Last week, M and I spent a week in Hampshire, camping near the New Forest.
We weren’t familiar with the area, so it was a great opportunity to explore, unfurl the OS map, and do a tour or two. We were blessed with mostly excellent weather which meant for spending hours outdoors, cooking and winding down, and doing some fun outdoor things like learning to paddle board and exploring castles. Maybe I’ll write more about some specific activities soon, but for now I felt like scribbling a brief write-up.
The weather wasn’t totally perfect – one night we were woken by what sounded like a heavy shower, but fortunately our tent held up pretty well. The worst weather episode was saved up for the morning of our packing up, because of course.
In fact, the severity of the wind and rain was such that our tent – and others around us – actually buckled a little. Pegs which had been driven into the hard, drought-addled land suddenly worked loose in the deluge. And then the wind lashed the weakened structures and it all felt a little bit apocalyptic for a few moments.
Thankfully the storm blew over within an hour or so, and the wind lingered after the rain had ended so that our tent was very much blown dry before we needed to pack it away.
It struck me at the time that it would be a great opportunity for a tent manufacturer to see exactly how different kinds of tents and gazebos react to such weather. I would guess that they conduct tests in wind tunnels or similar, but to actually see the failure points – particularly on tents erected by actual campers, literally in-the-field – would surely be very helpful.
Mostly what was nice about the week was just being outside for so much of every day. It tunes your senses to the natural world in a way that’s harder to do as you go about your day-to-day life in the city. I remember noticing the wind had changed one morning; lo and behold, it heralded a change in the weather.
I also have fond memories of the swifts darting about the site in the evenings – some whirling around in the trees, and others running low-flying raids mere centimetres above the grass for tens of metres at a time.
Our relatively remote location down near the south coast was also great for a bit of playing with radios.
In London I put up with the inevitable fog of radio interference that comes with densely packed residential areas. I’m lucky to be able to pick up a decent amount of shortwave stations there, but when visiting as rural as location as we were down near Milford-on-Sea, it still blows me away to hear the difference in the number and clarity of signals I can receive.
I spent a few evenings DXing on shortwave, seeing what I could find. Mostly the usual, but what was most enjoyable was just how clear so many stations were. The bigger stations boomed in with a strength and clarity approaching that of a nearby FM station. Meanwhile, other weaker stations – including the Dutch pirates – came in with enjoyable levels of signal. At home I can sometimes pick them up amongst the murk and the mire of interference. But it was nice to be able to actually listen to these stations for a short while.
The biggest ‘problem’ I was blessed with was the sheer number of stations I could pick up – automatic band scans regularly logged more than a hundred signals, and it was a constant compromise between checking out one station before wanting to carry on to the next.
I also had a few scans on FM – not an awful lot to be found where we were a mile or two inland, but down on the coast I was overrun by clear, loud French stations, which is a neat novelty. I was picking up more French stations than English – probably 30 or so foreign broadcasts creeping across the Channel versus the 15 or so local and national ones I had expected.
And, as I find myself doing more and more, I tried some DAB DXing on a small portable receiver, with mixed results. I didn’t log any foreign multiplexes, which was a little surprising given the number of strong French FM signals, but I did get a good range of British ones coming from all along the south coast, including the quite experimental selection on the Portsmouth trial operated by Solent Wireless. However, quite often I would find that although the multiplex was logged, actually tuning to a station would fail, so the signal must have been pretty weak.
I’m still working through the photos I took on my ‘proper’ camera, so I’ll be adding some to Flickr over the coming weeks.
Flickr’s a funny old place. Literally old, in web-years. And I go through phases of thinking it’s irrelevant in today’s web, to spending whole hours looking at photographs taken by others, and finding myself enthralled, enrapt, and inspired to take more and better photographs of my own.
It’s also recently been bought ‘back’ from Yahoo! by SmugMug, which either sounds like it’s a step in the right direction for a new future, or further scratches the nostalgic itch that Flickr belongs to ‘the old web’ and its attendant community.
But then I realise that, like a lot of these things, it’s just whatever you want to make of it, and if I want Flickr to be useful to me – and at the same time that makes me want to be a better photographer? – then so be it.
For many months now, I’ve been in the habit of reading from a couple of diary compilations – one of London diarists, the other with a rural angle – and around the turn of the month, a few pages from an almanac which talks about natural occurrences.
