1,000,000 Views at Flickr

Well, you did it! I've been checking the view statistics at Flickr throughout the day and when I looked at 20 minutes past eight o'clock tonight I had topped the million mark by a hefty 115!

A few minutes later when I snatched a screen grab it had gone up a bit more...

The photo with the most views during the day was this one with just 9 views - so it's place in the day's listings could change very quickly!

A massive thank you to you - my readers and viewers.

Get Me To A Million!

I'm getting all excited. This morning as I checked the statistics for my Flick account I found I was just 1000 views short of one million!

So this is a plea - help me reach the magic number today by having a look at a few photos on my site. Here's a few tasters of what you might find...

No surprises to say there's a few of Blackpool! In fact there are 20 sets of photos with almost 1400 photographs to choose from.

There are also 21 sets of photographs of different parts of Great Britain. All the countries and regions of Great Britain have their own set and there are sets of holidays we have taken in the UK plus sets for such things as bridges, rivers, canals, roman remains and pubs!

There are 22 sets with over 2700 photos of our travels abroad. Mainly of Europe, though there are 164 photos of a trip to Orlando, USA in 1993. Places include France, Italy, Spain, Austria, Greece, Croatia, Egypt and Turkey amongst others. Lots of cruise ships to look at too!

If it's animals that you like there are 12 sets containing over 500 photos of domestic pets, farm animals and zoo animals.

There are almost 5000 photos in a collection called simply Other. It houses sets on things like academic buildings, portraits, family, churches and religious sites, coin operated machines such as inball, jukeboxes and arcade games, celebrities, toys, night shots and my sketches.

There are two sets in the above collection of all of my black and white collection. These also appear in some of the other sets but the B&W sets bring them all together. Note also that a photo of a bridge will appear in the bridges set but also in the set for the region of the uk or the set for the holiday if it's abroad.

In the Curiosities collection you will find 22 sets of photos on such topics as castles, hillforts, stocks, crosses and memorials, legends, stone circles, statues and windmills. 1200 photos await you there. Again, they will also be in other relevant sets.

In all there are currently 8379 photos altogether - blimey! If you try hard you could have me well on the way to two million views!!!

3/4 Million Views

Today the counter at my Flickr account topped the 3/4 million views milestone.

This is by way of saying thank you to all of my readers here and viewers at Flickr and to those who download both my own and the band's music to the tune of 1000 downloads a month.

A particular thank you to all who have taken the trouble to follow this and any of my other blogs, or make me a contact at Flickr - the numbers creep up every now and then. Welcome to those who have joined recently and I hope you continue to enjoy these articles.

The scanning of the black and white negatives is entering an interesting phase with lots of articles to come for those who enjoy the curiosities topic - glimpses of England's past and tales of ghosts, old hillforts and Victoriana etc. At around the time I've reached in my scanning - 1983 - I was starting to freelance regularly to magazines such as Country Life, This England and even gained my own regular series, John Burke's Curious Lancashire in the Lancashire Magazine.

So more to come whenever my dashing around the country for work allows. Though even that can be very interesting sometimes - both for good and bad reasons!

Flickr Viewings

For the last few days I've been keeping a record on Facebook of the top scoring photographs from my Flickr collection.

Inevitably on a daily basis this leads to some repetition as my most viewed photos come top on a regular basis. But on those days I choose the No.2 or No.3 photo to feature.

The celebrity photos understandably come high up on the list of most-viewed photos with this one of actresses Carol Hawkins and Sally Geeson being all time top scorer by far. Currently (and this will change in 10 minutes or so) it has been viewed 13,452 times. Carol played Sharon in Please Sir having taken over the role from Penny Spencer. Sally was Sid James' daughter in Bless This House. Both appeared in Carry On films also, notably Carry On Abroad.

All time No.2 currently with 7,319 views is this one of me with Helene Hunt and Carole Ashby, who were both member's of Octopussy's all-girl team in the James Bond film of that name.

I'm actually sitting on Carole's knee here - at her insistance I hasten to add! We'd met a couple of times previously and she has a great sense of humour. She played Communist Resistance girl Louise in TV's 'Allo 'Allo.

