Ggood question, so hey there Mr Hobbs.
And you saw a twister you say, and a supercell electrical storm? Everyone on Beex should know how jealous that makes me. I am eating sour grapes by the bucketful at the Green-Eyed Monster Cafe.
Would have loved to see a shuttle launch too.
So, what have I seen?
Vimy Ridge was particularily affecting. Went on a High School trip and I still remember it well. Massive war memorial there.
Climbing up Misery Ridge on Smith Rock in Oregon and seeing nothing but cloud underneath, which melted away in the sun to reveal rivers and trees and a glorious amphitheatre of a golden rockface. Got some of my best photos out of that one.
Saw a fat man walk along eating a big pie.
I met Patti Smith and Tilda Swinton, that was pretty amazing. They have incredible presence.
I've seen the great outdoors of the new west, with creaking old abandoned pioneer houses, highways that go on forever and white picket fence suburbs and trailers. Nothing special there, perhaps, but oddly beautiful for an outsider's eye.
Port Sunlight in the mist outside Liverpool. A worker's village built by the Lever Brothers and, almost devoid of cars and filled with Edwardian houses laid out like a Roman city around a temple, one of the oddest 'timeslip' feelings I've ever had. Wish I'd done photography back then.
Mervyn Peake's self portrait, seared into me.
Rossetti's Persephone.
The Retreat from Moscow
Gassed by John Nash.
My grandad's green camper van parked across the road from The Shepherd's Rest in Hinchcliffe Mill, Holmfirth back in 1985-86 around abouts.
My grand-auntie Marie Louise handing me a plate of fresh shelled prawns at my Grandad Van's buffet back around the same time. Revelatory experience.
An eagle circling her nest in the mountains of Austria.
Flying over a great expanse of white in Minnesota, of egg-shell blue lakes in Canada, of Pac-Man shaped irrigated circles of crops in the mid-west, of vivid blood red scarlet cranberry fields in Vancouver, of homesteads in the hills around Portland, mist crawling over the ridges.
Being under a canopy of more stars than I ever thought possible in Virginia City, Nevada, in the cool night air.
The sound of a freight-train passing by and the howl of a coyote as I look out to the Cascade mountains at night in Redmond.
Watching a plastic beetle on a spring leap up from its suckered position on the coffee table back in Fartown, Huddersfield, as a child. Walking home from school with this miracle of fun in my pocket.
The painting shifting from Dorian Gray to a hideous skeletal figure in the black and white film, as Dorian's body lays dead on the carpet beneath, which I saw as a child at Arndale Grove, Holmfirth. It terrified me.
Seeing 13 shooting stars in one night at Hay-on-Wye.
A strangely shaped bulk under a blanketed coffee table in the dim light filtered through the curtains of my parent's bedroom on Christmas morning. I know with a thrill of pleasure that it is an Amiga 500 and monitor.
Seeing Concorde break the sound barrier over Torquay.
Rattling up and down the hillside tramway in Scarborough.
Marshal Ney Supporting the Rear Guard During the Retreat from Moscow by Adolphe Yvon.
Two French policemen violently arresting a man outside our school coach in Paris.
Ball lightning in Upperthong, West Yorkshire - a crackling sphere of blue that drifted down the road, suddenly zipped up to the power lines and along and then vanished with a sharp crack.
Richard 'Twice Nightly' Whiteley in a marquee tent at a polo match in Yorkshire with a young buxom blonde woman on his lap, doing his trademark 'Heh heh heh' laugh.
All these moments, etc...
_________________ "Peter you've lost the NEWS!"
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