I’m hopefully somewhere up in the hot, dry North, so here’s a moister, more verdant image from a beagle walk last weekend:
For all that the weather is on the turn, Cape Town is still pretty soggy underfoot. The beagle went knee deep into the mud, but that was ok, because we didn’t take my car down to the Green Belt for our wander.
It’s called the Spire of Dublin and I’m surprised that there isn’t more publicity around it – it’s an elegant, yet dominating structure.
Costing €4,000,000 and erected 20 years ago, it stands 120m tall right over the city centre.
It’s quite something:
That’s a photo from a local hotel website. I couldn’t really find a decent angle to get a similar shot when we were there (and I didn’t want a pic with 74,000 Spanish schoolkids in it anyway), so I went really close up and did this instead:
This is from the 10m diameter base, looking… well… up.
I have a couple of others which are respectively less and more abstract than this one, but I think this happy medium is probably the best of the three.
The structure being made of silver steel and the sky being steel grey make for nicely camouflaged boundaries.
Dublin big thing. Coming soon on the blog: London big things.
We’re back again. It’s been an amazing break, with some fantastic experiences and some good family fun, but we are now trying to combat the return to reality. Filthy weather – the like of which I hadn’t seen since Dublin or Chesterfield – greeted us yesterday when we landed, and that hadn’t improved by the time I headed out for a game of football on a single hour’s sleep. That actually turned out to be a lot of fun.
Today was better, meaning that I could make a start on the mountain of washing that needed to be done, and work on getting the house back shipshape. There’s been a bit of storm damage, the pool needed a bit of cleaning and there are a few issues in the kitchen. Hopefully nothing too massive.
And then on to the shops and then pick the kids up and head out to riding in Hout Bay.
It’s like we never left.
So photos will have to wait for the moment, although of course, there are many hundreds of them.
But don’t worry: just as soon as they are ready, I’ll be sharing them all.
Well, some of them, at least. I haven’t really looked at them in any detail as yet, but in “skim reading” them, they do look a little disappointing. Hopefully there will be a few keepers in there.
But as I said, that won’t be for a while.
Indeed. Revisiting a photo I took waaaay back in April 2019 – ironically just before we headed overseas for the last time. This was on a farm just outside Piketberg, a couple of hours north of Cape Town.
Simple enough stuff – the farmer has done most of the work for me here – but there’s still something quite cool about grabbing a drone shot like this. And it all comes back to that change of perspective, despite trees and vines being something that you see along many of the roadsides in the Western Cape.
Squint a bit and suddenly you could be looking at an urban grid or a circuit board. But I promise that these are very much lemon trees and table grapes.
Note: you’re not allowed to mention Piketberg without referencing this post. It’s The Rules!
A quick trip down to Agulhas to check that all is in order after the recent bad weather.
It mostly was, but a few important jobs and repairs got done, and now it really is.
A beautiful day, making me wonder if there actually had been any rain. But yes, the fields were sodden, and then I saw the state of the road south of Bredasdorp. The Agulhas Plain does serve as a giant runoff from the Soetmuisberg, but generally the roads remain clear. Not today, with the knee-deep water on the A319 allowing only the larger vehicles through. Thankfully, I was in one of them, and so it worked out ok.
Once here, managed a quick walk as well, and some photos, none of which were amazing, but that isn’t an issue.
Favourite one was probably this White-Fronted Plover on the beach here. And even then, maybe more for the pebbles than the bird.
Back home now, and ready to grab a quick dinner before loadshedding. Will the first clouds of the cold front hold off long enough to grab a quick shot of the Milky Way while the village lies in darkness (apart from the wanker with the generator in his garage)?
I guess you’ll find out right here tomorrow.