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I love these things. It's always fun to see which one I'll get and the little candy inside is tasty toooooo ♥
A martial arts education of intelligent curriculum curated by Sensei Dan Rominski at his martial art school located in Rutherford NJ. Visit our website www.thedojo.org Self-Defense for children at (201) 933-3050 or email SenseiDan@TheDOJO.org
Visit our website www.thedojo.org
Children Learn Focus, Discipline, Self-Control, Concentration, Fitness, Confidence, Respect, Have Better Self-Esteem, Healthy Eating and Self-Defense.
Adults Learn How to get and stay in shape, Stress Release, Fitness, Healthy Eating, Slow start program (come as you are), a coach in every class, Confidence, Focus, Self-Discipline, Positive Peer Group and it’s Fun!
Parents, Download your FREE Report The 7 Steps for Parents: Preventing Childhood Sexual Abuse Click HERE to visit our website
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Sensei Dan is available for Scheduled TALKS & PRESENTATIONS.
Get more information about our Martial Arts Education of Intelligent Curriculum involving Everything Self-Defense at TheDOJO located in Rutherford NJ.
Contact Chief Instructor: Owner Sensei Dan Rominski at (201) 933-3050 or email SenseiDan@TheDOJO.org
Visit our website www.TheDOJO.org
TheDOJO - 52 Park Avenue, Rutherford, NJ 07070 - Phone: (201) 933-3050 - Text us for info here: (201) 838-4177
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If you live in the Rutherford, NJ area and would like to inquire about our programs, reach out to us at the phone and/or e-mail or text addresses above. -Sensei Dan
Read our Blog at senseidanromisnki.blogspot.com...
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We Teach Children, Teens and Adults from Rutherford, NJ; East Rutherford, NJ; Carlstadt, NJ; Kearny, NJ; Lyndhurst, NJ; Woodridge, NJ; Hackensack, NJ; Belleville, NJ; Bloomfield, NJ; Nutley, NJ; Clifton, NJ; Montclair, NJ; and surrounding areas.
No Matter The Martial Art we’ll help you accomplish your goals through our expertise or help you find a school that will best suit you.
Karate, Judo, Jujutsu, Juijitsu, Jiu-jitsu, Goju Ryu, Shorin Ryu, Kendo, Iaido, Aikido, Mixed Martial Arts, Grappling, Daito Ryu Aiki Jujutsu, Ryukyu Okinawa Kobudo, Shorin Ryu, TKD, Tae Kwon Do
I really like the detail I was able to get and the glow effect on the lettering from condensation.
Taken with the stock camera app on my Galaxy S6.
I was combing out my hair after my shower tonight and I noticed how long it's getting, and I decided to take this to compare it to the last picture I took of my hair in the bathroom. Remind me to redye that color, though. Loves.
This is my guardian. Her title is "La Reina de mi Corazon" or "Queen of my Heart". I made her to represent things that I love and that I am grateful for. Sometimes (well, a lot of times) I forget how lucky I am and I need a little reminder. When I look at her, I am reminded of the fun, sparkly, beauty in my life: my love for art, my love for Mexico, Day of the Dead, and the beauty of the desert of the Southwest. The Nopal and the day of the dead dog are made of polymer clay. The Nopal reminds me that the desert is a beautiful place, full of life and color. I tried to make it so that she is an extension of the nopal, sorta growing out of it, or it growing out of her out of her, to show that we are all connected, nature, plants and animals. I also used some of the Crafty Chica products, such as the little Corazon tatoo (something that I really want to get) and the cupcake from the Loteria set (what girl doesn't love a good pastry). Also, using the Crafty Chica products reminds what an inspiration La Chica is herself. I also added ruffles to her dress to remind of a Flamenco dancer and the joy that comes from music and dancing.
Got a new guide for you guys that are playing Genshin Impact. Within 5 minutes you can get and infinite intertwined fates within your account in the game. As we all know primogems and intertwined fates is a must in-game currency to have in order to summon 4 to 5 star characters as well as weapons within the game. So if you lack this resources you will have some problems in getting the characters and weapon you like. If you like to play Spiral Abyss you know, that you will need powerful characters starting from floor 5 and above.
So please, do watch this video and follow all the step by step guide in order for this to work into your Genshin Impact account. Be assured if you follow it correctly you will get lots of intertwined fate.
Official Site: appmonarch.com/genshinimpact/
Film shot, BW, Pentax MX, 50mm.
Laneway Festival Singapore 2013 - Overall a disappointment, again queues were too long and water supply lacking. Paying 5 dollars for a 200ml bottle of Fiji water after waiting 45 minutes is lame, especially when water bottles were confiscated at the door. Obviously none of the 160 buck ticket price went on hospitality, because there was none. The organisers should be ashamed, putting revenue above safety, how can water be so hard to get, and why in such small quantities. There were many other issues with the event but I can't be bothered detailing them here. Really frustrating experience as a festival goer.
From the view you can see; The Brisons is a twin-peaked islet in the Celtic Sea situated 1 mile offshore from Cape Cornwall in Cornwall, United Kingdom. Wikipedia
These photographs were taken from the footpath leading from the Youth Hostel car park to the beach at Porth Nanven. The sat nav should have taken us to Porth Nanven via St Just, which would have been on a tarmac road taking us straight to the car park only a few yards from the beach. This very uneven footpath took us to some huge granite rocks on the coastal path where I had to remain as it was too steep for me to climb down to the beach to take photos. So off Jim went as he is fitter than me, but he told me afterwards that even if I had reached the beach I would not have been able to climb over the rocks to take any photos as it far too dangerous for me. I was a little disappointed but it was not raining and there were some beautiful landscape shots I could get, and I had company of a local man who was walking a friend’s dog and was telling me about the local area.
I shot this a couple years back on a trip I had to make to Ireland. This is out on the west side north of the Cliffs of Moehr. The countryside there is really breathtaking and a must to add to your travel wish list. I've never been out east towards Dublin though I would like to check it out some time. I've been on the west side 4 times and from what I hear it's more traditional than the west side. The castles and ruins are all over the place. I typically would just plan some circular route and just drive until I saw something interesting which meant I stopped quite often.
I hope you enjoy today's post. If you like what you see the greatest compliment you could give me is to share this with others. I appreciate all the feedback, comments and 'likes' I get and read and respond to every one of them.
- Noah Katz
Hit 'L' and check this out on black. It really stands out great.
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fgr: jumping. This is as jumpy as I get and I do like to dance around.
quote....
Friendship with ones self is all important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world.
-Eleanor Roosevelt
B/W - with a touch of color... I too like to ride the line...
Damn I think there was something else... oh yes. HNT. I did it is my skivvies.
Washington, DC-2018-Third Way is excited to launch its newest event series: “Wine with Wonks”. Wednesday, February 7th from 5:30-7:30pm at Sonoma Wine Bar, enjoy a glass of wine at a reception designed to help demystify accreditation by giving you time to mingle with the following higher education experts:
Emily Bouck, Policy and Advocacy Director at Higher Learning Advocates
Antoinette Flores, Senior Policy Analyst at the Center for American Progress
Michael Itzkowitz, Senior Fellow at Third Way
Terri Taylor, Strategy Officer for Finance and Federal Policy at the Lumina Foundation
Dr. Frank Wu, Distinguished Professor at University of California Hastings College of the Law
With Higher Education Act reauthorization conversations heating up on the Hill, wonky topics like accreditation reform are set to get a lot of air time. But how exactly does our accreditation system currently work? How do schools get and stay accredited? And what are some of the challenges of our current system, and how can we improve the status quo?
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More snow again today.
Not nearly what folks North of us or in the Northeast of the US are getting and have been getting.
My bride Karen went to a nice new restaurant tonight. The chef/owner is 23 years old. By the looks, tastes and crowds, I think it's a hit!
I walked from work, as it's just 2 blocks from me in the lobby of an old hotel - the Saint Nicholas - long since turned into apartments. The space was empty for ages until this place popped up right before the new year began.
Eclectic and savory tastes. For example, I had meatloaf, entitled: "Not Your Mama's Meatloaf" with ground lamb.
We topped of the dinner by moving to a couch/chair setting in another part of the dining room and splitting a blueberry-pecan pie.
Karen took me back to my car, and I started scraping the snow off that had fallen during the day. About 2 inches+ worth.
A fitting photo of the day.
There is a point in our lives when we, the children, become the adults in the relationship with our parents.
It will come for most of us, no one tells you this will happen, and you are unprepared for it. But it comes
And each of us has a different relationship with our parents than everyone else, what's right for me, and my views, do not apply to you.
Yesterday, was the funeral of the person I have known longer than anyone else on this earth, now that my family is all gone. Margaret and Brian were married a few weeks before mine, and moved into the new build bungalow also a few weeks before my parents.
They also had one child, a son, and Douglas and I have been friends longer than I have been friends with anyone else, although he is a year younger than me.
I have my views on Margaret, but the reason I travelled back to Suffolk for her funeral, was to be there for Douggie, and give him the support he has given me through three weddings and two funerals.
Norfolk isn't far away, and the funeral and wake were taking place just a mile or two over the border from Suffolk, but the roads beyond Ipswich are poor, twisty and where there are accidents or roadworks, no real alternative routes.
I was also leaving just before six, so had to get across the Thames at Dartford and up the A12 during rush hour, so it wouldn't be easy. But at least there would be no rain.
I was up at five, dressed and washed, with time to drink a coffee before leaving. Loading the car with me and my camera bag, as I had plans in case I had time, to visit a church or two.
It was dark up the M20 to Dartford, and busy with traffic, but I made good time, and listened to a loop of old music podcasts all day, so chat and music kept me awake.
I got onto the M25 with no problem, and through the tunnels with only a slight slowdown, but on the other side there were queues.
Despite not wanting to spend money on a new railway, there is always money for road and junction improvements, even if it will just increase traffic. So it is that the M25/A12 junction is being upgraded, and with narrow lanes, speed restrictions, jams began a good four miles before the roadworks started.
I forced my way to the left hand lane, which became a filter lane, meaning it was much quicker than the remaining four lanes. But then came the roundabout. The roundabout under the motorway is the reason the improvements are needed, and queueing traffic blocks the junctions and causes even more backlogs.
Of course, traffic lights on roundabouts are never good ideas, so I was confronted with a wall of traffic, so when the light went green, I went in front of a track before it could shuffle forward and block more of the junction, then there was some clear road.
And ducking into the extreme left hand lane, I dodged past the queuing traffic that was blocking the exit from the A12, and onto clear road.
Yay.
The sky was clear, the sun about to rise, and it was going to be a glorious day.
Just north of Chelmsford, I stopped for breakfast: two sausage rolls and a coffee from Greggs, then filled up the tank and on my way north.
More traffic at Ipswich where the A12 meets the A14 to get over the Orwell, but then clear traffic again after ten minutes delay.
Soon, though, the road narrows to two lane blacktop, and all is well until you meet a slower vehicle. Like a tractor as we did soon after Whickham Market.
For 15 long minutes the tractor lead a growing snake of cars along the winding lanes until it pulled over and we could get past.
Blythburgh was always the marker when travelling back from Ipswich or beyond, that we were nearly home. he handsome church sits high, for Suffolk, overlooking the village and river which is mostly mudflats.
The busy A12 skirts close, but you get to the church via a narrow land, leaving the modern world far behind.
The church opened at nine, it was nearly half past, it was probably open before nine, and was open when I pushed the porch door.
Inside is an unspoilt space, grey wood that have witnessed the centuries so that their vigour has faded to almost no colour of all.
Its the roof people come for. Wooden beams and pairs of wooden angels. I have brought my big lens so to snap them.
My plan was to visit the large and impressive church in Southwold. I turned off the A12 and drove along the straight road into the town, where I found multiple sets of roadworks, and few places to park for a short time, anywhere near the church.
My back is achy, so I wanted somewhere close to park. Anyway, I drove round the town twice, found nowhere to park, so turned the car round and headed back north, until I came to South Cove.
South Cove is a small village, a few farms really, but has a fine, if rustic, well-proportioned church, set in a large churchyard.
And the church was open, so small the wide angle lens wasn't needed, and with windows close to the floor too, no big lens needed either.
Next town up is Kessingland, which until the 80s had the A12 running through the centre of it, but now a bypass lays to the west and the village is quiet. I don't think I had been of the main street, so I went in search of the church, and found it on Church Street.
Obviously.
I rarely research churches before I visit, so nothing prepared me for the interior of St Edmund.
It seems in the last two years, they church had sourced some banners with apt slogans on, banners which were made to look like large tapered ensigns, hanging from or along the supports of the roof.
A man was practicing on the organ, and the notes echoed round the church. Not only does the church have banners, it has ship's wheels and other nautical stuff, although most traditionalists won't like it, I think it hangs together, and if the congregation wants it thus, who are we to argue?
Next stop was South Cove, which I had forgotten I had visited before, so redid all my shots. But this time did see the panel featuring St Michael behind the font, where the rood steps began.
A small, perfect, church, perfect for a small country parish.
I take my shots and leave, driving back onto the A12 and heading into Lowestoft, my main task was to drive over the new bridge which spans Lake Lothing.
The town had been waiting since at least 1966 for a new bridge, and the 3rd crossing was opened in September, and offers fine views as you drive across.
I went to see the old family home. It has been renovated and looks splendid, and not much like it was when sold four years back, it looks cared for and lived in, which is what the buyer promised us he would do.
So then to the crematorium, a drive north through Gunton and past Hopton where Dougie lives, then through the housing estate behind the area hospital to the car park, and then wait.
Margaret was 89, had a long life, but friends of the same age are few, and families are now scattered. So, one can never be sure how many will attend. The chapel was half full at least, with people coming from Kent, Wiltshire and even California to be there.
The celebrant spoke for twenty minutes, saying nice things as they have to do. But, avoiding, or just hinting at faults. Whatever she had done in her life to Dougie, he still loved her, and he was in bits.
Afterward we lined up to shake his hand or give him and Pennie a hug, and allowed me to tell him he was the brother I never had. He was always there for me, and will be there for him.
More tears.
There was a wake at the pub in Hopton, but there was no one I knew other than Dougie and Penny, so I had a drink and made my excuses. These things are really for family and close friends, so I left at quarter to three, hoping to get home before midnight.
In the end, I made good time, I was going round Ipswich before four, and at the M25 junction less than an hour later, and was able to easily join it and zoom round to the bridge. No queues on the southbound side, but the queue northbound went all the way back to the M20 junction, so six mines.
I zoomed on.
I got home at ten past six, happy to have done it and go home in under three and a half hours. Dinner was defrosted ragu, pasta and reheated focaccia, which we were sitting down to eat twenty minutes after getting in.
Phew.
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Perhaps some counties have a church which sums them up. If there has to be one for Suffolk, it must be the church of the Most Holy Trinity, Blythburgh. Here is the late medieval Suffolk imagination writ large, as large as it gets, and not overwritten by the Anglican triumphalism of the 19th century. Blythburgh church is often compared with its near neighbour, St Edmund at Southwold, but this isn't a fair comparison - Southwold church is much grander, and full of urban confidence. Probably a better comparison is with St Margaret, Lowestoft, for there, too, the Reformation intervened before the tower could be rebuilt. The two churches have a lot in common, but Blythburgh has the saving grace. It is so fascinating, so stunningly beautiful, by virtue of a factor that is rare in Anglican parish churches: sheer neglect.
Holy Trinity, Blythburgh, is the church that Suffolk people know and love best, and because of this it has generated some extraordinary legends. The first is that Blythburgh, now a tiny village bisected by the fearsome A12 between London and the east coast ports, was once a thriving medieval town. This idea is used to explain the size of the church; in reality, it is almost certainly not the case. Blythburgh has always been small. But it did have an important medieval priory, and thus its church attracted enough wealthy piety on the eve of the Reformation to bankroll a spectacular rebuilding.
It is to Lavenham, Long Melford, Mildenhall, Southwold and here that we come to see the late 15th century Suffolk aesthetic in perfection. But for my money, Holy Trinity, Blythburgh, is the most significant medieval art object in the county, ranking alongside Salle in Norfolk. Look up at the clerestory; it seems impossible, there is so much glass, so little stone; and yet it rides the building with an air of permanence. Beneath, there is a coyness about the aisles that I prefer to the mathematics of Lavenham. Here, it could not have been done otherwise; it distils human architectural experience. If St Peter and St Paul at Lavenham is man talking to God, Holy Trinity at Blythburgh is God talking to man.
At the east end, a curious series of initials in Lombardic script stretch across the outer chancel wall. You can see an image of this at the top. It reads A-N-JS-B-S-T-M-S-A-H-K-R. This probably stands for Ad Nomina JesuS, Beati Sanctae Trinitas, Maria Sanctorem Anne Honorem Katherine Reconstructus ('In the name of the blessed Jesus, the Holy Trinity, and in honour of Holy Mary, Anne and Katherine, this was rebuilt'). A fanciful theory is that they are the initials of the wives of the donors. However, note the symbol of the Trinity in the T stone, and I think this is a clue to the whole piece.
Figures stand on pedestals atop the south side and east end. The most easterly is unusual, a crowned old man sitting on a throne directly on the gable end. This is a medieval image of God the Father, a rare survival. Moving westwards from here we find the Blessed Virgin in prayerful pose, Christ as the Saviour of the World holding an orb in one hand and blessing with the other, and then a collared bear with a ragged staff, a seated woodwose, another bear, this time with a collar and bell, and last of all a fox with a goose in its mouth, his jaws grasping the neck:
The porch is part of the late 15th century rebuilding, but it was considerably restored in the early 20th century. Interestingly, the angels crowning the battlements look medieval - but they weren't there in 1900, so must have come from somewhere else. Pretty much all the porch's features of interest date from this time. These include the small medieval font pressed into service as a holy water stoup, and image niche above the doors. This has been filled in more recent years by an image if the Holy Trinity; God the Father holds the Son suspended while a dove representing the Holy Spirit alights; you can see medieval versions of this at Framlingham and Little Glemham. Of all medieval imagery, this was the most frowned upon by puritans. An image of God the Father was thought the most suspicious of all idolatries. Indeed, as late as the 1870s, when the Reverend White edited the first popular edition of the Diary of William Dowsing, he actually congratulated Dowsing on destroying images of the Holy Trinity in the course of his 1644 progress through the counties of Suffolk and Cambridgeshire.
