Beryl's Mid-Century Adventures

Here are some of the results from my slide sorting and scanning efforts. These ten images are among my favorites so far.

What I'm trying to do here, as I've said before, is save significant pictures from going to the landfill, or being turned into craft projects, or otherwise disappearing. My hope is that putting them online, making them public, will allow all of us to enjoy them and help enrich our cultural record.

Above is the waterfront in Plymouth, in the area known as Plymouth Hoe, in the summer of 1980. You can't read it because of the low resolution of this blog image, but the original scan shows that the open-top bus is named the "Sir Francis Drake" and it's going to the City Center, the Mayflower Steps and along the sea front. Those little girls in the foreground remind me of the red-headed dolls that some bloggers feature in their posts.

It's exactly the kind of picture I like -- well-composed, with lots of people and evidence of the era in the cars and clothing.

"Pauline's Wedding -- Beryl" from 1966. Such a fashion statement! I have several pictures of Beryl in different outfits. She was poised and stylish enough to have been a model, and maybe she was.

"Pits at Le Mans," from 1970. Love all the old advertisements.

"Punch & Judy -- Chalfont St. Peter," from 1966.

There's no information on this slide, but it's obviously a Christmas dinner, with the crackers on the table and a cake or tart labeled "Merry Christmas." I'm guessing it's the early '60s. The man at right is holding a bottle of something called "Celebration Cream," which sounds disgusting but apparently was a type of Pedro Domecq sweet sherry popular in the mid-century. Or so Google tells me.

I think that's Beryl sitting next to the man with the bottle.

"Gill's wedding," from 1965. A veritable smorgasbord of '60s fashion. I especially like the elaborate hairstyle of the woman at rear left, and the look of despair on the face of the probably exhausted little girl.

"Devon, 1980" -- I thought the photographer's choice to put the donkey in the corner was pretty brilliant. Or maybe the donkey wandered into the picture?

"Lech, Austria" from 1965. There are quite a few slides from Lech which I think come from at least one family trip. I like the fact that eight people have managed to squeeze onto that bench, which hopefully did not give way beneath them.

There's no information on this slide, dated September 1972. I love her sunglasses and her beads and the air of happy summer holidays.

And finally, there are several pictures from this office, dated August 1971. I have no indication where it was or what type of business was being done, but I'm struck by the incredible quantities of paper and files and books. The days before computers!

As usual, my eventual goal will be to add these to an album on Flickr. As you can see, the camera attachment that allows me to photograph the slides, rather than paying to have them commercially scanned, works pretty well. Sometimes it takes me a couple of tries to get the image in the right place and correctly focused but I'm slowly figuring it out.

I'm Obsessed

I was back in Camden Town yesterday, as you can see from the image above. I photographed this place years ago, during the lockdown, when it had recently been a functioning restaurant. It's been closed since then, I believe, and now it's looking a bit derelict. I wonder what the long-term plan is?

There's a second restaurant in the shopfront at left, a Chinese place called Fungsun Kitchen that's still open.

Anyway, I think it's a very photogenic building!

So, yes, I was back at Camden Market to talk to my slide dealer. He had another box of slides on hand, which I bought, and I asked him about buying his entire stock. We're talking about it. I know I'm taking a huge headlong plunge into this project, whatever it may eventually turn out to be -- maybe only blog posts and Flickr albums. But hey, it will keep me from becoming a delinquent in my late-middle age.

This is now on what I always think of as the Carmen Miranda wall, across from the market, even though Carmen hasn't been there for years. I love how the artist painted the disco ball. They really captured the glittery effect, didn't they? I'm not sure about the grammar of that sentence but let's not be nitpicky.

After securing my second batch of slides, I walked home from the market, and it was an ideal day for that. The temperature was a perfect 72º F and the sun was shining. London in the late spring and summer can really be amazing. I remember when Dave and I moved here in July 2011, we kept exclaiming about the climate: "People say the weather in England is horrible, but this is fabulous!" And then, of course, autumn came and the long, dark winter and we realized what everyone was talking about.

I stopped for coffee in Belsize Park, and there was a woman ahead of me in line. She ordered a latte and I ordered a white Americano. What emerged from the barista was an oat-milk latte and an Americano over ice. Apparently the woman who took our order wasn't very careful about the keys she was punching, and the barista gave her a stern talking-to right in front of us. "It's not your first day," she told her. Yikes!

Anyway, we eventually got our correct coffees and hopefully the counter woman didn't get fired. I'm not sure what it says about her future job prospects if she has trouble taking orders at a Pret.

