Heygate Tales

I took a friend to Heygate not so long back, the first time I’d been there since I posted this several months ago.

It’s changed, all the buildings have been sealed off now. The graffiti I pictured will be seen by no-one now until it gets blown to dust sometime in the next few years.

But something new has arrived. The local community have started using the open spaces of Heygate to grow vegetables, people have cleared away the junk and made a new space for creating, not for dwelling in destruction. More of that another time. Because I found something on this visit that I had missed before. On a small interior block, someone has scribbled messages on the walls, extracts from a narrative on the residents who once lived here.

 

The cynic in me wondered if they were true. If they are then where did they come from, if not then who would make them up?

Not for me to comment, these authors went for brevity, and the tiny extracts scrawled on breaking walls speak well enough for themselves. Go see them, while the buildings still stand.

Heygate. July 2011.

Non-Sequitur

I don’t know. I found these in the same album and that’s the only congruent theme. Stop yelling.

Fukuoka. Nov 2007.

Composition

Can sometimes make up for weak technique and a really cheap lens.

Sometimes.

The Shard, Feb 2011.

Peiron – the Dragon Boat Race

Another look back to Nagasaki in this post, the dragon boat race is another imported tradition that the Nagasakians… yeah, Nagasakians, take more seriously than is entirely sensible.

Japan was sealed off to the outside world for 400 or so years leading up to the 1860s. Only a small number of Chinese were allowed on the mainland and only in Nagasaki. They brought the tradition of dragon boat racing with them, and now the harbourside villagers of Nagasaki reignite the practice every summer.

What this involves is every village in a district putting forward a team and making a boat. Every member of the team makes their own paddle, and then everyone gets out on the water and trains like a beast every single night until the race day.

And it is hard. freakin. work.

Props to Motomura village for letting a few of the international students from Gaidai join the team and props to those guys for showing some yamato spirit. Come the day they didn’t win a great bunch of races, but man they learned what the word ‘Gambaru’ really means.

The Japanese say the journey is more important than the destination right? Fair shout.