Newcastle Beach Ocean Pool

I work in Newcastle one to two months a year. If I can, I try to swim in the Ocean Pool two or three times a week, usually in the morning. Not possible this year, but I thought I’d take a few photographs after work. The day/night transition was forced – it’s winter and it gets dark at around 6.00 pm. Weather and time allowing, I’ll explore some more. And, maybe, at Mereweather just along the coast – the largest Ocean Pool in the Southern Hemisphere.

‘It makes no sense to ask what entropy ‘is’, as though it was possible to find in this protean signifier a transcendent signification. Instead we must ask what it meant to whom, for what reasons, in what context, and with what consequences.’

N. Katherine Hayles (1990), Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

‘Most London business occurred in plain view. Chaucer’s London is a very public city, a place where people mingle together in crowded thoroughfare’s, where they post and publish their inner thoughts and broadcast them aloud, where different forms of street theater flourish, and where public presentation of the self far overwhelms any gestures toward privacy or inwardness. Whether in small lanes and byways, or in processional and ceremonial places like Cheap, in places of assembly like St Paul’s Cross or in taverns and bakeshops, Londoners rub elbows with one another. More to the present point, they socialize’

Paul Strohm (2014), Chaucer’s Tale: 1386 and the Road to Canterbury, New York: Viking, p.73.