Brief journeys - How walking the city with my eyes closed helps me see it

So, the idea for this week is to close my eyes, point the camera randomly in any direction and take some photographs. I tried this out on my walk home from work yesterday and these are the pictures I took.

What struck me about these (apart from how blue the sky is - it was a really beautiful day) is how obvious it is that I live in a city. Strangely, I seldom take overtly urban images. A city environment is not somewhere I feel particularly at home, although there are many things about living in a city that I enjoy and, having done so for so long, I wonder now if I would truly be able to settle in a country location*. I like the accessibility that city living offers - to restaurants, to theatres, to cinemas, to shops, to travel from here to wherever else I want or need to be. But cityscapes don't really make my heart beat faster. I'm not a city girl at heart. And yet, I really like some of these images.

I like the starkness of the angles against the sky, and the shadows and reflections against city textures. I like how that huge building with the even bigger cranes has grown out of an enormous hole over the past two years (there's as much of it underground as there is above ground) and that I have been able to observe that process on a daily basis. I like that I am surrounded by a modern city that was also at the heart of the European industrial revolution and that the layers of history are evident in the canals I walk every day and the bridges and the railway lines I travel. I love that I can walk to my office most days. And into a huge bookshop on my way home if I want to. There's a lot to recommend it.

But what really makes this city living bearable for me is that which is not city. The details I usually seek out, which speak of what is beyond the city limits: the sky and the clouds when I look up past the buildings, the small patches of grass along the pavements, the trees and other greenery that are in the parks and line the canals I walk, or the sound and reflection of the water on the underside of a bridge...

What I need is a city, with the sea on one side and, preferably, mountains on the other. A green city. Anyone know of somewhere like that, that would make me welcome?

Happy Friday lovely ones!

♥

*I do honestly dream of living on a beautiful island or in a relatively remote spot near the sea but it would need to be attached to the outside world with a fast internet connection, a speedy and reliable postal service, and great travel links so that I could blog, browse, shop online and have my books and goodies delivered daily, and so that loved ones could easily get in to visit me and I could get out just as easily to them, or even to a city if ever I needed a shot of cityness. Oh. And a way of making a living that doesn't rely on me being anywhere geographically specific. What I do now relies very much on my proximity to people. Lots of people. That's my biggest hurdle so far to making the dream come true. So far.

In the meantime, my city and I are bound to each other.