William Dowsing visited on the morning on April 9th, 1644. It was a Tuesday, and he had spent most of the week in the area. The previous day he'd been at Southwold and Walberswick to the east, but preceded his visit here with one to Blyford, which lies to the west, so he was probably staying overnight at the family home in Laxfield. He found twenty images in stained glass to take to task (a surprisingly small number, given the size of the place) and two hundred more that were inaccessible that morning (probably in the great east window). Three brass inscriptions incurred his wrath (but again, this is curious; there were many more) and he also ordered down the cross on the porch and the cross on the tower. Most significantly of all, he decided the angels in the roof should go.
Lots of Suffolk churches have angels in their roofs. None are like Blythburgh's. You step inside, and there they are, exactly as you've seen them in books and in photographs. They are awesome, breathtaking. There are twelve of them. Perhaps there were once twenty. How would you get them down if ordered to do so? The roof is so high, and the stencilling of IHS symbols would also have to go.
Perhaps this was already indistinct by the time Dowsing visited. Perhaps Tuesday, 9th of April 1644 was a dull day.
Several of the angels are peppered with lead shot. Here is another of those Suffolk legends; that Dowsing and the churchwardens fired muskets at the angels to try and bring them down. But when the angels were restored in the 1970s, the lead shot removed was found to be 18th century; contemporary with them there is a note in the churchwardens accounts that men were paid for shooting jackdaws living inside the building, so that probably explains where the shot came from. Here are some details of that wonderful roof:
The otherwise splendid church guide also repeats the error that the Holy Trinity symbol in the porch filled a gap that had been 'empty since 1644'. But there was certainly no image in it when Dowsing arrived here, or anywhere else in Suffolk; statues were completely outlawed by injunctions in the early years of the reign of Edward VI, almost a hundred years before the morning of Dowsing's visit.
Another feature used as evidence of puritan destruction is the ring fixed into the most westerly pillar of the north arcade. Cromwell's men stabled their horses here, apparently. Well, it almost certainly is a ring for tying horses to, and the broken bricks at the cleared west end also suggest this; but there is no reason to think that Cromwell and the puritans were responsible. For a full century before Cromwell, and for nearly two hundred years afterwards, a church as big as this would have had a multitude of uses. Holy Trinity was built for the rituals of the Catholic church; once these were no longer allowed, a village like Blythburgh, which can never have had more than 500 people, would have seen it as an asset in other ways. It was only with the 19th century sacramental revival brought about by the Oxford Movement that we started getting all holy again about our parish churches. Perhaps it was used as an overnight stables for passing travellers on the main road; not an un-Christian use for it to be put to, I think.
In August 1577, a great storm brought down the steeple, which fell into the church and damaged the font. This was at the height of Elizabethan superstition, and the devil was blamed; his hoof marks can still be seen on the church door. Supposedly, a black dog ran through the church, killing two parishioners; he was seen the same day at St Mary, Bungay. Black Shuck is the East Anglian devil dog, the feared hound of the marshes; and Holy Trinity is the self-styled Cathedral of the Marshes, so it is appropriate that he appeared here. You can see where the font has been broken. You can also see that this was one of the rare, beautiful seven sacrament fonts, similar in style to the one at Westhall; but, like those at neighbouring Wenhaston and Southwold, it has been completely stripped of imagery. Almost certainly, this was in the 1540s, but there is a story that the font at Wenhaston was chiselled clean as part of the 19th century restoration. More importantly in any case, the storm, or the dog, or the devil, damaged the roof; it would not be properly repaired for more than 400 years. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, accounts note that Holy Trinity is not impregnable to the weather. By the 19th century, parishioners attended divine service with umbrellas. By the 1880s, it was a positively dangerous building to be in, and the Bishop of Norwich ordered it closed.
Why had Holy Trinity not been restored? Simply, this is a big church, with a tiny village. There was no rich patron, and in any case the parishioners had a passion for Methodism. Probably, repairs had been mooted, but not a wholesale restoration as we have seen at Lavenham, Long Melford and Southwold. By the 1880s, attention in England had turned to the preservation of medieval detail; in short, restorations were not as ignorant as they had been a quarter of a century earlier. Suggestions that Holy Trinity should be restored in the manner of the other three were blocked by the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings, and this owed a lot to the energy of William Morris, the Society's secretary.
The slow, patient restoration of this building took the best part of a century; indeed, when I first visited in the 1980s I was still aware of a sense of decay.
Nothing could be further from the truth today. You step into a wide, white, open space, one of England's great church interiors. There, high above you, is the glorious roof and the angels of God. The brick floors spread around the scraped font, which still bears its dedicatory inscription and standing places for participants. You turn into the central gangway, and more than twenty empty indents for brasses stretch before you. Dowsing can be blamed for the destruction of hardly any of them. In reality, you see the work of 18th and 19th century thieves and collectors.
The bench-ends are superb. The benches themselves were reconstructed in the late 19th century, supposedly from the main post of Westleton windmill, but the ends are some of the county's finest medieval images. There are partial sets of basically three series: the Seven Deadly Sins, the Seven Works of Mercy, and the Labours of the Seasons. There are also angels bearing symbols of the Holy Trinity and the Crown. There are other figures too, obscure and fragmentary and whose purpose is unclear, as if surviving figments of a broken dream. The quality of what remains makes you grieve for what has been lost.
The rood screen is a disappointment; most of it is modern, and the medieval bits perfunctory and scoured. Having said this, note how tiny the exit from the north aisle rood loft stair is. Also at this end of the church, a scattering of medieval glass, mainly angels. There is more in the south aisle, including a collection of shields of the Holy Trinity:
But step through the central aisle to see something remarkable. The priest and choir stalls are fronted by exquisite carvings of the Apostles, the Evangelists, John the Baptist, St Stephen, Mary Queen of Heaven and Christ in Majesty. Seeing these eighteen carvings is a bit like gobbling up a very large box of chocolates, but it is worth stopping to consider quite how genuine they all are. For a start, there could not have been choir stalls here in medieval times, and in any case we know that these desks and their frontages were in the north aisle chapel until the 19th century. They were used as school benches in the 17th century; they still bear holes for inkpots, and the graffiti of a bored Dutch child (his father was probably working on draining the marshes) is dated 1665. There is nothing at all like them anywhere else in Suffolk.
Whatever, the east end of the chancel and aisles are thrillingly modern, wholly devotional. In the north aisle, traditionally the Hopton chantry, extraordinary friezes of skeletons become symbols of the four evangelists behind the altar. Beside them is Peter Ball's beautiful Madonna and Child. Separating the south aisle chapel from the sanctuary is is one of Suffolk's biggest Easter sepulchres, tomb of the Hoptons. Behind the high altar, branches arranged like huge stag antlers spread dramatically. It is all just about perfect. Tucked to one side of the organ is a clockjack; Suffolk has two, and the other is down-river at Southwold. They date from the late 17th century, and presumably once struck the hours; at high church Blythburgh and Southwold today, they are used to announce the entry of the ministers.
This is a wonderful church to wander around in, the light and the air changing with the seasons, a suffused sense of the numinous presenting its different faces according to the time of day and time of year. Come here on a bright spring morning, or in the drowsy heat of a summer's day. Come on a cold winter afternoon as the colours fade and the smell of woodsmoke from neighbouring cottages weaves a spell above the old stone floors and woodwork. And before you leave, find the doorway in the south-west corner of the nave. It opens onto a low, narrow stairway. You can go up it. It leads up into the parvise storey of the south porch, now reappointed and dedicated as a tiny chapel, a peaceful spot to spend a few moments before continuing your journey.
You may be reading this entry in a far-off land; or perhaps you are here at home. Whatever, if you have not visited this church, then I urge you to do so. It is the most beautiful church in Suffolk, a wonderful art object, and it is always open in daylight. It remains one of the most significant medieval buildings in England. If you only visit one of Suffolk's churches, then make it this one
Simon Knott, 2014.
I am quite happy with this image, I thought I would experiment with some filters to see what effects I would get, and I quite liked the Fresco filter. This is my edited image of the river photo I have taken. To create this image I adjusted the Hue and saturation of the image, I put the Hue at -5 and the saturation at 60. Doing this made the image become a little litter and brought out some of the detail in the image. I then went onto filter, render on the drop down menu and select Lens flare. I placed it in the corner of the Image because I thought it looked good there. The next thing I did was adjust the shadow and highlights the shadows were at 0% and the highlights I put to 15%. This brought out some brightness in the image and I think made it become more eye catching. The final thing that I did was add a filter to the image. I was messing about with the filters can come across fresco and I quite liked the artist effect it gave it. The fresco filter brush size was on 2, brush detail at 8 and had a texture of 1.
The second of two pieces I got on clearance from Bandai Namco during Black Friday 2022 was this Storm Collectibles Zangief, based on his Ultra Street Fighter 2 appearance.
Funny thing is that it is the Event Exclusive colour, which technically should be harder to get and cost more aftermarket, but here we are - I think it was like $50 USD?
My best guess? People really, really love their P1 colours and refuse anything else.
I actually own a SFV Zangief and generally wouldn't have bitten even at this price, but the Zangief I have cam with a really bad waist joint, to the point where it doesn't actually hold together properly.
I also just realized I was too lazy to fish it out of a cabinet to do some comparison photos.
The two are the same height and are actually much different aesthetically than you would think - they're actually two very different figures, though as youc an imagine the base body engineering is the same... which means that Zangief still has a functional neck joint.
Yes, that sound stupid, but keep in mind that I've not opened a male Storm collectibles figure for quite a while now, and they actually stopped putting working neck joints in their female figures as early on as SFV Cammy.
This is also the company that ditched their stands, so really such a cost cutting step shouldn't surprise any one.
Several head sculpts are included with the figure, including an Ultra SF2 line exclusive "You Lose" head sculpt. They look appropriately ugly because well quite frankly SF2 Zangief wasn't as pretty as he is now.
In addition to the heads, the figure has several hands, two dedicated Banishing Fist palms and one actual effect. There is one stand which I think is to support the effect, but I can't find a hole anywhere to mount it.
Zangief's articulation remains good, though the actual range of motion is limited, particularly in the legs, due to the sheer bulk of them. Also, as one would expect some poses don't quite look natural.
A fruitful creation
CONTINGENCY OPERATING SITE MAREZ, Iraq – Spc. Jun Zhao, a food service specialist, assigned to Troop B, 1st Squadron, 9th Cavalry Regiment, 4th Advise and Assist Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division, stands next to one of his fruit creations. Zhao, a native of Xiang Hai, China, enlisted in the military four years ago with acquired skills from working previously as an executive chef at a large restaurant. “My job is to take care of Soldiers by preparing their food. I take whatever criticism I get and apply it to improve (my cooking skills),” said Zhao
currently on his second deployment.
(U.S. Army photo courtesy photo)
Vince Gill in Wichita Apr 3rd 1997. Front row seats. He signs his song list at his shows and leaves it on the stage for someone to get and we got it.
There is a point in our lives when we, the children, become the adults in the relationship with our parents.
It will come for most of us, no one tells you this will happen, and you are unprepared for it. But it comes
And each of us has a different relationship with our parents than everyone else, what's right for me, and my views, do not apply to you.
Yesterday, was the funeral of the person I have known longer than anyone else on this earth, now that my family is all gone. Margaret and Brian were married a few weeks before mine, and moved into the new build bungalow also a few weeks before my parents.
They also had one child, a son, and Douglas and I have been friends longer than I have been friends with anyone else, although he is a year younger than me.
I have my views on Margaret, but the reason I travelled back to Suffolk for her funeral, was to be there for Douggie, and give him the support he has given me through three weddings and two funerals.
Norfolk isn't far away, and the funeral and wake were taking place just a mile or two over the border from Suffolk, but the roads beyond Ipswich are poor, twisty and where there are accidents or roadworks, no real alternative routes.
I was also leaving just before six, so had to get across the Thames at Dartford and up the A12 during rush hour, so it wouldn't be easy. But at least there would be no rain.
I was up at five, dressed and washed, with time to drink a coffee before leaving. Loading the car with me and my camera bag, as I had plans in case I had time, to visit a church or two.
It was dark up the M20 to Dartford, and busy with traffic, but I made good time, and listened to a loop of old music podcasts all day, so chat and music kept me awake.
I got onto the M25 with no problem, and through the tunnels with only a slight slowdown, but on the other side there were queues.
Despite not wanting to spend money on a new railway, there is always money for road and junction improvements, even if it will just increase traffic. So it is that the M25/A12 junction is being upgraded, and with narrow lanes, speed restrictions, jams began a good four miles before the roadworks started.
I forced my way to the left hand lane, which became a filter lane, meaning it was much quicker than the remaining four lanes. But then came the roundabout. The roundabout under the motorway is the reason the improvements are needed, and queueing traffic blocks the junctions and causes even more backlogs.
Of course, traffic lights on roundabouts are never good ideas, so I was confronted with a wall of traffic, so when the light went green, I went in front of a track before it could shuffle forward and block more of the junction, then there was some clear road.
And ducking into the extreme left hand lane, I dodged past the queuing traffic that was blocking the exit from the A12, and onto clear road.
Yay.
The sky was clear, the sun about to rise, and it was going to be a glorious day.
Just north of Chelmsford, I stopped for breakfast: two sausage rolls and a coffee from Greggs, then filled up the tank and on my way north.
More traffic at Ipswich where the A12 meets the A14 to get over the Orwell, but then clear traffic again after ten minutes delay.
Soon, though, the road narrows to two lane blacktop, and all is well until you meet a slower vehicle. Like a tractor as we did soon after Whickham Market.
For 15 long minutes the tractor lead a growing snake of cars along the winding lanes until it pulled over and we could get past.
Blythburgh was always the marker when travelling back from Ipswich or beyond, that we were nearly home. he handsome church sits high, for Suffolk, overlooking the village and river which is mostly mudflats.
The busy A12 skirts close, but you get to the church via a narrow land, leaving the modern world far behind.
The church opened at nine, it was nearly half past, it was probably open before nine, and was open when I pushed the porch door.
Inside is an unspoilt space, grey wood that have witnessed the centuries so that their vigour has faded to almost no colour of all.
Its the roof people come for. Wooden beams and pairs of wooden angels. I have brought my big lens so to snap them.
My plan was to visit the large and impressive church in Southwold. I turned off the A12 and drove along the straight road into the town, where I found multiple sets of roadworks, and few places to park for a short time, anywhere near the church.
My back is achy, so I wanted somewhere close to park. Anyway, I drove round the town twice, found nowhere to park, so turned the car round and headed back north, until I came to South Cove.
South Cove is a small village, a few farms really, but has a fine, if rustic, well-proportioned church, set in a large churchyard.
And the church was open, so small the wide angle lens wasn't needed, and with windows close to the floor too, no big lens needed either.
Next town up is Kessingland, which until the 80s had the A12 running through the centre of it, but now a bypass lays to the west and the village is quiet. I don't think I had been of the main street, so I went in search of the church, and found it on Church Street.
Obviously.
I rarely research churches before I visit, so nothing prepared me for the interior of St Edmund.
It seems in the last two years, they church had sourced some banners with apt slogans on, banners which were made to look like large tapered ensigns, hanging from or along the supports of the roof.
A man was practicing on the organ, and the notes echoed round the church. Not only does the church have banners, it has ship's wheels and other nautical stuff, although most traditionalists won't like it, I think it hangs together, and if the congregation wants it thus, who are we to argue?
Next stop was South Cove, which I had forgotten I had visited before, so redid all my shots. But this time did see the panel featuring St Michael behind the font, where the rood steps began.
A small, perfect, church, perfect for a small country parish.
I take my shots and leave, driving back onto the A12 and heading into Lowestoft, my main task was to drive over the new bridge which spans Lake Lothing.
The town had been waiting since at least 1966 for a new bridge, and the 3rd crossing was opened in September, and offers fine views as you drive across.
I went to see the old family home. It has been renovated and looks splendid, and not much like it was when sold four years back, it looks cared for and lived in, which is what the buyer promised us he would do.
So then to the crematorium, a drive north through Gunton and past Hopton where Dougie lives, then through the housing estate behind the area hospital to the car park, and then wait.
Margaret was 89, had a long life, but friends of the same age are few, and families are now scattered. So, one can never be sure how many will attend. The chapel was half full at least, with people coming from Kent, Wiltshire and even California to be there.
The celebrant spoke for twenty minutes, saying nice things as they have to do. But, avoiding, or just hinting at faults. Whatever she had done in her life to Dougie, he still loved her, and he was in bits.
Afterward we lined up to shake his hand or give him and Pennie a hug, and allowed me to tell him he was the brother I never had. He was always there for me, and will be there for him.
More tears.
There was a wake at the pub in Hopton, but there was no one I knew other than Dougie and Penny, so I had a drink and made my excuses. These things are really for family and close friends, so I left at quarter to three, hoping to get home before midnight.
In the end, I made good time, I was going round Ipswich before four, and at the M25 junction less than an hour later, and was able to easily join it and zoom round to the bridge. No queues on the southbound side, but the queue northbound went all the way back to the M20 junction, so six mines.
I zoomed on.
I got home at ten past six, happy to have done it and go home in under three and a half hours. Dinner was defrosted ragu, pasta and reheated focaccia, which we were sitting down to eat twenty minutes after getting in.
Phew.
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Perhaps some counties have a church which sums them up. If there has to be one for Suffolk, it must be the church of the Most Holy Trinity, Blythburgh. Here is the late medieval Suffolk imagination writ large, as large as it gets, and not overwritten by the Anglican triumphalism of the 19th century. Blythburgh church is often compared with its near neighbour, St Edmund at Southwold, but this isn't a fair comparison - Southwold church is much grander, and full of urban confidence. Probably a better comparison is with St Margaret, Lowestoft, for there, too, the Reformation intervened before the tower could be rebuilt. The two churches have a lot in common, but Blythburgh has the saving grace. It is so fascinating, so stunningly beautiful, by virtue of a factor that is rare in Anglican parish churches: sheer neglect.
Holy Trinity, Blythburgh, is the church that Suffolk people know and love best, and because of this it has generated some extraordinary legends. The first is that Blythburgh, now a tiny village bisected by the fearsome A12 between London and the east coast ports, was once a thriving medieval town. This idea is used to explain the size of the church; in reality, it is almost certainly not the case. Blythburgh has always been small. But it did have an important medieval priory, and thus its church attracted enough wealthy piety on the eve of the Reformation to bankroll a spectacular rebuilding.
It is to Lavenham, Long Melford, Mildenhall, Southwold and here that we come to see the late 15th century Suffolk aesthetic in perfection. But for my money, Holy Trinity, Blythburgh, is the most significant medieval art object in the county, ranking alongside Salle in Norfolk. Look up at the clerestory; it seems impossible, there is so much glass, so little stone; and yet it rides the building with an air of permanence. Beneath, there is a coyness about the aisles that I prefer to the mathematics of Lavenham. Here, it could not have been done otherwise; it distils human architectural experience. If St Peter and St Paul at Lavenham is man talking to God, Holy Trinity at Blythburgh is God talking to man.
