Cardiff Bay and Penarth,

October 2012, the month after my wife died, I took my 5-month-old puppy, Scrap, for a walk into Cardiff along the barrage from Penarth, where I was staying with a friend, and back.
It was a beautiful day, as you will see, and the first time in a long while that I managed to get lost in appreciating it, a glimpse of how things would get better, given time. And now that time has passed, and it is better.

The Mighty Taff

Sundog in a contrail over Penarth Pier

Northumbrian Skies

A weather-filled holiday on the Northumbrian coast nearly a quarter of a century ago.  I can't easily caption them as I don't really have a clue where they are. I seem to have mislaid my rough notes...

Swansea

Haven't spent as much time in Swansea as in Aberystwyth or Cardiff, where friends have lived for some 40 years, but I visited a few times in the ’90s and was often blessed with a nice day for snaps.

You can't miss with light, water and rigging

I love the way the ruined castle and the modern tower are jammed
together by the foreshortening magic of a long lens.

looking across the sea to the Mumbles and the Gower Peninsula.

Brighton Seafront (1)

Brighton was home away from home for me in the late ’70s and ’80s: Jim Boone (alias), my partner in Frisbee freestyling and various other vices lived there, and for many years worked as a lifeguard on the nudist beach. I would catch the train once a week, on average, for fun and frolic by the sea.

The sun shines off the sea pretty much all day in Brighton, making for some fine contre-jour shots
as well as underlighting the beach and surroundings beautifully

The gradual destruction of the West Pier and the proliferation of buildings on the Palace Pier provide a theme running through a quarter century of pics of Brighton

From the end of the pier, with a telephoto

Hove bandstand

Palace Pier entry

Jim's beat as a lifeguard took in the beaches between the Banjo groyne and the Marina

This man is working. What's the best job you ever had?

The Lea at Ware

The Granger family moved from Tottenham to Ware, Hertfordshire, at the end of 1964. It was only 20 miles away, but it was very much another world, very rural and almost deathly quiet after London. I carried on going back to Tottenham for school, and spent most of the weekends in London, too, being a teenager. In 1966, I went off to university in Canterbury and never went back to Ware to live. I didn't live in it long enough to love it, but I came to appreciate it more as a visitor.

The River Lea runs through the town from west to east, before it makes its decisive turn south to the Thames

Every time I went back to Ware to visit my mother, I made an effort to take a view east from the bridge towards the lock-keeper's cottage. I did it at first in a halting tribute to my father, who had died on the bridge in 1967, but it got
to be a habit, seeing how many moods I could wring out of the same subject. I'm sure I've taken more pictures
of the changing view over the last 40 years (my mother still lives there) than any other location

West of the bridge, on the north bank of the river, was a range of beaten-up,
dilapidated gazebos, built in the long gardens of the coaching inns ranged
along the High Street beyond – Ware was a coaching stage between
London and Cambridge.

Over the years the ruined gazebos were refurbished and are now a major feature of the town

The gazebo with the white horse weathervane from the second picture is triumphantly restored to full galloping order

The lock-keeper's cottage on a misty morning, shot with a long lens from the bridge

Cheating a bit: my grandad took this, in 1965. That's me on the footbridge, looming over mum and dad.