pete mcgovern

Broken TV fix - bake the main-board for 10 minutes at gas mark 5. All the really important stuff is on the internet.

Tritton Road, Lincoln: south-west corner. First stage due to complete September 2021, with a total of 1400 ensuite rooms by 2022. 40 weeks rent £7,017.60.

The neighbours must be wondering what's going on.  It's a Sunday and where is my usual half hour Alanis Morissette playlist at volume, which they must look forward to all week. I do my ironing in one room and the speakers are in another and so they need cranking up a bit to get the full benefit of Alanis. Alanis Morissette. Every Sunday. For months. But today she did not accompany me, or me her, with my singing along while ironing, and the random mix that got selected instead opened with a song by Ryan Miller (singer with US band Guster), 'This Is The Only Time We Have' .  I met him once after a gig in North London. I liked him. He liked my camera, (a Sony R1). I took a picture of us. So we're basically best friends. I first heard ' This Is The Only Time We Have ' when watching ' Fundamentals of Caring '. It was played over the closing credits and it was an ' I know that voice! ' moment. That film was a recommendation from Alexy at work in th

 I saw musicians setting up at the band-stand when I hit the park on my run this afternoon. I said hi and they said they were starting at 4pm so I headed back later to watch and listen. They are Ignite (Elim Pentacostal Church) who are more usually based at the library located at the north west entrance to the park. About 30 people showed up and there was free hot chocolate and coffee. Very small children danced enthusiastically.  I got home feeling I had participated in a triathalon. Running, cycling and home in the rain. It has been the year of doing random things - like Jim Carrey's character in the film, ' Yes, Man '.

I saw this painting when dipping into a book on her this morning and was immediately entranced. A few months ago I stood at the spot where she painted this, outside her cottage in the tiny village of Catterline in Scotland. Years ago I wouldn't have thought this loose figurative style innovative enough. It was - and still is  -  popular with many British artists. For me though she is the bestest of the best. Last week I was amazed to read that in 1945, at age 25, she came to Lincoln and briefly worked with the children in a school just a few hundred yards away from where I currently live.

Bigger than the Deutsche Borse Photography prize , it's the office photo competition: What A Year. 22nd March 2020 -  Tesco filled the shelves left empty from the panic-buying of loo rolls with buckets of flowers for mother's day.  The scent of the end of civilisation has unexpectedly turned out to be fresh and lovely. I don't think it will win any prizes for being an amazing looking photograph. It's a snapshot, and without the context doesn't mean anything particularly. Only with accompanying words does it carry much meaning at all, and even then perhaps only to me. I think it will be easy to forget the day to day experience early on in the pandemic. When a trip to the supermarket meant going to the back of a queue around the side of the building, maintaining social distancing from the person in front and accepting the rhythm of life had changed; feeling the sun on one's face, looking at distant tree tops waving in the breeze and the stop-start rhythm practicin

somewhat suprised and happy to wake to a sunny day. And it's the #1 weekend since lockdown #2 ended and my priority #1 was to get to TK#Maxx to see what new-in plant pot stock they might have waiting for me.  There were #millions of people out and about today; it was sunny and we were un-locked. At the shop I fought my way up to floor #1 past men and women wanting new clothes and was massively relieved to find the #2 shelves of plant pots without a #single person around them.  This is the #one. This is the #one I've waited for.  Hello, medium size pot.  You came from the land of Portugal, and not so heavy unlike #most of the other ones I've bought lately. A lovely pale cream glaze ceramic with textured detailing around the rim, and while the melted dark chocolately coloured splodges are not the best colour it's interestingly done.  I'd bought a huge #XL hoodie so could wrap it up in and carefully place in my rucksack for the ride home. I reminded myself not to do an

Not a peep from Western governments, or their opposition parties, to condemn the state-sponsored assassination of an(other) Iranian nuclear scientist by Israel. I'm not a fan but at least The Guardian/Observer has the cojones to write about the research from three Israeli human-rights organisations on the impact of intimidatory night-time searching of Palestinian homes - link here . Testimony includes that from Israeli soliders: “It wasn’t my job but they were looking for women to search Palestinian women [in Hebron]. I thought it was cool. I was 19 years old and playing war. I wanted to be part of it, to see how it was from the inside. In the end it was a turning point for me. “When I got inside, the commander said, ‘you have to search the women’. The family was really scared. I have this strong image of this other soldier who I really liked. He had a small machine gun. He’s holding it in front of this cute three-year-old. He has a face mask on and he pulls off the mask and smile

ensō  explained

for Richard M.