Both of these photos were taken at the Memorabilia events at Birmingham's NEC. There's always a number of film and TV people there signing autographs and willing to pose for photos. Just don't expect treatment like this until you've got to know them though! And even then don't expect it!

Here's some of the quirkier photos to crop up in the top 3 ratings this week. The Citroen was found in St Tropez in 2008 and at first I thought it was a surviving 1960s Mini Moke. As seen in TV's The Prisoner with Patrick McGoohan. Even the gear stick coming out of the dashboard or the chevrons logo didn't make me twig it was a Citroen based on a 2CV chassis from the 1980s until some kind soul commented on the photo!

Yesterday for some reason the focus was on this shot of Manchester Cathedral from 1998. It was Fran's birthday and we'd gone to Manchester for the day and the shopping got a little much for me so I left Fran and daughter, Gill, to the shopping and wandered round with the camera!

The black granite stone used inside is slightly oppressive I thought. A bit of limestone would have lightened the place up a bit.

Large versions of the photos: Carol and Sally, Helene and Carole, Citroen fun car, Manchester cathedral

Sunnyside 2011 - Friday 18 March

Phew - it's been one of those weeks out on the road eating up miles and not getting much chance to sort out photos or thoughts!

So let's go back just over a week to last Friday and we piled everything in the trusty MPV and breathed a sigh of relief as we considered that, had it had rafters, it would be full to them!

We were taking our full set of gear down this time so with PA and speakers, keyboard and guitar, gig bag, stands and luggage and four people, we zoomed off down the motorway, stopping at every second services - drat these pills...

The hotel we've used the last two years is now a Travelodge and a communal breakfast-free area so we were staying at the Sunley Conference Centre of Northampton University, who were providing a large room for the Friday night jam session.

Lots of familiar faces there from years past and also some new ones. Some that I knew from the Billy Fury forum but had never met.

In fact the first thing we saw was the Danmobile! Daniel Heeney, is a long-standing member of the billyfury.com forums but it was our first meeting. "Long-standing" suits him - he's a tall fella! And I loved his act on Friday night!

Cathy and Jean were on hand to give me my first cuddles, Katie, Marie and Jan hadn't been able to make it alas! Likewise a few others but there was a good crowd of us. The Furygirls' favourite, Johnny Storm was there to wow them with his voice. Miss Franny came over all accusingly at me because he did one of her favourite Michael Bolton songs - er... yes, it's a while since we've done that one I know...

MC, the fabulous Rob Dee called us up. Creeping Bentgrass took to the stage area and we set off with a Billy song - Like I've Never Been Gone, one of my favourites!

We had a bit of help with Johnny B Goode (below) - he can be a bit of a handful that one!

And at the end of the night we were surprised but very honoured to be asked back to play a live backing for all the performers from the night to sing Billy's best known hit, Halfway to Paradise.

All the photos from Friday night are in a set at my Flickr account and the video of Like I've Never Been Gone is at the band's YouTube channel.

Saturday night report to come...

I'm Just Boasting!

I know. I shouldn't. But I missed it the day when my photos at my Flickr account reached half a million views.

So today I'm celebrating 550,000 views instead!

Bunting. Fireworks. Trumpets. Hurray!

Thank you! I couldn't have done it without you. It doesn't count my viewings...

Blackpool Trams You've Seen Before

It's not only the blog that's been a bit neglected of late, it's the Flickr account as well!

Although there have been a few updates there even if you haven't noticed. This is because I am now re-scanning photos in widescreen format that had previously been uploaded in 800x600 format.

Have a peek in the Blackpool Trams set for instance and you'll see not only scans in new sizes, but I've managed to get the colour balance a bit better too! Some of these old negatives are horrendously mucky though, with hundreds of bits of dust stuck fast against the emulsion of the film. It takes ages cleaning them up and I have a limit of half an hour before I just think "Sod it..." and save the file as it is!

But that's not normally so bad! These two photos were taken early one evening in September 1985 as the illuminated trams came up the the North Pier pickup point for the Illuminations Tour.

