Pig Sty Avenue

Irish Music Night , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Ave . A rare night out. Met up with Alexander , Ian and Oli at the Alberta club in Jarrow for the "Irish Music Night" which takes place on the last Thursday of every month. Actually, it's not just Irish music. Last night there was some Cajun, Woody Guthrie and even Dylan - so I suppose it's really a folk club. A proper one, like folk clubs used to be. Last time I went to a mainstream folk night, it was like being in church. There was nothing too reverential last night. My project of getting a photographic record of the people of Jarrow is beginning to take shape .

nixons , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Ave . My Cousin Graham was visiting at the weekend. He lives in Hampshire. That’s me and his Dad, my Uncle Eddy. Graham’s a professional photographer , and that was naturally the main topic for the evening. He was happy to talk shop. I learned a lot from him in a few hours. Some of what I learned is really important. Just a few days ago I wrote here that “there’s nothing quite like black and white film”. Hmm. There is if I set the d50 to shoot in RAW, and do a wee bit of post processing in Photoshop. I did that yesterday to test out what he’d said, and it wasn’t the drink talking. Tell the truth, I’d begun secretly to fear that the d50 was little more than a glorified point-and-shoot. That’s because I was shooting jpegs. RAW’s a whole new world of clarity. This photo I took quite casually as my opening gambit in the Happy Trails Newcastle game seems to me to have all the sharp quality I was seeking in black and white, and had...

Dad was holding onto the bike to steady it and running along with me... I was concentrating on peddling, and glanced over my shoulder to make sure he was still there, but he was way behind me, down the lane, I'd gone maybe 30 yards on my own, and I'd learned to ride a bike.

I've gotten to grips now with short and long vowels, diphthongs - and even triphthongs. I have learned them all yet, that is, I couldn't say off the top of my head what their IPA symbol is, or whether they are back, front, open or closed or wtf - but it'll come. I spent a bit of time looking at Internet resources tonight, and made a note of them over on MAINTESOL. And then as usual my thoughts wandered to photography. You could get a really rather good film scanner for less than £170, and the bits and pieces for black and white development would be less than £50. Hmm. That would be a good medium term investment because the cost of B&W development at a shop is outrageous. I reckon the set up would pay for itself after 20 rolls of film. And there's nothing quite like B&W film.

Studying this is keeping me out of circulation lately. Here are some of the fruits of my labours , largely pointless without an accompanying MP3 - luckily I've got audio at home... (And that's another angle for the podcast, which is well into the planning stage now). Really, my lack of knowledge of phonetics - for an English teacher - has been a scandal. I'm hoping to put that right over the next few weeks. I had a big-light-bulb-going-"ping!"-over-the-head moment with this last night: the English phonetic alphabet is very limited indeed. It's a very strict version of Received Pronunciation - the way people spoke on the BBC until the Second World War. To accurately represent the way most of us speak, you need the full IPA. But I'll learn the "English" one first.

06 , originally uploaded by Selective-Memory . My cousin has just gotten a Flickr account , and we've both been scanning and uploading old family photos. This one is pure gold. That baby is my Dad, (AKA The Old Man), and that's his Mam. Dad can't recall seeing this photo before. Grandma was an old lady when I was little - she died when I was seven, and this is the youngest I've seen her. It's a wonder. She was born in the late 1880s, and will therefore be in her forties here - my age now. So sixty-odd years later, it's almost like looking a contemporary in the eyes. Time is indeed a relative phenomenon.

On Flickr, I started a group pool called Babies Days Out . Today I found that it has featured in the Internet magazine, Blogging Baby , with a picture of Molly and everything!

Teddington Lock 1969 , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Ave . My aunt and uncle lived on a boat "the Lindsey" on the Thames at Teddington in the 1960s. We used to visit them and stayed in another boat alongside, "The Ballerina". It was great fun. In those days, Eel Pie Island just downriver was an important alternative music venue, and you'd have hippies rowing around, the smell of dope across the water... That's my sister Sharon and me, with Dad rowing. And I'm certain that's just a cigarette.

Today I sowed Balm of Gilead , Bistort , Butterbur , Chinese Celery , Common Agrimony , Motherwort , and St. John's Wort . Three dimensional, wondrous names, eh? This is a photo of Bistort from the Internet. God willing, I'll blog a better one this autumn.