At the east end, a curious series of initials in Lombardic script stretch across the outer chancel wall. You can see an image of this at the top. It reads A-N-JS-B-S-T-M-S-A-H-K-R. This probably stands for Ad Nomina JesuS, Beati Sanctae Trinitas, Maria Sanctorem Anne Honorem Katherine Reconstructus ('In the name of the blessed Jesus, the Holy Trinity, and in honour of Holy Mary, Anne and Katherine, this was rebuilt'). A fanciful theory is that they are the initials of the wives of the donors. However, note the symbol of the Trinity in the T stone, and I think this is a clue to the whole piece.
Figures stand on pedestals atop the south side and east end. The most easterly is unusual, a crowned old man sitting on a throne directly on the gable end. This is a medieval image of God the Father, a rare survival. Moving westwards from here we find the Blessed Virgin in prayerful pose, Christ as the Saviour of the World holding an orb in one hand and blessing with the other, and then a collared bear with a ragged staff, a seated woodwose, another bear, this time with a collar and bell, and last of all a fox with a goose in its mouth, his jaws grasping the neck:
The porch is part of the late 15th century rebuilding, but it was considerably restored in the early 20th century. Interestingly, the angels crowning the battlements look medieval - but they weren't there in 1900, so must have come from somewhere else. Pretty much all the porch's features of interest date from this time. These include the small medieval font pressed into service as a holy water stoup, and image niche above the doors. This has been filled in more recent years by an image if the Holy Trinity; God the Father holds the Son suspended while a dove representing the Holy Spirit alights; you can see medieval versions of this at Framlingham and Little Glemham. Of all medieval imagery, this was the most frowned upon by puritans. An image of God the Father was thought the most suspicious of all idolatries. Indeed, as late as the 1870s, when the Reverend White edited the first popular edition of the Diary of William Dowsing, he actually congratulated Dowsing on destroying images of the Holy Trinity in the course of his 1644 progress through the counties of Suffolk and Cambridgeshire.
William Dowsing visited on the morning on April 9th, 1644. It was a Tuesday, and he had spent most of the week in the area. The previous day he'd been at Southwold and Walberswick to the east, but preceded his visit here with one to Blyford, which lies to the west, so he was probably staying overnight at the family home in Laxfield. He found twenty images in stained glass to take to task (a surprisingly small number, given the size of the place) and two hundred more that were inaccessible that morning (probably in the great east window). Three brass inscriptions incurred his wrath (but again, this is curious; there were many more) and he also ordered down the cross on the porch and the cross on the tower. Most significantly of all, he decided the angels in the roof should go.
Lots of Suffolk churches have angels in their roofs. None are like Blythburgh's. You step inside, and there they are, exactly as you've seen them in books and in photographs. They are awesome, breathtaking. There are twelve of them. Perhaps there were once twenty. How would you get them down if ordered to do so? The roof is so high, and the stencilling of IHS symbols would also have to go.
Perhaps this was already indistinct by the time Dowsing visited. Perhaps Tuesday, 9th of April 1644 was a dull day.
Several of the angels are peppered with lead shot. Here is another of those Suffolk legends; that Dowsing and the churchwardens fired muskets at the angels to try and bring them down. But when the angels were restored in the 1970s, the lead shot removed was found to be 18th century; contemporary with them there is a note in the churchwardens accounts that men were paid for shooting jackdaws living inside the building, so that probably explains where the shot came from. Here are some details of that wonderful roof:
The otherwise splendid church guide also repeats the error that the Holy Trinity symbol in the porch filled a gap that had been 'empty since 1644'. But there was certainly no image in it when Dowsing arrived here, or anywhere else in Suffolk; statues were completely outlawed by injunctions in the early years of the reign of Edward VI, almost a hundred years before the morning of Dowsing's visit.
Another feature used as evidence of puritan destruction is the ring fixed into the most westerly pillar of the north arcade. Cromwell's men stabled their horses here, apparently. Well, it almost certainly is a ring for tying horses to, and the broken bricks at the cleared west end also suggest this; but there is no reason to think that Cromwell and the puritans were responsible. For a full century before Cromwell, and for nearly two hundred years afterwards, a church as big as this would have had a multitude of uses. Holy Trinity was built for the rituals of the Catholic church; once these were no longer allowed, a village like Blythburgh, which can never have had more than 500 people, would have seen it as an asset in other ways. It was only with the 19th century sacramental revival brought about by the Oxford Movement that we started getting all holy again about our parish churches. Perhaps it was used as an overnight stables for passing travellers on the main road; not an un-Christian use for it to be put to, I think.
In August 1577, a great storm brought down the steeple, which fell into the church and damaged the font. This was at the height of Elizabethan superstition, and the devil was blamed; his hoof marks can still be seen on the church door. Supposedly, a black dog ran through the church, killing two parishioners; he was seen the same day at St Mary, Bungay. Black Shuck is the East Anglian devil dog, the feared hound of the marshes; and Holy Trinity is the self-styled Cathedral of the Marshes, so it is appropriate that he appeared here. You can see where the font has been broken. You can also see that this was one of the rare, beautiful seven sacrament fonts, similar in style to the one at Westhall; but, like those at neighbouring Wenhaston and Southwold, it has been completely stripped of imagery. Almost certainly, this was in the 1540s, but there is a story that the font at Wenhaston was chiselled clean as part of the 19th century restoration. More importantly in any case, the storm, or the dog, or the devil, damaged the roof; it would not be properly repaired for more than 400 years. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, accounts note that Holy Trinity is not impregnable to the weather. By the 19th century, parishioners attended divine service with umbrellas. By the 1880s, it was a positively dangerous building to be in, and the Bishop of Norwich ordered it closed.
Why had Holy Trinity not been restored? Simply, this is a big church, with a tiny village. There was no rich patron, and in any case the parishioners had a passion for Methodism. Probably, repairs had been mooted, but not a wholesale restoration as we have seen at Lavenham, Long Melford and Southwold. By the 1880s, attention in England had turned to the preservation of medieval detail; in short, restorations were not as ignorant as they had been a quarter of a century earlier. Suggestions that Holy Trinity should be restored in the manner of the other three were blocked by the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings, and this owed a lot to the energy of William Morris, the Society's secretary.
The slow, patient restoration of this building took the best part of a century; indeed, when I first visited in the 1980s I was still aware of a sense of decay.
Nothing could be further from the truth today. You step into a wide, white, open space, one of England's great church interiors. There, high above you, is the glorious roof and the angels of God. The brick floors spread around the scraped font, which still bears its dedicatory inscription and standing places for participants. You turn into the central gangway, and more than twenty empty indents for brasses stretch before you. Dowsing can be blamed for the destruction of hardly any of them. In reality, you see the work of 18th and 19th century thieves and collectors.
The bench-ends are superb. The benches themselves were reconstructed in the late 19th century, supposedly from the main post of Westleton windmill, but the ends are some of the county's finest medieval images. There are partial sets of basically three series: the Seven Deadly Sins, the Seven Works of Mercy, and the Labours of the Seasons. There are also angels bearing symbols of the Holy Trinity and the Crown. There are other figures too, obscure and fragmentary and whose purpose is unclear, as if surviving figments of a broken dream. The quality of what remains makes you grieve for what has been lost.
The rood screen is a disappointment; most of it is modern, and the medieval bits perfunctory and scoured. Having said this, note how tiny the exit from the north aisle rood loft stair is. Also at this end of the church, a scattering of medieval glass, mainly angels. There is more in the south aisle, including a collection of shields of the Holy Trinity:
But step through the central aisle to see something remarkable. The priest and choir stalls are fronted by exquisite carvings of the Apostles, the Evangelists, John the Baptist, St Stephen, Mary Queen of Heaven and Christ in Majesty. Seeing these eighteen carvings is a bit like gobbling up a very large box of chocolates, but it is worth stopping to consider quite how genuine they all are. For a start, there could not have been choir stalls here in medieval times, and in any case we know that these desks and their frontages were in the north aisle chapel until the 19th century. They were used as school benches in the 17th century; they still bear holes for inkpots, and the graffiti of a bored Dutch child (his father was probably working on draining the marshes) is dated 1665. There is nothing at all like them anywhere else in Suffolk.
Whatever, the east end of the chancel and aisles are thrillingly modern, wholly devotional. In the north aisle, traditionally the Hopton chantry, extraordinary friezes of skeletons become symbols of the four evangelists behind the altar. Beside them is Peter Ball's beautiful Madonna and Child. Separating the south aisle chapel from the sanctuary is is one of Suffolk's biggest Easter sepulchres, tomb of the Hoptons. Behind the high altar, branches arranged like huge stag antlers spread dramatically. It is all just about perfect. Tucked to one side of the organ is a clockjack; Suffolk has two, and the other is down-river at Southwold. They date from the late 17th century, and presumably once struck the hours; at high church Blythburgh and Southwold today, they are used to announce the entry of the ministers.
This is a wonderful church to wander around in, the light and the air changing with the seasons, a suffused sense of the numinous presenting its different faces according to the time of day and time of year. Come here on a bright spring morning, or in the drowsy heat of a summer's day. Come on a cold winter afternoon as the colours fade and the smell of woodsmoke from neighbouring cottages weaves a spell above the old stone floors and woodwork. And before you leave, find the doorway in the south-west corner of the nave. It opens onto a low, narrow stairway. You can go up it. It leads up into the parvise storey of the south porch, now reappointed and dedicated as a tiny chapel, a peaceful spot to spend a few moments before continuing your journey.
You may be reading this entry in a far-off land; or perhaps you are here at home. Whatever, if you have not visited this church, then I urge you to do so. It is the most beautiful church in Suffolk, a wonderful art object, and it is always open in daylight. It remains one of the most significant medieval buildings in England. If you only visit one of Suffolk's churches, then make it this one
Simon Knott, 2014.
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The early December winter storm was a bit unusual for this area. Much more snow than we typically get, and icicles in excess of 4 feet long hanging from the house.
This used to be the grandest part of town,
Now it's all scruffed up and subsiding into ground,
There's been markets, garbage riots,
Maydays and meteors in the streets,
Today it's just a place where we meet,
And i tell you about sleeping lions, slates and pool halls,
And you tell me about cheap tequila, placenames and fruit machines,
And i know you're always lying,
But is gets me everytime,
Down there's the place we dress up as mermaids for the day,
All tinsel, nylon and brocade,
And your sunglasses stuck with sequins from the shop dwon at the end,
Where they sell unlabelled tin cans,
You just guess what you're going to get,
And i tell you that this faded glamour's a stupid art-school idea,
And you tell me i don't know because i don't have to live here,
I could move away, probably will someday,
But you know what your faded glamour does to me,
It gets me everytime,
We could just walk around,
We could just walk all over town,
When there's nothing left to say.
...Faded Glamour - Animals That Swim
There is a point in our lives when we, the children, become the adults in the relationship with our parents.
It will come for most of us, no one tells you this will happen, and you are unprepared for it. But it comes
And each of us has a different relationship with our parents than everyone else, what's right for me, and my views, do not apply to you.
Yesterday, was the funeral of the person I have known longer than anyone else on this earth, now that my family is all gone. Margaret and Brian were married a few weeks before mine, and moved into the new build bungalow also a few weeks before my parents.
They also had one child, a son, and Douglas and I have been friends longer than I have been friends with anyone else, although he is a year younger than me.
I have my views on Margaret, but the reason I travelled back to Suffolk for her funeral, was to be there for Douggie, and give him the support he has given me through three weddings and two funerals.
Norfolk isn't far away, and the funeral and wake were taking place just a mile or two over the border from Suffolk, but the roads beyond Ipswich are poor, twisty and where there are accidents or roadworks, no real alternative routes.
I was also leaving just before six, so had to get across the Thames at Dartford and up the A12 during rush hour, so it wouldn't be easy. But at least there would be no rain.
I was up at five, dressed and washed, with time to drink a coffee before leaving. Loading the car with me and my camera bag, as I had plans in case I had time, to visit a church or two.
It was dark up the M20 to Dartford, and busy with traffic, but I made good time, and listened to a loop of old music podcasts all day, so chat and music kept me awake.
I got onto the M25 with no problem, and through the tunnels with only a slight slowdown, but on the other side there were queues.
Despite not wanting to spend money on a new railway, there is always money for road and junction improvements, even if it will just increase traffic. So it is that the M25/A12 junction is being upgraded, and with narrow lanes, speed restrictions, jams began a good four miles before the roadworks started.
I forced my way to the left hand lane, which became a filter lane, meaning it was much quicker than the remaining four lanes. But then came the roundabout. The roundabout under the motorway is the reason the improvements are needed, and queueing traffic blocks the junctions and causes even more backlogs.
Of course, traffic lights on roundabouts are never good ideas, so I was confronted with a wall of traffic, so when the light went green, I went in front of a track before it could shuffle forward and block more of the junction, then there was some clear road.
And ducking into the extreme left hand lane, I dodged past the queuing traffic that was blocking the exit from the A12, and onto clear road.
Yay.
The sky was clear, the sun about to rise, and it was going to be a glorious day.
Just north of Chelmsford, I stopped for breakfast: two sausage rolls and a coffee from Greggs, then filled up the tank and on my way north.
More traffic at Ipswich where the A12 meets the A14 to get over the Orwell, but then clear traffic again after ten minutes delay.
Soon, though, the road narrows to two lane blacktop, and all is well until you meet a slower vehicle. Like a tractor as we did soon after Whickham Market.
For 15 long minutes the tractor lead a growing snake of cars along the winding lanes until it pulled over and we could get past.
Blythburgh was always the marker when travelling back from Ipswich or beyond, that we were nearly home. he handsome church sits high, for Suffolk, overlooking the village and river which is mostly mudflats.
The busy A12 skirts close, but you get to the church via a narrow land, leaving the modern world far behind.
The church opened at nine, it was nearly half past, it was probably open before nine, and was open when I pushed the porch door.
Inside is an unspoilt space, grey wood that have witnessed the centuries so that their vigour has faded to almost no colour of all.
Its the roof people come for. Wooden beams and pairs of wooden angels. I have brought my big lens so to snap them.
My plan was to visit the large and impressive church in Southwold. I turned off the A12 and drove along the straight road into the town, where I found multiple sets of roadworks, and few places to park for a short time, anywhere near the church.
My back is achy, so I wanted somewhere close to park. Anyway, I drove round the town twice, found nowhere to park, so turned the car round and headed back north, until I came to South Cove.
South Cove is a small village, a few farms really, but has a fine, if rustic, well-proportioned church, set in a large churchyard.
And the church was open, so small the wide angle lens wasn't needed, and with windows close to the floor too, no big lens needed either.
Next town up is Kessingland, which until the 80s had the A12 running through the centre of it, but now a bypass lays to the west and the village is quiet. I don't think I had been of the main street, so I went in search of the church, and found it on Church Street.
Obviously.
I rarely research churches before I visit, so nothing prepared me for the interior of St Edmund.
It seems in the last two years, they church had sourced some banners with apt slogans on, banners which were made to look like large tapered ensigns, hanging from or along the supports of the roof.
A man was practicing on the organ, and the notes echoed round the church. Not only does the church have banners, it has ship's wheels and other nautical stuff, although most traditionalists won't like it, I think it hangs together, and if the congregation wants it thus, who are we to argue?
Next stop was South Cove, which I had forgotten I had visited before, so redid all my shots. But this time did see the panel featuring St Michael behind the font, where the rood steps began.
A small, perfect, church, perfect for a small country parish.
I take my shots and leave, driving back onto the A12 and heading into Lowestoft, my main task was to drive over the new bridge which spans Lake Lothing.
The town had been waiting since at least 1966 for a new bridge, and the 3rd crossing was opened in September, and offers fine views as you drive across.
I went to see the old family home. It has been renovated and looks splendid, and not much like it was when sold four years back, it looks cared for and lived in, which is what the buyer promised us he would do.
So then to the crematorium, a drive north through Gunton and past Hopton where Dougie lives, then through the housing estate behind the area hospital to the car park, and then wait.
Margaret was 89, had a long life, but friends of the same age are few, and families are now scattered. So, one can never be sure how many will attend. The chapel was half full at least, with people coming from Kent, Wiltshire and even California to be there.
The celebrant spoke for twenty minutes, saying nice things as they have to do. But, avoiding, or just hinting at faults. Whatever she had done in her life to Dougie, he still loved her, and he was in bits.
Afterward we lined up to shake his hand or give him and Pennie a hug, and allowed me to tell him he was the brother I never had. He was always there for me, and will be there for him.
More tears.
There was a wake at the pub in Hopton, but there was no one I knew other than Dougie and Penny, so I had a drink and made my excuses. These things are really for family and close friends, so I left at quarter to three, hoping to get home before midnight.
In the end, I made good time, I was going round Ipswich before four, and at the M25 junction less than an hour later, and was able to easily join it and zoom round to the bridge. No queues on the southbound side, but the queue northbound went all the way back to the M20 junction, so six mines.
I zoomed on.
I got home at ten past six, happy to have done it and go home in under three and a half hours. Dinner was defrosted ragu, pasta and reheated focaccia, which we were sitting down to eat twenty minutes after getting in.
Phew.
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Perhaps some counties have a church which sums them up. If there has to be one for Suffolk, it must be the church of the Most Holy Trinity, Blythburgh. Here is the late medieval Suffolk imagination writ large, as large as it gets, and not overwritten by the Anglican triumphalism of the 19th century. Blythburgh church is often compared with its near neighbour, St Edmund at Southwold, but this isn't a fair comparison - Southwold church is much grander, and full of urban confidence. Probably a better comparison is with St Margaret, Lowestoft, for there, too, the Reformation intervened before the tower could be rebuilt. The two churches have a lot in common, but Blythburgh has the saving grace. It is so fascinating, so stunningly beautiful, by virtue of a factor that is rare in Anglican parish churches: sheer neglect.
Holy Trinity, Blythburgh, is the church that Suffolk people know and love best, and because of this it has generated some extraordinary legends. The first is that Blythburgh, now a tiny village bisected by the fearsome A12 between London and the east coast ports, was once a thriving medieval town. This idea is used to explain the size of the church; in reality, it is almost certainly not the case. Blythburgh has always been small. But it did have an important medieval priory, and thus its church attracted enough wealthy piety on the eve of the Reformation to bankroll a spectacular rebuilding.
