I don't think I've heard anything funnier for a long time than Stephen Fry talking about his loathing for dancing "I hate that slovenly mixture of sexual exhibitionism, strutting contempt and repellent narcissism that it involves" in the second of his recent podcasts, or "podgrams" as he uniquely calls them.

So it was with great delight that I noticed his most recent podgram appear in my iTunes playlist this morning. Once downloaded I took a break from the office to take a walk to Sainsburys, going the long way round in order to allow time to hear Stephen's latest rant in full. You have to love Stephen Fry and if you don't then there's clearly something wrong with you. You have to admire the unashamed manner (if not the sound) with which he spends much of the first five minutes of the broadcast coughing into the microphone. You have to admire the way he returns to the microphone after a break mid-way through the podcast and apologises for the background sound of a toilet cistern filling up. It's all very normal and natural and every-day yet simultaneously flighty and fanciful and other-worldy.

He talks about one of his favourite subjects in this Podcast, Oscar Wilde, and paints the sort of glorious metaphor that we love him for. He suggests that our view of Oscar Wilde is similar to the view of the Empire State Building that you get when looking through the rear window of a taxi speeding down Fifth Avenue at night when the lights are all green. The building seems to grow more in stature the further away you get, much like our appreciation of Wilde has increased as the years have passed by. It's now 108 years since Wilde's death and in the taxi metaphor we're probably approaching Washington Square in terms of our perspective of the man.

I can't even begin to do the thing justice. Subscribe to Stephen Fry's podcasts and revel in the frippery.

Tags: stephen fry, podcasting

There simply have not been enough tea-related posts on this blog of late!

One of my long-term goals is to compile a book about tea. I have in mind a series of photos that follow the tea making process from the green slopes of northern India and China to the tea-drinking establishments of London, Harrogate and New York. You may wonder why Harrogate is included, it's simply because the genteel tea rooms of upper-class Harrogate seem to epitomise the ultimate, English, tea-drinking establishment to me.

With the early chapters filled with colourful photographs of Darjeeling and Assam, the later chapters will feature places like The Adore in New York. The wonderful Tea Muse web site introduces The Adore by describing its range of available teas:

"The tea menu is enough to make any tea lover's heart skip a beat. It is impressive in that it is both wide and deep in focus. It includes 11 decadent aromatized teas, which are a noted French specialty. (The sweetest of the aromatized teas, a black tea with hibiscus and mallow blossoms, is rather appropriately named 'Eros.') There are five (yes, really, five) variations on the classic Earl Grey, the simple fact of which begs for a tasting session"

Two interesting things I learned whilst writing this post. Firstly, tea is commercially cultivated in Tregothnan in Cornwall, which is a surprise to me. Secondly, the author of the Tea Muse review is a lady called Lindsey Goodwin who is a "freelance tea consultant". What a title! And Lindsey offers Tea Tours of New York City. I'm booking a place today!

Tags: tea, new york

This weekend was the annual RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch and inspired by Nic's annual report I decided to participate myself this year. In an hour our garden welcomed the following:

Blackbirds: 2
Blue Tits: 2
Chaffinch: 2
Collared Dove: 2
Great Tit: 2
Great Spotted Woodpecker: 1
Long-tailed Tit: 2
Robin: 3
Starling: 1
Woodpigeon: 2

Clearly the instinct to be part of a pair is strong in north Hampshire birds, except for the Starling and one of the Robins, who I suspect might be having an affair.

I was pleased that the woodpecker decided to visit during the "Birdwatch" hour as he's often around and I wanted to make sure he was included in the results. He duly obliged. The picture above is one that I snapped of him last year with the camera on a very long USB cable connected to a laptop in the kitchen. He was a bit punkier then with his spiky hair but he's much more sober looking now.

There were almost 42,000 results posted when I went to register mine and I imagine there will be a lot more in a couple of days' time. You can view the results online.

Tags: rspb

I saw Crowded House in concert at Bournemouth last night.

There are, in my experience, few things more uplifting than seeing your favourite band on stage. Fewer still, the number of things more uplifting than hearing music that's become so much a part of your life being performed so expertly, so enthusiastically and with such great heart. Read more...

Tags: crowded house, gigs

For a birthday present earlier in the year I received a voucher for lunch at Raymond Blanc's Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons restaurant in Oxfordshire. We finally took the opportunity to go recently and I must say that it lived up to all expectations. Usually, the merest hint of unnecessary flamboyance or showy pretension is enough to send me scurrying in the opposite direction. I don't like meals turned into carnivals and I shudder at the prospect of waiters flouncing around me whilst I try to perform what is, after all, simply an every-day necessity - eating my lunch.