Back home in the evening, I heard a knock on our door. It was a delivery guy with the slide-duplicating attachment for my camera. Woo hoo! So I'll be experimenting a bit with that. I've taken a couple of test shots and it seems to work pretty well, though the images are not as sharp as professional scans. They should be suitable for blogging, though.

A Letter From Uganda

I was walking through St. John's Wood a couple of weeks ago when I passed this derelict phone booth with a freaky baby doll's face peering out. I think it's a sticker on the inside of the glass. Bizarre!

Amazingly, all my seedlings -- except for the zinnia I lost to the slug the first night after I planted them out -- seem to be surviving. They're still tiny and not growing much. I think the weather is just too cool. Today is supposed to be beautiful, but rain is forecast for the weekend (please God) and we're getting another chilly spell next week, with highs in the mid-50s F. So they may be sulking for a while.

All but one of the dahlias have sprouted and they're looking good so far, at least.

Rescued plant report: The leaves have fallen off the fiddle-leaf fig and the green sprout has turned brown. It's not looking good. The leaves have also fallen off the tall stalk of the rubber tree, though they're still hanging onto the short branch. I'm thinking the tall stalk may have to come off but the short branch will survive. We shall see.

Here's a weird mystery that came in the mail last week. (The envelope includes our full address, but I've digitally erased it for blog privacy purposes.)

What would you do if you got a letter like this? It's from Uganda, addressed to someone I do not know, but at our correct address. There's no return address, so I couldn't just return it to the sender. I could give it back to the post office but they wouldn't know what to do with it either. It would just go to a dead-letter office, if those even exist anymore.

I decided to try to find the woman to whom it was addressed. I thought she might be a neighbor, so I began by Googling her, as one does. Turns out she was an author and fairly well-known vocal instructor. She even has a Wikipedia page! She was American but she lived in London in the 1980s and '90s, and perhaps she lived in our flat. I have no idea. But she died in California in 2019.

So now I have a letter with no return address, sent to a dead woman. At this point, I decided to open it. Perhaps there would be an address inside that I could respond to, just to let the sender know that their letter didn't reach its intended recipient.

Turns out it's a request for money from a young woman in Uganda who's trying to raise tuition to complete a college degree. I'm not sure why she's writing Ms. Dayme but apparently she does not know her. It's basically a snail-mail equivalent of phishing. If I write her back she's going to put the squeeze on me for money, so I've decided not to respond. It sounds rude but I think that's the way it has to be.

Isn't that strange? Cool stamps, though. I'll save the envelope.

A Fly Takes a Bath

As I sat reading on the garden bench the other day, occasionally watching the birds and bugs around me, this hoverfly landed on a nearby hydrangea. It periodically buzzed away and came right back again, to the exact same spot. Google tells me it's a Batman hoverfly, Myathropa florea. It has that name because there's a dark marking on the back of its torso that looks like the Batman logo. (You can't see it too clearly in my photo but it's clearer here.)

And now I'm wondering what this fly was called before Batman rose to prominence in the 1940s. Surely it had a name before that.

Anyway, I watched this little creature go through an elaborate grooming ritual, first rubbing its forelegs together, and then stroking its back legs over its back and across its wings.

It was pretty fascinating. We've all seen flies do this grooming, I'm sure, but this fly was large enough that I could really see it clearly. Apparently this action removes pollen, dirt and microbes that might interfere with its finely tuned flight capabilities. There's a whole blog post about it here; more than I needed to know, but interesting in its detail. (Here's a shorter version of the same information.)

I finished going through all my newly acquired slides yesterday. I'd say of the 1200 or so that I bought, ten to 15 are what I'd call really good photos with potential -- pictures that made me go, "Wow!" About 550 are mildly interesting and worth a second look. The rest are useless. I'm not disappointed with this ratio; in fact it's what I'd expect from a mass of unsorted slides. Now, the question is, what do I do with all the ones I don't want? I hate to just throw them out, but they really are photographically insignificant, I think. Maybe someone could make a lampshade out of them. I suppose I could put them on eBay as craft supplies!

I also walked down to Camden Market to talk to the dealer about the rest of his slides, but his booth was closed. I'll catch up with him again in a couple of days. I got a nice walk in, at least, though the wind was blowing and there was a lot of dust and pollen in the air, enough to give me sneezing fits.

Once again I am working my way through New Yorker magazines. I am going to conquer this stack if it kills me!

