Or “Breakfast at Tiffany’s behind bars”.

Yes, Bright Meadow is back, but in a new guise. Since getting Belle, the iPhone I have fallen in love with an app called Instagram. In replicates old polaroid shots in that all your photos are constrained to a square and you can’t alter the depth of field. What you can do is apply awesome filters which instantly make even the most mundane photo a work of art.

What makes it even better is the seamless way I can post to Twitter and Flickr to share the images. This, along with the pretty decent camera the iPhone comes with, has prompted me to do a Project 365. One photo, each day, for a year.

Gulp.

A bit of coding jiggerypokery later, and you get to share the fun here on Bright Meadow as well!

The rules:
1) the photo must be taken that day
2) only one photo of WhiskeyCat allowed per month
3) …

Just those two rules for now. I’m not going to be posting long explanations behind each photo, unless I feel there is a massive need. Hopefully each one, along with the title and/or caption will be all you need. Think of this as an experiment in a different sort of story telling.

Please,as always, comment away. Let’s try and bring Bright Meadow back from the brink!

Cas

Any guesses as to what this little piece of bent metal is?

I studied archaeology for many years and always I was plagued with two feelings:

1) It was all some huge elaborate joke. No one in their right mind would choose to build this massive earth fort on top of a windy hilltop, and choose to live there. Right? Surely, any minute, some Iron Age warrior was going to pop up from a particularly beautifully cut ditch and go “Hah! Fooled you!”

2) Everything (well, most things) we know of civilisations long gone are construed from the barest of traces. Things that haven’t rotted away. The rubbish. The few things they took care to bury. Anomalies, not day-to-day. The tiniest piece of wood, or metal, or stone is analysed for years and wild guesses made as to its purpose. Whole castles are built, from a few scattered stones.

I had this piece of bent metal on my desk just the other day and it struck me – it symbolised perfectly my feelings about this part of Archaeology. We can make VERY GOOD guesses as to how things might have been, but at the end of the day it is just a guess. I was looking at this artefact and, whilst I knew exactly what it was because I had been using it not three minutes before, no one else in the office knew what it was. What hope in hell does a future archaeologist have?

Hence, this piece of metal is my problem with Archaeology.

And it’s actually part of a delux German paper-clip thingy. If you’re curious.

(Whilst we’re on the subject, sort of, I’m being cremated and my urn being buried with a symbol of every major and minor religion I can find. Plus a stone plaque carved with the words “I was an Archaeologist too, leave me alone 😛 “)