Night Time in Kotor

Saturday, 13 August 2011. We are still in Kotor, Montenegro, 28 kilometres from the Adriatic Sea up the deepest fjord in southern Europe.

We are standing on the Promenade Deck of the Thomson Spirit cruise ship, waiting to sail out of Montenegro and back down the fjord to the sea.

As darkness falls the ancient city of Kotor comes alive - so much so that the full car park below us on the wharf has a long stream of cars queueing to get in. They each must wait until another car leaves.

Many of the cars are bringing people who have come to watch us sail. There's a sizeable number of people ready to wave at every slightest movement. It's still a very warm night and we wave back as the ship's crew continue their preparations to leave.

It's already quite dark, just a hint of a glow in the sky. There won't be much to see on our way down the fjord once we pass the lights of the last town.

The city walls that earlier had blended in with the mountainside which they climb, now stand out in floodlighting, showing just how high above the main city they reach. A crowd is now standing close to the gates to the dock area, waiting to see the ship leave the port. Young couples, older couples, entire families... they all stand or sit looking expectantly upwards. Then the startlingly loud blast on the ship's hooter. No wonder they are all out here with their kids - no one would have slept through that!

The crowd of people start to wave at the few of us who have come out to watch our own departure. "Goodbye! Don't forget to write!" Actually I don't speak Montenegrin... It could have been "You bastards! You woke the baby!" One chap looked slightly apologetic at the rail. Hmmm - maybe it had been "You bastard! You left me with a baby!!!" The ship moves away from the dock, turns slowly, then starts off down the fjord. We pass a few ferries, lots of small boats and a yacht, swinging slowly to its mooring.

As we move away from Kotor the lights dwindle until there are just a few houses here and there along the fjord's bank. There is not enough light to take photographs of the scenery by and we move towards the back of the ship.

From the rear of the Promenade Deck we stop to overlook the Lido Deck where people are enjoying a late dinner or snack and a drink.

We then climb up a few decks to Horizons Bar for a drink and to listen to the vocal harmony group, New Dimensions. We'll meet them properly later in the week.

It would be easy to drink yourself into stupefaction on a cruise ship - plenty actually do. Others set foot on the boat already pretty stupid... I'm not a good drunk. I have a short spell of feeling merry but, let's face it, most people wouldn't tell the difference anyway and then I just feel ill and fall over... Not good. I don't do it. People tell me they'd love to see me drunk but I'd just aim for them if they got me that way... So after a giddy pint, we finish our evening on the Lido Deck with a sedate coffee. The next day is our day at sea so in our next entry we will have travelled all the way up the Adriatic to call in at the top right hand corner into Koper in Slovenia.

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The Wrong Song in Kotor, Montenegro

Saturday, 13 August 2011. Normally the first day of a cruise would be a day at sea. This allows passengers to get accustomed to any motion that there may be and also provides time for the lifeboat drill which is required by law within 24 hours of boarding a ship. All passengers are required to attend.

On the Adriatic Explorer however we have a port visit - Kotor in Montenegro - to look forward to. To accommodate the lifeboat drill we will arrive at lunchtime and sail away a bit later at 11:00pm. So a second day where we have a chance to see somewhere after dark! To approach Kotor we have to sail along what they call the deepest fjord in southern Europe. It is some 28 kilometres long and as I hadn't realised we weren't sailing until after dark, I stuck my nose in a book on the sun deck and ignored it entirely... Duh... The bits I did see - and we were in it a long time - were spectacular! It is our first visit to Montenegro. All day long the song Montego Bay is going through my head even though it's about a totally different country on the other side of the world and the word "Montenegro" does not fit into the same space as "Montego"...

The Thomson Spirit moors right outside the city walls. Just a short walk is all we need to be into the city.

Kotor is a medieval walled city with earlier roots. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

At first we follow the walls around to our left, but very quickly we find we are heading for the modern part of town! So we retrace our steps along the wall towards the nearest gate into the city.

This is it. Literally a five minute walk from the ship by the direct route!

It brings us to the main square of Kotor. From here streets and alleys lead off in all directions.