My Grandparents' Living Room

Just another close-up of one of our neighborhood rose-ringed parakeets. They may be invasive, and they're certainly loud, but they're also really beautiful, aren't they? And they do love those suet balls, even though they drop a lot of the suet on the ground. The pigeons and starlings will gather beneath the parakeets whenever they're on the feeder, waiting for food to fall.

I was pretty much a homebody yesterday. I finished my sunflower book and spent most of the day looking at slides. I didn't get through the whole pile -- I still have quite a few to go. My method is to give every slide a glance through my hand-held viewer, and whatever seems utterly worthless -- too blurry, too dark, too damaged, too boring -- goes into a pile. I'll put those in a bag and throw them in the closet, possibly on the way to being tossed permanently. (I haven't decided yet.)

One photographer in this batch took particularly bad slides. I think there must have been something wrong with his camera -- or perhaps his vision. They are laughably out of focus.

Anyway, the rest I'm going to sort into slides of similar theme or by photographer, if I can tell who that is. Then I'll go through them all again and decide what's worth scanning.

I say scanning, but what I'm actually going to try is photographing the slides. I ordered a camera extension that allows me to mount each slide on my Canon camera, and with an even source of white light, I can take a high-resolution picture of it. We'll see how well that works. The camera piece wasn't very expensive so I thought it might be a better option than buying a new scanner.

This photo (above) has nothing to do with the slides. Not too long ago, blogger Ed posted some pictures of interiors where his ancestors lived. It got me thinking, "Don't I have a picture of my grandparents' apartment somewhere?" I dug through my digital archives and found the photo I remembered -- this one, which shows the apartment where my mother's parents lived in Massachusetts shortly after their marriage in 1929.

It's not a great photo but in my experience, people didn't often take pictures of the interiors of their own homes during this era. There aren't many pictures like this, in other words!

I own two items clearly visible in the photo.

I think this beige vase was an engagement or wedding present to my grandparents. You can see it on the drop-leaf table to the left of the photo, holding what looks like a bouquet of lilacs. Now it's on the windowsill in our bedroom. It has a cryptic mark -- B17 or possibly 817 on the bottom -- but no manufacturer name, and I have tried for years to figure out who made it and whether it has any value. Google Image Search returns similar-looking vases, but none quite exactly the same. (Addendum: I found this one on eBay, a different color but the same shape and marking, said to be Zanesville pottery from Ohio. Bingo!)

My grandmother gave me this vase when I was in high school. You can also see it in the pictures of my childhood bedroom I posted several years ago. (No cracks about the flowery drapes, which my parents bought!)

I also own these bookends, which are on the same table as the vase in the photo above. My grandmother had these in her living room all her adult life, and I took them after she died in 1989. The diary behind the elephant is this one.

I'm familiar with the other furniture in the photo, which went to various relatives after my grandmother died. That lamp was in the upstairs bedroom of her house for years -- the room where my brother and I always stayed on our visits. No idea where it is now, if it even still exists.

Anyway, I'll be sorting more slides today and hopefully I'll get out for a walk!

Ducklings and Slides

I spent most of yesterday morning reading about the secret lives of sunflowers -- which honestly aren't all that interesting. I'm in a portion of the book focused on their hybridization and modification as an agricultural crop, and I'm less personally concerned about sunflowers agriculturally than aesthetically. There were some interesting factoids -- for example, the International Sunflower Association bestows an award named for Soviet scientist V.S. Pustovoit, who is apparently considered the granddaddy of modern sunflower breeding. Probably too obscure to turn up on a pub quiz, but still, who knew?! Anyway, I've churned through all that now and I think I have just one more chapter to go.

After a simple lunch I decided to take a couple of bags of stuff to the local charity shop, and then head out for a long walk. I grabbed my stepmother's camera and walked down to St. John's Wood, where I picked up the Regent's Canal at Lisson Grove.

The canal in that area is lined with narrow boats that, as far as I can tell, are more or less permanently moored. The towpath is lined with potted plants, cafe tables, benches and other furnishings that show it functions as a patio for those living on the boats.

It's a beautiful little secret gem of an area, where I haven't walked in years. Past the boat moorings, the canal passes beneath some railroad tracks and a major road before running through Regent's Park, past some stately mansions with wide, sloping lawns running down to the water.

From there it connects to the boat basin where the floating Chinese restaurant is anchored, and then makes a sharp turn eastward toward Camden Market.

I passed this mother duck with 13 tiny ducklings (!) trailing behind her. I'm impressed by how well they keep up with Mom. As I began making this video, a mob of European high-school students descended some stairs from the street above onto the towpath, which is why I got jostled and why it's so noisy. They were all exclaiming over the ducks.

