Signs of Spring

As we approach the equinox, the days are lengthening rapidly (almost 30 minutes/week) ... the mornings are finally starting to lighten and the evenings are noticeably longer. Makes me wonder why the equinox was not more important in ancient cultures than the solstice!  [or maybe it was?] And as the winter fades, the weather here continues to be best described as changeable. So I choose my time for jogs around the harbor, or weekend errands, based on periods of sunshine that usually punctuate the clouds, wind and rain. Therefore when Sunday dawned clear and sunny, I decided that it was an expedition/exploration day. Alison agreed to join me on a visit to Prior Park Landscape Garden in Bath. So what, you might well ask, is a landscape garden? According to Wikipedia “The term landscape garden is often used to describe the English garden design style characteristic of the eighteenth century, that swept the Continent... The work of Lancelot 'Capability' Brown is particularly influential.” Capability Brown? I had to keep digging. Capability Brown was apparently “England’s greatest gardner [with a name like that would you expect anything less?]... His style of smooth undulating grass, which would run straight to the house, clumps, belts and scattering of trees and his serpentine lakes formed by invisibly damming small rivers, were a new style within the English landscape, a "gardenless" form of landscape gardening, which swept away almost all the remnants of previous formally patterned styles”. That does seem an apt description of Prior Park, which sits just outside of Bath (~ 1 mile south of the train station) and is sculpted on an impressive hill, with the mansion (of golden Bath stone) commanding an imposing overview of the grassy slope and “Palladian” bridge over the lake below. OK, so I had to resort to Wikipedia again. “Palladian” refers to “a European style of architecture derived from the designs of the Venetian architect Andrea Palladio (1508–1580),” who was strongly influenced by classical (Greek and Roman) influences (which is pretty obvious when you see it).

The garden and surrounding, surprisingly rural, Bath environs were showing the first tentative signs of spring. Prior Park prides itself on February displays of snowdrops, which were certainly in evidence, carpeting much of the woodland floor. But there were also more subtle signs, including the smell of young wild garlic leaves crushed underfoot and the angle of sunlight on the moss of stone walls, signs of seasonal change. In Bristol, spring signs include small clusters of crocus in Brandon Park (my daily hill walk and fitness workout en route to the department) and also in the small planter that comprises the brick wall of my tiny (asphalt) garden.

Alison and I then bumbled our way onto part of the Bath Skyline walk... pretty descriptive, reflecting the fact that Bath itself is surprisingly hilly: the town hugs the Avon valley, with enclaves of classic Bath stone houses drifting up the steep protecting hills. We didn’t have time to walk along much of the path - will save that for future expeditions, as it does seem worth some time, especially when the skies are clear and the days are long.
On Sunday, gravity won as we slid down the hill through the spring mud; we stopped at a well placed bench for a (late) picnic lunch before descending toward the Avon-Kennett canal. And there we encountered a complex system of locks that gently and gradually lower sthroughgoing narrow boats around the city center. In the late afternoon the canal was calm and glowing in the low level light. A contrast to my harbor water, which always seems to be shimmering in the breezes funneled through the Avon Gorge.

And so as the evenings lengthen, I realize that I haven’t yet described the ways in which the harbor comes alive at night. Even during these winter months, the early evening hours are times of activity on and around the floating harbor: the footpaths are crowded with a combination of walking and biking commuters, as well as swarms of runners, all providing a sweeping sense of movement through the chilly dark. At the same time, rowing gigs and shells emerge from the docks to take possession of the water. Marked by the cold blue of their LED lights mounted at the bow and stern, they form moving points of light as they move along the harbor, which constrains boat traffic to up and down, back and forth, to and fro, the rhythm of the tides for which the harbor was constructed. When the gigs finish, they moor along side Baltic Wharf, bow and stern LEDs barely illuminating the silhouettes of crews clustered on the harbor walls, mingling with the other colored lights reflecting off the water - the orange of sodium street lamps, full spectrum yellow from the windows of the Baltic Wharf condos, the flashing red warning lights at the underfall (the overflow connection between the harbor and the Avon River diversion through “The Cut”), the blue of the boatyard lights... each color a shimmering band of color accented by the midnight blue of the harbor water under a cold starry sky, Orion and Sirius overhead, the winter guardians of the sky.

