Arts Pride: A pop-up photo blog

Some beaches are grotty.  Some are crowded.  Some have no sand(!).  Many have far too many tourists (including me when I'm there).  This one, though?  It's perfect.  Sand, sea, dunes with Marram grass, and often blessed solitude.  Don't get me wrong - I love being with friends and family, but there are times when you want to be far from the s*dding crowd.   An easy walk through pinewoods from Wells-next-the-Sea, this is Holkham beach.  On the landward side of the beach, there are grazing marshes.  I saw my first spoonbills there, from a hide.  I didn't think I'd ever see one in the UK, but there they were!  My first Marsh harriers too, but I've seen them in a number of places since then. The phtot was opportunistic - many (most?) of my decent-ish photos are.  The metadata don't record what camera I took it with, but looking at the date I took it, it would almost certainly have been my Fujifilm FinePix S5700 (bridge ca...

The RC Cathedral of St. Marie, Sheffield, August 2017.  Camera: Samsung mobile phone.  Taken one summer day, the first time we'd visited Sheffield together; I'd previously stayed at Ranmoor Hall and at a venue outside the city itself.  The name Wortley Hall is coming to mind for the latter, but I could well be wrong about that.  I do vividly remember the fossil stump in the grounds. Sheffield turned out to have a lovely city centre, with two cathedrals to visit and take in.  It's a funny thing, but as a child, I knew that Liverpool has two cathedrals - there's a line in a song that goes 'and if you want a cathedral, we've got one to spare, in my Liverpool home.'  I thought that Liverpool was unique -  then I went to Norwich and found that they were well endowed in the cathedral department as well.  Then Sheffield...  In this one, the Roman Catholic one, the sun happened to be at the perfect angle to shine through a window and create this. ...