2010

Looking back through my photo library, it's time to recollect 2010. Eleven years ago when coronavirus pandemics only happened in the pages of preposterous science fiction novels. My photos for that year are filed in a folder named, rather unsurprisingly, "2010 Archive".

In snowy January into February I spent forty hours or more down in our underhouse area working on a mosaic that was inspired by my trip to Easter Island the previous year. It depicts the "birdman" that I had seen carved into the rocks above the cliffs of Orongo. In competition, brave young men would swim out to those offshore islets to collect the first sooty tern eggs of the year:-

In April, Shirley and I enjoyed a short break in Valencia, Spain - flying out there courtesy of one of Britain's budget airlines. This picture shows two of the modernistic buildings in the city's science park. You can see two window cleaners at work - almost as brave as the cliff divers of Orongo:-

In 2010, I kept walking in the countryside. There are countless pictures that evidence that habit and then early one morning at the end of June the telephone rang. It was my brother Paul's wife, Josephine, calling from western Ireland. She had just woken up and found Paul motionless beside her - as dead as can be. He was only sixty two. We had to make swift arrangements to get over there because traditional Irish funerals happen very soon after death has occurred. The cursory postmortem said that an undiagnosed heart condition had killed him but even now I am not so sure. The photo at the top of this blogpost  shows a green butterfly that mysteriously appeared on a sunny wall at their house on the morning of his funeral. Never seen before and never since. Below, local men - all of whom Paul knew - back-filling  his country grave. He was a very special, lovable man.

However, life carried on after Paul's death. 

In July, before schools were out for the summer, we headed down to Cornwall in south west England. We visited my old teaching colleague Mike in Kingswear, Devon  and also went to the Eden Project near St Austell, Land's End and St Ives. This is a souvenir shop window in St Ives - filled with typical tourist tat:-

In September, when schools were back for the new academic year, we had a week in Albufeira, Portugal. There were some amazing sand sculptures in the town:-

And this was our hotel pool, high on the cliffs to the east of a resort that we first visited in 1982 - the year after we were married:-

Another autumn came along and I kept walking as Christmas appeared on the horizon once again. This time there would be no Christmas Day telephone conversation with Paul.  I took this last picture on December 3rd 2010 in nearby Ecclesall churchyard and I still love the way the fresh snow was wreathed around Malcolm's angel - whoever Malcolm might have been:-

from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/31Z0xw5