Winter travels

Another chilly week - yesterday morning I awoke to a harbor completely veneered with a thin coating of ice. But yesterday was also another day of gloriously clear skies and sunshine that kept luring me outside. Grabbed my camera for the early morning walk (of course)... but I was not the first one outside. There were joggers a-plenty, and the little blue boat of the harbormaster had already cut a swath through the ice and along the length of the harbor. Soon after the harbor master passed, I watched with amusement as a boat from the Bristol gig-rowing club moved valiantly (and noisily!) along the narrow free water path, which was, of course, sufficiently wide for the gig but not the oars. In fact, I was surprised at how many boats decided, after lying still for weeks, to break their way through the harbor ice - maybe it was the sport of it, or maybe it was that the tide was high...

By the time I headed back around my end of the harbor, the comings and goings of boats had started to break up the ice around the shipyard and the sunlight was pouring in over the roofs of the Baltic Wharf apartments... the quality of light is really wonderful at these high latitudes - a benefit to counteract the short winter days. Although they are getting noticeably longer... I was walking to Mark and Alison’s at about 5:30pm yesterday, and it was still light with that pink grayness that follows sunset. I had dinner with them and then we all walked down the street to the “Tobacco Factory”, a converted factory that is now a small theater. We went to see a production of King Lear - it was excellent! The Tobacco Factory theater gets top quality British actors - last night Lear was played by John Shrapnel, who is not only a famous Shakespeare actor but has also been in numerous BBC TV series (including Inspector Morse and Inspector Lynley, for those of you who are PBS Mystery fans) and many British films. The theater is small and the stage is in the middle - truly a theater-in-the-round - and therefore the setting is intimate and the emotions of the play quite intense.

It was also another week of traveling. This time to Pisa, Italy, for a “kick-off” meeting about a new European Union training grant for early career researchers in Volcanology. Alison is the point person for Bristol’s role in the grant, and I went along to help out. It was also, of course, a chance for me to catch up with my Pisa friends. The workshop was held at a monastery now converted to a hotel... not surprisingly, the rooms were simple (to the point of austere) but at least were (I assume) better heated than in the time of the monks (which was lucky, because even Pisa was unusually cold) and it was the perfect place for a small workshop. Breakfast was provided by the hotel, and all other meals were catered - I needn’t say that we ate well! In fact, I’ll confess to eating a few too many croissants (‘cornetti’ in Italian) and other pastries, because Italy does them so well...

The workshop lasted for 1.5 days, with an executive meeting on the afternoon of the second day. While Alison attended that, I headed into the center of town to find my friends in the Geology Dept (Mauro, Raffaello, Marco) and to re-acquaint myself with Pisa... the winding narrow streets that open into small piazzas, the small shops and open-air stands, and, of course, the Arno River and the ‘duomo’ complete with tower that really does lean. I’ve pulled out a few pictures from past trips, where the sun was shining higher and brighter than this past week.

Returned to Bristol on Wednesday, reversing the long trip to Pisa on Sunday (a 3.5 hour bus ride to Gatwick Airport, the usual hanging about in the airport, a 2ish hour flight to Pisa - not bad, but apparently in the summer there are direct flights from Bristol to Pisa, which sounds much easier!). I was an internal examiner for a PhD ‘viva’ on Friday, so was kept busy prepping for that on Thursday and Friday morning. I was ready to slow down yesterday, so that it was particularly nice to wake to sunshine, and to watch the slow progression of open water from the early morning ice-breaking to partial melting in my waterway later in the day.. although, even this morning, with the temperature above freezing, the skies overcast, and the main harbor completely ice-free, my strip of water is still hosting almost invisible thin ice sheets that move with, but rapidly damp, the swells propagating in from water taxis and tour boats passing the blue bridge.

