Bastide de Blacailloux
March 20, 1915
Besides 1 man killed and 2 wounded, ‘Fletcher* was shot through the head by a sniper just after breakfast. During this tour he had gone out and brought in a French tricolour which the Germans had fastened to a tree right over their wire. The flag was afterwards presented to Eton College where he had been a master. He will be a great loss, not only for his gallantry, but for his personality and his conversation at Mess. To return off a cold and sticky digging party to Streaky Bacon [Farm] to find him sitting up over a decanter of rum with Wynne-Edwards and chanting in Greek a chorus from Aristophanes, or to hear his gay voice through a billet window on a bright March morning declaiming Swinburne’s “The Hounds of Spring are on Winter’s traces,” or watch him blowing smoke-rings after Mess while he parried the C.O.’s chaff about “University Education,” was an essential part of the amazing mixture of those days. There was something truly Elizabethan about “The Don”. He was buried in the cemetery on the right hand of the road as we go out to Bois Grenier.’
The war the infantry knew 1914-1919 by Captain J. C. Dunn, Abacus 2014.
*Second Lieutenant Walter George Fletcher, 1888-1914.
Saturday Sun
Saturday Sun
Saturday sun came early one morning
In a sky so clear and blue
Saturday sun came without warning
So no-one knew what to doSaturday sun brought people and faces
That didn’t seem much in their day
But when I remembered those people and places
They were really too good in their wayIn their way
In their way
Saturday sun won’t come and see me todayThink about stories with reason and rhyme
Circling through your brain
And think about people in their season and time
Returning again and againAnd again
And againBut Saturday’s sun has turned to Sunday’s rain
So Sunday sat in the Saturday sunand wept for a day gone by
Lyrics by Nick Drake
Ornamental Canada Goose
Candid Cameras
Last week The New Yorker commissioned photographer Daniel Arnold to document his journeys to the end of various NYC subway lines, and the results were published on Instagram.
I’ve been taking photographs of public transit passengers too, but on the London Underground. Here’s one taken on a foggy platform earlier this year:
Goodbye Cameras
According to Craig Mod, writing on the New Yorker’s Elements blog, all we really need is a “networked lens”.
Makes me want to shout “Up in the sky, look! It’s a camera. It’s a phone. It’s Supercam!”.
Happy
Here’s a fun discovery for the New Year. The world’s first 24-hour music video featuring Pharrell Williams’ song Happy, which was originally written for the movie Despicable Me 2.
It’s a theme and visual variations for a danceable pop song. The 4-minute piece repeats continuously for 24 hours, but each rendition features a different video of one or more people dancing to the song. If you watched one each day, it would take almost a year to watch all 360 of them.
If you click on the image below, your browser should open the video at the time that corresponds to your time of day.
Harvey
“Well, I’ve wrestled with reality for 35 years, Doctor, and I’m happy to state I finally won out over it.” — Elwood P. Dowd, Harvey (1950)
Platform with a view
While waiting 15 minutes (!) at the peak of rush-hour for a train one day this week, I had time to capture this view of the sky, including a few of the aircraft in it. London is served by five airports (Heathrow, Gatwick, Luton, Stansted and London City), and during the day at least, the sky is always full of aircraft. By holding my iPhone up to the sky, the Plane Finder AR app shows me each flight’s details in real-time. Incredible.