Norwich, again, and Cambridge

I have been down to Norwich, and Cambridge again, for yet more sorting of my father’s affairs (i.e mess). Actually, it was quite productyive on this occasion, as I did find much more of his art work, which I will discuss in due course, and some interesting historical and musical documents. It’s difficult, I could spend weeks or months looking through all this, as it is fascinating – my sister thinks this is odd and she would mostkly just throw it in the bin, and I am sure when I finally do a dead someone will, but I am interested in the history – for example a letter from my aunt to my father when she would have been about 13 or 14 gives a real insight into the way things were in the mid 1950s…

Anyway, I digress. Here’s some photography.

I didnt lug my DSLR down with me last time, which I ultimately regretted, so it was nice to have it this time and take a few alternative versions of my shots of the town.

And again, the Catherdral. While sometimes I do feel that my phone can have the edge over my old DIGIC4 Canon 60D, the “real” camera does give me some more control which I like and also has enabled me to use my favourite lens – the Sigma 10-20mm for these wider shots.

Also, breifly, I have played a little with the AI driven generative editing in Photoshop on some of these, to remove people and TV screens in the cathedral – with, mostly, good success though amusingly (not uploaded here) one of the shots replaced a TV screen with an hallucinated picture – of the people I removed from the nave. AI is an interesting one in it’s current form…

We were blessed with lovely weather again (though when dragging a heavy case through Norwich having been directed the wrong way to the station I was less amused) and a breif trip out to Fulbourne (to take documents to be incinerated) gave the opportunity for these stubble fields – this is something I miss up in Yorkshire, there’s something quintessentially English about this, and that has touched me aesthetically for a very many years. These will come out as paintings soon.

No Aurora this time, sadly, but Spooner Row still gave us some pretty epic skies…

And this time, we finally got to spend some time in Cambridge Proper. As anyone who follows anything I do as Requiem Ensanglanté will know there’s some pretty complex spatial emotions about this place, and this crops up in many of my songs.

It’s interesting, parts of the place are just unrecognisable now, whereas others have hardly changed.

We went to the Granta Inn on Coe Fen – very different from the place that served us all as teenagers over 30 years ago, but looking out over the Mill Pond, it is still… The Granta.

We walked up The Backs, doing the tourist thing. The colleges all cost a fortune to visit now, and I notice that Trinity Hall Punts, where we used to hire from at £3.40 an hour is now £24 an hour… Things change. And of course The Round Church is no longer a church…

It’s a generation, literally, since I have seen the centre of town in any way. Which is quite a frightening thought.