Pavement People

Amsterdam

Brooklyn Bridge

Brooklyn Bridge

Manhattan

Kröller-Müller, Netherlands

Padstow Cornwall

New York

New York

Amsterdam

Sunrise, sunset

The plane landed in Rio just in time for me to capture the sunset reflected in the windows of the airport buildings.

When I arrived in Brazil on a night flight earlier this year, the sun was just rising and the cool blue pre-dawn light was giving way to a warm orange glow as the sunlight flooded through the airport terminal, and lit-up the planes on the tarmac — it was a bright warm welcome to Brazil after cold grey London.

And now, heading back to Europe, the sun was setting, and somehow it just seemed as if it had just been one, very long, sunny day in Brazil.

Bar Chicos

One of the few beach bars that's open all year round, and by good chance, the first I found when I arrived here. This is a real feet in the sand bar, nothing fancy, plastic tables and chairs, but the view doesn't get much better.

The Can Woman of Canas

This woman spends each and every day walking around Canasvieiras, scouring the town and beach for empty cans, for which I guess, she gets a little money. Barely enough to life on judging by her skeletal frame and that she also sleeps rough.

Tainha Ahoy!

A Tainha boat just setting out from the small beach of Pria da Lagoinha do Leste on the east coast of Floripa. The guy to the right of the net is still paying out the rope, and the net will soon follow.

The idea is to steer the boat in a 'U' shape, encircling the fish, return to shore, and then pull in the net. Sometimes the win, sometimes they loose. 

Life is a beach...

8.30am, Florianopolis Brazil

Sitting on the front step of the white beach hut bar, having done my yoga and had my morning dip in the ocean. 

The beach bar is not open at this time of day of course.

Sun again after a few rainy days, the beach littered with debris washed into the sea and then re-deposited on the shoreline.

Walkers and runners, bikinis and swim shorts.

The sea chopped up with warm wind from the north and the waves breaking rhythmically onto the shore.

A two-masted schooner passes, under power from its engine. A lone white heron struts his stuff in the shallows. 

Beach dogs barking at a running man. He stops and so do they. 

The beach dogs roam the sand, occasionally barking and play fighting, then attach themselves to two women walking along the beach in bikini tops and shorts, and walk along behind them, playing at belonging to a family, for a while.

The Continent is a hazy green silhouette of tree covered mountains, fading to the distant horizon in diminishing shades of blue. 

Pizza and palm trees

It’s great to be back in Brazil again and I’m greeted with wall-to-wall blue skies. 

During my last few days in London, staring out of the hotel window across the surrounding roofs and chimneys of Paddington, I was trying to decide which shade of grey the sky most resembled — it seemed to me to be a cross between the dark slate roof tiles, and the lighter grey of the lead flashing — a reflection of the landscape perhaps.

To be fair, it’s not exactly comparing like with like: London in late winter, and Brazil in late summer, but there is an intense quality of light here that makes everything dazzlingly clear, a bit like looking through a 3D viewer. 

  

Three boats in a man

As Jerome K. Jerome might have said — every man has three boats inside him: the model (or toy boat) representing the innocence of childhood; the dream boat, representing ambition and desire; and the lifeboat — for when he has reached that stage in life when he feels that time is fast running out.

I have no idea if this is true or not, in fact I have just made it up.

But while we're on the subject, my childhood boat was not an elegant yacht carved from a solid wooden block and rigged with canvas sails, but a work-a-day cabin cruiser, the hull and deck made from blue plastic, the cabin from red plastic painted silver (which gradually wore off). It had a plastic outboard motor housing an electric motor, very basic controls (a switch to turn it on or off), and to set the course you angled the outboard one way or the other and hoped the batteries didn't fail, or that it got stuck in the reeds half way across the pond.

Besides the battery compartment the hull was open, just about large enough to fit a seated Action Man inside (in his commando's uniform if you had one), or most likely just naked.

I held onto this boat for most of my life, and even though it had no beauty I was pleased to see it when I occasionally stumbled upon it while looking for something else. But I'm sorry to say that it never brought back any vivid glimpses of happy days spent at the boating pond with my father. (This is not to say that my childhood was unhappy, which was far from the case).

I think eventually I consigned it to the landfill a couple of years back, realising at long last that it was not something my son would ever be remotely interested in inheriting.

My dream boat is perhaps one of the most beautiful boats ever built — the Riva powerboat. Of course I never distorted my sense of reality to the extent that I remotely thought that I would ever own one. But I can still admire its elegance and the alternative reality it inhabits.

As for the lifeboat, luckily I don't think I've quite reached that stage yet, and even if things get a little stormy at sea, you have to remain positive.