You cannot ignore the mountains in Kotor. The city is literally squashed against the side of the fjord by them. To secure the medieval city, the inhabitants built the city walls to climb high up the mountainside from one side of the city, along the mountain's side and down another steep slope to the other side of the city.

Here and there are wall sculptures. They are dotted about the city. In fact, the right hand winged cherubim here seems to have been dotted with bullets...

Kotor is a delight of narrow alleyways, very worn marble paving and cobbled squares, surrounded by ancient palaces and churches. Scrawny cats stalk the alleyways that were made so that even two donkeys would have to be skinny to pass each other! We come out at one side of the city wall and at what seems to be a pond.

On closer examination though it is the water of the fjord. The roadway is bridged over it at this point. It no doubt allowed the city's folk to fish from the walls in times of siege.

The walls run up an almost sheer mountainside to a fortress far above us. The walls meld into the mountainside. Come dark we will see them far more easily so we'll have a look at them on the next page.

We head back into the city and spend some time exploring the alleys and narrow streets.

Back on the ship we head up to the Horizons Bar where the irrepressible Aiza is practicing the phrases taught to her by some Geordies last week: "Why-aye man! Cheeky booger...." Priceless!

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Cruising the Adriatic Explorer

Did you miss me? Sorry about that, but I've been re-stocking with new experiences to bring you. I have to research every now and then - life cannot be just a steady stream of fun.

12 August 2011. So whilst everyone else was thinking about the start of their holiday, Miss Franny and I boarded the Thomson Spirit after flying to Corfu last Friday (12 August) ready to log our experiences to brighten these pages of academic learning. A hard life, but someone's got to do it... The Spirit is the sister ship to the Thomson Celebration and is identical in layout and names of bars, restaurants etc. so that we knew our way about immediately. "Where are we now? Fran asked, halfway up a flight of stairs. Well... almost immediately, then...

We arrived in the afternoon so there wasn't any time to explore Corfu. By the time we had unpacked, settled in and ensured the Horizons Bar matched the Celebration, dined and lounged about some more in the Horizons, the sun was going down. Quite spectacularly as it happened. So if you are looking for info about Corfu, then search for it at the top of the page. You'll find it!

Here, we'll just take a turn around the Promenade Deck which on this ship is Deck six. On this deck you can walk a full circuit of the ship without going back indoors. Five times around means you have walked a mile. Ten times around means you should have got off and walked into town...

It's warm. I've never known Corfu to be anything else really. But this is our first day and even 20 degrees, never mind thirty-odd would have felt warm to us shivery Brits!

It was a beautiful night and a near-as-full-as-makes-no-difference moon had risen to throw a cascade of pearly white along the water as straight as the flight of Cupid's arrow.

"Are you done?" asked Miss Franny, "We've been up since two o'clock this morning and I want to go to sleep!" Sigh...

Well then, here we are. Corfu, Greece, about to set off for Kotor on Montenegro also in Greece. Then will come a day at sea, a day in Slovenia, one in Venice, Italy and two in Split then Dubrovnik in Croatia. Most of those so close to the place where we'll dock that this is the first holiday (whoops! I mean "academic research trip"!) that we'll do without taking a single paid excursion. We're such meanies! More to come...

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Walking the Waterloo Road

Well not quite. I've not been on my way to the famous battle ground in Belgium but to a namesake a little closer to home. Quite a lot closer to home in fact...

Waterloo Road in Blackpool was one of the major routes to the Promenade until the development of the old railway route to Blackpool's Central Station was turned into an extension of the M55 motorway, feeding straight into the massive central car park.

So yesterday I went down to have a look at the road which used to be the family's main shopping destination when we lived in South Shore during the 1980s.

The main difference to the road itself is that the portion near its joining to the Promenade road is now one-way. The road has been narrowed considerably and car parking on the slant has been created.

The road name has been set into the pavement near the Promenade, which whilst it looks very attractive, wouldn't help anyone in a car wondering how far down the Prom they were... Street name signs are fast becoming a rarity - I suspect owners, particularly of modern buildings, are reluctant to have them "spoil" the sides of their costly architects' clean designs. Read the last sentence with as much sarcasm as you please! It is with relief and approval that I note the street name on the side of the Dutton Arms.