 I've started reading the journal, ' A Woman In Berlin '; a record of life between April 20th and June 22nd 1945 as the Russian army encircled then captured the city. 8 weeks of a life. Friday, 20 April 1945, 4 P.M. Rummaging through the few books owned by the tenant of this apartment (where I also found the blank notebook I'm using to write this), I turned up a novel. The setting is English aristocratic, with sentences like: ' She cast a fleeting glance at her untouched meal, then rose and left the table .' Ten lines later I found myself magnetically drawn back to that sentence. I must have read it a dozen times before I caught myself scratching my nails across the print, as if the untouched meal which had just been described in detail was really there and I could physically scrape it out of the book. A sure sign of insanity. Onset of mild delusions brought on by lack of food. The book was published anonymously in Germany in 1959 then withdrawn after an extreme

 

Yesterday afternoon I cycled out into the countryside to visit a plant nursery reputedly at Eagle Barnsdale, a village about 7 miles away.  I never found it.  I think I missed the turn or it doesn't exist except on Google maps and on review sites (where they get all 5* reviews). Some of the fields on the way were unexpectedly colourfully pretty for the time of year and seemed to almost shine under the overcast sky. I reached to my pocket but had forgotten my camera so had to make do with the simple reality of looking - which is often more sensible, especially with important things like fields, or mountains or forests or seas, or people, which don't like being squashed up into a tiny digital sensor anyway. Just looking is okay. The recent need for more pot-shaped objects continued today (three more),  & that's a rattlesnake  plant in the background.

If I ever go in to TK Maxx I always seem to come back with some little pot thing.  They always seem slightly badly made, are always ridiculously heavy and have come from exotic locations halfway around the world. To make my kitchen more airy I'm just about to pull out some boxy kitchen units to replace with rough cut scaffold board shelving and fix with steel brackets. Once they are up - not that I know about these things - I think I might need a hot little splash of colour sat on the pale wood. Next, some more house plants.

The oven's on but a pause to look at an Edward Weston book, and specifically  Pepper No. 30 Weston was shooting on a camera producing 10" x 8" negatives from which he made contact prints. First saw how amazing these were when I skipped school aged 15 to attend opening of a show in the Curtois wing of the local Usher Gallery, Lincoln, UK. Forever grateful to the curator who decided to put on a serious photography show in our art gallery. (It would be decades before the Tate in London would think to do so.)

MACK website    submission deadline 25th Jan 2021   Jury:  Mariama Attah,  Polly Fleury,  Renée Mussai,  Eugenie Shinkle,  Clare Strand

Independent Photographer website  The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of their Dreams - New Yorker interview:  It was the best time of my life, spending time with them. I had an excuse to regress a little. The first three years were just pure joy. I would just listen to them, film them—it was just completely free. I wanted their company; I had been sick a long time, I had been in Sweden, which can be dark and cold, and then when I went back to Argentina, there they were.

 

 

 

 

 

 A long, long time ago when I spent some time in Ireland one summer, based in a church in Rochfortbridge, we'd travel a bit on our trail bikes exploring the lush countryside. I'd lump a big RB67 medium format camera around with me and, very occasionally, take a photograph of a washing line whenever it was set in a nice view. I liked the idea of something so mundane set in the rolling fields or hills. Doing this was always a bit fraught as you can be sure no-one particularly wants a biker pulling up and taking photos of their washing hanging out to dry. But as it turned out no clothes props or expletives were ever aimed in my direction. That was what turned out to be my last post-photography-course little project idea for what was to be half a lifetime. Then I really got started. Travelling around the Scottish coast recently I found it impossible not to take a few washing lines in the landscape pictures. And, in this case, never have washing lines been so conspicuously publicly

So careful in its carelessness.

Eardley lived in the end cottage, which is now a swish holiday home. The watchie where she worked is along the clifftop on the other side of the bay and has a boxy wooden lean-to with large windows which artists still use to this day. The narrow path to get across to it is precarious, with a steep hillside offering a tumble of a hundred feet down to the rocky shore below for a misplaced step or two.

The nearer I got to Catterline the more I saw the landscape the way Joan Eardley painted it.

I take so long when taking a picture that sometimes living things appear in the frame.

 When the place names have been forgotten there will still be the colours.