Anyway I suspect scanning may be suspended for a couple of days! Miss Franny and I now have a very rare few days at home together! After all my chasing about, this week I've been working at home whilst Fran has been doing some grotty shifts. She had a 5:30am start, a midnight finish (thankfully not on the same day!) and both of my journeys to take her and pick her up saw me scraping snow off the car and coping with the festive skating rink that is our road. Last night as we got back around a quarter past midnight I thought I'd reverse into the lay-by at the end of the cul-de-sac but reversing and turning at the same time was out of the question. I could move sideways quite nicely but that would have ended a bit disastrously so in the end I gave up and parked outside the house again where the car had had two near misses during the morning.

A care worker had done a graceful and ballerina-like pirouette and parked abruptly rear onto the pavement just a few inches from my front bumper and some twit in a taxi sat for ages spinning his wheels like the clappers behind my car, turning the snow and ice into an extra slippery sheet whilst sliding uncontrollably sideways first one way and then the other. Being a professional driver obviously doesn't require you to necessarily have much of a brain...

It's thawing nicely now and hopefully by tomorrow morning even our grit-neglected road may be back to normal! But don't worry kids because Santa's sleigh always works because that clever old Santa has glued some snow to the bottom of the runners!!!

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all my readers!

My PC's Not Well At All...

Alas and alack I'm having one of those periods where inanimate objects are out to get me.

At the moment it's my home PC which has given up the will to play and I've had to restore it - which means all the way back to it's original self something like 5 years ago and it still thinks Wanadoo exists, if not Freeserve...

And can I remember my passwords to set up the Internet again? And all the software? All my data is securely on an external hard drive so no problems with that but I'm coming round to the idea it's not worth spending all this time and grief on a 5 year old machine.

So, readers, the key message is:

Please don't send me any emails to the Freeserve address!

Use instead my second (now only) personal email - bispham2-at-hotmaildott.com. I'm sure you know where to put @ signs and dots!

I'm away from home all next week so not a lot of point trying to sort out stuff this weekend - I might indulge myself and do some music instead!

Just before the PC went bye bye I reconfigured all the music links in the left hand column so they should all be working again now. All links to music on this blog are my own music - ie me playing all instruments and singing all the voices.

The band's music can be found on the band's blog.

Another thought has struck me. The PC demise may well spell the demise of my websites too - if I move away from Orange which I may well do. So these blogs and the Flickr account will have to do!

I'll try to recreate some of the websites as articles on here anyway. It might help me when I'm struggling to think of something!

Sigh, the Aston Martin purchase leaps further away - again!!!

London By Night

Someone was very quick off the mark this morning.

As I uploaded this photograph of Admiralty Arch at night up to Flickr, someone had viewed it and left a comment on it even as I was still editing the title and tags!

It's another of the photos I took on that weekend trip in December 1995. I've always liked night photography, though in the days of film it used to be much trickier than it is these days with digital cameras coping with low light levels.

We spent ages wandering around London that first night, photographing floodlit buildings and of course, as it was December, it went dark very early anyway!

Here's one that was taken from one of those open-topped tour buses as we crossed Westminster Bridge towards the Houses of Parliament. It was dusk and the lens picked up those strange relected images of street lights, placing them to float in the sky.

We found a discount theatre ticket office and booked to see the life story of Roy Orbison the following night. So we ensured our second night might be a little warmer than the first!

Large Versions of the Photos: Admiralty Arch, Westminster Bridge and Parliament

Web Sites Gone Permanently

The other day I mentioned that some of my web sites were down and it now looks as though it's a permanent thing.

Orange had sent out notifications in July but, as they say in their response to my plea for help, I might not have received them "due to a restrictive spam filter". Does that mean any spam filter, Mr Orange or just those that are worth switching on? Or perhaps you don't consider news about the pending disappearance of web sites important enough to send notification in a way you know has a good chance of reaching your intended recipients?

Grrr!

Anyway I have rehashed the main web index quite drastically and a lot of older pages have disappeared. I'll try to add some of them back in the form of sets of photos at Flickr but don't hold your breath.

Also if you do visit the web sites often please make sure you have bookmarked the Flickr site and this blog as the longevity of the main website must be in question - freeserve was bought out by Wanadoo long ago and in turn they were bought out by Orange a couple of years ago.

So if the main site disappears - please let me know as they probably won't have told me in a way that I'll get to know...