Woolworths have gone alas, but their building, with a bold blue colour scheme is still in use as Hartes. The building, in common with many of its former owner's premises, has these wonderfully huge windows, designed to tempt people to peer into the shop and be drawn inside and incorporates some large bowed pieces of glass.

Woolworths sold cheap and cheerful copies of more expensive stuff and yet their designers managed to do it so well that many of their designs from the 1950s and 60s are now fondly called classics and swap hands on the collectors' market for many times their original cost.

Diagonally opposite is The Ice Cream Shop - does what it says on the tin... Further up the road is the old Post Office building. Waterloo Road was the shopping centre for the South Shore community and boasted a large Post Office which, of course, is a Post Office no longer...

The Ice Cream Shop itself is an attractive clean white design with a large cornet of ice cream and a stick of rock, both in gigantic proportions, hanging from the upper storey of the building. It is the English version of the Italian Gelaterie, though there are a couple of examples of Italian ice cream parlours in the town - a tasty subject for a future posting perhaps!

The Victoria Centre, I remember as the Victoria Market. It was a crowded narrow-aisled place in the 1980s of the "up one side to the back, across and down the other" variety of market stall collection.

Presumably it dropped the "market" portion of its name to distinguish itself from the New Market which opened just next door, again back in the 1980s on the closure of the shop that had previously occupied the rather grand building with its 1930s cream tiles, which were a feature of 1930s Blackpool and can still be seen here and there all over the town. We've wracked our brains but can't say with certainty what the shop was before the market. Perhaps the Electricity Showrooms? I'm certain some Blackpool reader might know and leave a comment?

And so to Waterloo Road's first intersection with a major road. This shot looks south along Lytham Road to the rather decorative roundabout that now stands in replacement of the 1980s traffic lights.

Waterloo Road continues up to Oxford Corner, but this article ends here - for now!

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Songs to Change the World

Let no one say we don't mix in the right circles! This new release, Songs to Change the World has just been released by the Peaksoft label. It is an album of protest songs from the beginnings of recorded sound through to songs that were Internet download hits without troubling the official Charts.

We are featured on the opening track, having been asked by the man behind Peaksoft, Mr Harry Whitehouse, if we could record a song made famous in the early 1960s on the many CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) marches.

"The words of H Bomb's Thunder" (writes Harry in the sleeve notes) "were written by the best-selling novelist John Brunner and set to the traditional tune Miner's Lifeguard in 1958. Its haunting melody has helped it to live on in the memories of those who marched 50 years ago."

It was recorded by a youth choir on an early LP record, long since deleted and unavailable and Harry asked us if we could contribute an arrangement for this album.

This is not the first Peaksoft compilation we have contributed to, but never before have we found ourselves in such exalted company as Bing Crosby, Louis Armstrong, Paul Robeson, Billie Holliday, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Ewan MacColl and others. But nice to be in the company of our fellow artiste from Harry's Billy Fury website; the Gentleman from the Isle of Wight, Johnny Storme!

The CD is available through the merchandise page of the Billy Fury website, from the Peaksoft website, or from Amazon and some independant retailers.

On the Beach

A few days ago I showed the folks of 1982 Blackpool sitting it out in deckchairs on the Promenade whilst the tide was in. The very minute the tide turned and a strip of sand appeared, people were up and laying claim to their patch for the rest of the afternoon.

The traders were not far behind. Here the donkey ride has reached it's halfway point - the young lad is pushing to turn the lead donkeys around for the run back to their starting point. They are reluctant because the sand is still wet from the tide in the foreground.

Even before the majority of people have left the safety of the sloping sea wall, the caravans selling shrimps, whelks, cockles, crisps and ice cream are jostling for a position on the narrow strip of sand.

In the background are the Funland and Mr B's (later Mr Bee's) arcades as we are on Central Beach here on the Golden Mile. The Royal Mail tram trundles past. It had a counter for selling stamps - one of the more innovative or barmy of Blackpool ideas depending on your viewpoint!

The closeness of the sea to the sea wall is never an irritation for those whose idea of fun is to play in the sea anyway. However a retreating tide has to be treated with respect and caution even on as shallow a sloping beach as Blackpool's! Nobody came to any harm at least on this sunny July day in 1982.

