#willen lake

[will-regents]

[will-regents]

Feels like summer

[snooptheblog]

Snoopet 02. The second instalment of Snoop’s new daily videos. Today, Milton Keynes.

[neilwykes]

Not so wordy version

This is an unusual set of photographs from me; photos with people in them. Even more unusually they are people doing things.

I visited the IF Festival at Willen lake this summer and walked around  Willen Lake. or "Willen Lakes" as it now seems to be called. Here is a photoset of some sporty people using the WakeMK cables letting them practice waterski-ing and wake boarding.

In the summer of 1996 I spent a week on the lake doing watersports. I got sunburnt, exhausted and fell in love with someone I’d never speak with.

All the blisters that marked where we had had our BCG injections got infected as we fell and fell and fell into the lake, our feet touching the soft clay bottom

Some of the school friends I spent the that lively week  with filled with laughter and heart ache are still my friends. Some went to my wedding, some I don't remember anymore. Their faces ravaged by lossy memory.

Even in the years before that Willen Lake was where my family would go for days out. It was also where my longest bike rides would take me. I couldn't conceive of a destination further than there. Neither could I imagine a lake any bigger.

How small my world, how innocent I denied being.

Two years later I would fall in love again,  only to be quickly submerged into an elfshot body that I very nearly drowned in. 5 years later I would stand atop the CN Tower of Toronto looking out with wonder as the lights of New York’s skyscrapers just poked up and over the horizon, twinkling as the line of sight was doused by the waves of Lake Superior.

Toronto is where I would miss the death and funeral of one of the friends who I’d shared Willen lake with.

6 years later I’d be in the Australian outback watching dawn peel away the cover of darkness from Uluru. And there, as here I’d think about the friend who’s gone and my broken heart.

12 years later I’d stand on top of a butte just outside of Mula sharing the flat-toped hill with the ruins of an Arab fortress having cycled for an hour under a blister of blue sky infected with red sand and air thickened into mucous by the Spanish sun.

Once again I think of him and of  her(s)

and as I look out of my window listening to the Galician and Castilian words floating up from the once Roman street below and feel the eternal stare of an 800 year old cathedral I think of him and of  her(s).

How small my world, how innocent I wish I was.

Neilwykes@tumblr 2014 | Waterboarding and waterski-ing at Willen Lake in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire in the United Kingdom

A photoset with words

[packlight-travelfar]

Enchanted by "soft-boiled-egg" (KevinH) on Flickr.

[gabrielmayuk-blog]

[stepdownmoney-blog]