british isles

Yellow

Photo taken in the garden on one of those rare sunny days here.

british isles

Cornfield

A slightly long walk away from the house I found these fields ripe.

british isles

Sheep and the lamb

I was out with the long lens one day and captured a few shots of the sheep and their pups who were in a field behind out vet.

british isles

My Flickr groups

I’m a huge fan of Flickr and is where I post all of my photos (good and bad!). Since joining the site I’ve created a several groups and I thought I’d list them all just in case anyone is interested. The main ones are:

World Tour: Do Before You Die:
flickr.com/groups/dobeforeyoudie
(a group of photos that’ll inspire people to travel the World)

Wonders of the World:
flickr.com/groups/wondersoftheworld
(a group of photos you think are ‘wonders’)

British Isles & Ireland:
flickr.com/groups/britishisles
(a group for anything relating to the British Isles and Ireland)

Learn by Picture:
flickr.com/groups/learnbypicture
(a group to post your photos to get feedback and advice from others)

How-to by Photograph:
flickr.com/groups/howtobyphotograph
(a group to post images and their details of how they were created for others to learn from)

Tutorial by Picture:
flickr.com/groups/tutorialbypicture
(a group to post images that are photography tutorials)

And a quick list of the rest:

Ashdown Forest - a large park in the South East of England
Edenbridge - a small town in Kent, UK
Hever UK - near Edenbridge and home of the great Hever Castle
Rally Car British Isles & Ireland - I like rally cars what can I say
Rugby Union England - a group about the sport in England
Tennis UK - sports group for the UK
Thatcham - a town near Newbury and Reading in the UK and one of the many places I’ve lived
Tonbridge - a another town near Edenbridge
Westerham - guess where this town is near?
Westerham Golf Club - one of the golf clubs my brother has worked
Wimbledon Tennis Championships - a group for the great tournament

So please pop along, share you photos and post your discussions.

If you’re like me and rushed off your feet with little time to spare check the public Google Reader feed I’ve created here. It’s put all my groups together and any new photo added to any and all of the groups above will appear there. And once on the page you can subscribe to the RSS feed yourselves and receive regular updates. I’ve created several public feeds like this so if you think that might be of use to you then watch this space as I’ll be posting details of how to create them and a list of my other feeds in the future.

british isles

My experience of the UK flooding in 2007

I thought I’d post my experience of the major floods that hit the UK last Summer. This was written on 20th July 2007:

Well I had an interesting day yesterday (as did many others in the UK). I was working out of the Newbury Business Park [West Berkshire, South England] yesterday (not my usual place of work). It had been raining (and raining *hard*) since I woke up at 5am. News filtered through the office at about 1pm or a little earlier that Vodafone’s HQ [I used to work for the telecoms company] had been evacuated as it was flooded and had lost power. People were being sent home because if they couldn’t get home now they would definitely not be able to later.

So I decided to bugger off once it was likely that everyone would be sent home. I stood at the bus stop for 20mins waiting for the VF shuttle bus but nothing. I could hear police and ambulance sirens going back and forth but couldn’t see the road. I overheard form his phone call that the guy next to me had been there for 40mins so definitely something was wrong as shuttles are normally bang on time. The rain stopped just before 2pm so I chose to walk to the train station and by just walking around the corner I could see why there were no buses – cars, lots of them, not moving at all and all the way down the A4 road! I carried on towards the station, on route to Newbury station a colleague walked by saying Thatcham station was completely under water [the station near my home] so I headed for Newbury station to check if I could get home but found this…

You can just about see the track, so that’s a whole lot of water. Guess what, I had to walk home.

I’ve walked home before with a broken bike and also along the canal (there and back) and normally took an hour and a quarter but this was something else. The A4 was only slightly moving when I returned to it to get home. The side coming from Thatcham was fine but heading towards it was near-static. I decided to go down Lower Way [road] as it’s a shorter route to my home near [Thatcham[ station but this was one of the pics I took while going down it.

Basically most of the lower part of Lower Way was like this. People had to walk up on the hill and on the grass to walk along the road. Cars were being turned back up and onto the A4!! A few cars and a van has been abandoned, stuck in the middle of this. It didn’t help that water was furiously gushing down from the hill in 2 or 3 places and that this was all right next to the sewage works (my soaked-through work shoes went straight in the bin when I got back). I had parts of my journey where I was walking in water well over my ankles.

It didn’t get much better once I got off this road and onto Station Road. This and roads off it were totally water logged and you could see people had just given up and parked their car anywhere they could and walked the rest of their journey. I think ti was 2 hours later (could have been a lot more) by the time I came up to my house. I was fearing the worse, thinking my house was flooded but thankfully it wasn’t and have to admit being one of the lucky ones

I didn’t go down to see but Thatcham station was supposed to be even worse than Newbury station. Going pass it this morning it was OK but the grass area at the front of the pub near it had 2 mini swimming pools in it. Parts of roads in my residential estate were still flooded and you could see a few houses with piles of rubbish from their homes sitting outside their doors.

Wow that was some rainfall!

(both these pics were taken with my N73 mobile phone)

UPDATE:

It was a terrible day and we are now told to expect this on a more regularly basis. I was told that Thatcham was one of the worst hit and aerial shots appeared on the BBC news the following days. When I left Vodafone in October I think the HQ was still not fully operational so that shows have much damage that day made.

Country-wide there are still people living out of caravans or temporary accommodation, flood precautions are still not in place in lots of areas but luckily we have not had a day like that since.