A Portal To My Soul

I am insanely fortunate to have been able to spend hours and hours partaking of beautiful walks, taking photos, getting fit (or at least attempting to...) and I hope I shall always be this fortunate.

I am equally fortunate in that I appear to have the temperament that allows me to enjoy spending hours and hours editing photos from the hours and hours of beautiful walks, into creations that make my soul sparkle with happiness.

Walking begets photos, photos beget editing, editing begets blog, blog begets writing. And that makes me happy too, as I'm also fortunate in that I love playing with words!

It is, however, another world entirely to try and set up, for example, a website to showcase the end results of hours and hours of editing photos from hours and hours of partaking of beautiful walks!

Nevertheless, walking, photography, writing: a trifecta of happiness that come all wrapped up in this blog, has now been spread a little further across the interwebs in the form of my new PHOTOGRAPHY WEBSITE! WHEEEEE!!!!

Yes, it's called PORTAL! I was, at first, trying to find a name that suited both me, and the photos I like to take, and kept coming up with such pretentiousness that it was impossible to take myself seriously! (Well, as seriously as I can possibly take myself, at any rate!)

In the end I came back to the name I originally came up with when I first added my door photos to a facebook album back in August 2013: Portals. But just singular this time, to add a teeny bit of ambiguity. For portal does not only mean door, but it can also mean (amongst many meanings and now the word ‘meaning' has lost all meaning)... wait, I'll let Dr Google take over:

portal

ˈpɔːt(ə)l/

noun

noun: portal; plural noun: portals

1. a doorway, gate, or other entrance, especially a large and imposing one.

   synonyms:

   doorway, gateway, entrance, way in, way out, exit, egress, opening; More

   • an Internet site providing access or links to other sites.

I'm still tweaking the look here and there, adding pages there and here, and valiantly battling against fiddling too much!

And there is so much to fiddle with, given half the chance! From the layout, to the font, to the choice of... everything really. I'm rather impressed with Zenfolio for this. It's not all straightforward, although on the whole it's simpler than Blogger. (I won't begin to tell you how long I enjoyed playing with colours and fonts and layouts and backgrounds to arrive at what I have just now on here, though!)

Fonts, for example. Give me a facsimile of Henry Purcell's Orpheus Britannicus (a collection of songs posthumously published in 1698 and 1702) and I'll be just as enamoured of the beautiful type as I am with the beautiful music... 

Some of the (many) reasons I adore ancient books is the feeling of the raised ink against a less-than-smooth page; the slight irregularity to every printed word, the unevenness of each letter. The font I chose for this blog is called ‘IM Fell DW Pica'. It's a Google font by the designer Igino Marini, based on the typesetting work of printer John Fell (1625 - 86) and his personal typesetter, Peter de Walbergen, and to me feels like the internet text equivalent of an exquisite late 17th Century air.

But I couldn't have everything I put online look the same. Well, I could, of course, branding and whatever other business ideal it would be to have everything I did look the same... but not everything I do is the same. 

And so we come to ‘Century Gothic', the font I decided to use for the new website. I am split, and always have been, between the typographic ideals of the baroque and the 1920's, and ‘Century Gothic' (released in 1991 by Monotype Imaging), based upon a font called ‘Twentieth Century' (1937 by Sol Hess for Lanston Monotype), itself designed as a competitor to ‘Futura' (designed in 1927 by Paul Renner of the Bauer Type Foundry), has always been a favourite of mine. Although supposedly influenced by the Bauhaus School (I'm more of an Art Deco person myself), I'm still drawn to this font style as something synonymous with the glamour and modernity of the inter-war years. And it looks pretty!

So yes, I'm sure you can imagine the massive amount of enjoyment I get in playing about with page-designing tools, considering the amount of space I've just taken up on here discussing font choices! 

The hardest thing about creating the new site, however, has been choosing the photographs that I think, to get down to brass tacks, may bring in some revenue. I could very easily add every photo I've taken that has received, for want of less tragic example, a ‘love' on facebook, but 1) I'd quickly fill up my allotted (and paid-for) space on Zenfolio with photos already taken (oh yes, a little blowing of my own trumpet there!) leaving little space for future ‘loves', and 2) as much as I delight in knowing my facebook friend list is filled with dears who share, at least in part, my artistic temperament, this is sadly not an accurate representation of the money-spending world at large. Because we all know artists, musicians, and anyone associated with the arts, whether literature, performing, or visual, are pretty much as poor as church mice!

