Windows

Bah! No sooner do I start crowing about having got 400 followers when one drops off. Oh well, I've got 399 followers, then.  :)

It's been quite a social week, doing more than usual with family and friends. It's lovely but some of them don't like being featured on blogs so I can't write much about it.   I've also been doing a bit of work and lots of boring stuff - you know, renewing insurance, trying to sort out the computer, trying to get the filthy marks the decorators left off the BRAND NEW WHITE curtains, juggling finances,  removing thick layers of dust from the builders, nope, you don't need to hear more....

Just as well then, that my photo editing program decided to reshuffle all my photos into alphabetical rather than date order, so it's thrown up several interesting ones of windows, which I enjoyed looking at and thought you might like to see too.

Some of the pictures, I must confess, well, I've forgotten where I took them now.  I think the one below was in Herefordshire, in a cottage belonging to an artist, I assume it was one of his sculptures.  If you recognise it, let me know!

The reflections in this window seemed wonderfully muddled and multi layered to me.  Two brass deer, and a street scene intermingled.



A windscreen counts as a window, right?

When I passed this Suffolk caravan park last year I felt that this window display must be telling SOME kind of a story - a funny one, I think.

 Here's another window scene in Suffolk. (What's with Suffolk and weird windows?) A little more emotion in this one, perhaps the black rat is the Mama trying to persuade her son not to go off to fire that cannon in the war?

Here are graffiti and classical reflections from my recent trip to Hamburg.  We stayed in an area full of marvellously varied old houses, covered in graffiti and/or painted up in odd ways. The area seemed to be populated by a mixture of hippies and yuppies.  Anyway this house was covered in classical statues, and painted black. Hence the window reflection. And the graffiti? Well, what do you think?

Fascinating naive-art pargeting in Northern France. This is a forgotten little corner not far from the Northern coast. Once again I've forgotten exactly where - but I think it's near Honfleur.  Pargeting is the art of decorating plasterwork.  I've seen a lot of it in East Anglia, but only rarely noticed coloured examples like these. Someone is keeping it very well painted up.

Disorientated in Southern Spain... yes, this is a real street, below, and it did look like that.  The crooked windows are a version of what will eventually be built (or which was there before). The design is printed on a huge netting hoarding, designed to conceal building work going on, but someone has had the bright idea of making it interesting and eye catching.  It certainly is that, as you walk along the street, specially since the pavement is paved in eye dazzling grey and white zigzags. 

Some feathery lampshades and velvet curtains glimpsed through a window in Oscar Wilde's old house in Tite Street, Chelsea.  I am sure Oscar would have liked pheasant feather lampshades.

I thought the fronds of these palms somehow echoed the closely spaced glazing bars of the window

And here is a distinctly child-sized window which I spotted at this little greengrocer in Shere, Surrey, recently (no fruit and veg in the window because it was Sunday).  Look at Daddy towering up there!   But then, undernourished poor people a few hundred years ago could be very small indeed, so doors and windows were often low. And it was cheaper to build small.

The scene below was taken by moonlight from one of our windows, in the snow.  It reminds me a bit of one of those very old French photos of the 1840s.  I lightened it, otherwise didn't process the image at all.

Another night scene, chugging down the Nile towards sunset, just us and the boatman.
!

These abstract reflections are the windows of a Disney hotel reflected in the water. The hotel looked ugly in the day, but came into its own at night.

And this is not a window, but a reflection, somewhere in the Middle East, where a huge mirror reflects the enormous inner courtyard of an old mansion.  Reminds me of an old fifties art movie. What is that woman thinking?



My next job is to get round to visiting some blogs - and peep through the windows into other peoples' worlds.