why the name?

(photo taken by J, on a beach in the outer Hebrides)

This Glimmering World. Why the name?

Well, it's almost a lyric from one of my favourite songs - The Geese of Beverly Road. It's a song that always makes me feel better, even if I'm not entirely sure that it's happy song. It has some happy lyrics and some thoughtful lyrics. It starts off happier than it ends.

But it has some words in it that I love.

"We'll run like we're awesome"
"Hey love, we'll get away with it"
"We'll go from car to car/And whisper in their sleeping ears/We were here, we were here"
"Serve me the sky with a big slice of lemon"

and of course

"We're the heirs to the glimmering world"

It feels like a song that feels ultimately triumphant, though like most National songs, you can't be too sure.

It feels like a song about what makes me happiest. Looking at life, drinking it up, being open to it . And glimmering is a good word. It's not out and out glittering. It might be kind of dim sometimes, but there's something there to see.

I heard it last in the car, as it started to snow, driving back from Loch Lomond into a new city that was shining with Christmas lights. I felt a huge sense of stuff being out there for me to find. A whole country, a street, a block of life. And I wasn't quite sure what to do with it, apart from feeling slightly scared and slightly lucky.

things about me - photos

I was very careful, in my former blogging life, to never reveal too much personal stuff about myself. But that can change a bit now.

One thing I love doing - love, love, love - is taking photos. I've got a stack of old cameras that I'm getting to understand - and in the meantime, snap away with a modern DSLR (Canon 600D) and an old Nikon FM (c. 1969 I believe) that used to belong to my father in law.

Brilliantly forgiving as the new camera is, there's something magic about using the old one that makes even the mistakes, the under and over exposed, the shaky and the slightly shit look sometimes a bit magic.

The camera is currently in for repair (while I frantically save the money to get the light meter sorted) but I like to take photos of people, mostly. Here are some old camera photos from 2011, and a few from 2010 - the birth of a nephew, a trip to France and two weddings...

hello

Some of you might know me from the blog I wrote about my wedding, cakesandbunting. I never expected to love blogging so much that I would begin another.

The wedding blog was a bit like the stabiliser wheels on a bike - a little safety net - written anonymously, so that I could talk about the wedding somewhere supportive, without annoying my (then mostly un-betrothed) real life friends. And I was careful to mostly keep it about the wedding and things related to it. (I'm not done there yet, by the way...)

But there's so much more to life than that. Interesting things to talk about and people to meet. Without blogging, I'd have arrived in a new city, just a few weeks after getting married, without a friend to my name. And there's also the small fact that potential new followers keep mistaking me for a wedding cake baker. Naming fail...

Anyway - this is my new-ish home online (or one of them - there's still C&B, and there's even a work-related blog, if you're dedicated enough to find it).

Enough of the rambling. Nice to meet you.