Here's the scene near Camden Market. You can see all the kids on the towpath ahead of me. I saw a surprising number of kids out and about yesterday. Don't people have school? This coming Monday is a bank holiday, but as far as I know yesterday was a regular old school day.

At Camden Market I went to check out the booth of the dealer who sold me Joan Tubbs' photo slides a couple of summers ago. Sure enough, he had another box of slides, and many of them seem to be more of Joan's work. I knew I didn't have them all -- in fact, I got a note on Flickr last July from a university art student who also bought some of Tubbs' slides in Camden, so I knew there were more out there. Anyway, the guy sold me the whole box for £20. He said he has tens of thousands of slides from multiple sources and if I come back next week he'll have more available. I may well do that, because I am insane.

I brought them all home (stopping along the way in Belsize Park for coffee, because by then my feet were complaining). I've only been through about a quarter of them, but I've already found some photo gems so I will have another post of rescued slides coming up soon -- after I get everything sorted. I'm going to look into getting some equipment to scan them myself. The big expense is always the scanning, not the actual slides, so if I can avoid that it will be worth it.

Ironic that I brought home this big bag of slides after taking two boxes to a charity shop. Stuff out, stuff in. That's the way of life, right? At least slides are compact and easy to store.

Seedling update: One zinnia down, courtesy of a guilty-looking slug, found beneath an adjacent rock. Otherwise, everything is still hanging in there, and we even got a smattering of rain last night and this morning!

The Foxes Get Chinese Takeaway

We have one bluebell in our garden that isn't blue. It's a pinkbell. I know bluebells sometimes have color variations but this is a first for our garden, as far as I can remember.

I feel like I was busy as heck yesterday but when I told Dave's parents that on their regular weekly video-call, his mom said, "Oh, what did you do?" And I couldn't name anything that sounded very impressive! So I'm not sure where the time goes, but it does.

For one thing, I got my seedlings planted out, and that's a bigger deal than it sounds. There are only four or five of each type, but still, in our crowded garden, finding them a home was a challenge!

I put the cosmos and one zinnia in the long terra cotta planter that held the rescued primulas. (I saved the primulas too -- just moved them to a different pot.) Don't you love my ornamental rockwork? I know it looks like plant prison, but it's meant to keep the squirrels from digging up the seedlings.

Here's one of the sunflowers, complete with a copper slug ring (not very effective) to protect it. It's not great that our weather has been so dry, but at least it keeps down the slugs and snails.

And here are two little zinnias, with more pot shards to keep the squirrels at bay.

I am somewhat pessimistic about how well these tiny things will survive in our jungle of a garden, but at some point the plants just have to manage or not. I have one sunflower and one zinnia in some big pots at the side of the house, and those are the ones I consider our "insurance" if everything out in the main garden gets eaten -- though the squirrels can attack those pots too. I also have lots more unplanted seeds so I can always go another round if these die.

And what else did I do? Well, some routine stuff, like laundry and vacuuming and indoor plant maintenance.

Oh, and I compiled the week's video from the garden wildlife cam. Is it possible to have too much fox footage? If so, we may have it this week. At the beginning, I put out some mediocre leftover meat from a Chinese meal Dave and I ordered. The young fox came two minutes later and eventually, cautiously ate it, and then hung around for another 20 minutes or so, eating and then checking back to make sure nothing was left behind. So there's a lot of footage of him/her hanging around. (Dave has named this fox "Sharpie," because the tip of his tail is black. I think it's the same fox I saw atop the fence a few days back.)
-- In the midst of all that, at 2:54, Sharpie comes right up to the camera and gives it a sniff!
-- At 4:06, a few hours later, Crooked Tail comes and investigates the meat, but it's all gone.
-- At 4:53, we see another fox with a distinctly white-tipped tail. Q-Tip, maybe?
-- At 5:03, a pair of pigeons court each other.
-- At 5:24, the next night, I put down the rest of the Chinese meat. This time, Crooked Tail gets it, then comes back to make sure it's all gone.
-- At 6:15, I moved the camera to the back of the garden and aimed it outward, but all the footage I got was wind. I think I had it aimed too high. Nice wind video, though.
-- At 6:24, some pretty good close-up footage of a fox in the daytime, brushing right past the camera.
-- At 6:34, the fox runs into the garden from the corner of the fence, where it normally jumps in and out. About eight minutes later, it leaves by the same route.

This week I have the camera set up to film that corner, so hopefully we can see more of the animals coming and going.