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My son was convinced this warning sign is a false flag to deter any curious eyes from peeking inside where - he believed - there is a covert nuclear weapons facility. Or perhaps it's just an archery range.
Beneath the infinite vault of a twilight sky—where hues of gold disintegrate into bruised indigo—rises an immense shard of petrified time. Not shaped by compassion, but by the cold geometry of relentless forces. An arch of ice, improbable in its defiance, gapes like a ruptured portal, framing a sun that bleeds its final embers into the encroaching void. This light, fleeting and feral, clings desperately to the world before dissolving into darkness.
The ice itself is a contradiction. Its surface is etched with scars of upheaval, chaotic fissures that seem almost deliberate, like forgotten inscriptions carved by an indifferent universe. The void beyond the arch quivers, refracted and distorted, a reminder that even reality splinters when seen through such crystalline apertures.
Beneath this towering fragment, the water lies taut, a shimmering membrane of deceptive calm. It holds a reflection—pristine, yet disturbed—a liquid double that trembles as though under the weight of a concealed truth. This mirrored world does not merely echo the one above; it twists it, offering a version that is at once perfect and unnerving. It feels less like an image than an accusation, silent yet unyielding.
Here, form and dissolution are locked in perpetual combat. The ice, rigid yet eroding, looms not as a monument but as a fleeting testament to resistance. It exists on the brink of collapse, a fragile interval between birth and annihilation. To witness it is to confront the absurdity of persistence, the delicate violence of simply being.
In this frozen theatre, the serene and the catastrophic are indistinguishable. The sky burns with indifferent glory, the ice contorts in its silent struggle, and the water, ever watchful, remains a fluid archive of dissolution. To gaze upon this is to feel the raw pulse of entropy, to understand that all grandeur is borrowed time—beauty poised precariously at the edge of obliteration.
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If these reflections and landscapes speak to you, I warmly welcome you to visit my website. There, you’ll find more journeys through nature and thought — moments captured and stories told with a shared reverence for the raw, untamed beauty of the world: www.coronaviking.com
Nobody was more surprised than myself when I jumped out of bed before sunrise on New Year's Day. I'd stayed up until the small hours watching Richard E Grant having a splendid time playing the utterly dissolute Withnail alongside Paul McGann's ever timid "I," and gone to bed very late indeed. Generally this is a recipe for an especially slothful start to the following day, with an over reliance on the coffee reserves and little other meaningful sign of life before noon. But for once things were different. Improbably it had snowed in the evening, and even more surprisingly it had settled. With the weather forecast promising a cold clear night it seemed likely that the freshly laid white carpet on the badger eaten patch of scrub that passes for the front lawn would still be there in the morning, although for how long beyond that was uncertain. This was most unusual in our mild wet corner of the country so it couldn't really be missed. I set the alarm despite having no confidence whatsoever in my ability to crawl out of bed less than six hours after getting into it.
Early in the morning I wandered around the garden with a quiet smile. There's something about snow that takes me back to childhood. In the forty-five years since my parents moved us down to Cornwall I could count the number of times we've had more than a brief coating of the stuff on the fingers of one hand and still have a digit or two to spare. There was 1979 when Dad made sledges out of old bits of wood and fitted plastic curtain rails under the runners, which made them faster than anyone else's on the near vertical Trelawney Road in Falmouth. How none of us got killed I can't really say. Then there was 1987 when my return to University after Christmas was delayed by the big freeze and I watched "Gregory's Girl" for twenty consecutive nights on the VHS player. Since then we've had the odd afternoon when panic has broken loose at work as every car in the universe attempts to leave Truro at exactly the same moment, but there is generally a period of around ten years between each of these momentous events. Only rarely has the snow still been on the ground the following day. The message from Cornwall is, if you want to see snow in winter, this isn't going to be the likeliest place to find it.
I quickly decided the garden wasn't bringing any inspiration at all and prepared to go to the same place as I did when the Beast from the East visited three years ago. The woods across the road beckoned. By now the clock was against me and as I struggled through thick mud towards a spot I'd taken a shot from before, the sky filled with soft pink light. I checked my watch yet again; the moment of sunrise was very close. My right eye complained at me, streaming in the cold morning air. It wasn't used to being open or outdoors at such a disagreeable hour after ten days away from the office, and stonily refused to fully open and engage with the rest of me. Weeping from one eye and slipping around on the sodden track I pushed on urgently in a race against the sunrise, eventually arriving at this spot where a gate onto an open field waited appealingly under a soft white dust that didn't seem likely to last long. Mentally I recorded the scene before me, but I didn't stop. The composition I wanted was a few yards further along the path. When I got there it took seconds to reject it.
