drawn curtains

This image was never meant to be.    Which is not to say that it's a photographic accident, but I should have been posting an image of the flower-strewn meadows of Yosemite, or the Donner Memorial, or the little bed and breakfast just south of the Sequoia National Park where we were meant to be spending tonight - instead of which we are back in Hoover Street.   Alice woke up in the unpleasantly early morning Unwell: migraine? food poisoning? norovirus? all three??? - so the only thing to do was to drive back home and lie her down gently behind drawn curtains: one of those vile drives down Californian interstates (the 5, in this case) that one wishes that one wasn't doing - crazed white trucks, crazed grey trucks, tires spinning off cars (only once, but it was not very far in front of us), crazed everything.   But I made it in just about 6 hours, which has left me gently quivering from road motion.

But at the same time, the circumstances do bring home the difference between choosing a photo of the day when one's actively looking around one's own environment for things aesthetic or quirky or that represent that absolutely everyday suddenly transformed by light - and when one has - say - a number of competent, attractive, but ultimately too picture-postcardy views of Yosemite to click through.   It was a desperately hard place in which to see freshly (even my theme of photographing-those-photographing-the-views looked somewhere between hackneyed, and a carelessly composed image).   And yet, back in 962, which is familiar from living in it - rather than from many magnificent late C19th and early C20th images - it seems possible to look with an analytic eye at one's surroundings.