Up Against the Wall

English has been taught as a core subject at Swedish schools for many years, and it is seldom that one meets with a Swede below a certain age who is unable to speak the language. A command of idiomatic English expressions is even evident among the authors of the graffiti in the town where I live: Riot, don’t Diet! exhorts one, My Art is Better Than Your Art! declaimed another, recently effaced; I Hate This Place! laments a third. There is one particular graffito slogan which I see from the bus every day on my way home from work: it has been there for months. One day it occurred to me that I wanted to get my picture taken against that particular wall. This weekend, I went there armed with a tripod, and my new camera’s delayed-action exposure function, and succeeded in capturing the kind of picture I’d had in mind (click on the details below to see the full images)…

The snap above was my fourth and most successful attempt at the shot. I would had a few more goes at it, only it was decidedly cold in the brisk northwesterly breeze. The awkward grin on my face betrays my uncertainty as to when exactly the shutter would click. Below is my first attempt at the same shot, with added protective clothing and no attempt at a happy face: I am just wondering if I even pressed the right buttons. The pictures weren’t black-and-white to begin with, but the natural colours were drab, and the light rather dull, so it seemed to me that they could be made to look a little better with all the colour washed out.

At my feet there is snow, and there has been at least some snow on the ground here every day since December 26th: we have felt a ‘late and long-continuing cold’ this year. A little more snow fell yesterday evening, although, thankfully, it turned to rain: I hear a thaw is forecast for the coming week. The picture below is a detail from one of a few photos I took from the offices where I work on the 21st (taken from the same vantage-point as this one from two years ago): the sea still under snow & ice on the vernal equinox.

In the centre of town there is an ornamental fountain in the shape of a sculpted fish, which squirts water from its mouth. The final image below shows this the week before last, masked and bearded with ice…

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