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Thursday, 11 September 2014

A Cornwall mini break

On Friday, last week, I set off for a much needed mini holiday to Cornwall, with my boyfriend. It had been over a year since I was last in Cornwall (and even then it was only for a day before heading to Devon camping with my old sea swimming buddies) – which after three years of living there is a pretty long time to not smell the salty air and admire the stunning scenery. It was also Steve’s first experience of, not only Cornwall but, the South West of England in general (I know, what?!) so it was all very exciting.

We had amazing weather for pretty much the whole four/five days we were there and managed to fit a lot of different things in – having a car is really a necessity if you want to see Cornwall at its best. We stayed in Falmouth at a lovely B&B that both I and my parents have stayed at previously and although we spent a fair amount of time in Fal – we ate there every night – we also had days out in other parts of Cornwall.

It was a fairly smooth drive down to Falmouth  (about 6/7 hours including stopping for about half an hour) and we arrived right on time to check into the B&B at 3pm. It wasn't overly sunny on arrival but it was warm. We visited the important places – the beach and Trago Mills – and also went for a night time stroll around Pendennis point after dinner at Gylly Beach cafĂ©. But it turns out it gets very, very dark around Pendennis in the evening…

When can I move in?
Some excellent new informational and directional signage around Falmouth.
Steve befriending the hotel kitty – we later found out he is called Buster.

On Saturday, our first full day, we headed off bright and early to the Eden Project. I’ve been a few times before but it was great to see that, despite that, there were lots of new things. Plus there was a dinosaur attraction on for the school holidays – even though the school holidays were over!

Dinos! The T-rex moved and everything.
Baobab smoothie was absolutely delicious.
Ice cream too (and pretty signs/typography).
There was an apparent lack of As, I had to make the two in this out of C and Ls.
We spent way too long drawing dinosaurs with wax crayons in the kid’s Design-a-saur area.
And proud of our drawings we were too… well, someone was.
Back in Falmouth for late afternoon, we visited Gylly beach again to dip our feet in the sea.
And witnessed a levitating ship.
Probably my favourite trees in Falmouth.
And this shows how close to the sea we were staying!

Sunday was an even busier day with two different locations that I had planned for us to visit…

In the morning we headed down to Lizard village and the most southerly point in the UK. We admired the lighthouse, landscape and bird-life, and then even explored a small beach below the ‘point’. As always with The Lizard, it was rather windy… but some sunshine too!

Lizard Lighthouse.
Tourist!
I have photographed this shop’s sign before, and I photographed it again. I like it.

When we were done getting blown around at The Lizard, we hopped back in the car and drove further west (although we had to drive north first, as it was the most southerly point afterall!). We parked up at Marazion which is near Penzance and home to St Michael’s Mount – ‘the island castle’ as Steve referred to it as. This was something that he had been wanting to see ever since I first suggested we go to Cornwall, although I didn’t actually even realise that the building was a castle. We later learnt that it started life as a chapel and extra bits got added over the years – so it’s not a castle like Pendennis or St Mawes. Still awesome though.

We had to get the boat over as the tide was in and the walk-able route was inaccessible
(but I’ve walked over before).
The perfect shot – no people.
What. A. View.

For our final full day in Cornwall, on Monday, we left the car at the B&B for the whole day and travelled by boat and train instead. Firstly, we took the little ferry over to St Mawes to see Pendennis’s neighbouring castle and generally soak up the sun.

Boat ‘selfie’.
We sat on a bench here for a little while. The view was so stunning, no photo would do it justice.

After that, when back in Falmouth, we popped into Truro on the train for a spot of record shopping. Steve bought me Springsteen’s The River, which is my first Springsteen record (I have been listening tonight and it’s very good – obviously I’ve listened to it before, but not on vinyl). I took no photos in Truro. The only thing of real interest photographically is Truro cathedral, which still has scaffolding around it and it also had a funeral party surrounding it so seemed inappropriate to be snapping pictures.

We finished our last night in Falmouth with a tasty plate of fish and chips at Harbour Lights. It was a bit chilly outside, by the time we went out for dinner, to sit and eat on the pier, so we ate in the restaurant. Lovely it was too.


All of these photographs were taken on my iPhone (some through Instagram, as you can probably tell) but I did also take some photos on my Pentax film camera which I will get developed and scan in at some point. I just have half of another film to use up first.