Winter comes to Bristol

After an (unusually) warm January, winter seems to have arrived! In fact it’s snowing oh so lightly now (doesn’t look like it will amount to much). Yesterday morning I woke up to a thin veneer of ice across my little waterway... as the day dawned, I could see that much of the harbor was decorated with sheets and rafts of ice, thin but sufficient to hold the weight of the seagulls, who congregated on ice patches anchored to the harborsides. It was such a lovely morning that I was drawn repeatedly outside with my camera ... the light kept changing as the sun rose, and the quality of the light was exquisite as it reflected and refracted off of the ice and the ice-stilled water. Can’t resist including several of these images!

 

The first hint of winter arrived on Monday morning, when I was greeted with flurries of wet snow as I headed to the train station, en route to Cambridge to give a seminar. The public transportation route to Cambridge is a bit convoluted - train from Bristol to Paddington station, London; tube from Paddington station to Kings Cross station; train from Kings Cross to Oxford. My train from Bristol was cancelled, but there was another train 30 minutes later (quite crowded, as there were two train loads of people trying to squeeze in!)... but managed to make it to Cambridge only 30 minutes later than planned. I headed straight to the department to meet with some people there, and then made my way, indirectly through cute little winding streets and past sumptuous colleges, to Magdalene College (pronounced “maudlin”), where I was staying in a Fellows Room, courtesy of Prof. Mike Carpenter from the Earth Science department. I dumped my things in my room - a nice sitting room with overstuffed chairs, an ornate wooden chair (more about that later) and round table, plus a bathroom (tub only, no shower) and small bedroom, with, single beds and, puzzlingly, a calendar for June 1921 carefully framed on the dresser... Then I decided to head back outside to explore a bit more, before meeting Mike and Sally Gibson for dinner. Madgalene College is immediately adjacent to the River Cam (hence Cam-bridge), which hosts many flotillas of the punts for which Cambridge and Oxford are famous.

Dinner was a proper “high table” meal in the Magdalene College dining hall... no students that night (it was a Monday) but several staff with guests. Dinner was by candlelight, served by waiters who also kept wine glasses full. After dinner we retired to a wood-paneled room upstairs, also lit entirely by candles, for after dinner drinks (port, madeira or dessert wine). An experience from another century. As was my room. Remember the chair that I mentioned? It was given to the college’s most famous graduate - Samuel Pepys (pronounced “peeps” like the yellow marshmallow chicks). Most famous for the diary that he kept from 1660-1669, which provides a detailed account of daily life in Restoration England, Samuel Pepys was also Chief Secretary to the Admiralty, in which capacity he apparently partially responsible for making the Royal Navy a professional organizetion. He left his entire library to Magdalene College - all the books that he thought anyone needed to obtain a complete education.

Spent all day Tuesday at the University. High point was a chance to look at Darwin’s thin sections of samples from the Galapagos (some of which Sally has written a paper on) and to see many of his geologic specimens from the Beagle trip in the Sedgwick Museum (attached to the Earth Sciences Dept). Also had lunch at Emmanuel College with John McClellan, and a tour of the grounds of Clare College and Kings College (including a visit to King’s incredible gothic “chapel”, which is more like a cathedral - apparently the building has the largest fan-vault ceiling in the world) with Clive Oppenheimer. After my seminar, we retired to the Eagle pub (apparently where Watson & Crick worked on the DNA problem) and then to a nice little Italian restaurant for dinner. The next morning dawned cold and clear, so I headed out for an early morning walk around the “backs” before heading to the train station...

And so back to Bristol... went sailing last weekend, but even the sailors aren’t out today - too much ice for small dinghies, and too much white stuff in the air! Actually, it seems odd to me that the harbor freezes, but I realized that I just make the assumption that the water is salty, when, of course, it’s mostly fresh. And the temperature has been getting down to -5˚C. I’m off to Pisa tomorrow for a few days - apparently they have a lot of snow there (VERY unusual)... so hopefully I’ll have some snowy pictures for next week’s blog. For now will post another photo from yesterday morning!