Heyjude

My Magic Lamp

Krista asks in this week’s challenge, “What do you treasure? What’s most important to you?”

IN A NEW POST CREATED SPECIFICALLY FOR THIS PHOTO CHALLENGE CAPTURE SOMETHING YOU TREASURE.

There are a lot of things in life which I treasure, other than my family of course, but one object that I have loved since I was a small child is this Sheffield silver-plated tea-pot belonging to my mother. It was a wedding present to her and my father back in 1945 when they married shortly after VJ Day. They didn’t have very much, so this was her pride and joy and sat in a little Victorian glass cabinet for many, many years.

As a very young child I used to love to polish it, begging my mother to allow me to remove the tarnish and restore it to a perfect reflective shine. Softly rubbing my cloth over its many faceted sides I thought it looked like the magic lamp in Aladdin, and used to daydream about what I would wish for if the Genie appeared.

My mother sadly died in 1995 shortly after her Golden Wedding anniversary and one of the few things that I took from her house at that time was ‘my’ lovely tea-pot. Unfortunately all that love and polishing had removed some of the silver-plate and it was a looking a little sorry for itself. But I contacted a silver-smith in Sheffield and had it brought back to new by being re-dipped.

It now stands in my cabinet and every time I look at it I remember my mum and my romantic memories of the Genie of the Lamp 🙂

I have chosen this post for Ailsa’s Travel Theme too as this week the word is Romance. I hope you think it qualifies.

If you would like to see what others have come up with for this challenge then go to the Daily Post @ WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge

(What has this post to do with Travel? You may well ask. Nothing really other than my father had been away in the Middle East for four years during the war and I always thought the tea-pot looked a lot like the lamp in the folk tale from Arabian Nights – a tenuous link I know)

Cliff Villas

Cee’s Black & White Challenge: This black and white challenge is topic related and this week the theme is Older than 50 years.

And this is also my entry to this week’s Lingering Look at Windows hosted by Dawn over at “The Day After“.

There’s rather a lot in Ludlow that falls into this category. In fact most of the buildings go back as far as the 11th century so 50 years here is considered to be new. Even if you have lived here for 50 years you are still considered an outsider 🙂

(click to enlarge and see the detail)

Cliff Villas – Ludford

Dating back to circa 1840 Cliff Villas are Grade II listed character homes. There are stone mullion windows on the ground floor, oriel windows to the first floor, ornamental barge boards, ornamental plaster work with timber framing and decorative multi-shaft chimney stack. The windows are majority metal framed with lattice work or small panes.

A Word a Week Challenge: Violet

Every week Sue from ‘A Word in Your Ear’ dips into her English Oxford dictionary and picks a word on the page that it falls open at. The challenge is to post a photograph, poem, story – whatever the genre you like best to describe what that word means to you.

This week’s challenge is VIOLET (click to join in with the challenge)

Roses are red,
Violets are blue
Sugar is sweet
And so are you.

Violet (the colour) sits somewhere between the shades of blue and red. Purple is closer to red, violet is closer to blue and more subdued than purple. So violet can be mauve or lilac or lavender – soft muted shades that lean towards the blue end of the spectrum.

So here are a few of my violet shades captured in flowers:

(click on an image to enlarge)

Hardy Geranium

Alpine Clematis

Lilac

Early Dog Violets

Fuchsia

and if you have enjoyed these flowers then perhaps you would enjoy visiting Earth Laughs in Flowers for some more 🙂

F for Felbrigg Hall (Fiolbrygga)

frizztext hosts a weekly A – Z Challenge

Event Type: General Blogging

Start Date: Tuesdays, recurring weekly

Description: Every Tuesday I offer the “A to Z challenge”, walking step by step through the alphabet.

If you would like to join in then please click here.

Continuing with my urban theme through this challenge I would like to introduce you to Felbrigg Hall in North Norfolk. It is a delightful National Trust property with a beautiful walled garden where you can spend hours wandering around through the colourful plantings and the productive kitchen garden.

The name ‘Felbrigg’ is a relic of the Danish invasions. ‘Fiolbrygga’ is ancient Scandinavian for a plank bridge.

The Hall is a magnificent example of a country house and has a fine gothic style library and a magnificent collection of Grand Tour paintings.

We were too late to go inside the hall as we spent all our time in the garden, where you will also find an octagonal working dovecote, dating back to the early 1750s.

The 1700 acre estate also provides several way-marked paths for you to enjoy a stroll through the fields and woodland and beside the Felbrigg Lake.

Sunday Stills, the next challenge: Murals

Ed is a truck driving photographer from Tennessee who hosts a photography challenge blog called Sunday Stills here on WordPress.

This week Ed would like to see some MURALS.

Oh this is such a difficult challenge as I love taking photos of street art. So what should I choose? The amazing murals from Chemainus on Vancouver Island? Murals from Little Italy in San Diego? Or the random graffiti in Lisbon? Or what about the plethora of murals in and around Clarion Alley in San Francisco? And then there are the murals in North Beach. What a dilemma!

But some of my favourite murals, and the ones that have made the most impact on me, have to be the ones created in the Coit Tower, a 210 foot high Art Deco landmark in North Beach, San Francisco. You can get there by a steep walk up some steps or a #39 bus up Telegraph Hill – famous for its wild parrots, though I didn’t see any.

The views are good from the base of the tower, but I urge you to go inside to look at the 19 murals painted by 27 artists in the Depression era. Many of them studied under Diego Rivera. The themes focus mainly on “leftist” and socialist topics, popular in the 1930s.

The first painting you are likely to see as you enter the building is Ray Boynton’s Animal Force and Machine Force (with Diego Rivera’s eyes) over a doorway. (Above) Continue reading Sunday Stills, the next challenge: Murals