Politics, ripples and reflections

click photo to enlarge

The present British coalition government is the most inept that I have known in my lifetime, a period lest I forget, that includes the woeful Conservative government led by John Major. Today we are governed by people who have the best education that money can buy but promote policies that display little evidence of commonplace, basic intelligence, an elite drawn almost exclusively from the rich, with a background of public (i.e. private) schools and Oxbridge, a majority of whom are millionaires. They exhibit a dearth of experience of the people they govern, have an air that suggests they think they are born to rule, and manifest few deep political beliefs or understanding beyond a "private sector good, public sector bad", "the market knows best" dogma.

In the two years they have been in power the coalition has made, at the last count, 29 policy U-turns, converted a modest recovery into a double-dip recession, mis-read the steps necessary to stimulate the economy, made the poor shoulder the the cost of the economic mistakes of the rich, and actively promoted legislation that has increased inequality. Moreover, their policies have reversed the reduction in child poverty achieved by the previous government. Following the inverse Damascene conversion of the Work and Pensions Secretary, Ian Duncan-Smith, they now assert that there is no link between poverty and low wages, that it results from either a conscious choice, fecklessness, or is the consequence of too generous state benefits! Today I read that Duncan-Smith's Centre for Social Justice admits that in arriving at these conclusions it "missed in-work poverty" i.e. didn't take account of the fact that 62% of children living in poverty (under the current definition, that the government wants to change!) are in families where one or more parent is working. What kind of society is it that is unable to pay someone a living wage for a full week's work? Inept doesn't begin to describe people who don't notice this and can't appreciate its consequences.

It seems to me that one of the problems of politics today is that too many politicians are responding to the dominance of consumerism, one of the areas of people's lives over which individuals think they have real control. So, instead of offering us, for example, a national education system, organised, standardised and quality controlled across the country, politicians seek to give us a selection of school types, managed by different bodies, in quasi-competition with each other. In recent years they have imposed this consumerist/market ethic on virtually every public institution, from the utilities of gas, electric, water and telephones to aspects of defence and the civil service. The result has been baleful. Now they want the individual's contract with the health service to resemble buying a can of baked beans - "Would you like Tesco, Sainsburys, Asda or Morrisons to replace your hip sir?" The motivation behind all this is to remove community enterprise and provision and replace it with market-driven, self-serving individuality, to make every social transaction financial, to bring to fruition Margaret Thatcher's pernicious claim that there is no such thing as society. What we must never forget is that when that moment is achieved every government we elect will look like today's, our lives will be ruled by financial transactions, and the inequalities within our society will have returned to Victorian levels.

Isn't it odd what thoughts can be prompted by staring at the colours, reflections and ripples in the water of Lincolnshire's South Forty Foot drain?

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 42mm
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/640
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation:  -1.00 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Photographers and the sun

click photo to enlarge

Photographers love the sun. Look at any gallery of outdoor images produced by a group of amateurs or professionals and you'll usually find the majority (often a big majority) were taken in sunlight. The colour, contrast and feel that it brings to a photograph are clearly the qualities that attract us. So alluring is the visual "punch" that sunlight brings to an image, many are given to boosting the saturation to make their shots even more eye-catching. In fact, I sometimes wonder whether a photographic equivalent of the arms race has begun in the past ten years or so, as photographers push the boundary of what is deemed acceptable saturation ever further, perhaps responding to the glowing colours of competition-winning images, and those that are feted in magazines, newspapers and online.

I was thinking about this as I processed a few shots of Lincolnshire's South Forty Foot Drain, a watercourse with origins dating back to the 1630s, that I took during the recent hoar frost. The top photograph was taken after I'd walked a little way along the bank. I was captivated by the way the frost subdued the colours, giving them a blue/green/grey cast that I found very attractive, so I used the sharp outlines of the fence, gate and stock-pen as a middle-ground point of interest and composed this image. Then I walked on, through the open gate, and started to compose another shot using a piece of eroded bank as foreground interest. As I looked through the viewfinder a shaft of sunlight passed across the area in front of me. It worked its magic on the exposed soil, giving it a deeper, redder colour, made the frozen surface of the water more reflective, and changed the colour of the grass and frost that it rested on - it transformed the scene.

I imagine that if asked to choose which of the two images they liked best, most people would nominate the one that is partly sunlit. I like it for the qualities that I cite above. Yet, to my mind the first image is preferable for reasons that are both photographic and personal. I like the muted colours that stretch completely across the image of the first shot and the way they support the feel of the coldness of the day: they tell the story better. The sun, I feel, brings an unwarranted lift to the scene in the second shot: a note of gaiety where none is required. You might argue that both are accurate reflections of the scene as it presented itself to me, and that is of course, true. However, my recollection of the time I spent here is better reflected in the first image. It says "cold" so much better! I'm aware that this is an unfair comparison: the same shot, both with and without the sun's presence would be better. But, hey, sometimes you have to work with what you've got!

photograph and text (c) T. Boughen

Photo 1
Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 70mm
F No: 7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/320
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

History and The Fens

click photo to enlarge
Historians, like many people, often look for the easy life. When they come to write about a subject they tend to favour those that are well documented by contemporary primary sources and extensively covered by subsequent secondary sources. You might think that there is nothing wrong with that providing it produces useful additions to our understanding of the past. But, there is a danger, particularly when looking at a subject over a period of several centuries, that the later phases, where extensive written documentation survives, are given an emphasis and importance that isn't always warranted.

Take the draining of the Fens. Many people's knowledge of this undertaking begins with the "adventurers" who, in the seventeenth century raised money and made use of Dutch and English engineers to build large drains, such as the one in today's photograph, and ends with the conversion of the marshes, meres and seasonal pasture into some of England's most productive arable land. What is less widely appreciated is the fact that this was the third phase of drainage and "improvement". The Romans began the project, but their causeways and the Carr Dyke constitute the few remains of their work in this area, and there is no contemporary documentary evidence. The medieval monasteries undertook the building of extensive embankments and drains, the scope of which we don't fully appreciate. There are those who believe that their contribution to the conversion of this "waste" into farmland was at least as significant as the work of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, and possibly more so. Rather more of the medieval work can be seen in the form of, for example, old sea banks and the Midfen Dyke, but little documentary evidence remains, and so it is given much less emphasis than the later works.

The South Forty Foot drain was begun in the 1630s and extended and enlarged in subsequent centuries. It is a conduit that takes the water from subsidiary drains and deposits it in The Haven at Boston, where it joins the flow of the River Witham out into The Wash and the North Sea. My photograph shows the Drain at a point next to Neslam Bridge, half way between Billingborough and Gosberton. The inlet on the left is the waterway, called Billingborough Lode, feeding into the canal-like watercourse. I stopped to take a photograph from the bridge, but noticing a track to the water's edge, perhaps made by an angler, I went down into the vigorously growing reeds. The quality of light there was different, vivid and wonderful, and intensified by the yellow flowers of oilseed-rape growing along the top of the bank. I returned to the car happy to have secured this shot.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 11mm (22mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/640 seconds
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -1.0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On