The future's bright... but not "bright" as in clever...

Bildit

Quite some time ago I made a couple of entries on the blog about building toys.

One was about Meccano which is just about still going (but not particularly as I remember it) and the other described Bayko which was the building toy before Lego came on the scene.

There was a third toy I have fond memories of but for the life of me I couldn't remember its name or find any photos of it on the Internet. It had yellow rods that you could connect by using red plastic wheels - it was great for building cubes, cars, aeroplanes etc.

But it's strange how things work out in this world and I got a message from a work colleague, Dave Webster, who works at Sunderland after he had seen my photographs at Flickr and after having a look through his own photos I came across this one which I've cropped drastically above but which shows him as a young lad at school with that self same toy which I now know was called Bildit and on seeing the photo I immediately recognised the tube it came in.

Many thanks for filling that gap in my memories Dave!

Return to Toys Index Page

HMS Victory and Sketches

My God, it's like buses! No blog entries for ages and now three at once! So, I'm just in the mood I guess.

If I've not been writing the blog what have I been doing?

Well those of you who keep an eye on the Flickr account will have seen a few
sketches appear recently. That was prompted by a posting on the Billy Fury website.

Also on that site, it's my month to be included in the Hall of Fame. You'll find my musical biography there linked from the main index linked above. My entry in the Hall of Fame also includes two songs, both from Creeping Bentgrass albums, although one (Great Balls of Fire) is one of my solo pieces and the other one (Up Around The Bend) features David and Bob also.

Our entry in the Billy Fury Sounds Special feature this month is a live recording of Johnny B Goode and a few of the residents and holiday makers at Larbreck Hall Caravan Park may recognise their whoops and hollers and general joining in of the chorus!

I've also gone back to scanning the still massive pile of negatives from pre-digital days that still need to be scanned. This example was taken (despite the blue sky and sunshine) in February(!) 1996 and shows the famous warship, HMS Victory.

Not Nelson's ship, as Captain Hardy should have that honour, but it was on this ship that Nelson received a musket ball in his shoulder that passed down through his lung and broke his spine. He was taken below where he knew full well that he must die from his injuries.

"Not the side, Hardy," he said, forbidding Captain Hardy to perform the traditional ceremony of burial at sea. With the problem of how to keep the body from rotting and smelling, the ship's surgeon had the body placed in a large barrel which was then filled with port wine.

The spot where he died, in the ship's orlop below the waterline is as close to a shrine as the Royal Navy has. A ceremony is held there every year on the anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar at which Nelson was killed.

Oh yes... and the Sally Geeson photo has gone on to new levels of fascination for the Internet public as it has now reached a viewing count of 1473, racing for the 2000 target and achieving daily viewings that peaked with an amazing 66 views on the 3rd of May. All of this without a single comment on it!

Italy and Skipton

Oh dear, another week has gone by!

Well, I've found enough to keep me busy without venting my spleen at anyone or feeling the urge to rave about something or let off a few quips of humour.

I've spent most of my spare time this week trying to finish a project that's been ongoing for far too long. I've been creating a set of digital montages to create a year book. You'll understand what I mean about it having taken a long time when I point out it's a year book of 2005...

I've got as far as our Sorrento holiday from that year and the resulting montages have been being uploaded to my Flickr Account at the rate of a couple a day.

I have just about finished the holiday photos now and moved on to the rest of 2005 but it will take approx a couple of weeks for the photos to appear on Flickr - unless I get fed up or find something else to post up there in which case there could be a flood of photos uploaded at some point in the next few days!

Today we had a run out in the car to Skipton, taking the long way round, via Lancaster then Ingleton and back down.

We passed through some lovely little villages that are a definite for a return visit some day and the weather was really great until we got just a few miles from Skipton, after which it has poured down all day...

So here's a rather dreary photo of Skipton Castle just to prove we were there and I'll try to drum up some sunny weather for our next trip out!

Now - see if you can find a blog entry anywhere else that gives you Italy and Skipton in one entry!

1000 Views Clocked Up

A landmark day!

According to the statistics on my Flickr account, this photo passed the 1000 views milestone today.