It is to Lavenham, Long Melford, Mildenhall, Southwold and here that we come to see the late 15th century Suffolk aesthetic in perfection. But for my money, Holy Trinity, Blythburgh, is the most significant medieval art object in the county, ranking alongside Salle in Norfolk. Look up at the clerestory; it seems impossible, there is so much glass, so little stone; and yet it rides the building with an air of permanence. Beneath, there is a coyness about the aisles that I prefer to the mathematics of Lavenham. Here, it could not have been done otherwise; it distils human architectural experience. If St Peter and St Paul at Lavenham is man talking to God, Holy Trinity at Blythburgh is God talking to man.
At the east end, a curious series of initials in Lombardic script stretch across the outer chancel wall. You can see an image of this at the top. It reads A-N-JS-B-S-T-M-S-A-H-K-R. This probably stands for Ad Nomina JesuS, Beati Sanctae Trinitas, Maria Sanctorem Anne Honorem Katherine Reconstructus ('In the name of the blessed Jesus, the Holy Trinity, and in honour of Holy Mary, Anne and Katherine, this was rebuilt'). A fanciful theory is that they are the initials of the wives of the donors. However, note the symbol of the Trinity in the T stone, and I think this is a clue to the whole piece.
Figures stand on pedestals atop the south side and east end. The most easterly is unusual, a crowned old man sitting on a throne directly on the gable end. This is a medieval image of God the Father, a rare survival. Moving westwards from here we find the Blessed Virgin in prayerful pose, Christ as the Saviour of the World holding an orb in one hand and blessing with the other, and then a collared bear with a ragged staff, a seated woodwose, another bear, this time with a collar and bell, and last of all a fox with a goose in its mouth, his jaws grasping the neck:
The porch is part of the late 15th century rebuilding, but it was considerably restored in the early 20th century. Interestingly, the angels crowning the battlements look medieval - but they weren't there in 1900, so must have come from somewhere else. Pretty much all the porch's features of interest date from this time. These include the small medieval font pressed into service as a holy water stoup, and image niche above the doors. This has been filled in more recent years by an image if the Holy Trinity; God the Father holds the Son suspended while a dove representing the Holy Spirit alights; you can see medieval versions of this at Framlingham and Little Glemham. Of all medieval imagery, this was the most frowned upon by puritans. An image of God the Father was thought the most suspicious of all idolatries. Indeed, as late as the 1870s, when the Reverend White edited the first popular edition of the Diary of William Dowsing, he actually congratulated Dowsing on destroying images of the Holy Trinity in the course of his 1644 progress through the counties of Suffolk and Cambridgeshire.
William Dowsing visited on the morning on April 9th, 1644. It was a Tuesday, and he had spent most of the week in the area. The previous day he'd been at Southwold and Walberswick to the east, but preceded his visit here with one to Blyford, which lies to the west, so he was probably staying overnight at the family home in Laxfield. He found twenty images in stained glass to take to task (a surprisingly small number, given the size of the place) and two hundred more that were inaccessible that morning (probably in the great east window). Three brass inscriptions incurred his wrath (but again, this is curious; there were many more) and he also ordered down the cross on the porch and the cross on the tower. Most significantly of all, he decided the angels in the roof should go.
Lots of Suffolk churches have angels in their roofs. None are like Blythburgh's. You step inside, and there they are, exactly as you've seen them in books and in photographs. They are awesome, breathtaking. There are twelve of them. Perhaps there were once twenty. How would you get them down if ordered to do so? The roof is so high, and the stencilling of IHS symbols would also have to go.
Perhaps this was already indistinct by the time Dowsing visited. Perhaps Tuesday, 9th of April 1644 was a dull day.
Several of the angels are peppered with lead shot. Here is another of those Suffolk legends; that Dowsing and the churchwardens fired muskets at the angels to try and bring them down. But when the angels were restored in the 1970s, the lead shot removed was found to be 18th century; contemporary with them there is a note in the churchwardens accounts that men were paid for shooting jackdaws living inside the building, so that probably explains where the shot came from. Here are some details of that wonderful roof:
The otherwise splendid church guide also repeats the error that the Holy Trinity symbol in the porch filled a gap that had been 'empty since 1644'. But there was certainly no image in it when Dowsing arrived here, or anywhere else in Suffolk; statues were completely outlawed by injunctions in the early years of the reign of Edward VI, almost a hundred years before the morning of Dowsing's visit.
Another feature used as evidence of puritan destruction is the ring fixed into the most westerly pillar of the north arcade. Cromwell's men stabled their horses here, apparently. Well, it almost certainly is a ring for tying horses to, and the broken bricks at the cleared west end also suggest this; but there is no reason to think that Cromwell and the puritans were responsible. For a full century before Cromwell, and for nearly two hundred years afterwards, a church as big as this would have had a multitude of uses. Holy Trinity was built for the rituals of the Catholic church; once these were no longer allowed, a village like Blythburgh, which can never have had more than 500 people, would have seen it as an asset in other ways. It was only with the 19th century sacramental revival brought about by the Oxford Movement that we started getting all holy again about our parish churches. Perhaps it was used as an overnight stables for passing travellers on the main road; not an un-Christian use for it to be put to, I think.
In August 1577, a great storm brought down the steeple, which fell into the church and damaged the font. This was at the height of Elizabethan superstition, and the devil was blamed; his hoof marks can still be seen on the church door. Supposedly, a black dog ran through the church, killing two parishioners; he was seen the same day at St Mary, Bungay. Black Shuck is the East Anglian devil dog, the feared hound of the marshes; and Holy Trinity is the self-styled Cathedral of the Marshes, so it is appropriate that he appeared here. You can see where the font has been broken. You can also see that this was one of the rare, beautiful seven sacrament fonts, similar in style to the one at Westhall; but, like those at neighbouring Wenhaston and Southwold, it has been completely stripped of imagery. Almost certainly, this was in the 1540s, but there is a story that the font at Wenhaston was chiselled clean as part of the 19th century restoration. More importantly in any case, the storm, or the dog, or the devil, damaged the roof; it would not be properly repaired for more than 400 years. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, accounts note that Holy Trinity is not impregnable to the weather. By the 19th century, parishioners attended divine service with umbrellas. By the 1880s, it was a positively dangerous building to be in, and the Bishop of Norwich ordered it closed.
Why had Holy Trinity not been restored? Simply, this is a big church, with a tiny village. There was no rich patron, and in any case the parishioners had a passion for Methodism. Probably, repairs had been mooted, but not a wholesale restoration as we have seen at Lavenham, Long Melford and Southwold. By the 1880s, attention in England had turned to the preservation of medieval detail; in short, restorations were not as ignorant as they had been a quarter of a century earlier. Suggestions that Holy Trinity should be restored in the manner of the other three were blocked by the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings, and this owed a lot to the energy of William Morris, the Society's secretary.
The slow, patient restoration of this building took the best part of a century; indeed, when I first visited in the 1980s I was still aware of a sense of decay.
Nothing could be further from the truth today. You step into a wide, white, open space, one of England's great church interiors. There, high above you, is the glorious roof and the angels of God. The brick floors spread around the scraped font, which still bears its dedicatory inscription and standing places for participants. You turn into the central gangway, and more than twenty empty indents for brasses stretch before you. Dowsing can be blamed for the destruction of hardly any of them. In reality, you see the work of 18th and 19th century thieves and collectors.
The bench-ends are superb. The benches themselves were reconstructed in the late 19th century, supposedly from the main post of Westleton windmill, but the ends are some of the county's finest medieval images. There are partial sets of basically three series: the Seven Deadly Sins, the Seven Works of Mercy, and the Labours of the Seasons. There are also angels bearing symbols of the Holy Trinity and the Crown. There are other figures too, obscure and fragmentary and whose purpose is unclear, as if surviving figments of a broken dream. The quality of what remains makes you grieve for what has been lost.
The rood screen is a disappointment; most of it is modern, and the medieval bits perfunctory and scoured. Having said this, note how tiny the exit from the north aisle rood loft stair is. Also at this end of the church, a scattering of medieval glass, mainly angels. There is more in the south aisle, including a collection of shields of the Holy Trinity:
But step through the central aisle to see something remarkable. The priest and choir stalls are fronted by exquisite carvings of the Apostles, the Evangelists, John the Baptist, St Stephen, Mary Queen of Heaven and Christ in Majesty. Seeing these eighteen carvings is a bit like gobbling up a very large box of chocolates, but it is worth stopping to consider quite how genuine they all are. For a start, there could not have been choir stalls here in medieval times, and in any case we know that these desks and their frontages were in the north aisle chapel until the 19th century. They were used as school benches in the 17th century; they still bear holes for inkpots, and the graffiti of a bored Dutch child (his father was probably working on draining the marshes) is dated 1665. There is nothing at all like them anywhere else in Suffolk.
Whatever, the east end of the chancel and aisles are thrillingly modern, wholly devotional. In the north aisle, traditionally the Hopton chantry, extraordinary friezes of skeletons become symbols of the four evangelists behind the altar. Beside them is Peter Ball's beautiful Madonna and Child. Separating the south aisle chapel from the sanctuary is is one of Suffolk's biggest Easter sepulchres, tomb of the Hoptons. Behind the high altar, branches arranged like huge stag antlers spread dramatically. It is all just about perfect. Tucked to one side of the organ is a clockjack; Suffolk has two, and the other is down-river at Southwold. They date from the late 17th century, and presumably once struck the hours; at high church Blythburgh and Southwold today, they are used to announce the entry of the ministers.
This is a wonderful church to wander around in, the light and the air changing with the seasons, a suffused sense of the numinous presenting its different faces according to the time of day and time of year. Come here on a bright spring morning, or in the drowsy heat of a summer's day. Come on a cold winter afternoon as the colours fade and the smell of woodsmoke from neighbouring cottages weaves a spell above the old stone floors and woodwork. And before you leave, find the doorway in the south-west corner of the nave. It opens onto a low, narrow stairway. You can go up it. It leads up into the parvise storey of the south porch, now reappointed and dedicated as a tiny chapel, a peaceful spot to spend a few moments before continuing your journey.
You may be reading this entry in a far-off land; or perhaps you are here at home. Whatever, if you have not visited this church, then I urge you to do so. It is the most beautiful church in Suffolk, a wonderful art object, and it is always open in daylight. It remains one of the most significant medieval buildings in England. If you only visit one of Suffolk's churches, then make it this one
Simon Knott, 2014.
for a toddler renowned for his tantrums, he was ridiculously well behaved all day, relishing the attention he was getting and the occasional chocolate thrown his way as a sweetener...
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8
The Napoleonic era in Italy interests me as it seems about as implausible as Italian politics can possibly get, and that's saying something, given its normal conditions
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We tend to celebrate light in our pictures. Understanding how light interacts with the camera is paramount to the work we do. The temperature, intensity and source of light can wield different photography effect on the same subject or scene; add ISO, aperture and speed, the camera, the lens type, focal length and filters…the combination is varied ad multi-layered and if you know how to use them all, you will come to appreciate that all lights are useful, even those surrounded by a lot of darkness.
We are guided by three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, our longing to capture in print, that which is beautiful, the constant search for the one picture, and constant barrage of new equipment and style of photography. These passions, like great winds, have blown us across the globe in search of the one and we do understand the one we do look for might be this picture right here for someone else out there.
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A place without being
a thought without thinking
creatively, two dimensions
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possibly a perfect imitation
of what was then to see.
A frozen memory in synthetic colour
or black and white instead,
fantasy dreams in magazines
become imbedded inside my head.
Artistic views
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a photographer’s instinctive eye:
for he does as he pleases
up to that point he releases,
then develops a visual high.
- M R Abrahams
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Pt: A Barrinha de Mira é uma lagoa costeira portuguesa, localizada na Praia da Mira, a cerca de 250 metros de distância do Oceano Atlântico! Apesar de se localizar muito próxima do mar, a Barrinha de Mira é uma lagoa de água doce, continuamente alimentada por uma pequena ribeira!
Esta lagoa costeira é o que resta de um lento processo natural milenar de acumulação e formação de bancos de areia, que levou à sua separação do mar, seguido de um outro processo natural de contínuo e lento assoreamento! Nos últimos dois séculos, verificou-se um intenso processo contínuo de aterro e recuperação de terras pelo homem, para obter terrenos para habitação ou agricultura; que só terá parado há uns 10/20 anos atrás (???) e que diminuiu de forma considerável a área ocupada pela Barrinha de Mira!
En: The Barrinha de Mira is a portuguese coastal lagoon, located in Praia da Mira (Mira Beach), some 250 meters away from the Atlantic Ocean! Altough very near the sea, the Barrinha de Mira is a fresh water lagoon, fed continuously by one small stream!
The current area of the lagoon is what remains of a natural process of centuries of slow aggradation! This process was accelerated in the last two centuries, by an intense land reclamation by man, to get and convert land for habitation or agriculture! Also, some transportation and leisure infrastructures were made!
North Shore of Lake Superior, June 2015. This is the shot that everyone gets, and everyone sees, of one of the most photographed lighthouses in the US. A good view, not only of the lighthouse, but also of the fault contact between the reddish rhyolite rock on the left, (north), and the greyish diabase on the right, (south).
There is a point in our lives when we, the children, become the adults in the relationship with our parents.
It will come for most of us, no one tells you this will happen, and you are unprepared for it. But it comes
And each of us has a different relationship with our parents than everyone else, what's right for me, and my views, do not apply to you.
Yesterday, was the funeral of the person I have known longer than anyone else on this earth, now that my family is all gone. Margaret and Brian were married a few weeks before mine, and moved into the new build bungalow also a few weeks before my parents.
They also had one child, a son, and Douglas and I have been friends longer than I have been friends with anyone else, although he is a year younger than me.
I have my views on Margaret, but the reason I travelled back to Suffolk for her funeral, was to be there for Douggie, and give him the support he has given me through three weddings and two funerals.
Norfolk isn't far away, and the funeral and wake were taking place just a mile or two over the border from Suffolk, but the roads beyond Ipswich are poor, twisty and where there are accidents or roadworks, no real alternative routes.
I was also leaving just before six, so had to get across the Thames at Dartford and up the A12 during rush hour, so it wouldn't be easy. But at least there would be no rain.
I was up at five, dressed and washed, with time to drink a coffee before leaving. Loading the car with me and my camera bag, as I had plans in case I had time, to visit a church or two.
It was dark up the M20 to Dartford, and busy with traffic, but I made good time, and listened to a loop of old music podcasts all day, so chat and music kept me awake.
I got onto the M25 with no problem, and through the tunnels with only a slight slowdown, but on the other side there were queues.
Despite not wanting to spend money on a new railway, there is always money for road and junction improvements, even if it will just increase traffic. So it is that the M25/A12 junction is being upgraded, and with narrow lanes, speed restrictions, jams began a good four miles before the roadworks started.
I forced my way to the left hand lane, which became a filter lane, meaning it was much quicker than the remaining four lanes. But then came the roundabout. The roundabout under the motorway is the reason the improvements are needed, and queueing traffic blocks the junctions and causes even more backlogs.
Of course, traffic lights on roundabouts are never good ideas, so I was confronted with a wall of traffic, so when the light went green, I went in front of a track before it could shuffle forward and block more of the junction, then there was some clear road.
And ducking into the extreme left hand lane, I dodged past the queuing traffic that was blocking the exit from the A12, and onto clear road.
Yay.
The sky was clear, the sun about to rise, and it was going to be a glorious day.
Just north of Chelmsford, I stopped for breakfast: two sausage rolls and a coffee from Greggs, then filled up the tank and on my way north.
More traffic at Ipswich where the A12 meets the A14 to get over the Orwell, but then clear traffic again after ten minutes delay.
Soon, though, the road narrows to two lane blacktop, and all is well until you meet a slower vehicle. Like a tractor as we did soon after Whickham Market.
For 15 long minutes the tractor lead a growing snake of cars along the winding lanes until it pulled over and we could get past.
Blythburgh was always the marker when travelling back from Ipswich or beyond, that we were nearly home. he handsome church sits high, for Suffolk, overlooking the village and river which is mostly mudflats.
The busy A12 skirts close, but you get to the church via a narrow land, leaving the modern world far behind.
The church opened at nine, it was nearly half past, it was probably open before nine, and was open when I pushed the porch door.
Inside is an unspoilt space, grey wood that have witnessed the centuries so that their vigour has faded to almost no colour of all.
Its the roof people come for. Wooden beams and pairs of wooden angels. I have brought my big lens so to snap them.
My plan was to visit the large and impressive church in Southwold. I turned off the A12 and drove along the straight road into the town, where I found multiple sets of roadworks, and few places to park for a short time, anywhere near the church.
My back is achy, so I wanted somewhere close to park. Anyway, I drove round the town twice, found nowhere to park, so turned the car round and headed back north, until I came to South Cove.
South Cove is a small village, a few farms really, but has a fine, if rustic, well-proportioned church, set in a large churchyard.
And the church was open, so small the wide angle lens wasn't needed, and with windows close to the floor too, no big lens needed either.
Next town up is Kessingland, which until the 80s had the A12 running through the centre of it, but now a bypass lays to the west and the village is quiet. I don't think I had been of the main street, so I went in search of the church, and found it on Church Street.
Obviously.
I rarely research churches before I visit, so nothing prepared me for the interior of St Edmund.
It seems in the last two years, they church had sourced some banners with apt slogans on, banners which were made to look like large tapered ensigns, hanging from or along the supports of the roof.
A man was practicing on the organ, and the notes echoed round the church. Not only does the church have banners, it has ship's wheels and other nautical stuff, although most traditionalists won't like it, I think it hangs together, and if the congregation wants it thus, who are we to argue?
Next stop was South Cove, which I had forgotten I had visited before, so redid all my shots. But this time did see the panel featuring St Michael behind the font, where the rood steps began.
A small, perfect, church, perfect for a small country parish.
I take my shots and leave, driving back onto the A12 and heading into Lowestoft, my main task was to drive over the new bridge which spans Lake Lothing.
The town had been waiting since at least 1966 for a new bridge, and the 3rd crossing was opened in September, and offers fine views as you drive across.
I went to see the old family home. It has been renovated and looks splendid, and not much like it was when sold four years back, it looks cared for and lived in, which is what the buyer promised us he would do.
So then to the crematorium, a drive north through Gunton and past Hopton where Dougie lives, then through the housing estate behind the area hospital to the car park, and then wait.
Margaret was 89, had a long life, but friends of the same age are few, and families are now scattered. So, one can never be sure how many will attend. The chapel was half full at least, with people coming from Kent, Wiltshire and even California to be there.
