Tag: diamond geezer

Finding London’s Most Central Sheep

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London blogger Diamond Geezer (see 6000 miles… passim) located London’s Most Central Sheep in this post. And the rules were pretty simple:

I’m only interested in live sheep, so not a cuddly toy in Hamleys nor lamb cutlets at The Ritz. I’m not interested in temporary sheep like those that get driven over Southwark Bridge in September or shorn at the Lambeth Country Show in June. Also by ‘most central’ I mean closest to the centre of London which is generally agreed to be Trafalgar Square, specifically the statue of Charles I at the top of Whitehall. Hopefully that’s clear.

And using some traditional foot-based detective work and some internet sleuthing, he found London’s Most Central Sheep:

Here she is. She’s in the sheep enclosure at Vauxhall City Farm, lapping away at a bowl of water resting on a spare tyre.

And all was well with the world.

Except…

That isn’t London’s Most Central Sheep. In fact, it seems likely that it might only be London’s Third Most Central Sheep. DG had overlooked Oasis Farm Waterloo, less than a mile from Trafalgar Square.

And so he has revisited the question. And he found two sheep there. So those would be London’s Most Central Sheep.

Except…

There may be an additional issue.

…they might have been goats. Their heads were hidden so it was hard to be 100% sure what kind of cloven animal they were. The Oasis Farm Instagram feed has a number of photos of sheep but also some of goats so it is possible I saw the wrong animal.
Their website also says “our farm animals rotate from Jamie’s Farm in Wiltshire”, suggesting they’re not always here, and also that “we usually have a ewe with her lambs”, which before lambing season may mean they currently don’t. Alas this isn’t cut and dried.

At the end of the day, it’s reasonable to say that he has accomplished what he set out to do.
He has found London’s Most Central Sheep. It’s just that it is either 0.8 miles or 1.4 miles from Charles I statue in Trafalgar Square. And if it turns out that he was correct in the first post, and it is 1.4 miles, then he’s also managed to find London’s Most Central Goat.

Bonus points right there.

I’m sorry?
You’re saying that no-one would ever need to know where to find London’s Most Central Sheep?

Well, that just sounds like a ewe problem.

My photography summed up

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And summed up perfectly too, in this entry towards the end of an epic description of a day out in Bournemouth by diamond geezer:

20:45 Start looking through today’s photos (I appear to have taken 342).
Most are not as good as I’d hoped.

This is exactly the case with my photography – although usually on an entirely different south coast.

But that’s the way with photography today, isn’t it? And at least we have the luxury of taking that number of photographs in an attempt to capture something decent. Remember when you only had 24 or 36 shots for an entire holiday? And the expense of film and developing? That made each photograph precious: from the composition to the actual, tangible image at the end of the process.
That said, despite the fact that they now cost “nothing”, the fact that we’re still chucking 90+% of them away doesn’t speak much for our talent, does it?

The questions remain

Proportionately, are we now or were we then taking better photographs? And then, are our best photographs now better than our best ones then?

Sorry, I don’t think I have a considered answer, although I’d like to think that I’m improving bit by bit.

Meanwhile, talking of that photography, some of it has been Micklethwaited – which could be the catchall verb for “thinned, improved, made more interesting”. Something else that wouldn’t have worked very well or have been anywhere near as straightforward with a physical, old skool photograph.

LCY

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Nice shot of London City Airport approach from Flickrer/Blogger Diamond Geezer. Here’s the blog that I’ve popped  onto the blogroll for 2015.

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This was taken back in 2007. I wonder if you can still get as close to the flightpath these days?

Unconnected, and quite by chance, I’ve just noticed that Diamond Geezer was over in the Isle of Man last July. Nice.