pete mcgovern

In the afternoon, while photographing red leaves on white paper, a youtube songs mix playing in the background gave such big joy, it made me want to do better photographs. These songs have underscored my life these last 18 months. I want to live more so they can burn still at their brightest. The classical concert at the Cathedral this evening was mostly nothing to me in comparison, I pondered, opened myself, relaxed, but still felt adrift, unable to find the meaning that was evidently there. It's like the whole countryside thing. The Hadyn piece was written nearly ten generations ago and to those alive in 1780 this may have been one of the most profound experiences life had to offer - the sacred made loud, asserted. I enjoyed reading about Hadyn's life; his sense of humour (which got him into trouble) and the slow ascent from actual hunger to the hunger to express ideas in music to his last breath. The audience. The contrast between the affluent elderly to the elderly poor. T...

Conscientious objector : ‘I don’t want to wear a uniform that symbolizes violence and pain’. Shahar Perets, who was sentenced to prison for refusing to join the Israeli army, talks about meeting Palestinians for the first time, her visits to the West Bank, and how Israeli society represses the occupation. (As of Oct 31st 2021 she is serving her third prison term.)

art installation at St Peter at Gowts church, Lincoln - I was stopped in my tracks on Friday evening cycling home from work by the dazzle of lights and volunteers in festival t-shirts and woolly hats. Following the pathway of colour-changing bulbs led to the quiet, little space at the back. The pale limestone walls of this ancient church were being used as a screen for a video projection of abstract light effects. Loudspeakers provided background sounds and voices from lives on the other side of the world. So ethereal and lovely I went back the next evening to watch again, when it was darker. The most evocative audio was lush, shrieking rainforest birdsong (to which a blackbird in the tree close by responded), and, visually, the wispy strokes of light coming into being from darkness and darting across the walls before evaporating back into nothingness. Souls made visible, re-visiting. Flickers of life, un-bound from flesh and bone, timeless, gentle, possessing a playful grace.

Loaded up with headphones, stereo mics, esoteric narrative guidebook, and a little black box of tech to walk around Lincoln centre.  40 minute ambient audio soundtrack (with refracted external sounds): ominous, empowering, mournful, protective, apocalyptic, sci-fi, godly, epic, quiet. significant, wonderful. someone else described it as ' disconnecting from people but to nature instead' . Yes to that. And thanks to festival volunteer, Bashwan.

When I go for walks in the countryside some weekends I wonder where the sense of wonderment is in me when I get there. It's lacking. Hills, woodlands, streams, fields etc, and the things that live in them. It's a bit of fresh air. Not much more. Then - a new thing - sometimes, weeks afterwards I might be on my computer at work or be stood at a photocopier listening to ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum as the pages travel through its internal workings, and ba-dum those outdoors places are suddenly super vividly remembered and travelling through me. My memory has usually been like one of those things, um, with holes in it, to strain vegetables, what's it called? You know. That thing .  The remembered places might also be a little tea room visited in another city, and I am there again and can get up from that chair and explore. If it's what Proust had so he could write about any moment in his life in all its completeness no wonder he could bang out 30 pages on what he had for breakfas...

a sunny, blue sky morning, running back and forth to the bay window to watch for vapour trails

Here are the two guest speakers.  At the Q&A at the end I asked for thoughts on Colin Kaepernick (as he is my favourite peace activist) but no-one seemed to have heard of him. I wondered if I had mispronounced his name so ineptly it had been unrecognisable.

' The Rainbow '. If for no other reason, discovering DH Lawrence in 6th Form English Lit made going to school, the whole thing in its entirety, worthwhile.  I'm in re-read mode and 50 pages in to the second book of The Big Three - ' The Rainbow' , soaring over the fields between ' Sons and Lovers'  and ' Women in Love'. How unexpected to be re-reading with something close to sheer excitement.  ' The Rainbow ' published in September 1915 and banned within weeks, despite Lawrence already having been persuaded to cut, cut, and cut, until he finally said, ' no more' .   Bookseller Peter Harrington came across a rare first edition where the first owner had forever fixed the final censorial moment in amber by pasting inside the back cover an account in The Times of prosecutor and magistrate denigrating one of the great English novels, before declaring it fit only to be burned.