Gavin Duley's Weblog

Still nothing of interest

Mon, 02 Feb 2009

London or Siberia-on-Thames?

Well, that's exaggerating somewhat. Somewhat.

Whilst it wasn't exactly as cold as Siberia, there was a lot of snow. This is quite odd for London, it doesn't often snow here. It certainly doesn't often get this much snow, it was quite weird. There were several inches of snow on the ground, and it just kept snowing the whole day.

Anyway, with no buses and almost no trains, I walked to Greenwich Park. I haven't seen so many people in Greenwich park before, there were lots of people making snow men and sliding down hillsides on sleighs, plastic bags, road signs, real estate signs, or pretty much anything that could resemble a sleigh.

I took as many photos as I could before the battery decided it had had enough, and died. Still, I think I took some nice photographs: there was snow everywhere, on every branch, on the heath of Blackheath.

posted at: 21:57 | path: /travel/uk | permanent link to this entry

Mon, 26 Jan 2009

On the train
On the train to Newcastle, winter landscape flashing by. Cold reflections in fallow fields, winter villages huddled around churchyards. Slowly through towns, speeding past hedgerows. Empty platforms gone in a flash of station signs and sodium light.

Somehow the landscape reminds me of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, as if I can see the Raven King's words written in the empty fields and the grey sky. Even though we're not far enough north to be North, not yet.

Ah yes, here comes the trolley with tea and Mars bars. Enough to break anyone out of thoughts of the Raven King...

posted at: 10:14 | path: /travel/uk | permanent link to this entry

Fri, 26 Sep 2008

New Arrivals
Well, this is the first time I've been somewhere in Australia that isn't along the eastern coast since... since before I can remember. Since getting back to this country at the start of 2003, I've just been messing around on the eastern edge of the continent. Well, that's all changed now. Temporarily.

I'm in Adelaide for about a week, for the Australian Systematic Botany Society 2008 National Conference. The excitement doesn't start until Sunday, I got here a earlier so that I could look around Adelaide a bit.

I had been warned(?) in advance that Adelaide was designed by the same man as Christchurch in New Zealand. According to Wikipedia this isn't in fact the case, but walking along the river I did get a certain sense of deja vu, the city feeling more like Christchurch than any other Australian city than I am used to. This doesn't explain why I kept thinking that the traffic would be driving on the right, maybe I was subconsciously being reminded of a European city.

The walk along the river was pleasant, and graced by musk lorikeets (Glossopsitta concinna)

and Australian Pelicans (Pelecanus conspicillatus).

In a tree, noisy miners were raising a nest-full of appropriately noisey nestlings. The next was part twigs, part plastic: old shopping bags fished from the river, having finally found some use.

I crossed over the river on a rather ornate bridge, and walked across the fields. My attention had been drawn by church spires, by analogy with Christchurch, there should surely be some sort of square out in front. Sadly, the analogy did not stretch quite that far. Walking across the fields, though, I found a juvenile magpie using the tried-and-tested "nearly tread on it" method of bird detection. There were adult magpies lurking nearby, I could but hope that at least one of it was the juvenile's parent. Though no longer a chick, I don't think it was quite up to looking after itself.


The delusion that I was in Christchurch was more or less dispelled by the CBD. I didn't really look around the city centre much, though, but headed straight for the South Australian Musuem. Sad thought it may sound, this was one of the main reasons that I had arrived those extra few days early. Here, they have some very rare and unusual fossils indeed - trace remains of the first animals ever, from the Ediacaran period -- some 650 million years ago. It's something quite special to see, and think how long ago they lived. That the imprints of soft bodied organisms have survived so long is quite amazing. It's incredible to think that these ghostly shapes in the rock could well have been the ancestor of all of us. Debate still rages as to if, and how, these things are related to modern life. That they don't really look like any thing that you would see out there today still is undebatable.

This wasn't the only thing to see at the Museum, and I enjoyed looking through the Pacific Islands cultures exhibition, and the extensive and brilliantly done exhibition of Aboriginal Australia.

Then I capped off another amazing day by getting the wrong bus back to where I'm staying. This is where it helps to have made a note of what bus you got into town on.

Adelaide photo gallery

posted at: 13:47 | path: /travel/australia/south_australia | permanent link to this entry