As always, it was difficult to leave Falmouth and Cornwall once again but Steve seemed to like it very much, so I hope we’ll be back before too long. If only it wasn’t quite so far away…

Monday, 1 September 2014

Goodbye Ghibli

Not so long after Hayao Miyazaki, co-founder, director, producer and animator, announced he was retiring from Studio Ghibli, came the unsurprising news that the studio was to cease making movies (at least for the foreseeable future). Obviously it was going to be difficult to continue without Miyazaki anyway, the anime master that he is, but ultimately hand-drawn-animation is an expensive and time-consuming business.

‘Animators the world over have been inspired by Ghibli films; this is Animation Domination High-Def's small tribute to Studio Ghibli. We want to say Thank You. And we hope they don't go away for good.’

A fun, little bit silly but sweet tribute:

Goodbye, Ghibli by Animation Domination High-Def on YouTube

And if you don’t know what Studio Ghibli is or who Hayao Miyazaki is or any of these films:

Tribute to Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli from zeta69 on Vimeo.

The Studio Ghibli museum in Tokyo was one of the highlights of my visit to Japan earlier this year and I, like many others across the world, adore the movies. Lucky for me there are still a few I haven’t seen. Although I love watching my favourites again and again anyway.

Wednesday, 27 August 2014

Just keep swimming, just keep swimming

I have been a keen swimmer for most of my life – although my mum does like to tell me tales of how it was difficult to get me in the water as a really young child. At some point, longer ago than I can remember, I must have decided that I did like to be in the water after all…


Through primary school I had weekly (term time) swimming lessons, although I’m not sure I ever got further than my 100m badge. Possibly I made it to 200m? 400m? (I wonder if those badges and swimming certificates are still around at my parents’ house…) Although I stopped those lessons when I reached a certain level, I still used to go swimming for fun with friends sometimes – most notably after violin classes on a Saturday morning. Violin I did not keep up, but swimming I did.

In my second year of university, after only swimming sporadically in the first year, I had an annual membership to use a hotel’s gym and pool facilities. I only used the gym a handful of times but often I would swim maybe 3 or 4 times a week. The hotel was less than five minutes walk from where I lived so that helped – and being a student, apparently, meant lots of free time! Unfortunately the pool was tiny – only 12 metres in length, at the longest point (it wasn’t rectangular either) – so I’m not sure how much distance I actually covered.

PHOTO: Alice Douglas-Deane, fellow graphic designer and sea swimmer. (I’m second from the left.)

Then there was sea swimming. I didn’t start properly swimming in the sea until the end of second year – when I presumed the water to have warmed up a bit. By third year, I was an avid sea swimmer. I swam every Sunday without hesitation as part of the CSM Sea Swimming Club. But it was more of a social thing and an invigorating ‘makes you feel good about yourself for running into the freezing cold water on a Sunday lunchtime like a crazy person’ kind of thing. I’m going back to Falmouth in just over a week (I can’t wait!) and I’m planning on fitting in at least one dip in the sea. My body will need to do some serious re-acclimatising to the cold.

Before I moved from Milton Keynes, I used to swim at Middleton Pool in Newport Pagnell. It was conveniently on my way home from work and I used to try to go once a week – although more often than not, that didn’t work out. That’s when I started using an app on my iPhone called Splash Path so that I could keep track of how much I was swimming each time (yes, I count lengths as I swim) and try to consistently improve.

It’s only now that I’ve moved to Bedford, properly signed up for a gym/swimming pool (Robinson Pool – also 33.3m in length, like Middleton, which is handy) and have been going consistently once or twice a week, that I am starting to really appreciate being able to visualise my swims. It’s encouraging to see my swim streak weeks figure going up, as well as my general distance improving. I started swimming in Bedford doing a measly 20 lengths, or 666m, but now…

My swim this evening – 40 lengths of 33m.

Splash Path – now known as Speedo Fit (I assume because Speedo give them funding to make the app) but I still think of it as Splash Path anyway – at its most basic level gives you the function to record how many lengths you swim at a certain pool, at a certain time and therefore how far that is. But it does other things too:
  • Set your goals, track your swims and keep motivated with virtual swim challenges.

  • Track every swim, monitor your progress and personal statistics.
  • Keep motivated by setting yourself a virtual challenge like Escape from Alcatraz.
  • Join the swimming community – share and compare your progress with friends or swimmers at your local pool.
  • Find pools wherever you are with the UK’s most comprehensive source of local swimming pools (including Ireland).
  • Check pool opening hours, swim timetables.

I’m currently ‘swimming’ across the Irish sea. It is a long way but I have completed all the short challenges.

