365 Project - The Conclusion

I think it might be time to admit defeat - I'm not going to finish the 365 Project.

I still have a couple of dozen shots to get up here on the blog from the last couple of months of the year but I don't have enough to complete the set. I can't even be bothered to cheat. In the end it turned out to be a 327 Project, which isn't too terrible. Looking back at when I first started it I knew it was going to be a struggle, and so it proved. I'll slowly add the remainder of the year up in the coming weeks and then crack on with some new stuff.

Sadly, my foot doesn't look like it's going to get better, the tube strike today forced me to walk most of the way to work and it has killed me, so getting out for good long walks with the camera is still not really feasible. I'll do what I can, though. Maybe I'll do more science based posts to make up for it. There's always room for more science.

Review of 2013....

Soooooooo, it has been rather a long time since my last post. This has been due to a number of reasons, partly laziness, partly lack of inspiration and frustration with the 365 Project, and partly because I have been in Romania for the last 3 weeks and internet connections there were few and far between. I will finish off the 365 Project, I have a bunch of photos on the back burner that I need to process and get written up and I will try to have that done by the end of the month. For now, I'm going to do one of those lazy Review of the Year posts with some of my favourite pictures from 2013. I won't include any from the period I haven't posted yet, you'll just have to be patient for those.

In 2014 I will be going back to my usual format of a post every fortnight or so. I think this gives me time to get some decent photos together and the words to go with them. I think the daily requirement of the 365 Project ultimately lowered the quality of what I do here, which was one of the reasons I became increasingly disenchanted with it. However, this does not foreshadow the year ahead, I am optimistic and enthusiastic about the blog for 2014. I have had 70,000 hits so far which is orders of magnitude more than I ever expected and so thank you to everyone who takes time out of their day to see what I've been up to. I'll try to raise the bar.

The last 12 months have been the most traumatic and difficult of my life, much of it self-inflicted, but there were certainly some good times too. Thank you to everyone who has stuck with me this far.

Gargoyle from inside the Natural History Museum, January.

View from Westminster Bridge, January.

Chain in Vienna, March.

St. Marco's piazza, Venice, March.

Venice, March. 

 

Parliament Square, London, May.

Pocketwatch, May.

Parliament Square, London, May.

 Dead flower, July.

 Olympic Park, September.

365 Project: Photo 354

The journey continues....

Germany whizzed by at a great rate of knots but unfortunately we had a little more trouble once we got into Austria. It turns out the driver didn't know how to use the sat nav properly and he had merely plugged in the final destination and let the device do the rest. This is one of my major bug bears with sat navs, they stop people thinking. The mistake he made was to say that he wanted to avoid toll roads, this meant that instead of cruising along the E60 motorway avoiding the mountains we ended up snaking our way through mountainous back roads in the middle of the night. Along with the fog and the constant blind turns you might be forgiven for thinking that what you shouldn't do is drive in the middle of the road. This, apparently, is the safest way to negotiate such a route but having had to swerve back onto our own side of the road a few times I found myself strongly disagreeing with this philosophy.

After a couple of hours of this meandering at 20-30mph we eventually stopped for fuel at which point I leapt out of the car and bought an atlas. I eventually managed to pin down where we were and led us back to the E60 but the whole time the sat nav was forever telling us to get off the road. I insisted on being given the wretched thing and reprogrammed it, properly this time, and we soon made good progress through the rest of the country. Dawn brought Hungary which whizzed passed without mishap.

Since getting off the ferry in France the borders between each country have been non-existent. If you didn't keep an eye out for the sign announcing the frontier then you would never know you had passed into another country. There were no barriers or gates, no tolls or customs and no need for anything as archaic as a passport.

All that changed when we got to Romania, however. All of a sudden everything ground to a halt. Perhaps because they only get one car all day to look over the border guards decided that they would make the event last as long as possible. I wouldn't have expected three Romanians and an Englishman to have too much difficulty getting into Romania, but there were questions aplenty and the need to go to the little hut off to one side to pay the 'tax'. Once we were finally on our way again the going was a lot slower than it had been previously. Beautiful, slick, black tarmac gave way to pitted, gravelly tracks. As we crossed a wide, flat plateaux dotted with villages and farmsteads the difference in  affluence between the people of Hungary and Romania was stark.