So yes, choosing photographs to has been a bit of a challenge, and I suspect I'll change my mind many times about what belongs there and what doesn't, but that's half the fun, no? Why not keep everyone on their photo-procuring toes!

But enough talk, and more walk! The temperature has risen from the minus four of this morning to a robust zero degrees C, and the sun is shining its little heart out. I'm off to find my walking boots...!

Falling

One of the things about being large is that you fear falling over. It's a forty-fifty-ten mix of panicking that you'll not be able to get back up again without extraneous help; being afraid that there are witnesses laughing at your no doubt attention-grabbing pavement-plant; the dread that you might have seriously hurt something other than your pride.

So... 90% fear of dying from embarrassment, 10% fear of actually, yannow, dying.

I've had a few serious falls in my adult life so far. (The childhood falls through glass doors, off bikes, and from the top of bale forts totally don't count...)

The first was when I was at music college in Birmingham, outside our local pub; although I must point out it was on the way TO, and not coming home from said pub. It was a simple mis-judgement of a pothole that led to me being ambulanced away, my ankle being strapped-up rather firmly, and having to ‘walk' around with crutches for a week.

The second (already richly documented on this blog) version was a tumble down some Portuguese church steps in 2005 in which I broke both the zip of my dress, and my foot.

The third, in 2011, was really just a trip over a kerb-stone and an inelegant land on my right knee on the edge of the self-same kerb-stone. The kicker was that I was at my heaviest, and that innocuous fall gave me unspeakable amounts of pain, and an unresolved haematoma that is still slightly swollen to this day. To say that my right leg from mid-thigh to mid-calf was one massive purple-yellow mess is no exaggeration. I shared the photographic evidence with friends on Ravelry, and one dear friend was so impressed with the incredible colouration that she dyed a skein of yarn in the colours she saw, called it ‘Bruise' and sent it to me!

(I have yet to find the perfect project to show this off in the fashion it truly deserves, so if anyone finds a lovely pattern for a crocheted sling, or perhaps a pretty knitted neck-brace, please do let me know!)

I suspect fear of falling off anything is something that we come across in all walks of life, but I'm slowly learning that if you're so afraid of falling, whether it be off a bike; down some steps; in love; whatever, you'll end up cocooning yourself away from any hint of a trip, sitting in a safe place, by yourself, wondering how life got so boringly, achingly lonely.

Yes, yes, I'm totally speaking for myself.

Lately I've been testing the give on several safety nets of my own, though. Well okay, that sounds like it has been a decision made by myself rather than The Fates giving me a strong nudge in more dangerous directions, but, for example, venturing out onto pathways of a less flat and concrete state and more of a rocky, muddy, hilly state has given more than a tug or two on the threads of my particular tapestry of life.

What have I discovered? Well, for one thing my knees don't seem to mind bending so much these days. Okay, so yes, that discovery was made after slipping in the mud a couple of times and landing on a completely folded knee. You know - like when you kneel completely, sitting back with your heels on your behind. Now, just to let you know, the last time my knees did this without pain (well, apart from the initial ‘ow, I've just fallen' jolt) is before I hit my teenage years. Remember that knee disease? The one that stopped everything athletic and balletic in my life? Yup. No knee-bend with weight on since then. Actually, no real knee-bends of any sort since then.

But how long has it been since that full kneeling-sit pose has been possible? THAT is the question... How long have I been missing out on doing more because I had never even entertained the thought that it might be achievable? Possibly a couple of years if I take into consideration that that's when I started doing knee-strengthening exercises again.

So how long has it been since I didn't feel the fear (quite so much) of trying to do something that might or might not end up with me making a fool of myself? Um... perhaps a month. Why? Because being the clumsy person I am I was too scared to risk it before. I remembered the pain and let that remembered pain weave a web of doubt and dread that held me back from trying anything new. But having slipped and fallen several times in the last month doing things I haven't attempted to do in years and living to tell the tale has given me a new sense of possibility.

Fear of falling isn't enough to stop me any more. Well, it might slow me up a bit, as it is probably a good idea to remember just how much of a clumsy clown I can be, but I'm not going to let it stop me completely any more!

Just remind me I said that when you come to sign the cast on my broken ankle...