Hopefully I’ll be upping my days swim streak from 1 to 2 tomorrow, by going two days in a row. I usually tend to go Mondays and Thursday but the bank holiday threw me off this week. Plus I didn’t go until Sunday last week (my one and only swim of the week, but it was a good one) due to not wanting my freshly henna’d hair to turn the pool water green prior to that.

You can get Speedo Fit from the Apple app store here, for free.

Monday, 25 August 2014

Don Kenn’s Post-it Monsters

After a productive day – eye test and purchasing new glasses, catching up with a friend over coffee, cleaning almost the whole flat and doing something a little crafty – I have spent a well-earned late-afternoon/evening browsing through blogs. I say blogs but really it was mostly Bored Panda. There are some great posts on there and I found that I was looking through most of the recent once quite in-depth, but just this one I felt I wanted to share myself.

‘Danish artist John Kenn Mortensen (who goes by Don Kenn on Tumblr and other sites) taps into the terror of our childhood nightmares with brilliant and terrifying monster drawings that he does on sticky notes.’Bored Panda


Friday, 22 August 2014

The hidden treasures of language

My friend and colleague, Kat shared this Brain Pickings link with us at work today. As a lover of language and admirer of fine illustration, I just had to share this myself. These visual interpretations of unusual words, created by Project Twins, were originally exhibited at the MadArt Gallery in Dublin, 2011, and they are absolutely marvellous.

‘Bold graphics and visual wit are used to interpret and represent a collection of strange, unusual and lost words. These images explore the meaning behind the words, which are sometimes even more strange or unusual.’ – Project Twins

There is a whole alphabet to feast your eyes upon, viewable here, but these are my favourite illustrations along with their words and meanings.

B is for Biblioclasm
The practice of destroying, often ceremoniously, books or other written material.

F is for Fanfaronade
Swaggering; empty boasting; blustering manner or behavior; ostentatious display.

H is for Hamartia
The character flaw or error of a tragic hero that leads to his downfall.

J is for Jettatura
The casting of an evil eye.

L is for Leptosome
A person with a slender, thin, or frail body.

M is for Montivagant
Wandering over hills and mountains.

O is for Ostentiferous
Bringing omens or unnatural or supernatural manifestations

S is for Scripturient
Possessing a violent desire to write.

W is for Welter
A confused mass; a jumble; turmoil or confusion.

Z is for Zugzwang
A position in which any decision or move will result in problems.


Friday, 8 August 2014

World Cat Day

A lunchtime spent browsing through my Twitter-stream told me that today is, apparently, World Cat Day! How did I not know?!

I had a read/look at this Best Cats on the Internet post by i100 – a website I keep finding myself linked to (via Twitter) lately. The website seems, to me, to be a more respectable version of Buzzfeed – from The Independent newspaper – with lots of Top 10 articles and weird/interesting news stories.

And so I read the article, featuring their Top 13 cats on the Internet, but found myself disagreeing with the list. Some of the cats I haven’t even heard of or seen before – Snoopy? Brother Cream? And Maru should definitely be a lot higher up the list!

I decided, as the crazy-cat-lady that I am, I should make my own list! Not just Internet cats, however. Because all cats are awesome whether they are of Internet fame, fictional or just a random kitty you see walking down the street.

TOP 9 CATS
(because 9 lives, y’know.)

9 Tara the heroine
The cat that saved her young human from a dog attack.


8 Nyan cat
The rainbow-pop tart cat with an incredibly catchy soundtrack.


7 Pusheen
The adorably animated fat cat.

6 Street Cat Bob
The ex-stray cat who found his human busking on the streets of London.

5 Keyboard cat
The most talented of musical cats.

(Also, seen in the cinema last night… this is amazing!!)


4 The Bear
The world’s most melancholic cat, literary and Twitter star.

Catbus
Everyone’s favourite animal/vehicle, from Studio Ghibli’s My Neighbour Totoro.


Maru
The box-loving cat from Japan.


1 CLEO
The [cat] love of my life and feature of many-a-Instagram post, my tailless-tabby-cat.

Thursday, 7 August 2014

Rail Transport in Westeros

I’m a big fan of transport maps, I’m a big fan of maps of fictional places and, of course, I’m a big fan of Game of Thrones. So this map of Westeros based on US Subway systems (would have been nice if it was the London Underground instead, but oh well) is incredible. The level of detail and accuracy that its creator, Michael Tyznik, has put into it is crazy.

The map, and an extended map of all known lands in the books, are available to buy as prints. I need one for my flat.