As I look back the main images I have of that area are of a dead dog in the middle of the road, frozen stiff and entrails being picked at by crows; and an old man (I almost want to say 'peasant') sat on a crate at the roadside selling some home grown vegetables on a blanket. It's fair to say none of the produce at hand would have passed the QC of a British supermarket. The people here were dirt poor and I feared that all of the worst stereotypes that many of us will have of Romania were true after all. As we progressed, slowly, we got to the city of Timsoara which, happily, looked like any other city; although the undercurrent of poverty never completely faded.

This picture was taken by Georgiana as I slept. We had eventually come across a good road that should have shuttled us down to the capital, Bucurest, but it appeared to be closed. The third and final fuck up of the journey was when it was decided that instead of following alongside the main road on smaller roads for a while and then joining it later, we started ascending the Transalpine road. This felt a lot like climbing into Narnia. The road was frozen, the trees were frozen, waterfalls were frozen; everything was white, cold and hard. After nearly thirty hours of non-stop driving I didn't feel that this was the best way forward; the road was single track, the tyres we had were completely unsuitable, the driver was exhausted, and the place was completely deserted. It could have gone very badly wrong. I was, however, overruled. I was so pissed off about this that I decided to try to sleep my way through it.

365 Project: Photo 353

Finally! We're back on the road! This was sunset as seen from a German autobahn. Our unplanned and lengthy stay in Brussels ended at lunchtime today when we picked the car up from the garage. Unfortunately/stupidly we had a bit of a run in on Saturday night on the outskirts of the Belgian capital. Our driver hadn't noticed that the turn at the top of the slip road we were leaving the motorway by was a right angle. He valiantly tried to make the turn anyway, at 60mph, but failed. We mounted the curb destroying the tyre and the wheel and damaging the suspension. This was at about 2am and, would you believe it, there wasn't a local garage just waiting to fix it for us. I won't go into details here but two and a half days later we're back on the road. Only 30 hours of driving to go!!

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Georgiana looks most unimpressed with the Pissing Manequin; and, yes, another photo from Brussels. Don't ask....

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What's that you say? Why have you posted a picture of the Hotel de Ville from the Grand Place of Brussels when you're supposed to be barrelling through Hungary by now? It's a complicated and frustrating story which will have to wait for another day...

365 Project: Photo 350

Romanians....

365 Project: Photo 349

Tonight I set off for Romania. We're going by car. Yup, driving the full width of Europe. It's about 2,700 miles and we're expecting it to take about 36 hours of actual driving time; about 40 hours in total. We don't intend to stop but for comfort breaks. This was my last view of Blighty as we chugged out of Dover headed for Calais. The rough route is France, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Romania; the final destination being the town of Mangalia on the Black Sea Coast.

The sea was not exactly smooth as we pulled out and quite a few people were struggling to find their sea legs, Georgiana included. Even though it was raining and very windy I was very excited and insisted on spending as much time as possible up on deck. 

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It was decreed that today we have to wear awful Christmas jumpers to work. Luckily I have a really good one.

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It's time for the work Christmas Party. These two ladies have helped make 2013 a lot more fun than it otherwise would have been. Thank you Tina and Anastasia.

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I'm not going to go into details but this lady has been a big help to me this year. Thank you Renata; I'll miss our chats.

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Real Mandela has died and so people lay flowers at the feet of Zombie Mandela. Strange.

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Another trip up to High Barnet to visit friends, another carriage all to myself on the Northern Line.

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My fifth and final blood donation of 2013. I got assigned to the 10 week arm of the Interval study which means I get to donate more frequently than most people. More often the better as far as I'm concerned. You get more info on donating blood here.

365 Project: Photo 338

The theme today is Prepare. In a couple of weeks I will be going to Romania for a few weeks so now I am on an intensive, self-imposed crash course to try and get my spoken Romanian up to scratch. Here are a couple of pages of my notes.

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The view from the train back down to London. I love the flat landscapes of east Anglia.

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Today is my youngest sister's 15th birthday. This is the card I got her. Happy birthday Shannon! Or Shanagolden, as she insists on being called.

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Winter Wonderland at Hyde Park for Georgiana's birthday.

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I'm not going to try to come up with an explanation to fit this into the theme of Relationships, I just like the lines, the shadows and the simple colours.

365 Project: Photo 327

The theme was Imperfect Moments, the moment here was fine but the photo is certainly far from perfect. This was taken at about 3am in a club in north London. I think the orange light just caught my drunken eye.