Gallery: a January selection (2025)

January brings the snow, makes our feet and fingers glow

Sara Coleridge, The Garden Year

Not in London it doesn’t, or at least, hardly ever. Oh, it used to! I remember many a snowy January as a child, including some very bad ones, when my mother would recite that poem to me. And well into my adult years snow was a regular occurrence. But in recent years we’ve seen it less and less, although northern England still gets its fair share. This January it probably got more than its fair share, as storms hit the UK, but in London we saw only a dusting of snow first thing one morning, gone almost as soon as it got light.

But I’m not complaining, quite the reverse. Snow looks pretty in the countryside but in the city it quickly turns dirty or icy or both. It causes transport chaos and plays havoc with people’s plans. However, the price we pay for snow-free days is a month of largely dull skies, with only the occasional bright and frosty one to give us a lift.

Out and about in January

Apart from the weather however, this has been a good month. At the start of the year we were in Newcastle but came home just a couple of days into January. Since then we’ve been at home but with no shortage of enjoyment. There were various evenings out including a theatre visit to see Sigourney Weaver as Prospero in The Tempest at the Theatre Royal (one of my Christmas presents from Chris and a wonderful production). Two days later we saw Ben Elton returning to stand-up in what was probably the best live routine we’ve seen from anyone (one of Chris’s presents from me!) We had a couple of cinema outings, A Complete Unknown and The Brutalist (both excellent). We also got tickets for a TV football chat show featuring a former Newcastle player, Steve Howey, which was great fun as the audience were all Toon fans.

I had lunch out with friends and with some of our Plan Zheroes volunteers, went to a great meeting of my photo group and had a blogger meet-up. Whom did I meet? It was none other than one of our Changing Seasons hosts, Ju-Lyn, who has been staying in London for family reasons. She made the time to pop over to Ealing to see me and we had a great chat over hot drinks in one of my favourite coffee shops.

We also saw a couple of good photography exhibitions. The first was a free one in a small gallery in Mayfair featuring the stunning wildlife photos of German Lars Beusker. You can see one of the works here: https://www.miartgallery.com/artists/107-lars-beusker/works/9994-lars-beusker-mufasa-2023/. The second was on a much larger (and more expensive!) scale, The 80s: Photographing Britain, at Tate Britain. But size and cost don’t always equate to best, and although I liked a lot of the photos on display, they were mostly ones I’d seen previously by favourite photographers such as Chris Killip, Don McCullin, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen and Tish Murtha. Many of the others interested me less and there were really too many to take in properly.

Technical notes

Most of this month’s shots were taken with my phone, and the remainder with my Panasonic Lumix point and shoot camera. Most have been at least a little edited with Photoshop Elements and some also with Nik Color Efex or with Nik Silver Efex for the monochrome shots. The first of my tulip shots was created with a copper filter applied in Nik Silver Efex and a black background in Elements.

My featured image was taken in our local park, Walpole.

As always I am linking my selection to Ju-Lyn’s and Brian’s Changing Seasons challenge. Use the arrows to navigate the slideshow if you want to see all the images.