pretty difficult to take a photo into the sun like this, so I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Although its quality may be more of a testament to the quality of my camera rather than the quality of my photography.

This one is similar to the last one, and to be honest I'm running out fo things to say about them...

One thing I did discover on holiday; the best thing to listen to while drifting off to sleep is Pink Floyd. Psychedelic Rock just sounds so much better when you are half asleep, I don't know why and I don't know that relates to this photo, but in any case, Pink Floyd are amazing and you all need to listen to them more. See you next week.