Strelitzia reginae photo La Gomera

What will happen to our High Streets and Shopping Malls?

High street stores have had a disastrous Christmas, and it seems they are now having a disastrous time in the January sales. The fact is many of us have little if any money to spend, are unemployed or are fearful of losing our jobs. Or if we are pensioners our pension simply does not go so far these days, with interest rates on savings at an all time low. Several household names have gone bust in the last few months and weeks. Camping equipment shops, clothes shops, shoe shops, card shops. No business seems immune from failure in these difficult times, except perhaps undertakers and accountants, death and taxes being as ever the only certainties in life! Even here, tax accountants could be in for a lean time if much needed simplifications to the tax system ever happen.
One household name that is disappearing is Kodak, the company who brought cameras to the masses with the old Box Brownie. What a fiddle it was to change the film in those old cameras. If you were not very careful, light got in and ruined the film before it had a chance to be processed. Then Kodak developed the Instamatic. The film was in a cartridge that we just dropped into the camera. That was so much easier.
But then along came digital cameras and Kodak just didn’t seem to know how to respond to such fundamental change in photography techniques.
But there is even more monumental change on the way. Internet sales over Christmas and New Year were up 10% over the same period last year. It is so easy to buy on line. And it is green. We save petrol as well as time. And now we buy our groceries, our clothes and our Christmas presents on- line. We buy car tax and pay all our bills on-line. We even send greetings cards by email. We buy our holidays and order our holiday money on the Internet. Where is this going to end? Even if we do go to the supermarket, we can now pay at self-service checkouts, being spoken to by a machine not a real person.
What this means, of course, is that fewer and fewer of us will use shops or banks or post offices any more. We can even print off our postage stamps at home now! Think what this will mean. There will simply be no need any more for many of the shops in the High Street. Or for the big out of town shopping malls. Things are changing in a huge way! Will the High Street shops and shopping malls become a thing of the past? What will happen to those areas? Will we spend all our spare time in our own bubbles, staring at our own screens and losing our human communication skills in the process?
Any ideas?

London at Night - Hay's Wharf and London Bridge

La Gomera up in the clouds

All is safely gathered in - Harvest Festival

Harvest Festival at our local church

Fabulous Funchal

Beautiful Hever Castle

Childhood home of Anne Boleyn in Kent, South East England (seen with her new husband Henry VIII in bottom photo!!)

beautiful Windsor

Some reasons to love The Algarve, Portugal

Zimsculpt and Loseley Park

We visited Loseley Park gardens in Surrey, England, at the weekend - they were looking absolutely glorious. But a real unexpected bonus was the exhibition of Zimbabwean sculptures. I love sculptures anyway. But these really shone as being some of the very best I have seen. I loved the style; all unique, made mostly from stones of the serpentine family, hand mined in small scale open cast Zimbabwe mines. Most of the sculptors are inspired by the shape of the rocks available to them to influence the form of their work. Do visit the website of Zimsculpt to see what they are about, and if you get a chance to see an exhibition (this is now moving to Canada from July 22nd to 25th September) and if you like sculptures even half as much as I do, I would strongly suggest you go. Here are some flavours of the work, as shown to such advantage in the glorious gardens of Loseley park.

Reflections and Shadows - Nature's Healing Power - Deep Ecology

I wrote yesterday of Stephanie Sorrell's new book Psychosynthesis Made Easy, and in particular her thoughts on the healing power of nature. Here are some beautiful scenes photographed this last weekend. We must ensure that our children are brought up to see, appreciate and love the natural world, to understand their fragile interconnections with it, to appreciate the Deep Ecology of the late Norwegian Arne Naess - all life forms are integral, part of a living web, all supporting each other, a spiritual philosophy, Stephanie reminds us, that engages all life, much like Buddhism.

© Eleanor Stoneham 2011

Loseley Park

I visited Loseley Park in Surrey England the other day. It really has the most delightfully manicured gardens I have seen for a long time. Just look at those lawn edges in the vegetable garden and the beautiful patchwork of lettuces!!

There were also poppies in abundance around the vegetable plots. I imagine these are useful as well as pretty, encouraging bees to come and pollinate the various vegetable flowers. This will be particularly important when the flowers of the runner and broad beans need to "set."

Even more reasons to love Sri Lanka

I make no apology for putting up even more Sri Lankan photos. It truly looks a colourful and fascinating part of the world.

I particularly love the sense of tranquility that the last two photos evoke.