The photo was taken in September 1982 at Blackpool Zoo and from the time I uploaded it to Flickr has been a favourite with viewers. I uploaded it on 12 January 2007 and so far it has had 43 people flag it as a favourite and it's also my most commented on photo.

See the larger version at my Flickr account

Floods and Aftermaths

No, in this case I'm not referring to the current weather, but rather to the subject of a few photos of Blackpool I've taken in past.

Yesterday I uploaded a couple of photographs of flooding to my Flickr account (no longer active). Almost immediately someone commented asking if I had any similar photographs. Whilst the answer is 'yes', as the photos were taken in the late 1970s or early 1980s, they are on film negative and the only scans I have are somewhat more modest in size. The negatives are up in the attic and I will definitely dig some out over the weekend, but for now I had a small scan of lumps of seaweed, left all over the Promenade roadway by a high tide in or around 1979.

The Promenade tends to be closed to traffic when weather like this is forecast with any certainty but every now and then a high wind (and there are plenty of those in Blackpool!) whips the tide up an extra ten feet or so and can wash over the Promenade. At the moment the sea defences are being made a little more effective in an attempt to reduce the probability of this happening. Although with the sort of rain we've been having over the past few days the flooding need not necessarily come from the sea...!

Return to Blackpool Promenade and Beach Index Page

2007 Review

2007 was the point at which I decided to stop writing web pages from scratch and start to use some of the new tools that were becoming available.

This blog and the others listed in the column to the left are the result of that, as are the 1100+ photographs at my Flickr account.

The original websites still exist though, a legacy that started in 1996, with the first web page about Blackpool.

I'm not sure how many photographs I took in 2007 because I throw out mercilessly, anything blurred, uninteresting, too dark/too light or that duplicates too closely another photograph. I do know that I kept 1401 photographs on my hard drive, some of which will have been donated by friends. Together with previous years and the odd photo filched from the Internet or scanned from books makes up 15,734 images at full screen resolution.

You can add to that a further 37,886 photos at smaller resolution that I have included within the 4,085 web pages, all of my own creation that exist on my hard drive.

That makes the 500 or so web pages available from my online index pale into insignificance. However the previously mentioned Blackpool pages alone include 886 photographs on 103 web pages. Each of the holiday web sites have around 200 photos included. All in all, there's a few hours reading material on the website!

In 2007 I started this blog, originally known as John's Place until I decided there were just too many Johns in the world for this to allow people to find me easily. Even with the current name there are so many John Burkes that any friend looking for me would probably find it hard to find this blog. The web page though is normally No.1 listed on a search for John Burke at http://www.google.co.uk.

See - shown up as a liar, I've just looked and I've dropped to No.2! Happily though four of my pages come up within the first ten entries. There's an incredible number of John Burkes listed, many of whom are interested in music and/or showbiz. One makes Northumbrian pipes and another, probably my favourite, performs in German circuses with a troupe of sealions!

In 2007 I created 357 blog entries and ceased to publish the monthly web page updates which I wrote for 10 years. The first monthly update appeared on my website in May 1997 and the final one in May 2007 when I realised that all I was doing was trawling the blog for material for the monthly update!

Anything is fair game for the blog. A colleague losing a yoghurt in the office at the end of October started a series which is still ongoing and which has generated so much interest and suggested storylines from others that I was amazed. One person said they were going to write to yoghurt manufacturers Danone about it. I'm not sure whether they did or not but if so then the manufacturers have stayed aloof, probably wisely!

Another entry that created quite a bit of interest was the entry following an email from Blackpool's Margot Carey about the remains of the box where her father used to keep a telescope on the North Pier. Margot contributed several interesting memories of Blackpool and is still in touch.

The two ladies we met on our cruise, who I called Cissie and Ada on the blog have also kept in touch and were much tickled at their new names. We received Christmas cards signed "Cissie and Ada" and whilst Ada realised straight away we did receive one message from Cissie that finished "Which one am I?" Come on, flower, that one should have been obvious!!! They spent a week in Blackpool during one of the worst weeks for weather in October and we went down to the hotel a couple of times to have a drink with them.

The band I play in, Creeping Bentgrass, had a record number of gigs during the year and since March have been featured every month in the downloadable Sounds Special feature on the Billy Fury website. The site is superb and there's a whole host of friends there for anyone with an interest in Billy Fury.