Uncertain Prodigal , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Ave . It's a week for memories and friendships. I was in the shop in Jarrow where you can get absurdly priced tins and packets of stuff. For example, peanut butter Kit Kats, eight for £1. They'll do you no good at all, but eight for a quid! Anyway, I see this big bloke eying up the 50p angel cake, and... It's my old mate Ian, last heard of in Berwick upon Tweed! So we indulged in a frenzy of mutual amazement that we were both back in our hometown, where we went to school together. And arranged to meet up for a drink, which we did on Wednesday night - when I took this photo. It's great to see him again. A true pal and stout fella all round - that's a result of the cheap cake. And yesterday at a visit to Mam and Dad's I got hold of a load of old photos. I've started scanning in the best of them, and uploading them to Flickr. I'll be posting some of them here.

Garry Rob Steve at 2 Deneside - circa 1975 , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Ave . Click on it for the who's who.

Went with a group of students to the Newcastle Science Festival this afternoon, to see a "one of a kind science show", which was at any rate a welcome break from the classroom. The highlight was some fun with two Tesla coils . As luck would have it, I had my Chinon camera with me because I'm having some double exposure humour , whereby one photographer in one part of the world underexposes a roll of film, rewinds it and posts it on to another, who double exposes it. The results are necessarily patchy, but with luck can be magical - and anyway it's a lot of fun. Anyhow, I took ten exposures of the coils in action at a f2.8 and 1/30th of a second - which was pure guesswork; we shall see if it works. I'm hoping to pass the film on to someone far away, living in a place quite different. On Saturday I took 16 exposures in Jarrow. Now I've got about 10 left. Yesterday, the Old Man and I got a bag of pondweed and frogspawn from the brother of a friend of his....

I was in the butcher's in Jarrow today with Molly. Normally, when she's out and about in her pushchair, she's in a kind of trance, but she started to bawl in the butcher's. An old man said to me: "She doesn't eat meat, eh?" Well, no. "Hmm", he said, pointing to her baldy gums. "Doesn't have the equipment for it." Mind you, we've a feeling she's just about to teethe.

angelica archangelica , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Ave . Click on the photo if you want to know the story.

Kodak 66 III , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Ave . I got this in the Marie Curie charity shop yesterday for only £4.99. It takes 120 film, so it's all new to me. I went to Newcastle on the metro this morning with Molly and bought a film. I've taken four exposures already just getting to grips with its unusualness. Getting the film developed will likely be a right production. Click on it for a better view.

NORTHERN , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Ave . "Northern" was what they called our bus company in North East England. They went west with Margaret Bloody Thatcher and the privatisation and fragmentation of infrastructure twenty-odd years ago. These were their head offices. Occupied by a taxi company now.

As I passed by the National Express bus station on my way from the College to the Central Station tonight, a group of three young people in track suits overtook me, and as they were doing so our ways intersected with a guy standing by the bus station, as if he’d got off a bus and was waiting for a taxi or for his lift to turn up. The three were a couple holding hands, and a male companion. As these three were drawing level with me, walking more quickly than I, to my right, I noticed the guy at the bus stop, to my left, looking… At me? Not at me, surely, I’m rarely leered at. No, as they overtook me and all our courses momentarily met and then diverged he was looking at those kids. And then they were past me, and I was looking ahead. But the male of the couple, keeping on walking quickly, was looking back over his shoulder, beyond me, mouthing angry words I couldn’t hear because of Tom Waits on my MP3 player. He looked briefly ahead, and then turned back again, and he was angry ...

A big fat bundle of study material arrived from Leicester University yesterday, to keep me busy for the next few months with grammar and phonology. My grammar's ok, but this is going to be at a very detailed, technical level. And my knowledge of phonetics and phonology is not good, so I'm going to have to put in a lot of time with that. There'll be less time for blogging and Flickr; and the MA TESOL blog will be getting most of the attention. All of February was spent away from the books, and I'm ready to get back to them now.

big bloke on the metro , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Ave . I thought I was being clever, no flash and all. But there's a little light to help the autofocus, and that alerted this bloke to the camera pointing at him... It was a dodgy moment.

I know a story about Gary Glitter . It's interesting because it shows how one's perspective of of the truth changes over time. Somebody I once knew, involved in the music industry, was a friend of Gary Glitter in the 70s. One night, there's a party at Glitter's house, and he has a "girlfriend" there, who was said to be 16 years old. The party was dramatically gatecrashed by Keith Moon , who belted Glitter a time or two, and left with the young lady. The story as told to me had Moon as the villian, Glitter as the victim. When I heard this story ten years ago, before the world knew about Glitter's sexual preferences, I didn't quite know what to make of it. Now I do. Maybe.

"Dear Garry, "I am pleased to report that the marking on your Module 1 Porfolio is completed and you have been awarded a grade of C - 53%. Full comments and a pass letter are on their way to you. "Regards..." Hmm. A better grade would have been appreciated, but I can't complain. It was a difficult term what with Molly and the new job coming along. I've passed the first hurdle. Hooray!

Shall I Be Mother? , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Ave .