In memoriam - Barbara May Ellis, aka "Bead"

Yesterday I had the sad pleasure of attending the funeral of my auntie, who passed away well into her 80s. She was officially Barbara May Ellis, but her children, grandchildren, great-granchildren, nieces, nephews, great-nieces and great-nephews and their friends knew her simply as Bead.

Those who knew her don't need any reminding of her sparkling personality and quirky ways - they were beautifully evoked by her grandsons Anton Llewellyn and Zavier Ellis. And for anyone who didn't know her, it's not much use me waxing lyrical here.

The important thing is that despite the tears and sorrow at her passing, no-one could think of her and talk about her without a chuckle and a smile, remembering her love of practical jokes and funny stories. She was a master of the art of fun and I want to mark out this little corner of cyberspace to commemorate her, with love.


RIP Bead

Learning to see anew

I went for a vigorous spin on my bike last Sunday, and for once didn't take a camera - it was raining. But even without a camera, I found myself looking more appreciatively around me, taking more delight than usual in the lines, patterns, colours, shapes and forms of everything around me.

Vision is a highly "synthetic" process, meaning that the brain has to work hard to combine all the visual input from our eyes, moment by moment. What we see and take for granted as "reality" is in fact a selective composition that we put together in our heads without knowing it. And one of the most striking things about taking photos -certainly at first - is the huge difference between what we think the picture will look like and what actually emerges.

For me, taking photos purposefully is turning out to be an on-going process of re-learning how to see - a real adventure.

Anyone for scratchy music?

Ever since CDs became mainstream there has been a counter-current of audiophiles who insist that valves and vinyl make for a warmer sound. As for MP3, hard-core audiophiles won't even consider it.

Over the years I've also noticed that classical musician friends are largely indifferent to the whole issue - their sound systems tend to be pretty ordinary, even though they pay a fortune for instruments and agonize over the timbre and nuance of live performances.

I raised this point with a couple of musician friends recently, knowing that their whole music collection is digitized and played on a Bose+iPod set-up. "How can you be so picky about performance and so indifferent to sound system quality?" I asked. They had to think about it for a moment. And they came to the conclusion that the important thing for them was to hear what the musician was trying to do with the music rather than how well it was reproduced. They don't expect recording and playback to be more than a shadow of the real thing.

As for myself, I'm absolutely delighted that I can get all CDs and audiobooks and podcasts onto an iPod. And I'm amazed how different it all sounds played through room speakers, different earphones and car systems.