The Bloggler

This week the theme of the Sunday Stills photo challenge is 'Floating'.  Natalie from Natalie the Explorer  is hosting Sunday Stills from August 22-Sept 5 whilst our usual host Terri at Second Wind Leisure Perspectives is on holiday. May I start with three photos I took at the Dubai Mall Aquarium.  These creatures may actually be swimming but 'floating' seems a more apt description.  They just 'bob' about serenely. The next one is a fishing boat moored at the harbour in St Martin de Re on the Ile de Re. This scene couldn't look more captivatingly 'French' could it? The subject of the next two are 'boats in Nice Marina'. The first shows the small brightly coloured boats and the second shows the 'floating' reflection of the some of the smaller yachts on the water. The next one was taken just a few miles from where we live.  It features Hollingworth Lake, a man-made lake which spans 118 acres and originally built as the main water sou...

I've never heard of the colour 'burlywood' but it is apparently a thing, and it has its own hexadecimal colour code #deb887.   Some definitions say it is a 'light brown, sandy colour' and some say its a 'sandy, light brown colour'.  I can live with either. But what photographs in my collection should I look up for the 'Burlywood' Sunday Stills Photo Challenge hosted by Terri at Second Wind Leisure Perspectives ?  I know! Photos with 'sand' in them. But not white sand, yellow sand or red sand....  Light brown sand. My best offer is a collection of photos taken in the desert south of Dubai.  They were taken in 2016 whilst visiting my daughter and her husband who lived there for three years.   The sand dunes are pretty impressive and we had great fun doing a desert safari in a Toyota land cruiser with a crazy driver. Driver resting whilst engine and gearbox cool down. The dunes don't look that big until you try and walk up them. My daughter...

I was reading recently about how the sale of men’s and women’s magazines is declining due to the changing media landscape. We must now click through on-line magazines, blogs and social media to keep ourselves in touch with news, fashion, lifestyle, technology, etc. That’s all well and good but I do enjoy the process of ‘flicking’ through something that isn’t a screen once in a while. Years ago, before men’s lifestyle magazines existed, I often couldn’t resist looking through my wife’s magazines, at least until my eyes glazed over and I realised I wasn’t much interested in the content - more the graphics and the clues as to what made women tick. I was motivated to write a poem (something I never do) about Women’s Glossies around 1980 after it struck me just how glib and superficial they were, and that they seemed to demean women and undermine their self esteem. I’m sure they’ve improved since that time with more women editors taking a more politically and culturally correct approach....