Water, Water Everywhere – Wet, Weird and Wonderful Vintage Snapshots To Treasure

‘Water, Water Everywhere’ features snapshots on the theme of water from Robert E. Jackson’s fabulous collection of photographs. We’ll start the man underwater at a slant and end with the press photo of looking at a wet street scene through a car window. As we go, we’ll include a few thoughts, poems and lyrics on the watery theme.

As ever, let’s try to imaging the stories between…

 

 

“Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.”

― Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

 

 

“For whatever we lose (like a you or a me),
It’s always our self we find in the sea.”

— E.E. Cummings, 100 Selected Poems

 

 

He felt the rough surface of the macadam under his fingers, and the thin sheet of cold water flowing around them. He saw himself getting up and backing away, and that was when a voice – a perfectly reasonable and rather pleasant voice–spoke to him from inside the stormdrain.

“Hi, Georgie,” it said.

– Stephen King, It

 

 

“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”

— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

 

 

Somewhere beyond the sea
Somewhere waiting for me
My lover stands on golden sands
And watches the ships that go sailin’

– Bobby Darin, Beyond the Sea

 

 

 

 

 

Ah, might as well jump (jump)
Might as well jump
Go ahead and jump (jump)
Go ahead and jump

– Van Halen, Jump

 

 

Tossing and turning, another sleepless night
The rain crashes against my window pane
Jumped into my car, didn’t drive too far
That moment I knew
I would never be the same

I saw you (and him)
Walking in the rain
You were holding hands
And I’ll never be the same

– Oran ‘Juice’ Jones, The Rain

 

 

“I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it’s just too much. The current’s too strong. They’ve got to let go, drift apart. That’s how it is with us. It’s a shame, Kath, because we’ve loved each other all our lives. But in the end, we can’t stay together forever.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

 

 

It’s gone! It’s gone! There’s no fleet! It’s, eh, it’s disappeared! No magician who ever could have waved his wand could have waved it with more acumen than he has now at the present moment. The fleet’s gone. It’s disappeared.

I’m trying to give you, ladies and gentlemen, (indistinct) the fleet’s gone. It’s disappeared. I was talking to you … in the middle of this damn (cough), in the middle of this fleet … and what’s happened is the fleet’s gone, disappeared and gone. We had a hundred, two hundred warships around us a second ago, and now they’ve gone, at a signal by the Morse code, at a signal by the fleet flagship which I’m in now, they’ve gone, they’ve disappeared.

There’s nothing between us and heaven. There’s nothing at all.

– Lieutenant-Commander Thomas Woodrooffe (1899–1978),  1937 commentary of the Spithead Review for the BBC (listen here)

 

 

 

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