Friday, April 9, 2010 4:02:19 AM
spring, photograph
Spring really
has arrived this time, finally there are some flowers are out! A lot of Hawthorn blossom anyway, here's some I found whilst taking advantage of the sunshine to go cycling. You may notice a strange shape in the distance in that picture, it's a shell-like structure which was originally a sewage pump but is now on display like a scuplture:
One more picture from today of another ancient artefact: an old and rotting jetty which only emerges from the water at low tide:
I call this photograph "Jetty and Swan" (can you see the swan?).
Wednesday, March 24, 2010 10:09:49 PM
spring, diary
Spring seems to arrived with the Spring Equinox, at least temperature-wise. One day about a week ago, quite suddenly, I realised that I'd not had the heating on all day, and it was now midnight. I've not needed it since! Previously it had been on every day. The same day I also saw my first creepy crawly insect of the year. Then today I switched from sweat-shirt and long pants to shorts and tshirt for wearing around the house.
And yet, there is no sign of spring in the vegetation here. In the North of England i'm told the spring floweres are all out, but here in the South not a sausage, no blossom or flowers or anything, no leaves on the trees. I wonder why Spring comes sooner to the colder North?
Or is it just that in urban areas like where I live, plant life has all but given up (if so, I can't blame it, since my local council seems intent on eradicating all the remaining green areas, with more and more "facilities" been built in the local park, and a line of nice 3 metre high shrubs that I used to admire cut down for no reason leaving the ground ugly and bare.
So Spring is sprung,
but the grass is not yet ris,
and I wonder where the flowers is....
Thursday, April 17, 2008 1:56:17 AM
spring, photograph
This is one of the better blossom pictures I’ve managed to get this year, though to be honest I’m not all that impressed by any of the ones I’ve taken. Round where I live there seems to been a dearth of trees in blossom, and I couldn’t find any really inspiring angles on this one, situated as it was against a security fence with a train depot behind! I don’t actually know what kind of tree this is, it doesn’t look like cherry blossom to me. My mum tells me that when I was little I knew the names of all the flowers and plants in the neighbourhood, but sadly this knowledge has long since withered.
Sunday, March 23, 2008 6:49:27 PM
Winter, spring, snow
The Japanese have a word for the spectacle of falling cherry blossom, 花吹雪 (hanafubuki), which literally means "petal snow storm". Well I looked out of my window this morning and it really did look like a snow storm:
It
was a snow storm! It seems after having a warm sunny Spring in February, we’re now going to have Winter in March! (Mind you, although it is really freezing here today, sadly the snow had melted by mid-morning. But perhaps there’s more to come?)
Today’s events brought to mind a both a manga and an anime. (Ok, so almost
everything that happens reminds me of an anime or manga in some way, but anyway...) In the
Love Hina manga, snow blowing off the trees reminds the characters of cherry blossom, triggering a childhood memory which immediately turns their world upside down:
(I coloured this page myself BTW, like most manga it was originally black and white).
In the anime
5 centimetres a second, the girl Akari says at the start “Hey, doesn’t this cherry blossom look just like snow?” and then later, when, like here today, they suffer unseasonal snow in March, she makes the exact same comment again whilst standing under a snow-laden chrry tree.... wishful thinking perhaps, as she had originally hoped to meet her sweetheart under a blossoming cherry tree, until the weather intervened.
Saturday, March 15, 2008 8:56:18 PM
cherry blossom, Windy Tales, anime, photography
...
My new pocket pc seems to have revived my interest in watching anime, and I’ve been using it to watch the series Windy Tales (風人物語) which I downloaded a long time ago, but then never got past the first episode. Windy Tales is unusual as it doesn’t look like anime: it has a very simple graphic style, and the characters actually look Japanese! (No big round eyes or brightly coloured hair.)
Today I finally finished it. Although it started out being a supernatural tale of people who can manipulate the wind, this quickly becomes little more than a motif for what is reall a slice of life story consisting of a series of vignettes about growing up and the difficulties of being an adult. I thought that the final episode would bring the original tale of mysterious wind users back into focus but it didn't really. In fact I didn't really understand the ending at all! (I'll have to watch it a couple more times I think.)
But right now I’m going to talk about episode 12, Cherry Blossom Time (櫻のころ) which I found struck a chord with me due to the time of year and the recent weather, and which had lots of inspirational quotes in it.
As I said in a previous post, the blossom is starting to appear on the trees here, but it's been hard to enjoy it because of the wind and rain. In Windy Tales it’s the same. It starts with the heroine Nao photographing the cherry blossom in the rain. She gets wet through and as a result catches a cold (hoary old cliché that anime stories love to trot out despite it being complete nonsense). Anyhow, this gives her an excuse to lie around in the school infirmary, which by now we know is a favourite hideout for some of the school's misfit teachers, who enjoy chatting up the school nurse.
Taiki-sensei, maths teacher and (secretly) master wind user, arrives to share some sakura mochi (桜餅 - pink rice cake wrapped in cherry leaves) with the nurse, and Nao (showing her photographer’s eye, perhaps) asks him if the colour of the cherry blossom changes every year. His response is, “The colour of the blossom reflects the heart of the observer.” When Nao says he should raise a wind to blow the rain away so they can enjoy the cherry blossom properly, he quotes a famous (so it says here) passage from Essays in Idleness by Kenko:
Should we only appreciate flowers at their peak,
and the Moon when it is full? Nay.
To yearn for the Moon through the rain,
or fail to observe the Spring’s passing from being shut indoors,
arouses even deeper feelings.
Budding boughs just before they burst into blossom,
and gardens strewn with wilted flowers,
are by far more worthy of notice.
Anyhow, inspired by another poem about the beauty of cherry blossom at dawn, Nao ends up getting up before sunrise (along with her long-suffering sidekick, Miki) to photograph the trees in the pink-purple light of dawn.
The best thing in Spring is the dawn.
The sky, dyed in the morning light, slowly brightens
and purple clouds stretch across the mountains.
(from the
Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon).
Anyhow, even though it wasn’t the story I thought it was going to be, I’ve enjoyed watching Windy Tales (and especially being able to watch it whilst sat in the kitchen or lying in bed at night, thanks to my cute little pocket pc! There's something more intimate about having anime on a little screen in your hand or on your pillow.)
The quotes about viewing cherry blossom in less than ideal conditions inspired me to go out today to look for blossom on the trees despite the dull and threatening skies. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be much where I live. I found one hawthorn tree with white blossom, but the setting was poor. Later I found a tree with pink cherry blossom in a supermarket carpark just as it started to rain. In the end I didn't manage to photograph anything, but will try again soon, I'm sure there will be blossom on the trees in one of the parks near here.
My Opera
