About Me
"Again Knulp started off, unaware that he was staggering with weariness. He felt much happier now and nodded gratefully to everything God said.
"Look", said God, 'I wanted you the way you were and no different. You were a wanderer in my name and wherever you went you brought the settled folk a little homesickness for freedom. In my name, you did silly things and people scoffed at you; I myself was scoffed at in you and loved in you. You are my child and my brother and a part of me. There is nothing you have enjoyed and suffered that I have not enjoyed and suffered with you'
'Yes' said Knulp, nodding heavily. 'Yes that's true and deep down I've always known it.'
From the last page of Knulp by Herman Hesse.
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Autobiography.docx Size : 18.213 Kb Type : docx |
“But he who dares not grasp the thorn
Should never crave the rose.”
Anne Bronte.
'So beautiful and strange and new! Since it was to end so soon, I almost wish I had never heard it. For it has roused a longing in me that is pain, and nothing seems worth while but just to hear that sound once more and go on listening to it for ever.'
Water Rat to Mole when he first hears Pan's song from the chapter 'The Piper at the Gates of Dawn' from 'The Wind in the Willows'.
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Dying of the Light.docx Size : 12.869 Kb Type : docx |
“Creativity in science, as in the arts, cannot be organised. It arises spontaneously from individual talent. Well-run laboratories can foster it, but hierarchical organisation, inflexible, bureaucratic rules, and mountains of futile paperwork can kill it. Discoveries cannot be planned; they pop up, like Puck, in unexpected places.”
Max Perutz - Nobel Prize winning discoverer of the structure of Haemoglobin.
“Sit down before fact like a little child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads or you shall learn nothing.”
Thomas Henry Huxley
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The Whole Truth.docx Size : 11.392 Kb Type : docx |
“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
George Orwell.
"You have deep-seated survival anxieties. And you don't like bigots, bullies, snobs, or hypocrites. Subconsciously there are many people you hate."
"Consciously, sir, consciously," Yossarian corrected in an effort to help. "I hate them consciously."
"You're antagonistic to the idea of being robbed, exploited, degraded, humiliated, or deceived. Misery depresses you. Ignorance depresses you. Persecution depresses you. Violence depresses you. Corruption depresses you. You know, it wouldn't surprise me if you're a manic-depressive!"
"Yes, sir. Perhaps I am."
"Don't try to deny it."
"I'm not denying it, sir," said Yossarian, pleased with the miraculous rapport that finally existed between them. "I agree with all you've said.”
Joseph Heller - Catch 22
Love’s Philosophy
Joy in the second moment of its arrival is already less keen than in the first, is still fainter in the third, and finishes by coalescing with our normal mental state, just as the circles which the fall of a pebble forms on the surface of water, gradually die away.
Nikolai Gogol
“I used to analyze myself down to the last thread, used to compare myself with others, recalled all the smallest glances, smiles and words of those to whom I’d tried to be frank, interpreted everything in a bad light, laughed viciously at my attempts ‘to be like the rest’ –and suddenly, in the midst of my laughing, I’d give way to sadness, fall into ludicrous despondency and once again start the whole process all over again – in short, I went round and round like a squirrel on a wheel.”
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Crime and Punishment
"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." LP Hartley.
The Tin Man
Sky above Rusey Beach
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Why I Take Photographs.docx Size : 789.884 Kb Type : docx |
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Serendipity.docx Size : 19.483 Kb Type : docx |
I have been interested in photography since my brother bought me an Olympus Trip compact camera for my twenty first birthday, which was so many years ago now that I should draw a veil over it!
I only take photographs of places that I love; those landscapes that have got underneath my skin, leading me to return to the same wood, beach or tor time and time again until I get something that captures, in my eyes at least, the essence of that place. All the places photographed here are off the beaten track, they are not widely known but each means something special to me, they tell my story and that is what I want my photography to do, but obviously if you like it too then that is rather wonderful.
I still use slide film for my photographs because it 'sees' the world in a way that is subtly different from the way that I see it, leading me to always being nervous and surprised when I first hold the finished transparencies with their miniature worlds captured on a tiny sliver of plastic up against the light. Sometimes the surprise is a disappointing one, when I had convinced myself that I had taken a sure- fire winner of a picture only for the finished article to be something that is only fit for the bin but at other times I have been thrilled to see that something that I thought would be entirely ordinary is revealed as a little magical instead.
None of the pictures here have been 'improved' digitally (apart from the illusions page) but are an accurate record of what the original transparency is like.