The celebrant spoke for twenty minutes, saying nice things as they have to do. But, avoiding, or just hinting at faults. Whatever she had done in her life to Dougie, he still loved her, and he was in bits.
Afterward we lined up to shake his hand or give him and Pennie a hug, and allowed me to tell him he was the brother I never had. He was always there for me, and will be there for him.
More tears.
There was a wake at the pub in Hopton, but there was no one I knew other than Dougie and Penny, so I had a drink and made my excuses. These things are really for family and close friends, so I left at quarter to three, hoping to get home before midnight.
In the end, I made good time, I was going round Ipswich before four, and at the M25 junction less than an hour later, and was able to easily join it and zoom round to the bridge. No queues on the southbound side, but the queue northbound went all the way back to the M20 junction, so six mines.
I zoomed on.
I got home at ten past six, happy to have done it and go home in under three and a half hours. Dinner was defrosted ragu, pasta and reheated focaccia, which we were sitting down to eat twenty minutes after getting in.
Phew.
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Perhaps some counties have a church which sums them up. If there has to be one for Suffolk, it must be the church of the Most Holy Trinity, Blythburgh. Here is the late medieval Suffolk imagination writ large, as large as it gets, and not overwritten by the Anglican triumphalism of the 19th century. Blythburgh church is often compared with its near neighbour, St Edmund at Southwold, but this isn't a fair comparison - Southwold church is much grander, and full of urban confidence. Probably a better comparison is with St Margaret, Lowestoft, for there, too, the Reformation intervened before the tower could be rebuilt. The two churches have a lot in common, but Blythburgh has the saving grace. It is so fascinating, so stunningly beautiful, by virtue of a factor that is rare in Anglican parish churches: sheer neglect.
Holy Trinity, Blythburgh, is the church that Suffolk people know and love best, and because of this it has generated some extraordinary legends. The first is that Blythburgh, now a tiny village bisected by the fearsome A12 between London and the east coast ports, was once a thriving medieval town. This idea is used to explain the size of the church; in reality, it is almost certainly not the case. Blythburgh has always been small. But it did have an important medieval priory, and thus its church attracted enough wealthy piety on the eve of the Reformation to bankroll a spectacular rebuilding.
It is to Lavenham, Long Melford, Mildenhall, Southwold and here that we come to see the late 15th century Suffolk aesthetic in perfection. But for my money, Holy Trinity, Blythburgh, is the most significant medieval art object in the county, ranking alongside Salle in Norfolk. Look up at the clerestory; it seems impossible, there is so much glass, so little stone; and yet it rides the building with an air of permanence. Beneath, there is a coyness about the aisles that I prefer to the mathematics of Lavenham. Here, it could not have been done otherwise; it distils human architectural experience. If St Peter and St Paul at Lavenham is man talking to God, Holy Trinity at Blythburgh is God talking to man.
At the east end, a curious series of initials in Lombardic script stretch across the outer chancel wall. You can see an image of this at the top. It reads A-N-JS-B-S-T-M-S-A-H-K-R. This probably stands for Ad Nomina JesuS, Beati Sanctae Trinitas, Maria Sanctorem Anne Honorem Katherine Reconstructus ('In the name of the blessed Jesus, the Holy Trinity, and in honour of Holy Mary, Anne and Katherine, this was rebuilt'). A fanciful theory is that they are the initials of the wives of the donors. However, note the symbol of the Trinity in the T stone, and I think this is a clue to the whole piece.
Figures stand on pedestals atop the south side and east end. The most easterly is unusual, a crowned old man sitting on a throne directly on the gable end. This is a medieval image of God the Father, a rare survival. Moving westwards from here we find the Blessed Virgin in prayerful pose, Christ as the Saviour of the World holding an orb in one hand and blessing with the other, and then a collared bear with a ragged staff, a seated woodwose, another bear, this time with a collar and bell, and last of all a fox with a goose in its mouth, his jaws grasping the neck:
The porch is part of the late 15th century rebuilding, but it was considerably restored in the early 20th century. Interestingly, the angels crowning the battlements look medieval - but they weren't there in 1900, so must have come from somewhere else. Pretty much all the porch's features of interest date from this time. These include the small medieval font pressed into service as a holy water stoup, and image niche above the doors. This has been filled in more recent years by an image if the Holy Trinity; God the Father holds the Son suspended while a dove representing the Holy Spirit alights; you can see medieval versions of this at Framlingham and Little Glemham. Of all medieval imagery, this was the most frowned upon by puritans. An image of God the Father was thought the most suspicious of all idolatries. Indeed, as late as the 1870s, when the Reverend White edited the first popular edition of the Diary of William Dowsing, he actually congratulated Dowsing on destroying images of the Holy Trinity in the course of his 1644 progress through the counties of Suffolk and Cambridgeshire.
William Dowsing visited on the morning on April 9th, 1644. It was a Tuesday, and he had spent most of the week in the area. The previous day he'd been at Southwold and Walberswick to the east, but preceded his visit here with one to Blyford, which lies to the west, so he was probably staying overnight at the family home in Laxfield. He found twenty images in stained glass to take to task (a surprisingly small number, given the size of the place) and two hundred more that were inaccessible that morning (probably in the great east window). Three brass inscriptions incurred his wrath (but again, this is curious; there were many more) and he also ordered down the cross on the porch and the cross on the tower. Most significantly of all, he decided the angels in the roof should go.
Lots of Suffolk churches have angels in their roofs. None are like Blythburgh's. You step inside, and there they are, exactly as you've seen them in books and in photographs. They are awesome, breathtaking. There are twelve of them. Perhaps there were once twenty. How would you get them down if ordered to do so? The roof is so high, and the stencilling of IHS symbols would also have to go.
Perhaps this was already indistinct by the time Dowsing visited. Perhaps Tuesday, 9th of April 1644 was a dull day.
Several of the angels are peppered with lead shot. Here is another of those Suffolk legends; that Dowsing and the churchwardens fired muskets at the angels to try and bring them down. But when the angels were restored in the 1970s, the lead shot removed was found to be 18th century; contemporary with them there is a note in the churchwardens accounts that men were paid for shooting jackdaws living inside the building, so that probably explains where the shot came from. Here are some details of that wonderful roof:
The otherwise splendid church guide also repeats the error that the Holy Trinity symbol in the porch filled a gap that had been 'empty since 1644'. But there was certainly no image in it when Dowsing arrived here, or anywhere else in Suffolk; statues were completely outlawed by injunctions in the early years of the reign of Edward VI, almost a hundred years before the morning of Dowsing's visit.
Another feature used as evidence of puritan destruction is the ring fixed into the most westerly pillar of the north arcade. Cromwell's men stabled their horses here, apparently. Well, it almost certainly is a ring for tying horses to, and the broken bricks at the cleared west end also suggest this; but there is no reason to think that Cromwell and the puritans were responsible. For a full century before Cromwell, and for nearly two hundred years afterwards, a church as big as this would have had a multitude of uses. Holy Trinity was built for the rituals of the Catholic church; once these were no longer allowed, a village like Blythburgh, which can never have had more than 500 people, would have seen it as an asset in other ways. It was only with the 19th century sacramental revival brought about by the Oxford Movement that we started getting all holy again about our parish churches. Perhaps it was used as an overnight stables for passing travellers on the main road; not an un-Christian use for it to be put to, I think.
In August 1577, a great storm brought down the steeple, which fell into the church and damaged the font. This was at the height of Elizabethan superstition, and the devil was blamed; his hoof marks can still be seen on the church door. Supposedly, a black dog ran through the church, killing two parishioners; he was seen the same day at St Mary, Bungay. Black Shuck is the East Anglian devil dog, the feared hound of the marshes; and Holy Trinity is the self-styled Cathedral of the Marshes, so it is appropriate that he appeared here. You can see where the font has been broken. You can also see that this was one of the rare, beautiful seven sacrament fonts, similar in style to the one at Westhall; but, like those at neighbouring Wenhaston and Southwold, it has been completely stripped of imagery. Almost certainly, this was in the 1540s, but there is a story that the font at Wenhaston was chiselled clean as part of the 19th century restoration. More importantly in any case, the storm, or the dog, or the devil, damaged the roof; it would not be properly repaired for more than 400 years. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, accounts note that Holy Trinity is not impregnable to the weather. By the 19th century, parishioners attended divine service with umbrellas. By the 1880s, it was a positively dangerous building to be in, and the Bishop of Norwich ordered it closed.
Why had Holy Trinity not been restored? Simply, this is a big church, with a tiny village. There was no rich patron, and in any case the parishioners had a passion for Methodism. Probably, repairs had been mooted, but not a wholesale restoration as we have seen at Lavenham, Long Melford and Southwold. By the 1880s, attention in England had turned to the preservation of medieval detail; in short, restorations were not as ignorant as they had been a quarter of a century earlier. Suggestions that Holy Trinity should be restored in the manner of the other three were blocked by the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings, and this owed a lot to the energy of William Morris, the Society's secretary.
The slow, patient restoration of this building took the best part of a century; indeed, when I first visited in the 1980s I was still aware of a sense of decay.
Nothing could be further from the truth today. You step into a wide, white, open space, one of England's great church interiors. There, high above you, is the glorious roof and the angels of God. The brick floors spread around the scraped font, which still bears its dedicatory inscription and standing places for participants. You turn into the central gangway, and more than twenty empty indents for brasses stretch before you. Dowsing can be blamed for the destruction of hardly any of them. In reality, you see the work of 18th and 19th century thieves and collectors.
The bench-ends are superb. The benches themselves were reconstructed in the late 19th century, supposedly from the main post of Westleton windmill, but the ends are some of the county's finest medieval images. There are partial sets of basically three series: the Seven Deadly Sins, the Seven Works of Mercy, and the Labours of the Seasons. There are also angels bearing symbols of the Holy Trinity and the Crown. There are other figures too, obscure and fragmentary and whose purpose is unclear, as if surviving figments of a broken dream. The quality of what remains makes you grieve for what has been lost.
The rood screen is a disappointment; most of it is modern, and the medieval bits perfunctory and scoured. Having said this, note how tiny the exit from the north aisle rood loft stair is. Also at this end of the church, a scattering of medieval glass, mainly angels. There is more in the south aisle, including a collection of shields of the Holy Trinity:
But step through the central aisle to see something remarkable. The priest and choir stalls are fronted by exquisite carvings of the Apostles, the Evangelists, John the Baptist, St Stephen, Mary Queen of Heaven and Christ in Majesty. Seeing these eighteen carvings is a bit like gobbling up a very large box of chocolates, but it is worth stopping to consider quite how genuine they all are. For a start, there could not have been choir stalls here in medieval times, and in any case we know that these desks and their frontages were in the north aisle chapel until the 19th century. They were used as school benches in the 17th century; they still bear holes for inkpots, and the graffiti of a bored Dutch child (his father was probably working on draining the marshes) is dated 1665. There is nothing at all like them anywhere else in Suffolk.
Whatever, the east end of the chancel and aisles are thrillingly modern, wholly devotional. In the north aisle, traditionally the Hopton chantry, extraordinary friezes of skeletons become symbols of the four evangelists behind the altar. Beside them is Peter Ball's beautiful Madonna and Child. Separating the south aisle chapel from the sanctuary is is one of Suffolk's biggest Easter sepulchres, tomb of the Hoptons. Behind the high altar, branches arranged like huge stag antlers spread dramatically. It is all just about perfect. Tucked to one side of the organ is a clockjack; Suffolk has two, and the other is down-river at Southwold. They date from the late 17th century, and presumably once struck the hours; at high church Blythburgh and Southwold today, they are used to announce the entry of the ministers.
This is a wonderful church to wander around in, the light and the air changing with the seasons, a suffused sense of the numinous presenting its different faces according to the time of day and time of year. Come here on a bright spring morning, or in the drowsy heat of a summer's day. Come on a cold winter afternoon as the colours fade and the smell of woodsmoke from neighbouring cottages weaves a spell above the old stone floors and woodwork. And before you leave, find the doorway in the south-west corner of the nave. It opens onto a low, narrow stairway. You can go up it. It leads up into the parvise storey of the south porch, now reappointed and dedicated as a tiny chapel, a peaceful spot to spend a few moments before continuing your journey.
You may be reading this entry in a far-off land; or perhaps you are here at home. Whatever, if you have not visited this church, then I urge you to do so. It is the most beautiful church in Suffolk, a wonderful art object, and it is always open in daylight. It remains one of the most significant medieval buildings in England. If you only visit one of Suffolk's churches, then make it this one
Simon Knott, 2014.
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There is a point in our lives when we, the children, become the adults in the relationship with our parents.
It will come for most of us, no one tells you this will happen, and you are unprepared for it. But it comes
And each of us has a different relationship with our parents than everyone else, what's right for me, and my views, do not apply to you.
Yesterday, was the funeral of the person I have known longer than anyone else on this earth, now that my family is all gone. Margaret and Brian were married a few weeks before mine, and moved into the new build bungalow also a few weeks before my parents.
They also had one child, a son, and Douglas and I have been friends longer than I have been friends with anyone else, although he is a year younger than me.
I have my views on Margaret, but the reason I travelled back to Suffolk for her funeral, was to be there for Douggie, and give him the support he has given me through three weddings and two funerals.
Norfolk isn't far away, and the funeral and wake were taking place just a mile or two over the border from Suffolk, but the roads beyond Ipswich are poor, twisty and where there are accidents or roadworks, no real alternative routes.
I was also leaving just before six, so had to get across the Thames at Dartford and up the A12 during rush hour, so it wouldn't be easy. But at least there would be no rain.
I was up at five, dressed and washed, with time to drink a coffee before leaving. Loading the car with me and my camera bag, as I had plans in case I had time, to visit a church or two.
It was dark up the M20 to Dartford, and busy with traffic, but I made good time, and listened to a loop of old music podcasts all day, so chat and music kept me awake.
I got onto the M25 with no problem, and through the tunnels with only a slight slowdown, but on the other side there were queues.
Despite not wanting to spend money on a new railway, there is always money for road and junction improvements, even if it will just increase traffic. So it is that the M25/A12 junction is being upgraded, and with narrow lanes, speed restrictions, jams began a good four miles before the roadworks started.
I forced my way to the left hand lane, which became a filter lane, meaning it was much quicker than the remaining four lanes. But then came the roundabout. The roundabout under the motorway is the reason the improvements are needed, and queueing traffic blocks the junctions and causes even more backlogs.
Of course, traffic lights on roundabouts are never good ideas, so I was confronted with a wall of traffic, so when the light went green, I went in front of a track before it could shuffle forward and block more of the junction, then there was some clear road.
And ducking into the extreme left hand lane, I dodged past the queuing traffic that was blocking the exit from the A12, and onto clear road.
Yay.
The sky was clear, the sun about to rise, and it was going to be a glorious day.
Just north of Chelmsford, I stopped for breakfast: two sausage rolls and a coffee from Greggs, then filled up the tank and on my way north.
More traffic at Ipswich where the A12 meets the A14 to get over the Orwell, but then clear traffic again after ten minutes delay.
Soon, though, the road narrows to two lane blacktop, and all is well until you meet a slower vehicle. Like a tractor as we did soon after Whickham Market.
For 15 long minutes the tractor lead a growing snake of cars along the winding lanes until it pulled over and we could get past.
Blythburgh was always the marker when travelling back from Ipswich or beyond, that we were nearly home. he handsome church sits high, for Suffolk, overlooking the village and river which is mostly mudflats.
The busy A12 skirts close, but you get to the church via a narrow land, leaving the modern world far behind.
The church opened at nine, it was nearly half past, it was probably open before nine, and was open when I pushed the porch door.
Inside is an unspoilt space, grey wood that have witnessed the centuries so that their vigour has faded to almost no colour of all.
Its the roof people come for. Wooden beams and pairs of wooden angels. I have brought my big lens so to snap them.
My plan was to visit the large and impressive church in Southwold. I turned off the A12 and drove along the straight road into the town, where I found multiple sets of roadworks, and few places to park for a short time, anywhere near the church.
My back is achy, so I wanted somewhere close to park. Anyway, I drove round the town twice, found nowhere to park, so turned the car round and headed back north, until I came to South Cove.
South Cove is a small village, a few farms really, but has a fine, if rustic, well-proportioned church, set in a large churchyard.
And the church was open, so small the wide angle lens wasn't needed, and with windows close to the floor too, no big lens needed either.
Next town up is Kessingland, which until the 80s had the A12 running through the centre of it, but now a bypass lays to the west and the village is quiet. I don't think I had been of the main street, so I went in search of the church, and found it on Church Street.
Obviously.
I rarely research churches before I visit, so nothing prepared me for the interior of St Edmund.
It seems in the last two years, they church had sourced some banners with apt slogans on, banners which were made to look like large tapered ensigns, hanging from or along the supports of the roof.
A man was practicing on the organ, and the notes echoed round the church. Not only does the church have banners, it has ship's wheels and other nautical stuff, although most traditionalists won't like it, I think it hangs together, and if the congregation wants it thus, who are we to argue?
Next stop was South Cove, which I had forgotten I had visited before, so redid all my shots. But this time did see the panel featuring St Michael behind the font, where the rood steps began.
A small, perfect, church, perfect for a small country parish.
I take my shots and leave, driving back onto the A12 and heading into Lowestoft, my main task was to drive over the new bridge which spans Lake Lothing.
The town had been waiting since at least 1966 for a new bridge, and the 3rd crossing was opened in September, and offers fine views as you drive across.
I went to see the old family home. It has been renovated and looks splendid, and not much like it was when sold four years back, it looks cared for and lived in, which is what the buyer promised us he would do.
So then to the crematorium, a drive north through Gunton and past Hopton where Dougie lives, then through the housing estate behind the area hospital to the car park, and then wait.
Margaret was 89, had a long life, but friends of the same age are few, and families are now scattered. So, one can never be sure how many will attend. The chapel was half full at least, with people coming from Kent, Wiltshire and even California to be there.
The celebrant spoke for twenty minutes, saying nice things as they have to do. But, avoiding, or just hinting at faults. Whatever she had done in her life to Dougie, he still loved her, and he was in bits.
Afterward we lined up to shake his hand or give him and Pennie a hug, and allowed me to tell him he was the brother I never had. He was always there for me, and will be there for him.
More tears.
There was a wake at the pub in Hopton, but there was no one I knew other than Dougie and Penny, so I had a drink and made my excuses. These things are really for family and close friends, so I left at quarter to three, hoping to get home before midnight.