Five minutes later I was back here, just in time to get the shot before the sun rose and blew the highlights and what was left of the pastel pinks clean out of the sky. A minute or two later and I'd have missed it completely. Later on I returned for a leisurely stroll. The snow had almost completely gone, leaving only traces of the beautiful morning landscape that I'm so glad I didn't miss.
Several people, my own dear mother included, have said the result of this New Year's Day outing should be on a Christmas card. The trouble is I still can't decide whether that's a compliment or a thickly veiled insult. But I'm thinking of getting some Christmas cards printed at the end of this year.
Les liégeois sont presque tous passés par cet endroit improbable, un café étroit, avec un bout d'estrade, où les vendredis et samedis soirs et dimanches, il suffit de s'inscrire et d'attendre son tour pour monter sur scène et pousser la chansonnette, accompagné par une pianiste légendaire, capable de jouer n'importe quel morceau, ou presque. "Les Olivettes", c'est "the voice", version "amon nos-autes".... La qualité vocale n'est pas toujours au rendez-vous. Mais quelques verres de bière suffisent à l'oublier. Et puis, pas plus de deux airs par personnes, ça limite les dégats.
The people of Liège have almost all passed through this improbable place, a narrow café, with a bit of a stage, where on Friday and Saturday evenings and Sundays, you just have to register and wait your turn to go on stage and push the ditty, accompanied by a legendary pianist, capable of playing almost any piece. “Les Olivettes” is “the voice”, “amon nos-autes” version.... The vocal quality is not always there. But a few glasses of beer are enough to forget it. And then, no more than two tunes per person, that limits the damage.
The improbably named Lower Slaughter is quite simply one of the prettiest villages that I have come across. With its beautiful Cotswold stone cottages, its shallow river, old watermill and low footbridges it reminds me of Bourton on the Water, which lies just over a mile away.
The Grade II-listed water mill, dating from the early 1800s, has an undershot waterwheel and a chimney for additional steam power. The building is now a museum having last been used commercially as a mill in 1958.
For example: Nassim Nicholas Taleb "The Black Swan: the impact of the highly improbable" (on picture)
(english follow)
LAZY DAYS
Regarde ces gens qui marchent au loin
On dirait des figurines coincées entre un ciel et une mer sans frontière,
Dans un tableau couleur pêche et turquoise
Comme ces veilles affiches vintage
qui vendaient du rêve pour tous, dans les années 50.
Lazy days affichaient-elles.
Aujourd’hui le rêve, c’est le pouvoir de marquer un temps d’arrêt
Et se donner le courage d’avouer à ses amis que nous avons passé des journées entières de pure paresse, des journées sans but ni objectif…
Sinon que de retrouver son souffle et se souvenir de ceux qui nous manque…
Ceux qui se sont évanouis au passage du temps, dans un jugement sans appel.
Le temps est le pire des bourreaux
Laisse moi rêver que tu pourrais être là, à un seul battement de coeur du mien
Je marche sans but comme ces figurines
Enya chante Lazy Days dans mes écouteurs.
Et je te fais un sourire couleur pêche et turquoise
Sens-tu l’odeur des embruns de cette mer improbable?
Patrice
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Lazy days
Look at these people who walk in the distance
They look like figurines stranded between a sky and a sea without borders
In a painting peach and turquoise
Like these Vintage Posters who were selling dreams for all in the 1950s.
Lazy days, they would say.
Today the dream is the power to mark a time to stop
And to give ourselves the courage to confess to our friends that we spent whole days of pure laziness, days without aim or objective ...
Otherwise than to catch our breath and remember those we miss ...
Those who vanished in the passage of time, in a judgment without appeal.
Time is the worst of executioners
Let me dream that you could be there, in a single heartbeat of mine.
I walk aimlessly like these figurines;
Enya sings Lazy Days in my headphones;
And I make you/give you a smile peach and turquoise.
Do you feel the odor of mist from this unlikely sea?
Patrice
In the evening of the 27th July 1689, Donald McBane, a Scottish government soldier fleeing the Highlanders after the Battle of Killiecrankie, is said to have jumped across the River Garry here, to escape pursuing Jacobite Highlanders - a leap of about 18 ft or 5m.
Prints, cards, masks and things are available via the website: www.shinyphoto.co.uk/photo/Improbable-Jump-5928e8547061ce...
(english follow)
Il y a des moments et des endroits, comme ici à Cannon Beach (Oregon, USA), où je n’ai pas envie de chercher des explications aux mystères du monde, ni même de me perdre en rêveries, mais simplement de creuser avec mes mains dans le sable, construire d’improbables sculptures de galets et de rire dans le vent et la lumière de ma planète, la Terre. (Patrice)
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There are moments and places, like here in Cannon Beach (Oregon USA), where I did not want to search for explanations for the world mysteries, not even to daydream, but simply to explore with my hands the sand, building improbable sculptures of pebbles, and laughing in the wind and the light of my planet, the Earth. (Patrice)
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