Last Thursday thanks to a visiting friend I finally got around to visiting the S.S. Great Britain, a ship which marks just one of the many links that Bristol has to Isambard Kingdom Brunel and is a piece of shipping history in her own right.
Launched in 1843 she was the largest ship on the seas and the first ocean going ship to have an iron hull and was in use for just under 100 years until in 1937 she was scuttled in the Falkland Islands. In 1970 she was raised once more to the surface and returned to the port where she had been built and set sail from all those years ago; Bristol.
When chatting with friends I have a habit of linking things together quite randomly, if not always altogether appropriately. Earlier this week it say me attempting to pen a song on entitled, “Anything Could Happen, But It Probably Won’t.” A title which came about though the idea about how people seem to expect the worst to happen, but in reality for most people at least nothing ever does.
An example would be the hysteria about children playing in the street, where if you believe the tabloids they’re certain to be run over by cars, abducted by paedophiles or meet some other equally unpleasantt fate. I am not saying this doesn’t occur, but in reality (thankfully) it doesn’t happen that often. Amongst the doggeral I produced for this song to illuminate the risks of the road I wrote:
If you let your kids out on the street.
They’ll run out in the road,
And get squashed flatter than a toad.
By a car that’s doing ninety,
In a 30 mile zone.
Today’s challenge however was a little different. Last night whilst watching Glastonbury on the TV the phrase, “Ich bin ein Berliner” came up and for some reason I figured that there was probably a song or songs in it and so I decided that at work today I was going to attempt to write a song in German with that as a title. The results so far include:
Die alte Leute sagen -
“Mann ist, was man isst!”
Ich bin überzuckert,
Aber voll von scheiss.
Ich bin ein Berliner,
Ungesund und fettvoll.
Aber es sorgt mich nicht -
Weil, um faul zu sein ist toll!
Ich hab’ Energie genug,
Zu feiern durch die Nacht.
Doch frag’ mich zu arbeiten,
Dann hab’ ich keine Macht!
Or for those of you that cannot read my dodgy German (Shame on you!) the translation runs roughly as follows:
The old people say -
“You are what you eat!”
I am sugar coated,
But also full of shit.
I am a doughnut,
Unhealthy and full of fatt.
But it doesn’t worry me -
Because being lazy is great!
I have enough energy,
To party through the night.
But ask me to work,
And I have no strength.
As I mentioned yesterday, I am not at Glastonbury and instead I am seated on a couch with cider handy in the fridge and burgers fresh from the oven and the closest I have been to any mud today is when I leaned out of my bedroom window to talk to my housemate cutting the lawn.
One of the joys of taking photos of musicians performing at venues is that the light is generally against you - If you want sharp photos you need a short exposure meaning that the photo is just too dark or if you go for lightness you have to hope that they stay still for a quarter of a second, which is a surprisingly long time when taking photos. It’s that or use the flash and ruin any ambiance that there might be from the lighting there.
For a change on Wednesday I decided to deliberately play around with overlong exposures and moving the camera at the same time. One of the results of that experiment can be seen above in the photo of Gravenhurst; the support act from the night. I got this picture by taking a photo at an exposure of 1 second and additionally twisting the camera part way through the exposure. I don’t know if I like it yet, but I will probably will try it again at some point.
Is the proper way to “do” Glastonbury…
a)Risk sunstroke and/or drowning in mud to watch a stage that from where your standing can be obscured with the tip of one finger, knowing that you have a tent waiting for you if you can find where you set it up and your next shower will be in 3 days time when you get home?
Or…
b)At home on the couch tuned into BBCi interactive flicking between the acts that annoyingly were scheduled to perform at the same time on different stages and share the viewpoint of the cameraman on the stage and having the luxury of a proper toilet should you need it and not having to fight your way back through the crowd afterwards.
B might not be the right answer, but it is what I have been doing this evening.
I’ve just spent a very pleasant afternoon with a visiting friend strolling around the S.S. Great Britain with a camera in hand taking photos so I suspect that a theme week could be just around the corner.