…And The Day After

Washingborough, Lincolnshire, December 2014

We had a little fall of snow on Boxing Day evening this year.  It was a few hours too late to allow for much sentimentalising over white Christmases, and didn’t hang around very long, - at least where I was.  Nonetheless, this being Britain, a few centimetres of the white stuff quickly became inflated in the media imagination into a major weather event.  There were numerous weather and travel warnings, shading into implications of infrastructure breakdown and societal collapse.  Apologies to anyone who may have experienced the odd closed road or cancelled bus service, or who may have lost control on a slippery road, but really I’m baffled by how easily we get ourselves into a national tizzy about so little in this country.  Like most Brits, I retain a race-fascination with the weather, but this affected mild helplessness is something else again.

Washingborough, Lincolnshire, December 2014

Anyway, it was pretty enough for a few hours on 27 December, and I'm always intrigued by how a fall of snow can affect the quality of illumination and general appearance of the most familiar surroundings.  Finding myself at my parental home, just outside Lincoln, I took a couple of shots of melting snow in the placid housing estate where my Mother and Stepfather live.  I won’t pretend this is normally the most stimulating environment, (visually or otherwise), but after its dusting of snow, I was immediately reminded of George Shaw’s lovely painting of a similar situation, ‘Scenes From The Passion: The First Day Of The Year’.

George Shaw, ‘Scenes From The Passion: The First Day Of The Year’, Humbrol Enamel
On Board, 2003.

I’ve outlined my enthusiasm for Shaw’s work before, and always respond to his ability to mine a rich vein of melancholy visual poetry within the mundane surroundings of his childhood home in Coventry’s Tile Hill.  I don’t have the same emotional memory-connection with my Mother’s current home, so this time it was really a case of reality taking on greater resonance through the imitation of Art.

Ermine Estate, Lincoln, (Photographer Unknown)

Coincidentally, I'd earlier taken a little car journey of reminiscence around Lincoln’s Ermine Estate, on the city’s northern fringes.  The Ermine is a post-war housing development with a certain nostalgic resonance for me, being a place I, and my friends would often wander around aimlessly during our Secondary School lunch breaks.  We were searching for some undefined excitement beyond the school gates I suppose, but never really found it.  Strangely though, for all its suburban blandness, the estate always had a sense of slightly alien potential in my mind, - a frisson of stimulating unease.  Perhaps, I should undertake my own visual exploration of that peripheral territory of the imagination some day.