Righto then! Here we are inside the corner cupboard. No single malt collection. No urn containing Colin's ashes. No secret compartment hiding "ten pounds of the finest weed". No sparkly dress and pumps. No Santa costume. No Laughing Horse Blog Awards outfit. Not even any cups!
No my friends, what we mostly have in "The Cupboard That Colin Made" is photographs. Hundreds of them from those good old days before digital photography became commonplace, before the smartphones plague arrived. I am sure you remember those long ago days and you may well be in possession of many old prints yourself. They are part of our cultural history now and young humans born in this millennium are possibly bemused by past methods of capturing images.
I acquired my first digital camera at Christmas 2004 - it was a gift I had requested. Since then there have been remarkably few physical prints. Randomly, for the purposes of this blogpost, I selected the top box and again quite randomly I pulled out a wallet of photos from 2002...
That was the year that Shirley, Ian, Frances and I boarded an aeroplane (American: airplane) bound for Atlanta, Georgia. There was no need to visit a travel agent beforehand because I had planned it all myself - the hotels, the car hire, the insurance, tickets for the Epcot Centre and Universal Studios in Orlando and our very travel itinerary. From Atlanta to Macon to Apalachicola (FL) to Cedar Key to Orlando to Savannah (GA) and back to Atlanta. It was spread over two weeks and my plan came together quite flawlessly - apart from picking up two speeding tickets.
It was the first time that Shirley and the kids had been to America and they loved the whole experience. Ian was seventeen and Frances was thirteen at the time. The trip happened during their Easter holidays.
Anyway, back to the photos. Lazily, I have just photographed a small selection of them when I admit that superior reproduction would have happened through scanning the pictures on my printer but that can often be quite a faff. I apologise.
Above - the courthouse in Moultrie GA. There were state prisoners in the grounds on gardening duty but the guard said I couldn't photograph them. They were all black.
Below - Frances at the Ocumulgee Mounds National Historical Park near Macon, Georgia. Its history goes back over 10,000 years so how come some Americans claim that their country is so young that it has very little history of consequence? Waves of Native Americans knew this remarkable place for countless generations until Europeans arrived with their European ways and changed everything.
Below - two images from one of my favourite places in the entire world - Apalachicola, Florida. Situated on The Gulf of Mexico in Florida's Panhandle, it became a settlement because of fishing and oysters. Today it has growing appeal for tourists and a permanent population of under 2500. As Ms Moon has informed me, the oyster harvesting days are now gone because of pollution.
I had seen Cedar Key on a map and instead of heading straight for Orlando after departing Perry, we headed twenty miles west from Otter Creek on Highway 24 until we arrived off-the-beaten-track at Cedar Key on The Gulf Coast. Almost as charming as Apalachicola, we could only afford three hours before continuing our journey to Orlando. I remember pelicans and swathes of large flat fish feeding greedily by the pier.
Savannah was a characterful coastal city. There we met up with Chris, my friend from Ohio and his youngest daughter Abby but before we got there, I pulled off Highway 95 to visit the Hofwyl-Broadfield Plantation on the coast of Georgia. Somewhat surprisingly, it was once a rice plantation but reliant upon the same kind of hard-working slaves that once made cotton production so profitable for landowners. I took the following peaceful picture on the kitchen decking round the back of the main plantation house.
from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/t815DGO
ليست هناك تعليقات:
إرسال تعليق