tantramar

St Catherine's Monastery

I was in Egypt over Christmas and although I mostly just swam in the sea looking at the fish and coral I did take a little trip up to St Catherine's Monastery.

The place has some serious history being one of the oldest functioning Christian monasteries in the world. It's at the foot of Mount Sinai, yup the place where Moses came down with the ten commandments. The (alleged) burning bush is there too (pictured left) although I think it's just a cutting now!

The place is stupidly hard to access, in the middle of the desert. It took bloody ages to get there. This makes it all the more impressive realising how hard it must have been to undertake building it, in the 6th Century!

Apparently the scientific thinking about the burning bush was that it was natural gas escaping from the ground that had caught alight. That's why the fire never went out. Science can solve all questions don't you know, well most of them.

There's a Flickr set here if you want to see more pictures.

Too Good

via Happy funtime

San Francisco After The 1906 Quake

I stumbled across this somewhere recently and I thought it was so amazing I felt compelled to post it. It shows the devastation of San Francisco after the hefty earthquake of 1906. This shot was taken from a stationary airship.

The picture is a lot bigger on my Flickr site, go have a peak.
They must be bricking it over there as another mammoth quake is meant to be just around the corner.

Look How Great My Country Is

Jenny sent me a whole load of images of African cloths the other day. They are pretty special.

I can just imagine two African leaders having tea on a warm summers day and one remarking to another, 'look at this cloth that my wife designed for me'. Then the other leader going home and immediately commissioning one. Soon every nation in Africa has one. This isn't what happened but it's more fun to imagine it that way.

I have put them all on a Flickr set for folks to enjoy.

Wartime Stuff 4 – Ration Time

My mum had a ration book when she was at school just after the war. Everyone did, even as late as 1954, when this book dates from. I love really functional graphic design like this.

The design is pretty fresh and the printing on super recycled paper has so much character.

Wartime Stuff 3 – German Surrender

This is pretty crazy. It’s a document that German soldiers carried on them to pass to allied troops upon capture.

It's another little gem that I found in my parents loft.

Wartime Stuff 2 – Thanks!

I found this the other day in some of my parent’s stuff. It seems my granddad was a pretty helpful fella during WW2 and the Parish of Datchet gave him this certificate to say thanks on behalf of the town. I feel quite proud of that. It says ‘for services rendered to King and country’… I wonder how much those values still ring true today or am I just being cynical?

It's a shame we don't have hand written documents like this anymore. Perhaps as more and more writing becomes computerised, we will see a return to hand written articles such as this, for special occasions. I hope so.

Wartime Stuff - It's a Gas Gas Gas

My mum grew up during WW2 and (like everyone else) had a gas mask. You were meant to give them back after the war ended but I’m damn glad she didn’t.
Everyone has seen countless gas masks before in museums and on TV, but how many of you have seen a child’s gas mask? How nuts is this little guy!

Beer Caves

I went to the Beer caves at the weekend in Beer, East Devon. There was no beer there sadly, but just some caves that have been there for 2000 odd years. The Romans starting quarrying stone there, then pretty much everyone else after that. It’s good stone you see. Many English Cathedrals have been built out of it.

The geologist, John, who was taking us around these underground caverns explained that the rock above our heads was so dense that the rainwater takes a long time to seep through. In fact the drops that were falling on our heads in the caves landed topside some 400 years previously. I thought that was pretty nuts.

He also demonstrated how incredible the echo was in the caves (as you might expect). He explained that with 100 people swinging picks into the rock for 12-14 hours a day, the noise was deafening – making many workers, stone deaf.