marramgrass

Another from my dander around Portrush last week.

Sunday 30th November, 2008: the First Sunday in Advent.

My brother has developed a family tradition whereby he will, on roughly this Sunday, haul his fiancee to my parents’ house and put up their Christmas tree. If you haven’t seen my mother’s tree, look out your window :) It stands about seven feet tall in a low-ceilinged room, and I don’t know how many lights are on it — possibly more than are on the tree outside City Hall. (Actually, given the feebleness of that tree, I wouldn’t be surprised.) My father likes to joke that if you listen carefully you can hear the wheel in the electricity meter speeding up.

The evening, including a visit to see my gran in the City Hospital, was a reminder that alongside the liturgy, the longing and the waiting in darkness, this joy and these lights are also true markers of the season, and — if I can say it — offer a little taste of Kingdom. There is room for laughter in the observance, an accompaniment to the hope of the day.

I was going through my archives and realised that I never posted this photograph. It was taken in the multi-storey car park at Edinburgh Airport in the spring of 2006, very shortly after that car park was built, a quick shot with an old folding Polaroid packfilm camera (shot on Type 667, if you’re interested in such details).

I have a couple of those cameras lying around, to one of which I applied a very rough conversion to use modern batteries. The other is half-awaiting a more refined version of the same procedure.

I did go back and try to duplicate the shot with a ‘real’ camera (my wife’s 6×6 Bronica, if you must know), and I believe it’s one of a set of negatives that’s been waiting to be scanned ever since. Next time I get the scanner out I’ll have to find them.

One more from Dublin in September.

I’ve finally grabbed a chance to scan the rest of the pictures from our trip to Dublin in September. On the Monday evening, while my wife was studying in our hotel room, I took a walk with a camera. It must have been somewhere just before 9 o’clock, and the staff at M&S Simply Food were tidying up. This was my view in the window.

Another pic from our few days in Dublin in September.

I wished I had a real camera with me instead of just my phone, as
there is great potential here for wallpapery goodness.

It’s also a nice change to see the grafitti/guerilla marketing done so tastefully.

While my wife was studying, I was discovering that I seem to have lost what small ability I had to hold a camera steady. I had fun, though.