Tubeworms live in the sea, some in shallow water and some deep on the seabed around hydrothermal vents.

When they are larvae they can move around, but once they are adults, with their tails anchored to the spot they have chosen, they are fixed to that spot for the rest of their lives.

It would be tiring to stand on end as a worm, waiting patiently with their feathery plumes to eat tiny plankton, bacteria, and organic detritus as it floats by.

So they construct a tube of minerals around their bodies so they can stand up supported rather than flopping down under their own weight. And they stand in little forests of tube worms with just their feathery plumes moving free at the top end to catch passing food, for they have no mouths or stomachs, and just stand in their tubes waiting patiently.

Deep sea tube worms that live near hydrothermal vents use their plumes to absorb oxygen, carbon dioxide, and hydrogen sulfide from the water around the vents.

Inside the worms are billions of bacteria and they absorb the oxygen, carbon dioxide, and hydrogen sulfide to produce sugars and amino acids to feed themselves.

That incidentally feeds the tube worms, and that is how tube worms can live without a stomach to process food.

When I was out with landscape photographer Matt Oliver a couple of days ago, we went to a disused quarry abandoned a century ago. Nature has come back to claim its own, and the black trunks of the birch trees in the quarry bottom reminded me of a forest of tube worms.

And when I think about it, trees truly are similar to the worms. First they are young spoors traveling in the wind and then they anchor themselves in the ground and grow upwards and become solidified in place, waiting patiently for the sun and the air and the ground to feed them.

The Quarry

When the market for millstones disappeared and the quarry was abandoned, the unwanted millstones were left behind. A century later they are dotted around the quarry bottom, and some – like here – in little graveyards of millstone grit millstones.

The Danish postal service began in 1624, and the post horn logo and the red and yellow postboxes are part of the Danish experience.

An exhibition at the Design Museum in Copenhagen highlights the changes to the typeface and layout of the current design to reflect the changing demands on the postal service. The photo above is from that exhibition.

And if you are a tourist and you visited the museum, you might never learn that a year ago the postal service abandoned stamps and post offices.

To send a letter now you have to find a DAO shop or go online to dao.as and get a code. Put that code on your envelope and either ask DAO (for an extra fee) to collect the letter from you, or go to a DAO shop and post your letter.

Dao is the abbreviation for Dansk Avis Omdeling A/S (Danish Newspaper Distribution) and the .as top-level country code domain belongs to American Samoa, an unincorporated territory of the United States in the South Pacific.

The service chose .as because in Denmark a public limited company is called an Aktiese/skab, which is abbreviated as A/S. And from there to .as is a small hop, but perhaps not a wise one if the United States and Denmark ever fell out over their arrangement for security in Greenland.

51% of Dao is owned by JP Politikens Hus, 32% by JFM, and 17% Berlingske Media, which are three Danish media groups that between them publish national and regional newspapers and financial websites.

Looked at from the UK experience, the idea of private enterprises owning the postal service should not seem so strange. After all, Royal Mail is owned by EP Group, controlled by through its parent company, International Distribution Services (IDS).

One difference is that EP Group ia controlled by Czech billionaire Daniel Křetínský, rather than by homegrown owners as in the Danish arrangement.

Here is the letter I sent from Copenhagen to our home address in London, using the code I obtained from the online service. Look at the return address in the event that the letter is undeliverable. It reads

If undeliverable, please return to KD 22049367, P.O. Box 2450 5000 Salzburg. Austria

So this little letter sent from Copenhagen to an address in London, using the code (rather than a stamp) obtained from the Dao.as online service, left Denmark and arrived in the UK via Austria.

How strange.

Following on from my last post, this same question arises to what version of this photograph represents the view that I or anyone else would have seen at that time of day on that particular day?

The two versions are so different. And it’s just a matter of moving some sliders in Photoshop to get one image rather than the other.

It’s a pertinent question for landscape photographer, which I don’t say that I am.

As long as the image itself is not so manipulated as to be simply untruthful – such as by taking out trees or adding trees or whatever – then does it matter how I arrive at the image that pleases me?

The only criterion is, at least in my view, what do I want the final image to be like?

And if that is the case, then taking the photograph and processing the photograph are part of the whole. And it’s not possible to say that everything beyond the point at which the photograph is taken is an adulteration or whatever you want to call it.

I mean just look at these two images and then say whether one is right or wrong compared to the other. I mean it’s impossible to do so.

Trees on the edge of a birch wood at Surprise View in the Peak District. Shot with a Canon EOS R6 at 1/13th of a second, an aperture of f5, and ISO 200 with a 28-70mm lens at 37mm. I had my camera on centre-weighted metering.

With hindsight I would probably have been better advised to use evaluative metering because the shot was underexposed. So I had to lift the shadows: But by how much?

After I processed this in Photoshop, I had another go with this result.

The fact is that there is no such thing as a completely faithful view of a landscape other than my fidelity to a memory of how it looked to me.

The first version reflects the bright colours of the vegetation better but I cannot say how bright the overall scene was. It was around seven in the morning and the light was still brightening in the sky, and that’s all I can say.

To each his own, and there is no accounting for taste – as the saying goes. Some years I have been to the photo awards or painting awards at the National Portrait Gallery and wondered how they let some of the entries through the door.

This year the paintings for the Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award 2026 are very good, in my opinion of course. You can see them for yourself by clicking this link to the gallery. Click through to the Visitors’ Choice gallery to see them.

I too liked several of the visitors’ choice nominees – Useless, Part II, 2024 by Karin Neijenhuis, Diane, 2025 by Martin Jessup, Mummy needs a break, 2026 by Hannah George, and Another Day, 2026 by Sarah Quick.

It’s this last one that I really liked. From a distance it looks like rough brushwork around the edges of his arms. But get into it and the colours of the skin and the way there are blended is adorable.

I’ve linked to the image file, so if you click this image it will bring it up larger.

About The Painting

Another Day By Sarah Quick Oil on canvas, 2026
Sarah Quick’s portrait of her husband, Mark, is atypical in its composition and yet highly familiar. The artist built up the image through several layers of oil paint, while using a photograph for reference. This portrait encapsulates a period that was particularly stressful in the couple’s lives – switching between long work hours and parenting at home without additional support. ‘We don’t get to spend much time together and this was the five-minute interlude before the switch.’

Sarah Quick (b.1979) undertook a BA (Hons) degree in fine art at Mount Allison University, New Brunswick, Canada. Her work has been seen in the Royal Hibernian Academy Annual Open Exhibition 2025, the Sir William Orpen Prize Shortlist 2025 and Lapis Lazuli at the Hamilton Gallery, Sligo, Ireland, 2024.

Info

The photo of the visitor looking at the paintings was shot on a Fuji X100F at an aperture of f4.0, shutter speed of 1/55th of a second and, ISO 800.

The close-up of the painting was shot on an iPhone 16.