We’ve been experiencing a low-fi day today. DM has been working on his latest photographic project……a new pinhole camera! Mind you, we did go out in the car to Trago Mills to buy some catches for his film holder/back. Tsk Tsk.

Later, I spent the afternoon gardening and planted celeriac and courgettes, potted on the chillis and did a bit of general tidying around. That’s all fairly low-fi activity I reckon.

We then spent two and a half hours wandering around Craddock Moor with the dogs. There are several stone circles that are four thousand years old, the remains of medieval villages, tin and copper mines that ceased working over a hundred years ago and quarries where the last blocks of stone were cut in the late 1800s and had been worked since the 1600s.

It is a place as wild and bleak as you can imagine. On parts of the moor, you can see no signs of human habitation, just moorland and marsh stretching seemingly for miles. You could be forgiven for thinking Armageddon had happened and that you were truly alone. I think Iain Bankes must have visited there before he wrote ‘A Song Of Stone’, which is as bleak a vision of the future as I have ever encountered.

Having said that, it is also a place with a quiet and relentless beauty that haunts and torments your soul like a siren. You can stand on that moor and not see another soul or hear life other than the sound of skylarks. It’s a world where you can feel totally at one with nature. The last few thousand years may simply have been wiped away.

We popped into our local watering hole for a pint of hand-pumped beer (a centuries old tradition) and a packet of pork scratchings for the babes. (R&A to you!)

Then home. Within ten minutes of arriving home, we lost our power. So did everyone else in the village mind you. We had no idea how common power cuts are in remote villages until now. This is our second in less than two weeks. We’d just put on our supper (in best Blue Peter fashion, prepared by yours truly before we went out) and fizz……off it went.

So, we lit candles, DM got out his guitar and we entertained ourselves for half an hour. Then we decided a contingency plan needed to be in place so he went in search of camping stoves and the supper got finished off on butane stoves designed to be used in a tent! Supper was eaten by candle-light with the most wonderful soundtrack provided by Frank Sinatra (Would you like to swing on a star) and courtesy of Radio 2.

I decided that I could ‘practice what I preach’ (after telling Ruth “vetnurse” some of my whackiest lighting techniques) and get another low-fi shot of the chive flowers, after yesterday’s natural daylight shot, here is the candle-lit shot. I did a few macro shots but liked this one because of its sort-of surreal quality.

So, here it is for the second day running, a low-tech, low-fi shot of a natural thing. The whole effect is all rather destroyed by the fact that it was taken on a digital camera but even that is quite a low-fi one these days, having only six of those mega thingys and lots and lots of lovemarks!!!

Kate was getting married last year!