February Photo a Day Challenge #23: Your Shoes
I’ve had my boots since I was eighteen so they are manky as fuck, but they’re too comfy and lovely to say goodbye to!
Surprise Breakfast
Yeah, so work hasn’t been great lately. My hours have been reduced and because of exams what hours I have left are very flexible and easily cancelled. It’s not fun getting up at 7 and dragging your half-dead arse to work only to find that you don’t have to be there for an hour. But I figured, fuck it, I’ve got a coffeehouse and my iPod, I’m grand!
So I spent my morning with coffee, scones and Lana Del Rey:
Old Warden, Bedfordshire
Sometimes you forget that the most beautiful places are right on your doorstep. It was ice cold today, but it was sunny so we went for a drive and a walk around this lovely little village and had a coffee at Shuttleworth.
Naturally, I had my camera on me. [Sony NEX-5N with 16mm & 18-55mm lenses. Edited with Photoshop and Pixlr-o-matic. (I may post the pure shots at a later date, because they are lovely without the filters and effects.)]
We also stopped off at Clophill and Cople and here are a few shots:
I’m still fairly in love with these instragrammatic-esque effects – and they certainly make snapshots look lovely – but as I said before I’ll start doing less of these retro style photo sets soon and focus on pure photography for a little while. I’m going to be doing portrait shoots and macro shoots soon, all of which will be free from these retro stylings. However, because I’m such a sucker for these beautiful old, rusty, dirty, shaky, unique and idiosyncratic shots I’ve actually purchased one of these cheap & impossible Holga lenses for digital systems. They create the same kinds of images, but in the camera – including underexposure, vignetting, ghosting and all of the things that you don’t usually want from a lens, but (when used creatively) make for great shots. So look out for plenty of new photo posts soon!
February Photo a Day Challenge #17: Time
I didn’t want to do something really bog standard like taking a shot of a clock and I didn’t really have the ability to do what I wanted to do (a timelapse or slow shutterspeed shot of a clock ticking away) with the equiptment I have, so instead I got a bunch of shots and did creative things to them by making a gif. Here goes:
(Well, I’m not sure about you guys but WordPress appears to be refusing to play my gif so here it is on Tumblr in full working glory.)
Book Review | War Horse by Michael Morpurgo
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
War Horse is a short novel by celebrated children’s author and previous Children’s Laureate Michael Morpurgo. It follows a young shire horse, Joey, from infancy through to his youth on a Devonshire farm and right up to the outbreak of World War One when Joey is enlisted as an army horse. It follows his adventures, trials and tribulations as a war horse and depicts the terrible effects of war from a very unique vantage point.
I saw Steven Spielberg’s 2012 film before I read this novel and, having been less than impressed by the film adaptation, I was hoping this book would salvage what could clearly have been a fantastic story. I’m glad to say that it did. The book has many advantages over the film: for a start, it is short and succinct without ever losing any action, plot or pace. Second, the major drawback of the film was the inability to really sympathise with Joey without the story seeming slightly corny. The book easily assuages this effect by having Joey narrate the tale from a first-person perspective. The book also has the advantage of avoiding any censorship laws like those that a film must comply with, so disturbing violence can be hinted at whilst still being an “appropriate” (I hate that word) novel for children. The best and most successful parts of the film also seem to come direct from the book, whilst the slightly more cheesy moments that were in the film are absent.
If I were to actually discuss the book’s merits without comparing it to the film, though, I would say that rather like John Boyle‘s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, this book is most successful for the way that it portrays war in a way accessible to children. It doesn’t shy away from dealing with hardship, violence, injustice and death, but nor is it so relentlessly nihilistic in its portrayal of war that it is too disturbing for kids to read. It gets the reader involved and deeply empathic towards the lives of its protagonists and then eloquently describes the terrible effects the war had on them, leaving you with a better understanding of the terror and misery of war and a greater compassion for anyone involved. I also love the fact that it is fair on both of the sides involved in the fight. Children should always be encouraged to read stories like these.
War Horse is a short read that leaves a big effect, and it’ll get you thinking about human life, family, friendship, love, and how these are affected by war, in a way that might just leave you very quiet and thoughtful for the rest of the day.
Book Review | How To Pass Exams by Dominic O’Brien
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
If you’re already familiar with the art of mnemonics (and by that I mean the ancient Greek art of memory, subsequently taught and theorised by Giordano Bruno and Matteo Ricci amongst others, rather than the popularised form used by primary school teachers), this book won’t do much good for you. If, however, you are the intended audience – a school kid who struggles to learn by stale, traditional methods – there’s a chance this could help you learn everything from mathematics to history, and chemistry to new languages.
This book takes the traditional arts of memory – the link method, the loci method, the peg system etc. – and applies some ingenuity and imagination to them in order to improve typical learning situations faced by students, thereby helping them learn faster and more effectively. There are also passages dealing with how to revise; specifically how to organise time and make the most efficient use of your brain power. Similarly, O’Brien takes some of the memory methods and uses them in new ways to encourage kids to learn outside of the typical ways teachers often inflict – rote learning, dry factual reading etc. Some of the most impressive parts of the book are the ways O’Brien offers solutions for learning languages – by employing the link method to learn individual words and the loci method for learning the genders of words in foreign languages. Along with Michael Gruneberg’s books, it is easy to see why some people argue you can actually learn up to 4000 verbs a day using techniques like these (although I imagine that would be pretty exhausting). Also, the way O’Brien has adapted the peg system for certain purposes is useful.
The only real drawback of this book is in fact also its main strength: that it is an “adaptation”, if you will, of the established techniques to fit a study environment. I can’t help but think that it would be better for a student to read a book establishing the memory techniques themselves – and to then use their intuition to apply them more autonomously to their own life and learning. To do so would be of far higher benefit to a student, I think. However, for anyone looking for a quick, enjoyable and simple way of improving their study skills, memory and learning efficiency, this book is a must-read and you certainly won’t regret shelling out some cash for what will easily become a go-to reference book on your shelf.