In the end, I made good time, I was going round Ipswich before four, and at the M25 junction less than an hour later, and was able to easily join it and zoom round to the bridge. No queues on the southbound side, but the queue northbound went all the way back to the M20 junction, so six mines.
I zoomed on.
I got home at ten past six, happy to have done it and go home in under three and a half hours. Dinner was defrosted ragu, pasta and reheated focaccia, which we were sitting down to eat twenty minutes after getting in.
Phew.
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Perhaps some counties have a church which sums them up. If there has to be one for Suffolk, it must be the church of the Most Holy Trinity, Blythburgh. Here is the late medieval Suffolk imagination writ large, as large as it gets, and not overwritten by the Anglican triumphalism of the 19th century. Blythburgh church is often compared with its near neighbour, St Edmund at Southwold, but this isn't a fair comparison - Southwold church is much grander, and full of urban confidence. Probably a better comparison is with St Margaret, Lowestoft, for there, too, the Reformation intervened before the tower could be rebuilt. The two churches have a lot in common, but Blythburgh has the saving grace. It is so fascinating, so stunningly beautiful, by virtue of a factor that is rare in Anglican parish churches: sheer neglect.
Holy Trinity, Blythburgh, is the church that Suffolk people know and love best, and because of this it has generated some extraordinary legends. The first is that Blythburgh, now a tiny village bisected by the fearsome A12 between London and the east coast ports, was once a thriving medieval town. This idea is used to explain the size of the church; in reality, it is almost certainly not the case. Blythburgh has always been small. But it did have an important medieval priory, and thus its church attracted enough wealthy piety on the eve of the Reformation to bankroll a spectacular rebuilding.
It is to Lavenham, Long Melford, Mildenhall, Southwold and here that we come to see the late 15th century Suffolk aesthetic in perfection. But for my money, Holy Trinity, Blythburgh, is the most significant medieval art object in the county, ranking alongside Salle in Norfolk. Look up at the clerestory; it seems impossible, there is so much glass, so little stone; and yet it rides the building with an air of permanence. Beneath, there is a coyness about the aisles that I prefer to the mathematics of Lavenham. Here, it could not have been done otherwise; it distils human architectural experience. If St Peter and St Paul at Lavenham is man talking to God, Holy Trinity at Blythburgh is God talking to man.
At the east end, a curious series of initials in Lombardic script stretch across the outer chancel wall. You can see an image of this at the top. It reads A-N-JS-B-S-T-M-S-A-H-K-R. This probably stands for Ad Nomina JesuS, Beati Sanctae Trinitas, Maria Sanctorem Anne Honorem Katherine Reconstructus ('In the name of the blessed Jesus, the Holy Trinity, and in honour of Holy Mary, Anne and Katherine, this was rebuilt'). A fanciful theory is that they are the initials of the wives of the donors. However, note the symbol of the Trinity in the T stone, and I think this is a clue to the whole piece.
Figures stand on pedestals atop the south side and east end. The most easterly is unusual, a crowned old man sitting on a throne directly on the gable end. This is a medieval image of God the Father, a rare survival. Moving westwards from here we find the Blessed Virgin in prayerful pose, Christ as the Saviour of the World holding an orb in one hand and blessing with the other, and then a collared bear with a ragged staff, a seated woodwose, another bear, this time with a collar and bell, and last of all a fox with a goose in its mouth, his jaws grasping the neck:
The porch is part of the late 15th century rebuilding, but it was considerably restored in the early 20th century. Interestingly, the angels crowning the battlements look medieval - but they weren't there in 1900, so must have come from somewhere else. Pretty much all the porch's features of interest date from this time. These include the small medieval font pressed into service as a holy water stoup, and image niche above the doors. This has been filled in more recent years by an image if the Holy Trinity; God the Father holds the Son suspended while a dove representing the Holy Spirit alights; you can see medieval versions of this at Framlingham and Little Glemham. Of all medieval imagery, this was the most frowned upon by puritans. An image of God the Father was thought the most suspicious of all idolatries. Indeed, as late as the 1870s, when the Reverend White edited the first popular edition of the Diary of William Dowsing, he actually congratulated Dowsing on destroying images of the Holy Trinity in the course of his 1644 progress through the counties of Suffolk and Cambridgeshire.
William Dowsing visited on the morning on April 9th, 1644. It was a Tuesday, and he had spent most of the week in the area. The previous day he'd been at Southwold and Walberswick to the east, but preceded his visit here with one to Blyford, which lies to the west, so he was probably staying overnight at the family home in Laxfield. He found twenty images in stained glass to take to task (a surprisingly small number, given the size of the place) and two hundred more that were inaccessible that morning (probably in the great east window). Three brass inscriptions incurred his wrath (but again, this is curious; there were many more) and he also ordered down the cross on the porch and the cross on the tower. Most significantly of all, he decided the angels in the roof should go.
Lots of Suffolk churches have angels in their roofs. None are like Blythburgh's. You step inside, and there they are, exactly as you've seen them in books and in photographs. They are awesome, breathtaking. There are twelve of them. Perhaps there were once twenty. How would you get them down if ordered to do so? The roof is so high, and the stencilling of IHS symbols would also have to go.
Perhaps this was already indistinct by the time Dowsing visited. Perhaps Tuesday, 9th of April 1644 was a dull day.
Several of the angels are peppered with lead shot. Here is another of those Suffolk legends; that Dowsing and the churchwardens fired muskets at the angels to try and bring them down. But when the angels were restored in the 1970s, the lead shot removed was found to be 18th century; contemporary with them there is a note in the churchwardens accounts that men were paid for shooting jackdaws living inside the building, so that probably explains where the shot came from. Here are some details of that wonderful roof:
The otherwise splendid church guide also repeats the error that the Holy Trinity symbol in the porch filled a gap that had been 'empty since 1644'. But there was certainly no image in it when Dowsing arrived here, or anywhere else in Suffolk; statues were completely outlawed by injunctions in the early years of the reign of Edward VI, almost a hundred years before the morning of Dowsing's visit.
Another feature used as evidence of puritan destruction is the ring fixed into the most westerly pillar of the north arcade. Cromwell's men stabled their horses here, apparently. Well, it almost certainly is a ring for tying horses to, and the broken bricks at the cleared west end also suggest this; but there is no reason to think that Cromwell and the puritans were responsible. For a full century before Cromwell, and for nearly two hundred years afterwards, a church as big as this would have had a multitude of uses. Holy Trinity was built for the rituals of the Catholic church; once these were no longer allowed, a village like Blythburgh, which can never have had more than 500 people, would have seen it as an asset in other ways. It was only with the 19th century sacramental revival brought about by the Oxford Movement that we started getting all holy again about our parish churches. Perhaps it was used as an overnight stables for passing travellers on the main road; not an un-Christian use for it to be put to, I think.
In August 1577, a great storm brought down the steeple, which fell into the church and damaged the font. This was at the height of Elizabethan superstition, and the devil was blamed; his hoof marks can still be seen on the church door. Supposedly, a black dog ran through the church, killing two parishioners; he was seen the same day at St Mary, Bungay. Black Shuck is the East Anglian devil dog, the feared hound of the marshes; and Holy Trinity is the self-styled Cathedral of the Marshes, so it is appropriate that he appeared here. You can see where the font has been broken. You can also see that this was one of the rare, beautiful seven sacrament fonts, similar in style to the one at Westhall; but, like those at neighbouring Wenhaston and Southwold, it has been completely stripped of imagery. Almost certainly, this was in the 1540s, but there is a story that the font at Wenhaston was chiselled clean as part of the 19th century restoration. More importantly in any case, the storm, or the dog, or the devil, damaged the roof; it would not be properly repaired for more than 400 years. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, accounts note that Holy Trinity is not impregnable to the weather. By the 19th century, parishioners attended divine service with umbrellas. By the 1880s, it was a positively dangerous building to be in, and the Bishop of Norwich ordered it closed.
Why had Holy Trinity not been restored? Simply, this is a big church, with a tiny village. There was no rich patron, and in any case the parishioners had a passion for Methodism. Probably, repairs had been mooted, but not a wholesale restoration as we have seen at Lavenham, Long Melford and Southwold. By the 1880s, attention in England had turned to the preservation of medieval detail; in short, restorations were not as ignorant as they had been a quarter of a century earlier. Suggestions that Holy Trinity should be restored in the manner of the other three were blocked by the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings, and this owed a lot to the energy of William Morris, the Society's secretary.
The slow, patient restoration of this building took the best part of a century; indeed, when I first visited in the 1980s I was still aware of a sense of decay.
Nothing could be further from the truth today. You step into a wide, white, open space, one of England's great church interiors. There, high above you, is the glorious roof and the angels of God. The brick floors spread around the scraped font, which still bears its dedicatory inscription and standing places for participants. You turn into the central gangway, and more than twenty empty indents for brasses stretch before you. Dowsing can be blamed for the destruction of hardly any of them. In reality, you see the work of 18th and 19th century thieves and collectors.
The bench-ends are superb. The benches themselves were reconstructed in the late 19th century, supposedly from the main post of Westleton windmill, but the ends are some of the county's finest medieval images. There are partial sets of basically three series: the Seven Deadly Sins, the Seven Works of Mercy, and the Labours of the Seasons. There are also angels bearing symbols of the Holy Trinity and the Crown. There are other figures too, obscure and fragmentary and whose purpose is unclear, as if surviving figments of a broken dream. The quality of what remains makes you grieve for what has been lost.
The rood screen is a disappointment; most of it is modern, and the medieval bits perfunctory and scoured. Having said this, note how tiny the exit from the north aisle rood loft stair is. Also at this end of the church, a scattering of medieval glass, mainly angels. There is more in the south aisle, including a collection of shields of the Holy Trinity:
But step through the central aisle to see something remarkable. The priest and choir stalls are fronted by exquisite carvings of the Apostles, the Evangelists, John the Baptist, St Stephen, Mary Queen of Heaven and Christ in Majesty. Seeing these eighteen carvings is a bit like gobbling up a very large box of chocolates, but it is worth stopping to consider quite how genuine they all are. For a start, there could not have been choir stalls here in medieval times, and in any case we know that these desks and their frontages were in the north aisle chapel until the 19th century. They were used as school benches in the 17th century; they still bear holes for inkpots, and the graffiti of a bored Dutch child (his father was probably working on draining the marshes) is dated 1665. There is nothing at all like them anywhere else in Suffolk.
Whatever, the east end of the chancel and aisles are thrillingly modern, wholly devotional. In the north aisle, traditionally the Hopton chantry, extraordinary friezes of skeletons become symbols of the four evangelists behind the altar. Beside them is Peter Ball's beautiful Madonna and Child. Separating the south aisle chapel from the sanctuary is is one of Suffolk's biggest Easter sepulchres, tomb of the Hoptons. Behind the high altar, branches arranged like huge stag antlers spread dramatically. It is all just about perfect. Tucked to one side of the organ is a clockjack; Suffolk has two, and the other is down-river at Southwold. They date from the late 17th century, and presumably once struck the hours; at high church Blythburgh and Southwold today, they are used to announce the entry of the ministers.
This is a wonderful church to wander around in, the light and the air changing with the seasons, a suffused sense of the numinous presenting its different faces according to the time of day and time of year. Come here on a bright spring morning, or in the drowsy heat of a summer's day. Come on a cold winter afternoon as the colours fade and the smell of woodsmoke from neighbouring cottages weaves a spell above the old stone floors and woodwork. And before you leave, find the doorway in the south-west corner of the nave. It opens onto a low, narrow stairway. You can go up it. It leads up into the parvise storey of the south porch, now reappointed and dedicated as a tiny chapel, a peaceful spot to spend a few moments before continuing your journey.
You may be reading this entry in a far-off land; or perhaps you are here at home. Whatever, if you have not visited this church, then I urge you to do so. It is the most beautiful church in Suffolk, a wonderful art object, and it is always open in daylight. It remains one of the most significant medieval buildings in England. If you only visit one of Suffolk's churches, then make it this one
Simon Knott, 2014.
There is a point in our lives when we, the children, become the adults in the relationship with our parents.
It will come for most of us, no one tells you this will happen, and you are unprepared for it. But it comes
And each of us has a different relationship with our parents than everyone else, what's right for me, and my views, do not apply to you.
Yesterday, was the funeral of the person I have known longer than anyone else on this earth, now that my family is all gone. Margaret and Brian were married a few weeks before mine, and moved into the new build bungalow also a few weeks before my parents.
They also had one child, a son, and Douglas and I have been friends longer than I have been friends with anyone else, although he is a year younger than me.
I have my views on Margaret, but the reason I travelled back to Suffolk for her funeral, was to be there for Douggie, and give him the support he has given me through three weddings and two funerals.
Norfolk isn't far away, and the funeral and wake were taking place just a mile or two over the border from Suffolk, but the roads beyond Ipswich are poor, twisty and where there are accidents or roadworks, no real alternative routes.
I was also leaving just before six, so had to get across the Thames at Dartford and up the A12 during rush hour, so it wouldn't be easy. But at least there would be no rain.
I was up at five, dressed and washed, with time to drink a coffee before leaving. Loading the car with me and my camera bag, as I had plans in case I had time, to visit a church or two.
It was dark up the M20 to Dartford, and busy with traffic, but I made good time, and listened to a loop of old music podcasts all day, so chat and music kept me awake.
I got onto the M25 with no problem, and through the tunnels with only a slight slowdown, but on the other side there were queues.
Despite not wanting to spend money on a new railway, there is always money for road and junction improvements, even if it will just increase traffic. So it is that the M25/A12 junction is being upgraded, and with narrow lanes, speed restrictions, jams began a good four miles before the roadworks started.
I forced my way to the left hand lane, which became a filter lane, meaning it was much quicker than the remaining four lanes. But then came the roundabout. The roundabout under the motorway is the reason the improvements are needed, and queueing traffic blocks the junctions and causes even more backlogs.
Of course, traffic lights on roundabouts are never good ideas, so I was confronted with a wall of traffic, so when the light went green, I went in front of a track before it could shuffle forward and block more of the junction, then there was some clear road.
And ducking into the extreme left hand lane, I dodged past the queuing traffic that was blocking the exit from the A12, and onto clear road.
Yay.
The sky was clear, the sun about to rise, and it was going to be a glorious day.
Just north of Chelmsford, I stopped for breakfast: two sausage rolls and a coffee from Greggs, then filled up the tank and on my way north.
More traffic at Ipswich where the A12 meets the A14 to get over the Orwell, but then clear traffic again after ten minutes delay.
Soon, though, the road narrows to two lane blacktop, and all is well until you meet a slower vehicle. Like a tractor as we did soon after Whickham Market.
For 15 long minutes the tractor lead a growing snake of cars along the winding lanes until it pulled over and we could get past.
Blythburgh was always the marker when travelling back from Ipswich or beyond, that we were nearly home. he handsome church sits high, for Suffolk, overlooking the village and river which is mostly mudflats.
The busy A12 skirts close, but you get to the church via a narrow land, leaving the modern world far behind.
The church opened at nine, it was nearly half past, it was probably open before nine, and was open when I pushed the porch door.
Inside is an unspoilt space, grey wood that have witnessed the centuries so that their vigour has faded to almost no colour of all.
Its the roof people come for. Wooden beams and pairs of wooden angels. I have brought my big lens so to snap them.
My plan was to visit the large and impressive church in Southwold. I turned off the A12 and drove along the straight road into the town, where I found multiple sets of roadworks, and few places to park for a short time, anywhere near the church.
My back is achy, so I wanted somewhere close to park. Anyway, I drove round the town twice, found nowhere to park, so turned the car round and headed back north, until I came to South Cove.
South Cove is a small village, a few farms really, but has a fine, if rustic, well-proportioned church, set in a large churchyard.
And the church was open, so small the wide angle lens wasn't needed, and with windows close to the floor too, no big lens needed either.
Next town up is Kessingland, which until the 80s had the A12 running through the centre of it, but now a bypass lays to the west and the village is quiet. I don't think I had been of the main street, so I went in search of the church, and found it on Church Street.
Obviously.
I rarely research churches before I visit, so nothing prepared me for the interior of St Edmund.
It seems in the last two years, they church had sourced some banners with apt slogans on, banners which were made to look like large tapered ensigns, hanging from or along the supports of the roof.
A man was practicing on the organ, and the notes echoed round the church. Not only does the church have banners, it has ship's wheels and other nautical stuff, although most traditionalists won't like it, I think it hangs together, and if the congregation wants it thus, who are we to argue?
Next stop was South Cove, which I had forgotten I had visited before, so redid all my shots. But this time did see the panel featuring St Michael behind the font, where the rood steps began.
A small, perfect, church, perfect for a small country parish.
I take my shots and leave, driving back onto the A12 and heading into Lowestoft, my main task was to drive over the new bridge which spans Lake Lothing.
The town had been waiting since at least 1966 for a new bridge, and the 3rd crossing was opened in September, and offers fine views as you drive across.
I went to see the old family home. It has been renovated and looks splendid, and not much like it was when sold four years back, it looks cared for and lived in, which is what the buyer promised us he would do.
So then to the crematorium, a drive north through Gunton and past Hopton where Dougie lives, then through the housing estate behind the area hospital to the car park, and then wait.
Margaret was 89, had a long life, but friends of the same age are few, and families are now scattered. So, one can never be sure how many will attend. The chapel was half full at least, with people coming from Kent, Wiltshire and even California to be there.
The celebrant spoke for twenty minutes, saying nice things as they have to do. But, avoiding, or just hinting at faults. Whatever she had done in her life to Dougie, he still loved her, and he was in bits.
Afterward we lined up to shake his hand or give him and Pennie a hug, and allowed me to tell him he was the brother I never had. He was always there for me, and will be there for him.
More tears.
There was a wake at the pub in Hopton, but there was no one I knew other than Dougie and Penny, so I had a drink and made my excuses. These things are really for family and close friends, so I left at quarter to three, hoping to get home before midnight.
In the end, I made good time, I was going round Ipswich before four, and at the M25 junction less than an hour later, and was able to easily join it and zoom round to the bridge. No queues on the southbound side, but the queue northbound went all the way back to the M20 junction, so six mines.
I zoomed on.
I got home at ten past six, happy to have done it and go home in under three and a half hours. Dinner was defrosted ragu, pasta and reheated focaccia, which we were sitting down to eat twenty minutes after getting in.
Phew.