I needn't have worried. Lunch at Le Manoir was a real delight. Apart from squirming a bit in a jacket that I rarely wear these days, it was a very comfortable experience. The waiting staff were the very definition of understated, the food was delicious - really delicious and the whole experience was remarkably unfussy. I think that my experience of what I can only think to describe as "upper class" restaurants before now has been of establishments that want to show how "upper class" they are. Waiters fuss and make a show of pouring wine (not a tricky task in my experience), menus are complicated and sometimes unintelligible, everything is done with a "look at how posh we are" flounce and both the food and bill are apt to leave a nasty taste in the mouth.

Le Manoir is very different. Perhaps because it really is top notch and so isn't trying to prove anything. It just is spectacularly good. Waiters and waitresses move silently through the restaurant and, remarkably, they're friendly. There's no hurry, no palaver, no sense of being out-of-place. It felt like somewhere that you could pop into for a quiet lunch if you were nearby. Yes, the wine list could more appropriately have been called a wine novel (hundreds of pages) and yes, there were several wines listed at over £1000 a bottle but there were also reasonable offerings and we didn't go thirsty!

It was also interesting to take a walk around the vegetable and herb gardens before and after lunch. Nice to think that the pumpkin soup I enjoyed had been made from pumpkins taken from the garden and interesting to see the small mushroom farm down by the stream.

I know Mr. Michelin's stars are much more sought after but Le Manoir gets the thumbs-up from me. Will I go back? I might have to wait for another generous birthday present but yes, I think I might.

Tags: eating out

It's been a while. How are you? How have things been?

Me? Oh, I've been pretty busy with one thing and another. Thanks for asking.

Unfortunately, the .Mac web site, from which I'd hoped to see great things, has been experiencing "some speed issues in Europe". I liked being able to update my site from anywhere and the iLife software was easy to navigate but the speed of uploads and downloads was little more than ponderous. I struggled along with it for a while, wondering if it might have been something in my set up but after several e-mails to and from the .Mac support team they finally came clean and admitted to a less than sparkling performance on their European-based web sites.

I'm sure that it will improve but until it does I'm back with a proper ISP and a piece of software called RapidWeaver, which is proving to be first class. I've put all of these new web pages together with it and managed to integrate it with a customised PhotoShelter installation that will go live as soon as I've finished populating the photo galleries. The advantage of the PhotoShelter site is that it will allow me to sell prints and photo licenses online with the minimum of daily management from me. Whilst the Digital Railroad web site was also excellent, it doesn't yet offer the levels of integration.

I'm quite excited about the new site and the way that I'm hoping it will work. You can get a preview of the image galleries by visiting http://archive.gavingough.com.

I'll be posting more to the blog in the next few days so we'll be able to catch up.

In the mean time, you might like to entertain yourself by compiling your own Top Five Commuting Tracks, in the manner of the Guardian's "OK Commuter" column. The one below, from a correspondent you may be familiar with, was published in last Monday's Office Hours supplement.



Guardian's Office Hours

Tags: mac, guardian, photoshelter

After a very pleasant lunch with young Tewfic on Friday, I took a leisurely ferry ride down the Thames to the Tate Modern to see the giant crack that has been made in the floor of the massive Turbine Hall.

The crack forms an artwork, an installation by Doris Salcedo called “Shibboleth”. Now, whether or not you think that a giant crack in the floor of a building can be considered “art” or not you’d have to admit that it’s an absolutely fascinating thing to see. The crack itself is, well, it’s a crack. It gets a bit deeper and a bit wider as it progresses along the length of the Turbine Hall and one can see that the sides of the crack are formed with a wire mesh that I’m told was once used in a fence that divided two countries in Eastern Europe. Whether that’s actually true or not I don’t know.

Flicking through the leaflet that visitors are given as they enter, I see that there’s a great symbolism attached to the work by the artist “the history of racism, running parallel to the history of modernity and... its untold dark side”.

However, walking up and down its length, I didn’t hear anybody discussing the broader themes of division and separation although perhaps those are just not subjects that many people would discuss openly. The main topic of conversation was, perhaps predictably, how was it done. How did it get here? Was it made elsewhere and lowered into the floor of the Tate? Had the actual floor been attacked by men with pneumatic drills? People laid down and tried to see if there’d been a change in the height of the floor, they pushed their fingers against the joins in the concrete to test the putty and they carefully paced out the width and length of the concrete blocks in an attempt to find clues.

