IPHONE ART ALL AROUND US - 3

These photos are time exposures ...

Cheltenham Town Centre

Italian Restaurant

The Abbey Grounds

Woods along the Churn

Buddlia

Morning Café

IPHONE ART ALL AROUND US - 2

I used a time exposure app in full daylight in the Abbey Grounds, Cirencester, to see what would happen. This is what happened.

Cotswold Water Park Lake 6, from the café. I just boosted the colours a little.

I love the fact that iPhones make street photography very easy. This is the Adamant Jazz Band outside Brecon Cathedral, warming up for the morning jazz service, where it is traditional for them to lead the clergy in and out of the building.

The Cotswold Water Park is being formed from ongoing gravel extraction works in the upper Thames Valley. This creates some intriguing photographic opportunities. This is near Ashton Keynes.

Ross-on-Wye August 2014. It stands on a red sandstone bluff above the beautiful River Wye, on the Wales/England border. This border country is known as the Welsh Marches (pronounced 'marshes').

Another time exposure app experiment in the Abbey Grounds, Cirencester. I don't cut and paste in my pictures. They are all straight shots except for the colour balance. I play around with colour filters, that's all.

A Cirencester apple orchard near us. This scene just leapt out at me and said 'Take me!' So I did. It's a straight shot except for the fact that I lightened the shadow slightly.

IPHONE ART ALL AROUND US

A selection of my favourite photographs ...

Gloucester Docks Silhouette, August 2014. I like the connection with sails and weather conditions here. I just under exposed the shot.

Gloucester Docks during filming of "Through The Looking Glass" August 2014. The tall ships always make the docks look olde worldly, especially with a touch of sepia filter.

New Brewery Arts Centre, Cirencester, 2013. The man and the pigeons are as it was, with postcard effect added using an app.

Smoke Bush, Abbey Grounds, Cirencester 2014. As with my other iPhone pictures this is a straight shot with just the colours brought out strongly by applying a filter.

Waiting for a bus, Ilfracombe 2014. I was in the bus station when I took this shot.

National Arboretum Memorial 2014. At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month each year the sun is lined up with the slot in the wall and shines on the poppies. One hopes it is shining at that time. Very moving, even just thinking about it.

Clevedon Pier, 2014. At the end of the pier is a lovely little cafe selling tea, coffee and cake. I prefer that to fishing.

The Rosetta Stone, British Museum, London 2014. One of my 'selfies', using the reflective glass of the display cabinet.

Mill Stream, Cirencester 2014. A straight picture.

Abbey Grounds Fishing Lake, Cirencester 2014. All this took was to increase the contrast.

The Norman Arch, Cirencester 2013. A straight shot. I love the gateway being echoed by the doorway, both leading into the Abbey Grounds. 

Display Cart, The Organic Farm Shop, Wiggold, Cirencester 2013. This scene was just there for the taking, so why not?

Waiting for the Swindon Bus, Cirencester 2013. I just loved this chap's outfit. He had real style, but I didn't have the courage to ask him about it. It would have disturbed what, to me, was a gift of a scene.

The Vortex Water Feature, Alnwick Castle Gardens 2013. All this took was an increase in contrast. Otherwise the picture, again, is as it was, whirling water in a great steel dish. It is quite my favourite feature in the water garden, and takes about ten minutes to go through its sequence of emptying and refilling, so stick around for the whole show. So many people don't stay. Too impatient.

The North Sea at Alnmouth 2013. My personal caption to this is, "That's the North Sea, that is, Ethel. Starts here and goes all the way to Denmark." Feel free to make up your own.

Patrick Wise's Schooldays - Primary Days ~

The Migraine Years

It soon became clear to me, but no-one else, with the possible exception of my mother to some degree, that I suffered at school. It was not from bullying, which came later at Grammar School, but from what nowadays is known as migraine. Severe migraine. Migraine didn't exist in the forties. One had headaches and they were regarded as a woman's complaint. Men didn't have them, and neither did schoolboys. My experience was that I could not look at black print on white pages for more than ten minutes without getting a blinding sharp pain in my head.

And it didn't go away when I stopped reading. The trigger had been pressed and I would have to go through the whole ghastly process. This was raging head pain that lasted around twenty-four hours and made me feel sick. Sound and light became unbearable and I just wanted to bury my head under a pillow to shut out the world. If all this sounds a little extreme, believe me, this was how it was, and it stayed that way until after I was over forty years old.

It made school work very difficult. It made everything difficult. But I had to try to keep up with the pack, even though the going was tough. University was out of the question, although I did manage a one year course at what is now known as The Royal Agricultural University. It was a College when I went. 

My mother, God bless her, realised that something was wrong with me, but what could she do? Take me to the doctor? She did, many times. The answer was always the same. Take him home and give him an aspirin. Sometimes I was taken to the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, where I was led into small hot rooms after long waits, asked to lie on a bed while rubber nets were stretched over my head! Electrodes were inserted under this unbecoming stretchy hairnet until I looked like Medusa, and I was asked to lay back and keep still. The medic would then sit across the room behind a screen, the lights would be turned down I'd be asked apparently randomly to close my eyes, open my eyes, take a deep breath, hold it, close my eyes, breathe out, open my left eye, close it, open my right eye, or so I remember. Eventually I'd be put back together and packed off back to the consulting room where I'd be looked at with some disdain.  

Take him home,they'd tell my mother, and give him an aspirin.

As anyone who suffers from migraine will know, this was entirely useless advice. Migraine didn't exist, so it was thought, hence the inappropriate advice.

Migraine continued not to exist until I my mid teens.

By then things were happening. People who mattered must have been reporting similar symptoms to me, I suspect. It was beginning to dawn on the medical profession that there was a problem out there in general public land. I expect work days were being lost and industry was complaining.

The Migraine Trust was founded in 1965.

I subscribed, and it marked a small turning point in my life. Reading letters from other sufferers in the Trust's newsletter was an eye opener. I was not alone. I was not a malingerer, a tag I had acquired in some circles. I really did have a medical condition. My mother, a former children's nurse, continued to fight for me. She even got me an appointment to see a migraine specialist in Harley Street. But this was still early days. I guess that there was much experimentation going on. I was given some pills and told to take them whenever a migraine attack occurred. I did. They made my kidneys ache and knocked me out for 24 hours. I stopped taking them.

I continued to have severe migraine attacks until I reached my mid forties, on average half of every week would be spent fighting them while trying to lead a normal life. To use a term, they were a drag. They affected every aspect of my life. Everything. It was difficult, to say the least. But by my mid-forties I was beginning to win the battle. The attacks were becoming milder and less frequent. Now I hardly ever get them. It's taken one heart attack and a life sentence of daily pill taking, but hey! I'm walking and talking. Life is good. 

I'm alive and happy.