15 May 2025
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I’ve been sorting through some older, unprocessed photos on my hard drive. This Lindera trilobata was photographed at RHS Rosemoor in February 2019… and that’s not the oldest of the photos I need to attend to!
14 May 2025
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I couldn’t resist getting my camera out this morning. Green, yellow, purple and blue are the predominant colours in the back garden at the moment and the morning sun highlighted them beautifully.
I used my 50mm lens and an aperture of f/2.5, which gives a narrow depth of field (ie. only a narrow band of distance from the lens is in sharp focus). You can compare a similar image where I move the focus a bit closer to me in order to highlight the Aquilegia on the right.
13 May 2025
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Having sometimes turned up at rehearsals or even gigs without something vital (such as, on one occasion, my bass!) I try to carefully check things before I leave the house. For regular events, it is fairly easy but it gets a little more complicated when I’m doing things that are out of the ordinary. For example, tonight is the final rehearsal with the Broom Leys Choral Society before Friday’s concert so I need both my electric and upright basses and all the bits and pieces to go with them.
Time to stop typing and go and do my final pre-flight check.
12 May 2025
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In a couple of weeks (in fact a week this Wednesday) I will be performing in the Loughborough University Choir’s summer performance (details). The main piece will be a performance of Twelve Trees by Katy Lavinia Cooper (words by Catriona Downie). It was commissioned to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the UK choral charity Sing for Pleasure and was first learned and performed at a workshop they did in the summer of 2024. The LU choir has been learning it this season and will be one of the first choirs to put on a public performance of the work. If you happen to be in Dublin instead of Loughborough apparently a choir is also performing it there on 21 May!
It has some fascinating bits of music although it would be fair to say that each of the twelve pieces has its challenges. Sometimes it is fitting the words in or finding the starting note for a phrase but there are also lots of pieces with irregular time signatures. For example “May: The Eildon Tree”, celebrating a particular Scottish hawthorn, starts with alternating 3/8 and 3/2 with a little burst of 9/8 and 5/4 before “settling down” into 6/8 and 2/4. That isn’t easy to count although at least it could be described as a learning experience!
Another challenge has been that only one of the songs from the suite has been released online so we can’t go and listen to a full choir recording of the rest of them. September’s song remembers the Sycamore Gap tree. This is the one for which two men were very recently convicted for illegally felling it in 2023 and it ends in a poignant way with the words gradually fading out and only silent actions being left. You can watch this one online:
11 May 2025
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It was good to be back at church this morning although, on the music side, I have confess that I forgot how I wired myself in and ended up starting off with the bass going through what should have been my vocal mic channel!
Part of that was probably down to a slightly different set up. Rather than taking my combo amp, I took my amp head and a new (to me) cabinet that a friend gave me yesterday. It has a single 12″ speaker, technically set up for guitar and only rated for 80W. However, it has enough juice to handle the volume I need to get a clear bass foldback tone – I just have to remember not to crank the amp, which could easily drive it too hard. The big advantage is that I can leave the cabinet at church and just carry the (tiny, class D) amp head with me for rehearsals and services… or perhaps that should be the “small” advantage?
10 May 2025
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The allotment is looking quite verdant at the moment. There isn’t much to harvest just at the moment, unless you want to overdose on lovage, but things like broad beans and cabbages are well on their way to being ready and I came back with a good handful of tree spinach that had sprung up of its own accord. It wasn’t where I wanted it but its distinctive look meant I could easily set it aside from the rest of the weeding and take it home for dinner.
9 May 2025
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When I started using the OpenSCAD program to design 3D models it was fascinating but also often frustrating. Programming a model and adjusting parameters to shape it was powerful but simple things, like putting a fillet (rounded join) between two adjacent planes required careful thought. I seemed to spend a lot of my design time trying to figure out how to accomplish tasks that, on the surface, seemed like they ought to be simple.
I sometimes tried creating my own submodules to make things easier and also explored various packages other people had put together. Eventually, after some disappointments with downloads that seemed buggy, I came back to the OpenSCAD website and looked at their list of libraries. I decided to give the Belfry OpenSCAD Library v2 (ie. BOSL2) a go, despite the daunting amount of options it offered.
A couple of months down the line, I’m still far from mastering it but I rarely find myself pondering how to build my own custom libraries as BOSL2 does so much, so well. For example, I’ve recently designed a couple of lids to fit some glass storage tubes I got from my mum. Using cyl() rather than OpenSCAD’s built in cylinder(), I could quickly stack a couple of disks to create the lid and give them rounded edges. I wanted to add some knurling to the larger disk to improve grip and it turns out BOSL2 has me covered there, too, with a texture option.
In other words, thus far, it has functioned as a brilliant example of what a coding library should be. To borrow a line originally used to describe the Perl language, it makes easy things easy and hard things possible.
8 May 2025
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A month or two back, I spotted that the GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) had finally reached its 3.0 release. I can’t remember exactly what version number it was on when I first started using the program for digital images but I do know that it was over quarter of a century ago (late 1990s)! Small updates come reasonably often (we’re already on 3.0.2, which I’ve updated to) but bigger changes happen slowly.
The biggest practical change I’ve found so far is that you can now go back and redo the various filters that you have applied to your work. My normal process for digital photos would be to create a copy of the base layer, adjust the colour and then (after any cropping or resizing), create a copy of that layer and apply sharpening. Now I can just work on the base image but, if I decide an effect wasn’t quite right, I can go back and edit it individually without adding the extra layers. That alone makes the upgrade an essential step forward – a little time saved working on each photo will add up to a lot of time saved overall.
I expect I’ll find some other benefits of the upgrade too but that has been my starting point.
7 May 2025
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A couple of years ago I got an opportunity to support the Broom Leys Choral Society in their annual summer concert and it has become a bit of a habit. Today was the first of two rehearsals to pin down the preparations.
This one was without the choir although a few of the members came along to sing their solo or small ensemble pieces with bass and drums joining their regular piano accompaniment. I’d done a fair amount of preparation but I also took the precaution of recording the whole session. I’ll do some more work before next week’s rehearsal with the choir, which will help me add in notes and corrections that I didn’t manage to jot down while playing and make sure I am set to give an excellent performance.
Details of the concert are below:
6 May 2025
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Tolpuddle is a quiet village in the Dorset and the kind of place you could pass through without a second thought if you didn’t have a personal connection to it… except for the fact that, almost 200 years ago, an injustice was done that ended up furthering the cause of the workers rights that its perpetrators sought to destroy. We visited last week and spent some time in the excellent (and free) museum that continues to tell the story.
In the early 1830s, conditions for agricultural labourers were hard and the average wage was not really sufficient to subsist on. Six men, many of them stalwart members of the local Methodist church, agreed to form a society together but to keep the membership secret. For that, they ended up being convicted in 1834 of criminal action and deported to Australia. Rather than quelling potential trouble, it galvanised public feeling and, by the end of the decade, all six had been pardoned and returned to these shores although most later emigrated to Canada, where they kept a low profile.
For a former history student, I do remarkably little exploration of history but was glad to include my first visit to Tolpuddle on my holiday itinerary last week and learn a little more about this episode which I was aware of but only in a limited, fuzzy way.