Fellow Blackpool-based musician Les Cotton was instrumental (sorry!) in getting one of my solo songs featured on The Strawbs website. Thanks Les for your help with that!

I found somewhere on the Internet to store music and you can now download a selection of Creeping Bentgrass and solo tracks and older stuff from my music web page.

Then finally at the beginning of December we finished the band's third CD album which after a year and a bit of having the working title "Already Plastered" has been released with the title "Right On The Line". We feel it's our best yet. It took so long to make we're starting the 4th straight away!

So, here's to a new year full of blog entries. I hope you, the readers, will contribute, suggest, send photos, get in touch and most of all, provide lots of the ideas and anecdotes. I seem to have a bit of a reputation now with one person from the next office saying "Watch what you say - it'll end up on his blog!", but it's all in fun and what better way of remembering those one-off spur-of-the-moment things that happen or are said that would otherwise just be forgotten about?

Like the male colleague who responded to the usual January greeting with: "Oh my God, I've spent all Christmas sneezing my baubles off..."

To be continued...

Flickr Album of 2005 Cruise

I've uploaded an album of montage and storyboard images of our 2005 cruise to Flickr.

The cruise was the Atlantic Islands cruise to various islands of the Canaries.

It was the last year that the Carousel did this trip for MyTravel before being sold to another group and all the crew going off to learn French.

There are 42 images in the set and you can see them at their best by clicking each photo then clicking the "all sizes" link. You can leave comments against the images and for once there's not a yoghurt in sight...!

Before IMAX came Cinema USA

It was a busy day yesterday for people leaving comments against my Blackpool photos at Flickr. (no longer online) Someone mentioned the old Cinema USA on the Pleasure Beach and, although I haven't any photos of it there I knew there was one of it on the Central Pier somewhere.

A bit of rooting through the computer came up with this. Taken in 1981 this shows the Cinema USA dome. Inside, a film was shown with the normal eye-line way above the normal horizon. There were no seats so you stood looking upwards which threw you off balance a bit to start with. The films were of the fast motion variety - a ride in a Porsche, a roller coaster ride, a helicopter over a gorge etc. People would sway or even lurch sideways watching the film. I seem to remember the odd one in 3D too. They were a pre-cursor to Imax.

It is now the site of a Big Wheel. Almost immediately after uploading the photo to Flickr (still no longer online), a comment appeared against it from "Yorkie", an ex-pat living in America.

"There's a similar attraction still operating in Canobie Lake Park in New Hampshire, and though the film has definitely faded over the years they're still showing the same footage you describe ..."http://www.flickr.com/photos/yorkie/tags/cinema180/ "Love your old shots of Blackpool, John!"

Cheers, Yorkie! The link in Yorkie's message is to his photograph taken inside the dome he mentions showing a film that has decidedly yellowed with age!

Return to Blackpool Central Pier Index Page

A Quick Catch-Up

This remains the last time I saw my car. (See Ouch! My Car!!!)

We haven't got it back yet from the body shop as the last estimate for it being ready, before we went away, was 31 August. I've not had chance to get in touch with the body shop yet so I don't know whether it will return triumphantly or not tomorrow.

The other guy's insurance have been paying for a hire car for me, so a conservative estimate for his little prang so far will be at least £1000 GBP.

There are 312 photos from the holiday so you just sit tight and they (not all obviously!) will appear bit by bit here or at Flickr.

We are off to see actresses Caroline Munro and Martine Beswick at a film festival in Manchester today so there'll be a few from that too!

Oh and we really do know we are back home - it's raining!

More Curiosity or Treasure Photographs

I've uploaded a number of photos of curiosities to my Flickr account.

The photos can be of anything with a story. Something old, something forgotten, something with a history, or something fallen out of use and soon to disappear.

Many of the curious things I have photographed in the past have now vanished altogether. A great shame in some cases. There used to be a set of stocks that were set on wheels in the churchyard at Colne. They were taken to various towns on market days in days gone past, but presumably no one wanted them once they started rusting or rotting away and so they have disappeared forever.

There are over 100 photos at the Flickr collection.