Blackpool has always been the place for fun and good-natured humour and it is written large across the faces of this pair here, who I spotted for the first time yesterday as I scanned the original negative, 29 years after taking it! They were right in the very bottom corner of the photo and I've enlarged this enormously to zoom in on this happy couple enjoying the fun of a Blackpool day out.

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The Blackpool Experience

The following is adapted from an article that I wrote for the Photographic Press in 1982. Regardless of who I wrote it for - they didn't publish it. So this - dear reader, just for you, is a piece that the magazines of 1982 wouldn't touch with a barge pole...

At the time I lamented how long it had been since I got my slide projector out to give a slide show. Remember those? All that setting a screen up, setting the projector on a table or stepladder.

My slide projector was rather ancient. No push button remote to change slides. No magazine to hold them all. You dropped a slide in a slot on the top and pushed a lever at the side which moved the new slide in front of the lens and in turn pushed the current slide out of the side of the projector where it fell in the dark on the floor and you found it by hearing the noise of the plastic frame snapping when you trod on it...

So I was quite impressed when a friend took me to an exhibition show at the local photographic society. There were two projectors the slides fading into one another very professionally. Not only that but instead of the photographer describing the photos in person, a taped soundtrack with music did the job.

Then one day I was taking photos of a young lady and wanting to get her talking, asked where she worked.
"The Blackpool Experience" she said, "it's a slide show with 18 projectors and special effects!".

The next day saw me down at the Coral Island amusement arcade where around the back I underwent The Blackpool Experience.

The size of the screen was bigger than in many studio cinemas. To fill the screen with a single photo took three of the projectors projecting left, centre and right with softened overlaps. It worked very well.

The special effects included an old train with fiery boiler and smoke belching from the funnel. When Jayne Mansfield appeared on the screen, switching on the Illuminations, flashguns appeared to go off behind the audience from a strobe unit.

The show was the brainchild of Alan Murgatroyd who had been one of four photographers who had gone out in all weathers to take shots of the current day Blackpool. There were lots of photos of holidaymakers and others on the streets, the beach, the fairground. I asked Alan what their reaction had been.

"Normally you get the odd reaction - people asking what the photos are for - but nobody in Blackpool took the slightest notice of us! Blackpool's such a friendly place anyway, but it was really amazing. For instance, I was doing the sequence in the tattooist's parlour and we're in this tiny room, about eight feet by five. I had a camera on a tripod and loads of lights because I was using close-up lenses and this girl came in wanting a rose tattooed on her thigh. She just dropped her trousers and the tattooist got on with it. I was clicking away and she never even asked me what I was doing!" (Note: this might almost be the norm in 2011 but members of the public were not usually keen to bare flesh for cameras in public or otherwise in 1982!)

The photographs were taken over a period of two to three years. Somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 were taken and whittled down to around 1,400 for the show. They were mostly taken on Ektachrome 64 slide film on Nikon 35mm cameras for the candids with a Pentax 6x7 camera used for the views and a rostrum camera for the big panoramas.

The same company's The Jersey Experience won a silver medal at the New York Film Festival and the Blackpool show was also being submitted for awards. Meanwhile Alan and his team were planning to start photographing in York. As for me... my slide projector never seemed adequate after that...

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Mass Photography: Blackpool through the Camera

A very enjoyable early evening outing yesterday to the preview of a new exhibition at Blackpool's Grundy Art Gallery. The exhibition: Mass Photography: Blackpool through the Camera contains over 100 photographs of Blackpool and people enjoying Blackpool through the ages, with a number of photographs having been taken during the Mass Observation social recording project of the 1930s.

Curator Nina Koennemann from Germany (seen with me above) put the exhibition together, selecting from a wide variety of sources of photographs.

We are standing in front of a group of my own photographs, some 9 of which are to be found in the exhibition.

The exhibition has excited a lot of interest. It was featured in The Observer last weekend and after the preview last night, Grundy Art Gallery Drirector, Stuart Tulloch (seen above talking to Nina) was travelling down to London to be interviewed on Radio 2, talking about the exhibition.

It runs from today Saturday 6 August for a 3-month run to 5 November 2011.

Link: Grundy Art Gallery

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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