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Perhaps some counties have a church which sums them up. If there has to be one for Suffolk, it must be the church of the Most Holy Trinity, Blythburgh. Here is the late medieval Suffolk imagination writ large, as large as it gets, and not overwritten by the Anglican triumphalism of the 19th century. Blythburgh church is often compared with its near neighbour, St Edmund at Southwold, but this isn't a fair comparison - Southwold church is much grander, and full of urban confidence. Probably a better comparison is with St Margaret, Lowestoft, for there, too, the Reformation intervened before the tower could be rebuilt. The two churches have a lot in common, but Blythburgh has the saving grace. It is so fascinating, so stunningly beautiful, by virtue of a factor that is rare in Anglican parish churches: sheer neglect.
Holy Trinity, Blythburgh, is the church that Suffolk people know and love best, and because of this it has generated some extraordinary legends. The first is that Blythburgh, now a tiny village bisected by the fearsome A12 between London and the east coast ports, was once a thriving medieval town. This idea is used to explain the size of the church; in reality, it is almost certainly not the case. Blythburgh has always been small. But it did have an important medieval priory, and thus its church attracted enough wealthy piety on the eve of the Reformation to bankroll a spectacular rebuilding.
It is to Lavenham, Long Melford, Mildenhall, Southwold and here that we come to see the late 15th century Suffolk aesthetic in perfection. But for my money, Holy Trinity, Blythburgh, is the most significant medieval art object in the county, ranking alongside Salle in Norfolk. Look up at the clerestory; it seems impossible, there is so much glass, so little stone; and yet it rides the building with an air of permanence. Beneath, there is a coyness about the aisles that I prefer to the mathematics of Lavenham. Here, it could not have been done otherwise; it distils human architectural experience. If St Peter and St Paul at Lavenham is man talking to God, Holy Trinity at Blythburgh is God talking to man.
At the east end, a curious series of initials in Lombardic script stretch across the outer chancel wall. You can see an image of this at the top. It reads A-N-JS-B-S-T-M-S-A-H-K-R. This probably stands for Ad Nomina JesuS, Beati Sanctae Trinitas, Maria Sanctorem Anne Honorem Katherine Reconstructus ('In the name of the blessed Jesus, the Holy Trinity, and in honour of Holy Mary, Anne and Katherine, this was rebuilt'). A fanciful theory is that they are the initials of the wives of the donors. However, note the symbol of the Trinity in the T stone, and I think this is a clue to the whole piece.
Figures stand on pedestals atop the south side and east end. The most easterly is unusual, a crowned old man sitting on a throne directly on the gable end. This is a medieval image of God the Father, a rare survival. Moving westwards from here we find the Blessed Virgin in prayerful pose, Christ as the Saviour of the World holding an orb in one hand and blessing with the other, and then a collared bear with a ragged staff, a seated woodwose, another bear, this time with a collar and bell, and last of all a fox with a goose in its mouth, his jaws grasping the neck:
The porch is part of the late 15th century rebuilding, but it was considerably restored in the early 20th century. Interestingly, the angels crowning the battlements look medieval - but they weren't there in 1900, so must have come from somewhere else. Pretty much all the porch's features of interest date from this time. These include the small medieval font pressed into service as a holy water stoup, and image niche above the doors. This has been filled in more recent years by an image if the Holy Trinity; God the Father holds the Son suspended while a dove representing the Holy Spirit alights; you can see medieval versions of this at Framlingham and Little Glemham. Of all medieval imagery, this was the most frowned upon by puritans. An image of God the Father was thought the most suspicious of all idolatries. Indeed, as late as the 1870s, when the Reverend White edited the first popular edition of the Diary of William Dowsing, he actually congratulated Dowsing on destroying images of the Holy Trinity in the course of his 1644 progress through the counties of Suffolk and Cambridgeshire.
William Dowsing visited on the morning on April 9th, 1644. It was a Tuesday, and he had spent most of the week in the area. The previous day he'd been at Southwold and Walberswick to the east, but preceded his visit here with one to Blyford, which lies to the west, so he was probably staying overnight at the family home in Laxfield. He found twenty images in stained glass to take to task (a surprisingly small number, given the size of the place) and two hundred more that were inaccessible that morning (probably in the great east window). Three brass inscriptions incurred his wrath (but again, this is curious; there were many more) and he also ordered down the cross on the porch and the cross on the tower. Most significantly of all, he decided the angels in the roof should go.
Lots of Suffolk churches have angels in their roofs. None are like Blythburgh's. You step inside, and there they are, exactly as you've seen them in books and in photographs. They are awesome, breathtaking. There are twelve of them. Perhaps there were once twenty. How would you get them down if ordered to do so? The roof is so high, and the stencilling of IHS symbols would also have to go.
Perhaps this was already indistinct by the time Dowsing visited. Perhaps Tuesday, 9th of April 1644 was a dull day.
Several of the angels are peppered with lead shot. Here is another of those Suffolk legends; that Dowsing and the churchwardens fired muskets at the angels to try and bring them down. But when the angels were restored in the 1970s, the lead shot removed was found to be 18th century; contemporary with them there is a note in the churchwardens accounts that men were paid for shooting jackdaws living inside the building, so that probably explains where the shot came from. Here are some details of that wonderful roof:
The otherwise splendid church guide also repeats the error that the Holy Trinity symbol in the porch filled a gap that had been 'empty since 1644'. But there was certainly no image in it when Dowsing arrived here, or anywhere else in Suffolk; statues were completely outlawed by injunctions in the early years of the reign of Edward VI, almost a hundred years before the morning of Dowsing's visit.
Another feature used as evidence of puritan destruction is the ring fixed into the most westerly pillar of the north arcade. Cromwell's men stabled their horses here, apparently. Well, it almost certainly is a ring for tying horses to, and the broken bricks at the cleared west end also suggest this; but there is no reason to think that Cromwell and the puritans were responsible. For a full century before Cromwell, and for nearly two hundred years afterwards, a church as big as this would have had a multitude of uses. Holy Trinity was built for the rituals of the Catholic church; once these were no longer allowed, a village like Blythburgh, which can never have had more than 500 people, would have seen it as an asset in other ways. It was only with the 19th century sacramental revival brought about by the Oxford Movement that we started getting all holy again about our parish churches. Perhaps it was used as an overnight stables for passing travellers on the main road; not an un-Christian use for it to be put to, I think.
In August 1577, a great storm brought down the steeple, which fell into the church and damaged the font. This was at the height of Elizabethan superstition, and the devil was blamed; his hoof marks can still be seen on the church door. Supposedly, a black dog ran through the church, killing two parishioners; he was seen the same day at St Mary, Bungay. Black Shuck is the East Anglian devil dog, the feared hound of the marshes; and Holy Trinity is the self-styled Cathedral of the Marshes, so it is appropriate that he appeared here. You can see where the font has been broken. You can also see that this was one of the rare, beautiful seven sacrament fonts, similar in style to the one at Westhall; but, like those at neighbouring Wenhaston and Southwold, it has been completely stripped of imagery. Almost certainly, this was in the 1540s, but there is a story that the font at Wenhaston was chiselled clean as part of the 19th century restoration. More importantly in any case, the storm, or the dog, or the devil, damaged the roof; it would not be properly repaired for more than 400 years. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, accounts note that Holy Trinity is not impregnable to the weather. By the 19th century, parishioners attended divine service with umbrellas. By the 1880s, it was a positively dangerous building to be in, and the Bishop of Norwich ordered it closed.
Why had Holy Trinity not been restored? Simply, this is a big church, with a tiny village. There was no rich patron, and in any case the parishioners had a passion for Methodism. Probably, repairs had been mooted, but not a wholesale restoration as we have seen at Lavenham, Long Melford and Southwold. By the 1880s, attention in England had turned to the preservation of medieval detail; in short, restorations were not as ignorant as they had been a quarter of a century earlier. Suggestions that Holy Trinity should be restored in the manner of the other three were blocked by the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings, and this owed a lot to the energy of William Morris, the Society's secretary.
The slow, patient restoration of this building took the best part of a century; indeed, when I first visited in the 1980s I was still aware of a sense of decay.
Nothing could be further from the truth today. You step into a wide, white, open space, one of England's great church interiors. There, high above you, is the glorious roof and the angels of God. The brick floors spread around the scraped font, which still bears its dedicatory inscription and standing places for participants. You turn into the central gangway, and more than twenty empty indents for brasses stretch before you. Dowsing can be blamed for the destruction of hardly any of them. In reality, you see the work of 18th and 19th century thieves and collectors.
The bench-ends are superb. The benches themselves were reconstructed in the late 19th century, supposedly from the main post of Westleton windmill, but the ends are some of the county's finest medieval images. There are partial sets of basically three series: the Seven Deadly Sins, the Seven Works of Mercy, and the Labours of the Seasons. There are also angels bearing symbols of the Holy Trinity and the Crown. There are other figures too, obscure and fragmentary and whose purpose is unclear, as if surviving figments of a broken dream. The quality of what remains makes you grieve for what has been lost.
The rood screen is a disappointment; most of it is modern, and the medieval bits perfunctory and scoured. Having said this, note how tiny the exit from the north aisle rood loft stair is. Also at this end of the church, a scattering of medieval glass, mainly angels. There is more in the south aisle, including a collection of shields of the Holy Trinity:
But step through the central aisle to see something remarkable. The priest and choir stalls are fronted by exquisite carvings of the Apostles, the Evangelists, John the Baptist, St Stephen, Mary Queen of Heaven and Christ in Majesty. Seeing these eighteen carvings is a bit like gobbling up a very large box of chocolates, but it is worth stopping to consider quite how genuine they all are. For a start, there could not have been choir stalls here in medieval times, and in any case we know that these desks and their frontages were in the north aisle chapel until the 19th century. They were used as school benches in the 17th century; they still bear holes for inkpots, and the graffiti of a bored Dutch child (his father was probably working on draining the marshes) is dated 1665. There is nothing at all like them anywhere else in Suffolk.
Whatever, the east end of the chancel and aisles are thrillingly modern, wholly devotional. In the north aisle, traditionally the Hopton chantry, extraordinary friezes of skeletons become symbols of the four evangelists behind the altar. Beside them is Peter Ball's beautiful Madonna and Child. Separating the south aisle chapel from the sanctuary is is one of Suffolk's biggest Easter sepulchres, tomb of the Hoptons. Behind the high altar, branches arranged like huge stag antlers spread dramatically. It is all just about perfect. Tucked to one side of the organ is a clockjack; Suffolk has two, and the other is down-river at Southwold. They date from the late 17th century, and presumably once struck the hours; at high church Blythburgh and Southwold today, they are used to announce the entry of the ministers.
This is a wonderful church to wander around in, the light and the air changing with the seasons, a suffused sense of the numinous presenting its different faces according to the time of day and time of year. Come here on a bright spring morning, or in the drowsy heat of a summer's day. Come on a cold winter afternoon as the colours fade and the smell of woodsmoke from neighbouring cottages weaves a spell above the old stone floors and woodwork. And before you leave, find the doorway in the south-west corner of the nave. It opens onto a low, narrow stairway. You can go up it. It leads up into the parvise storey of the south porch, now reappointed and dedicated as a tiny chapel, a peaceful spot to spend a few moments before continuing your journey.
You may be reading this entry in a far-off land; or perhaps you are here at home. Whatever, if you have not visited this church, then I urge you to do so. It is the most beautiful church in Suffolk, a wonderful art object, and it is always open in daylight. It remains one of the most significant medieval buildings in England. If you only visit one of Suffolk's churches, then make it this one
Simon Knott, 2014.
You don't get a chance to shoot fireworks very often, I think it took me about half way through the show before I got things kinda under control as far as how long to keep the shutter open, after a while you can visualize what kinda of look you'll get and when to release the shutter. But it's really a big guess and luck!!
Plain City, Ohio
Seemed weird to be out there with just a T-shirt and hiking shorts, soon enough the cold weather gear will come back out. These last few days have been a godsend ending to a cool wet summer here, I'll take every moment I get and love it.
She doesn't know, but she was waiting for a man
A man who is sweet and strong in love
Who knows how to get and how to give
A man without a sense even a little bit fragile but so intense
With his smell of smoke, tobacco wine and incense
So innocent even in his mistakes.
Eugenio Finardi
Un Uomo
Iceland
The Luxury of being yourself
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We tend to celebrate light in our pictures. Understanding how light interacts with the camera is paramount to the work we do. The temperature, intensity and source of light can wield different photography effect on the same subject or scene; add ISO, aperture and speed, the camera, the lens type, focal length and filters…the combination is varied ad multi-layered and if you know how to use them all, you will come to appreciate that all lights are useful, even those surrounded by a lot of darkness.
We are guided by three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, our longing to capture in print, that which is beautiful, the constant search for the one picture, and constant barrage of new equipment and style of photography. These passions, like great winds, have blown us across the globe in search of the one and we do understand the one we do look for might be this picture right here for someone else out there.
“A concise poem about our work as stated elow
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of what was then to see.
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become imbedded inside my head.
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for he does as he pleases
up to that point he releases,
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- M R Abrahams
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There are other aspects closely related to photography that we do embark on:
All prints though us is put through a rigorous set of quality control standards long before we ever ship it to your front door. We only create gallery-quality images, and you'll receive your print in perfect condition with a lifetime guarantee.
All images on Flickr have been specifically published in a lower grade quality to amber our copyright being infringed. We have 4096x pixel full sized quality on all our photos and any of them could be ordered in high grade museum quality grade and a discount applied if the voucher WS-100 is used. Please contact us:
We do plan future trips and do catalogue our past ones, if you believe there is a beautiful place we have missed, and we are sure there must be many, please do let us know and we will investigate.
In our galleries you will find some amazing fine art photography for sale as limited edition and open edition, gallery quality prints. Only the finest materials and archival methods are used to produce these stunning photographic works of art.
We want to thank you for your interest in our work and thanks for visiting our work on Flickr, we do appreciate you and the contributions you make in furthering our interest in photography and on social media in general, we are mostly out in the field or at an event making people feel luxurious about themselves.
WS-165-221570739-71324613-1250264-1462022072226
This was taken in a little fishing village I passed through named Liscannor in Ireland. The sun was shining with an amazing blue sky. These boats were just a few feet from the marina water wanting to be fixed up and returned to sea.
This was 3 shots combined in Photomatix and touched up in PS.
I hope you enjoy today's post. If you like what you see the greatest compliment you could give me is to share this with others. I appreciate all the feedback, comments and 'likes' I get and read and respond to every one of them.
- Noah Katz
Hit 'L' and check this out on black. It really stands out great.
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All Rights Reserved - Noah Katz
There is a point in our lives when we, the children, become the adults in the relationship with our parents.
It will come for most of us, no one tells you this will happen, and you are unprepared for it. But it comes
And each of us has a different relationship with our parents than everyone else, what's right for me, and my views, do not apply to you.
Yesterday, was the funeral of the person I have known longer than anyone else on this earth, now that my family is all gone. Margaret and Brian were married a few weeks before mine, and moved into the new build bungalow also a few weeks before my parents.
They also had one child, a son, and Douglas and I have been friends longer than I have been friends with anyone else, although he is a year younger than me.
I have my views on Margaret, but the reason I travelled back to Suffolk for her funeral, was to be there for Douggie, and give him the support he has given me through three weddings and two funerals.
Norfolk isn't far away, and the funeral and wake were taking place just a mile or two over the border from Suffolk, but the roads beyond Ipswich are poor, twisty and where there are accidents or roadworks, no real alternative routes.
I was also leaving just before six, so had to get across the Thames at Dartford and up the A12 during rush hour, so it wouldn't be easy. But at least there would be no rain.
I was up at five, dressed and washed, with time to drink a coffee before leaving. Loading the car with me and my camera bag, as I had plans in case I had time, to visit a church or two.
It was dark up the M20 to Dartford, and busy with traffic, but I made good time, and listened to a loop of old music podcasts all day, so chat and music kept me awake.
I got onto the M25 with no problem, and through the tunnels with only a slight slowdown, but on the other side there were queues.
Despite not wanting to spend money on a new railway, there is always money for road and junction improvements, even if it will just increase traffic. So it is that the M25/A12 junction is being upgraded, and with narrow lanes, speed restrictions, jams began a good four miles before the roadworks started.
I forced my way to the left hand lane, which became a filter lane, meaning it was much quicker than the remaining four lanes. But then came the roundabout. The roundabout under the motorway is the reason the improvements are needed, and queueing traffic blocks the junctions and causes even more backlogs.
Of course, traffic lights on roundabouts are never good ideas, so I was confronted with a wall of traffic, so when the light went green, I went in front of a track before it could shuffle forward and block more of the junction, then there was some clear road.
And ducking into the extreme left hand lane, I dodged past the queuing traffic that was blocking the exit from the A12, and onto clear road.
Yay.
The sky was clear, the sun about to rise, and it was going to be a glorious day.
Just north of Chelmsford, I stopped for breakfast: two sausage rolls and a coffee from Greggs, then filled up the tank and on my way north.
More traffic at Ipswich where the A12 meets the A14 to get over the Orwell, but then clear traffic again after ten minutes delay.
Soon, though, the road narrows to two lane blacktop, and all is well until you meet a slower vehicle. Like a tractor as we did soon after Whickham Market.
For 15 long minutes the tractor lead a growing snake of cars along the winding lanes until it pulled over and we could get past.
Blythburgh was always the marker when travelling back from Ipswich or beyond, that we were nearly home. he handsome church sits high, for Suffolk, overlooking the village and river which is mostly mudflats.
The busy A12 skirts close, but you get to the church via a narrow land, leaving the modern world far behind.
The church opened at nine, it was nearly half past, it was probably open before nine, and was open when I pushed the porch door.
Inside is an unspoilt space, grey wood that have witnessed the centuries so that their vigour has faded to almost no colour of all.
Its the roof people come for. Wooden beams and pairs of wooden angels. I have brought my big lens so to snap them.
My plan was to visit the large and impressive church in Southwold. I turned off the A12 and drove along the straight road into the town, where I found multiple sets of roadworks, and few places to park for a short time, anywhere near the church.
My back is achy, so I wanted somewhere close to park. Anyway, I drove round the town twice, found nowhere to park, so turned the car round and headed back north, until I came to South Cove.
South Cove is a small village, a few farms really, but has a fine, if rustic, well-proportioned church, set in a large churchyard.
And the church was open, so small the wide angle lens wasn't needed, and with windows close to the floor too, no big lens needed either.
Next town up is Kessingland, which until the 80s had the A12 running through the centre of it, but now a bypass lays to the west and the village is quiet. I don't think I had been of the main street, so I went in search of the church, and found it on Church Street.
Obviously.
I rarely research churches before I visit, so nothing prepared me for the interior of St Edmund.
It seems in the last two years, they church had sourced some banners with apt slogans on, banners which were made to look like large tapered ensigns, hanging from or along the supports of the roof.
