Whimsical Musings of a Loon

Untitled , a photo by sian_quincy on Flickr. Climbed an aircraft, skin shade pale, Amongst elderly fields of Daily Mail; Time is dead, time to kill, Travelling, yet feel so still. Leaving grey, mist relief, Into colour; flame Tenerife. Gigantic mountainous, against so weak, They speak, they tower, the mighty peak. Amidst snaking roads fear do give, Astonishment! In this they live. Such beauty makes a Spine-a-curled, I'm here. Not there. In my other world.

Hundred years ago this month, Captain Robert Falcon Scott and four other members of his British Antarctic Expedition 1910, reached the South Pole. What should have been triumphed as a great achievement of effort, bravery, knowledge and exploration, was diminished when it was realised that Scott's expedition had been 'beaten' to the Pole first by the Norwegian expedition lead by Amundsen. What followed after Scott reached the Pole was a decreasing circle of fate. Upon reaching the South Pole and the crushing reality that they had been beaten to the race, Scott and his small team began the even more exhausting 800 mile return to their base in constantly deteriorating weather and ill health. By March 1912, Scott and his team had lost their lives; perishing in the horrifyingly frozen temperatures. They had been hungry, frost bitten and fatigued for weeks. Captain Scott, Captain Oates, Lieutenant Bowers, Edward Wilson, and Petty Officer Evans had all passed away in their fin...

It's that time of the year again - Lazuary; no, not some annual homage to the former Bond star (whom was vastly underrated in my opinion); but the month of lazy journalism and blogs as we review the year just departed with endless lists and reminders of what happened as if we can't remember just a few months ago (to be fair, I often can't). It's as if we can't be bothered to think of any new blog topics of originality so just wheel out geeky lists of things we like as if to define ourselves as having a purpose of existing because of the elements in life that we favour. Which is exactly what I am going to do. It would be against my geeky religion not to. And besides, it's jolly satisfying. So here is my top 10 of favourite albums from 2011. Real Estate: Days Real Estate have been a favourite band of mine for a while. They produce simple pop of understated goodness. White Denim: D Lushness. A touch of the  psychedelic groove.  Cerys Matthews - Explorer...

Photography is one of my passions, and today whilst on a long walk with the dog up Caerphilly Mountain, I stopped at a style that overlooked Cardiff and wished I could master capturing the view. For years I have tried, and I have never quite achieved to replicate the oddly part-picturesque-part-M4-induced-city-scape exactly how I wanted. I will continue to try every time I trample past, but it did make me ponder over what was my actual favourite image of all time. Growing up, it was press images of sporting moments that captured beautifully split-second action, that got me fascinated photography. The images, perhaps, of Wales scoring a try in a rare victory - they were such exciting photographs -  the excitement in the players' eyes, the mud, the emotion, the faces of the crowds; you could sit and pour over the image and live it for much longer than you could watching the replay endlessly on TV. As I studied photography more, I saw the power this medium had for lettin...

I love running. No, I LOVE running. When people hear this or see how enthusiastic I get about running long distances, clocking up the miles early morning, or struggling up a Caerphilly mountain training run, some respond in sheer recoiled horror. I may as well have admitted I enjoy eating puppies for dinner before washing them down with a mug of vinegar once owned by Hitler. But I genuinely love it. And I wasn't always sure why; until I read Murakami's 'What I Talk About When I Talk About Running' short book; his philosophy on his love of the pursuit. What he writes is essentially this: running is part of what he is. Like an artist's art, or musician's music. Just because it is an exercise (a sport!) makes it no less valuable or trivial to study and philosophise about. I had always liked sport as a kid. I spent the first 10 years of my life kicking a football against the garage door, winning Wimbledon against the side of the house, and using my mum's h...

When You Tube was in its relative infancy, I stumbled upon a video that made me laugh so much I spilt tea on my keyboard. The late 90s and early years of the new millennium was the beginning of the Internet video cult phenomenon, a time when footage would slip easily through copyrighted nets and the for-father to the iplayer age. I'd already discovered the power of the internet's time wasting capabilities - hours spent entertaining myself as a student building websites on geocities-  on Bargain Hunt's leathery badger haired David Dickinson; aging ex tennis players and their similarities to various zoo animals (of course my sites were hilarious [sic] and satire witticisms and not just er [sic]). I spent whole evenings looking up 'celebrity morgue.com' with my flatmates; finding out when I would die on deathclock.com; and conspiracy theories pages with flashing GIFs (the animated GIF - the comic sans of early internet elements - which naturally made any 'fact...

When it comes to literature, I am not usually particularly keen on spin-off books or novels based on classic characters. When I first read Jane Austen as an 11 year old, I was so captivated by the sparkling characters in Pride & Prejudice , so desperate to be part of their lives and learn more, I read a 'sequel' written by a modern writer. It was based on Elizabeth Bennett's married life with Darcy. It was one of the worst pieces of writing I had ever read, even worse than the deliciously awful Point Horror books I use to devour as a sort of pot noodle literature alongside the gourmet Austen. It was like a bad Hollywood sequel where the actors couldn't act, the director couldn't direct and script was was written with invisible ink on thin air. So it was with trepidation that I began reading ' Wide Sargasso Sea' . Recommended by a good friend of similar tastes and with whom I trusted with my cultural life, I took it up with the sort of enthusiasm of ...