Saughton Park, Edinburgh, 29 December 2014
Saughton Park, Edinburgh, 29 December 2014.

A belated Merry Christmas, and a premature Happy New Year. Here’s the winter sun; mouseover for the moon.

With growing children it’s harder than it once was to use this time to write my traditional end-of-year lists, but I’ll try to get a few up before the week is out. I was going to redesign the site for 2015, even port it over to WordPress, but wintry inertia has defeated me so far. Nevertheless, There Will Be Resolutions of an online nature, so pop back sometime to see the snail’s new shell.

31 December 2014

Seasons

I’ve taken so many photos at Jupiter Artland over the past few years that one gallery wasn’t enough. This one is art- and architecture-free, featuring instead its changing flora across the seasons.

9 December 2014

Jupiter Artland

For the past few years, each spring and autumn, we’ve been taking our kids along to some art classes for young children held at one of the most impressive places in Edinburgh, Jupiter Artland. It’s in the grounds of a private stately home, but is open to the public each summer. You’ll find plenty of photographs of its monumental artworks online, but this is a gallery of three years’ worth of my own, taken in conditions the public doesn’t usually get to see, and including some temporary works now removed. The stars of the site are Cells of Life by Charles Jencks (who was featured here previously) and Love Bomb by Marc Quinn, but there’s a lot more to see, including some works not shown here. If you ever get the chance, make the trip.

26 November 2014

Was Blocked (Not Blocked)

The Open Rights Group Blocked project has found that one in five sites are blocked in Britain by web filters put in place by one or more ISPs in response to government hyperventilation. When I checked on Wednesday, MetaFilter, Freaky Trigger and this very site were all blocked by TalkTalk, which would have killed half of my web reading and writing if we’d switched to them as we’d been considering. It looked almost as if TalkTalk were blocking all blogs by default, which seemed insane. They’re showing as okay now, so maybe they’ve been scrambling to fix things behind the scenes.

Maybe they didn’t like this ancient page of mine about how filters are fundamentally broken.

4 July 2014

Tasmania ’82

After cleaning up their dust specks and scratches in Photoshop, I’ve now added a gallery of my earliest black-and-white photos to Detail. Camping trips on the coast, day walks in the bush, ferries out to islands, and our quiet country town: this was my world at age fourteen.

Read More · 24 June 2014

Yet More Castles of Scotland

As part of a gradual process of belatedly adding galleries to Detail, here’s a third collection of Scottish castles to add to the ones I made a decade ago. The castles range from the rugged and rural to the urban and urbane, and include a few revisits of old favourites. As someone who grew up in a land where the only castles were bouncy, I can never get enough of the real ones.

28 January 2014

Your One-Stop Running-Away-From-Things Shop

Happy new 95.34% of a year. As you can guess, I’ve been busy elsewhere, and that’s likely to be true for a while, so the blog side of things might be quieter than usual in 2014. But I’m keeping the lights on just in case.

In the meantime, here are two clips of people running away, from floods and fireworks.

17 January 2014

Site News in 2013