A man was practicing on the organ, and the notes echoed round the church. Not only does the church have banners, it has ship's wheels and other nautical stuff, although most traditionalists won't like it, I think it hangs together, and if the congregation wants it thus, who are we to argue?
Next stop was South Cove, which I had forgotten I had visited before, so redid all my shots. But this time did see the panel featuring St Michael behind the font, where the rood steps began.
A small, perfect, church, perfect for a small country parish.
I take my shots and leave, driving back onto the A12 and heading into Lowestoft, my main task was to drive over the new bridge which spans Lake Lothing.
The town had been waiting since at least 1966 for a new bridge, and the 3rd crossing was opened in September, and offers fine views as you drive across.
I went to see the old family home. It has been renovated and looks splendid, and not much like it was when sold four years back, it looks cared for and lived in, which is what the buyer promised us he would do.
So then to the crematorium, a drive north through Gunton and past Hopton where Dougie lives, then through the housing estate behind the area hospital to the car park, and then wait.
Margaret was 89, had a long life, but friends of the same age are few, and families are now scattered. So, one can never be sure how many will attend. The chapel was half full at least, with people coming from Kent, Wiltshire and even California to be there.
The celebrant spoke for twenty minutes, saying nice things as they have to do. But, avoiding, or just hinting at faults. Whatever she had done in her life to Dougie, he still loved her, and he was in bits.
Afterward we lined up to shake his hand or give him and Pennie a hug, and allowed me to tell him he was the brother I never had. He was always there for me, and will be there for him.
More tears.
There was a wake at the pub in Hopton, but there was no one I knew other than Dougie and Penny, so I had a drink and made my excuses. These things are really for family and close friends, so I left at quarter to three, hoping to get home before midnight.
In the end, I made good time, I was going round Ipswich before four, and at the M25 junction less than an hour later, and was able to easily join it and zoom round to the bridge. No queues on the southbound side, but the queue northbound went all the way back to the M20 junction, so six mines.
I zoomed on.
I got home at ten past six, happy to have done it and go home in under three and a half hours. Dinner was defrosted ragu, pasta and reheated focaccia, which we were sitting down to eat twenty minutes after getting in.
Phew.
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Perhaps some counties have a church which sums them up. If there has to be one for Suffolk, it must be the church of the Most Holy Trinity, Blythburgh. Here is the late medieval Suffolk imagination writ large, as large as it gets, and not overwritten by the Anglican triumphalism of the 19th century. Blythburgh church is often compared with its near neighbour, St Edmund at Southwold, but this isn't a fair comparison - Southwold church is much grander, and full of urban confidence. Probably a better comparison is with St Margaret, Lowestoft, for there, too, the Reformation intervened before the tower could be rebuilt. The two churches have a lot in common, but Blythburgh has the saving grace. It is so fascinating, so stunningly beautiful, by virtue of a factor that is rare in Anglican parish churches: sheer neglect.
Holy Trinity, Blythburgh, is the church that Suffolk people know and love best, and because of this it has generated some extraordinary legends. The first is that Blythburgh, now a tiny village bisected by the fearsome A12 between London and the east coast ports, was once a thriving medieval town. This idea is used to explain the size of the church; in reality, it is almost certainly not the case. Blythburgh has always been small. But it did have an important medieval priory, and thus its church attracted enough wealthy piety on the eve of the Reformation to bankroll a spectacular rebuilding.
It is to Lavenham, Long Melford, Mildenhall, Southwold and here that we come to see the late 15th century Suffolk aesthetic in perfection. But for my money, Holy Trinity, Blythburgh, is the most significant medieval art object in the county, ranking alongside Salle in Norfolk. Look up at the clerestory; it seems impossible, there is so much glass, so little stone; and yet it rides the building with an air of permanence. Beneath, there is a coyness about the aisles that I prefer to the mathematics of Lavenham. Here, it could not have been done otherwise; it distils human architectural experience. If St Peter and St Paul at Lavenham is man talking to God, Holy Trinity at Blythburgh is God talking to man.
At the east end, a curious series of initials in Lombardic script stretch across the outer chancel wall. You can see an image of this at the top. It reads A-N-JS-B-S-T-M-S-A-H-K-R. This probably stands for Ad Nomina JesuS, Beati Sanctae Trinitas, Maria Sanctorem Anne Honorem Katherine Reconstructus ('In the name of the blessed Jesus, the Holy Trinity, and in honour of Holy Mary, Anne and Katherine, this was rebuilt'). A fanciful theory is that they are the initials of the wives of the donors. However, note the symbol of the Trinity in the T stone, and I think this is a clue to the whole piece.
Figures stand on pedestals atop the south side and east end. The most easterly is unusual, a crowned old man sitting on a throne directly on the gable end. This is a medieval image of God the Father, a rare survival. Moving westwards from here we find the Blessed Virgin in prayerful pose, Christ as the Saviour of the World holding an orb in one hand and blessing with the other, and then a collared bear with a ragged staff, a seated woodwose, another bear, this time with a collar and bell, and last of all a fox with a goose in its mouth, his jaws grasping the neck:
The porch is part of the late 15th century rebuilding, but it was considerably restored in the early 20th century. Interestingly, the angels crowning the battlements look medieval - but they weren't there in 1900, so must have come from somewhere else. Pretty much all the porch's features of interest date from this time. These include the small medieval font pressed into service as a holy water stoup, and image niche above the doors. This has been filled in more recent years by an image if the Holy Trinity; God the Father holds the Son suspended while a dove representing the Holy Spirit alights; you can see medieval versions of this at Framlingham and Little Glemham. Of all medieval imagery, this was the most frowned upon by puritans. An image of God the Father was thought the most suspicious of all idolatries. Indeed, as late as the 1870s, when the Reverend White edited the first popular edition of the Diary of William Dowsing, he actually congratulated Dowsing on destroying images of the Holy Trinity in the course of his 1644 progress through the counties of Suffolk and Cambridgeshire.
William Dowsing visited on the morning on April 9th, 1644. It was a Tuesday, and he had spent most of the week in the area. The previous day he'd been at Southwold and Walberswick to the east, but preceded his visit here with one to Blyford, which lies to the west, so he was probably staying overnight at the family home in Laxfield. He found twenty images in stained glass to take to task (a surprisingly small number, given the size of the place) and two hundred more that were inaccessible that morning (probably in the great east window). Three brass inscriptions incurred his wrath (but again, this is curious; there were many more) and he also ordered down the cross on the porch and the cross on the tower. Most significantly of all, he decided the angels in the roof should go.
Lots of Suffolk churches have angels in their roofs. None are like Blythburgh's. You step inside, and there they are, exactly as you've seen them in books and in photographs. They are awesome, breathtaking. There are twelve of them. Perhaps there were once twenty. How would you get them down if ordered to do so? The roof is so high, and the stencilling of IHS symbols would also have to go.
Perhaps this was already indistinct by the time Dowsing visited. Perhaps Tuesday, 9th of April 1644 was a dull day.
Several of the angels are peppered with lead shot. Here is another of those Suffolk legends; that Dowsing and the churchwardens fired muskets at the angels to try and bring them down. But when the angels were restored in the 1970s, the lead shot removed was found to be 18th century; contemporary with them there is a note in the churchwardens accounts that men were paid for shooting jackdaws living inside the building, so that probably explains where the shot came from. Here are some details of that wonderful roof:
The otherwise splendid church guide also repeats the error that the Holy Trinity symbol in the porch filled a gap that had been 'empty since 1644'. But there was certainly no image in it when Dowsing arrived here, or anywhere else in Suffolk; statues were completely outlawed by injunctions in the early years of the reign of Edward VI, almost a hundred years before the morning of Dowsing's visit.
Another feature used as evidence of puritan destruction is the ring fixed into the most westerly pillar of the north arcade. Cromwell's men stabled their horses here, apparently. Well, it almost certainly is a ring for tying horses to, and the broken bricks at the cleared west end also suggest this; but there is no reason to think that Cromwell and the puritans were responsible. For a full century before Cromwell, and for nearly two hundred years afterwards, a church as big as this would have had a multitude of uses. Holy Trinity was built for the rituals of the Catholic church; once these were no longer allowed, a village like Blythburgh, which can never have had more than 500 people, would have seen it as an asset in other ways. It was only with the 19th century sacramental revival brought about by the Oxford Movement that we started getting all holy again about our parish churches. Perhaps it was used as an overnight stables for passing travellers on the main road; not an un-Christian use for it to be put to, I think.
In August 1577, a great storm brought down the steeple, which fell into the church and damaged the font. This was at the height of Elizabethan superstition, and the devil was blamed; his hoof marks can still be seen on the church door. Supposedly, a black dog ran through the church, killing two parishioners; he was seen the same day at St Mary, Bungay. Black Shuck is the East Anglian devil dog, the feared hound of the marshes; and Holy Trinity is the self-styled Cathedral of the Marshes, so it is appropriate that he appeared here. You can see where the font has been broken. You can also see that this was one of the rare, beautiful seven sacrament fonts, similar in style to the one at Westhall; but, like those at neighbouring Wenhaston and Southwold, it has been completely stripped of imagery. Almost certainly, this was in the 1540s, but there is a story that the font at Wenhaston was chiselled clean as part of the 19th century restoration. More importantly in any case, the storm, or the dog, or the devil, damaged the roof; it would not be properly repaired for more than 400 years. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, accounts note that Holy Trinity is not impregnable to the weather. By the 19th century, parishioners attended divine service with umbrellas. By the 1880s, it was a positively dangerous building to be in, and the Bishop of Norwich ordered it closed.
Why had Holy Trinity not been restored? Simply, this is a big church, with a tiny village. There was no rich patron, and in any case the parishioners had a passion for Methodism. Probably, repairs had been mooted, but not a wholesale restoration as we have seen at Lavenham, Long Melford and Southwold. By the 1880s, attention in England had turned to the preservation of medieval detail; in short, restorations were not as ignorant as they had been a quarter of a century earlier. Suggestions that Holy Trinity should be restored in the manner of the other three were blocked by the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings, and this owed a lot to the energy of William Morris, the Society's secretary.
The slow, patient restoration of this building took the best part of a century; indeed, when I first visited in the 1980s I was still aware of a sense of decay.
Nothing could be further from the truth today. You step into a wide, white, open space, one of England's great church interiors. There, high above you, is the glorious roof and the angels of God. The brick floors spread around the scraped font, which still bears its dedicatory inscription and standing places for participants. You turn into the central gangway, and more than twenty empty indents for brasses stretch before you. Dowsing can be blamed for the destruction of hardly any of them. In reality, you see the work of 18th and 19th century thieves and collectors.
The bench-ends are superb. The benches themselves were reconstructed in the late 19th century, supposedly from the main post of Westleton windmill, but the ends are some of the county's finest medieval images. There are partial sets of basically three series: the Seven Deadly Sins, the Seven Works of Mercy, and the Labours of the Seasons. There are also angels bearing symbols of the Holy Trinity and the Crown. There are other figures too, obscure and fragmentary and whose purpose is unclear, as if surviving figments of a broken dream. The quality of what remains makes you grieve for what has been lost.
The rood screen is a disappointment; most of it is modern, and the medieval bits perfunctory and scoured. Having said this, note how tiny the exit from the north aisle rood loft stair is. Also at this end of the church, a scattering of medieval glass, mainly angels. There is more in the south aisle, including a collection of shields of the Holy Trinity:
But step through the central aisle to see something remarkable. The priest and choir stalls are fronted by exquisite carvings of the Apostles, the Evangelists, John the Baptist, St Stephen, Mary Queen of Heaven and Christ in Majesty. Seeing these eighteen carvings is a bit like gobbling up a very large box of chocolates, but it is worth stopping to consider quite how genuine they all are. For a start, there could not have been choir stalls here in medieval times, and in any case we know that these desks and their frontages were in the north aisle chapel until the 19th century. They were used as school benches in the 17th century; they still bear holes for inkpots, and the graffiti of a bored Dutch child (his father was probably working on draining the marshes) is dated 1665. There is nothing at all like them anywhere else in Suffolk.
Whatever, the east end of the chancel and aisles are thrillingly modern, wholly devotional. In the north aisle, traditionally the Hopton chantry, extraordinary friezes of skeletons become symbols of the four evangelists behind the altar. Beside them is Peter Ball's beautiful Madonna and Child. Separating the south aisle chapel from the sanctuary is is one of Suffolk's biggest Easter sepulchres, tomb of the Hoptons. Behind the high altar, branches arranged like huge stag antlers spread dramatically. It is all just about perfect. Tucked to one side of the organ is a clockjack; Suffolk has two, and the other is down-river at Southwold. They date from the late 17th century, and presumably once struck the hours; at high church Blythburgh and Southwold today, they are used to announce the entry of the ministers.
This is a wonderful church to wander around in, the light and the air changing with the seasons, a suffused sense of the numinous presenting its different faces according to the time of day and time of year. Come here on a bright spring morning, or in the drowsy heat of a summer's day. Come on a cold winter afternoon as the colours fade and the smell of woodsmoke from neighbouring cottages weaves a spell above the old stone floors and woodwork. And before you leave, find the doorway in the south-west corner of the nave. It opens onto a low, narrow stairway. You can go up it. It leads up into the parvise storey of the south porch, now reappointed and dedicated as a tiny chapel, a peaceful spot to spend a few moments before continuing your journey.
You may be reading this entry in a far-off land; or perhaps you are here at home. Whatever, if you have not visited this church, then I urge you to do so. It is the most beautiful church in Suffolk, a wonderful art object, and it is always open in daylight. It remains one of the most significant medieval buildings in England. If you only visit one of Suffolk's churches, then make it this one
Simon Knott, 2014.
Pictures from a visit to the Skegness Natureland & Seal Sanctuary during March 2024. The organisation rescue beached and seals needing treatment and provide treatment in the purpose built seal hospital. This is in my opinion worthy of all the support they can get and well worth a visit,
The Luxury of being yourself
We have selected pictures on our website, but can always add more depending on the requests we do get and the current trend in the world of luxury fine art:
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We tend to celebrate light in our pictures. Understanding how light interacts with the camera is paramount to the work we do. The temperature, intensity and source of light can wield different photography effect on the same subject or scene; add ISO, aperture and speed, the camera, the lens type, focal length and filters…the combination is varied ad multi-layered and if you know how to use them all, you will come to appreciate that all lights are useful, even those surrounded by a lot of darkness.
We are guided by three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, our longing to capture in print, that which is beautiful, the constant search for the one picture, and constant barrage of new equipment and style of photography. These passions, like great winds, have blown us across the globe in search of the one and we do understand the one we do look for might be this picture right here for someone else out there.
“A concise poem about our work as stated elow
A place without being
a thought without thinking
creatively, two dimensions
suspended animation
possibly a perfect imitation
of what was then to see.
A frozen memory in synthetic colour
or black and white instead,
fantasy dreams in magazines
become imbedded inside my head.
Artistic views
surrealistic hues,
a photographer’s instinctive eye:
for he does as he pleases
up to that point he releases,
then develops a visual high.
- M R Abrahams
Some of the gear we use at William Stone Fine Art are listed here:
Some of our latest work & more!
Embedded galleries within a gallery on various aspects of Photography:
There are other aspects closely related to photography that we do embark on:
All prints though us is put through a rigorous set of quality control standards long before we ever ship it to your front door. We only create gallery-quality images, and you'll receive your print in perfect condition with a lifetime guarantee.
All images on Flickr have been specifically published in a lower grade quality to amber our copyright being infringed. We have 4096x pixel full sized quality on all our photos and any of them could be ordered in high grade museum quality grade and a discount applied if the voucher WS-100 is used. Please contact us:
We do plan future trips and do catalogue our past ones, if you believe there is a beautiful place we have missed, and we are sure there must be many, please do let us know and we will investigate.
In our galleries you will find some amazing fine art photography for sale as limited edition and open edition, gallery quality prints. Only the finest materials and archival methods are used to produce these stunning photographic works of art.
We want to thank you for your interest in our work and thanks for visiting our work on Flickr, we do appreciate you and the contributions you make in furthering our interest in photography and on social media in general, we are mostly out in the field or at an event making people feel luxurious about themselves.
How frustrating - i finally get my studio built and heated and i am toooo busy to get and play. Stuff just *waiting* patiently to get stashed nicely.
We ended our adventures of the day with another piece of original preserved history. Not abandoned! And that’s the best part. This place is original and so cared for. And by a lady who just made the experience so fun! Dear Mrs.Lehr, Linda’s first grade teacher!
Mrs.Lehr’s property has been in her family for ages. And she has the stories to prove it! And although the main house is gone now, many other buildings remain.
Mrs.Lehr is a classic “German from Russia” ND lady and she gave us a great tour of her place!
Here’s the main event - the summer kitchen! And it stands, much as it once was!
Look how well preserved this place is! Mrs.Lehr kept it all! And told us the history of each pot and pan and dish - and even what food traditionally went inside each dish!
Everything is original with a history. I think it’s a lovely kitchen!
I liked that flamingo coffee thing.
I really enjoyed our tour. If you ever are lucky enough to get the chance have Mrs.Lehr give you the tour. By the end you know ALL the family history! And she is so funny and very frank in that ND German woman way.
It was a great ending to a day of adventure. And just so wonderfully North Dakotan! Like, this tour was as North Dakotan as it gets! And I love that. I think that if you know North Dakota, you know what I mean.
Thank you Mrs.Lehr for the tour, thank you Donna for connecting us with Mrs.Lehr and the Lehr Tabernacle and her old homestead, and thank you most of all to Bethany and family for organizing this entire day, feeding us, and being the best and kindest hosts! I may not have picked up a camera again if it wasn’t for our day of exploring North Dakota. It means the world to me!
If you'd like to read the entire blog post, here's the link: outhereontheprairie.tumblr.com/post/174666952387/mrslehrs...
Six Days Seven Nights, New Beetle - Day 2: Chiricahua National Monument.
We made a loop out of the Ed Riggs trail and the Hailstone trail, returning via the Echo Canyon trail. Hoodoos, gnarly trees, and a raven aerial ballet, and to top it all off, a singing canyon wren. In November. A Fan-freakin-tastic hike overall. One or two photos didn't seem like enough, walking among the hoodoos was very cool indeed. So instead of posting one or two shots, here's a photo tour of the route.
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We had no plans for Thanksgiving except to stay home in the unseasonable cold so Mrs M took a few personal days off. Armed with reservations via Hotwire (you never know what you're going to get) and a rental car, we set out for a new 7 days, 6 nights adventure.