I noticed that couples walking along the length of the crack, deep in conversation, would often subconsciously position themselves on the same side of the divide, reluctant to walk on different sides. Children, obviously, tried to climb down inside it and there was lots of posing for photographs that involved pretending to have got a foot or an arm stuck deep in the crevice. One unlucky man dropped his mobile phone, which caught the toe of his shoe at the perfect angle to send the device skittering across the floor until it plopped into the crack. This acrobatic disaster was accompanied by a chorus of several sharp intakes of breath.

From the floor overlooking the Turbine Hall it was interesting to see the snaking line of visitors as they followed the line of the crack, leaving the rest of the hall deserted. Yes, from a people-watching exercise it was a fascinating afternoon. I spent over three hours there, watching, photographing and occasionally recording some audio. Jo arrived later in the day, walked the length of the crack in three minutes and suggested we head to the bar. By which time, I have to say, I was in need of a beer. Clearly, she was more interested in the ‘craic’ than the ‘crack’.

Whether or not Shibboleth succeeds in prompting us to think about divisions in our society I’m not sure. It certainly succeeds in firing people’s imaginations in other ways and definitely gets people talking to one another. Which, we must admit, is quite an achievement for a crack in the floor.

Tags: art, tate modern, london, slideshows

The BBC start airing a new series about Photography on BBC4 next week. ‘The Genius of Photography’ is a six-part series that looks at the history of the art.

Programmes include a look at how Kodak brought photography to the mass market, Editorial photography, Travel, Documentary and Photography as Art.

Nice to see the my licence fee going to something of interest.

The first programme goes out at 9 p.m. on Thursday, October 25th.

Tags: photography, bbc, television

Not according to my friend Masher it’s not. And if Modern Art leaves you bewildered then the latest installation at Tate Modern is probably unlikely to bring you any further into the folds of the Modern Art community.

After giant spiders, slides, white cubes and a massive solar installation, the Tate is, like The Jam, going underground. The latest piece to grace the massive Turbine Hall is a chasm that stretches the length of the building.

Now I can see how that might be an interesting concept and I can understand how it might invert our usual views of such a robust and impressive structure as the Tate but artist Doris Salcedo claims to be “addressing a long legacy of racism and colonialism that underlies the modern world”. I haven’t seen the crack in person but I must admit that it didn’t immediately bring the subject of racism to mind.

Either way, you can’t deny that it’s an unusual subject for an artwork and continues the Tate’s record of displaying ground-breaking art. “Ground-breaking” - geddit?

Tags: art, tate modern, london

Armed with expert advice from Masher, I have finally taken the plunge and purchased a GPS unit. Until now, I’ve been a determined luddite on the subject of GPS, insisting that a map and compass is sufficient and that GPS really is one gadget too many.

Then I remembered that there’s no such thing as ‘one gadget too many’.

Actually, I’d been looking at Google Earth and one thing led to another. It’s far less expensive to buy digital Ordnance Survey maps than it is to buy the paper versions at £7.00 a pop and as I’m in the process of updating my current library I thought that digital was probably the way to go. The digital versions also have the advantage of having 3D fly-through modes so you can get an impression of the relative sizes of hills, valleys and mountains. Also, the premium Memory Map software comes with quite detailed aerial photography, which I find fascinating. And, as it’s possible to print the maps (onto waterproof paper if you’re so inclined) it seemed an obvious choice.

Once I’d made that decision, the prospect of linking up to a GPS unit became quite inviting. As soon as I understood that I could plot out routes beforehand and also download my routes back onto the computer at the end of the day I was pretty much sold.

Lastly, prompted my Masher’s Blog entries, I took a look at Geocaching. Having spent many hours searching remote rural locations in search of ‘Letterboxes‘, I was intrigued by the 21st Century variation on this treasure hunt game. Boxes are hidden all over the world and I managed to track down five at the weekend, aided by my swish new Garmin eTrex Vista CX!

I’ve ordered digital maps of the Lake District and am really looking forward to plotting my walks and transferring them to the GPS. Poor old Wainwright would turn in his grave at the thought of all this technology up on the fells but you can’t stop progress. Can you?

So, Geocaching, it’s the new black, or something.

Links:
geocaching.com

Tags: geocaching