is that you get out of the house on a regular basis.  the bad thing is actually getting there and having to put up with people you’d like to kill.  i used to have a job I loathed and I’ll tell you why.  I’d spent a lot of money and time getting an MA in a subject I really thought mattered then I’d spent the best part of 12 years being called a techie and asked to do unrelated stuff to what I was supposed to do ranging in perceived skill set from banal questions about Word, to being asked to construct some kind of massive student tracking system in python and PostgreSQL.  Yeah, right, they teach everybody about relational databases and postgresSql in between Sapir Whorf and Chomsky.

Anyway, one good thing was I don’t live on a tube route so i could either sit on a bus for a very long time indeed or I could walk over my local park, past the old arsenal stadium that was being slowly demolished and turned into a very odd looking set of condos and down to the tube.  at the other end I could take the long route into my office via a big church which had some lovely grounds.  I was often late, but nobody seemed to notice or care to be honest, I began to suspect that was because they didn’t give a shit and my job was more about fulfilling some administrative promise and racial/gender quota.

anyway, I took these pictures and of my 3.5 years in one particular institution, they are the only thing I did during my time there that I’m pleased with.

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Me and Darlene decided to go to Prague. It was early January 1992. I’d been hating Krakow on a fairly constant basis since the previous July and everybody who came back from there said it was like Krakow, but much much better. We decided to take the train as it seemed the best option. I couldn’t tell you why. It started off well enough, the train from Krakow left on time, which was a bonus. We arrived at Katowice about 20 minutes late and I began to stress that we might miss our train. Luckily it was delayed, first for 30 minutes then for quite a lot longer.

It was freezing outside so we just tried to make ourselves comfortable on the station where there were what seemed to be hundreds of people from all of the place milling about and stinking. My most abiding memory though, was of a man who was sleeping on the floor. He woke up for a moment and threw up into his coat and went back to sleep. Me and Dar agreed that perhaps this wasn’t going to be quite the deluxe trip to fairly land we’d been planning on.

The train chugged around the tatra mountains at about 6kmph. It rolled and creaked and clanked so we barely slept. Then at about 6 in the morning we reached the outskirts which were as grim as any communist landscape. Considering the last place we’d seen was Katowice I would have expected Prague’s suburbs to be a little more lovely. We both felt despondent and started to implement coping strategies. People say Prague is lovely but they say Krakow is too and a huge amount of it is shyte. That sort of thing. The buildings grew, the train creaked and swayed and eventually we heaved to a halt at the terminus.

We were greeted by a small woman in her late 50s, I’d guess, who persuaded us to take a room in her nearby flat. We were then ushered into the underground and taken in the opposite direction to the city. We got out at a place that was somewhere between a building site and a city being repaired after a minor war. I remember having to walk over a some planking suspended over a ditch to get to the flat. As accommodation, it was really nice. The woman’s husband was very welcoming and they made us a breakfast fit for germans.

To be honest, we dawdled. Prague wasn’t so appealing now. But the sun was up and as we’d come all that way, once we were fed, there really wasn’t an excuse to stick about with the locals, so we tramped back over the plank bridge and onwards to the underground.

We got off at the Muzeum Station and looked down an almost deserted Wenceslas Square, which by the way, is an oblong. Famous it might be, perhaps in 1968 it was an amazing sight later repeated, this time with more success only two years earlier.   At 8 am on a day in early January, it just looked cold and damp and dreary. By then we’d even stopped the coping strategies and we just grimly plodded on to the bit where the square just stops because there are buildings in the way and the broad street gives way to alleyways which themselves give way to the main square in the old town which which you pass through to the river, over the charles bridge and up into the castle district.

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the gresham building was knackard when i first saw it.  i was doing my usual thing of looking at all the fancy plastering on the buildings which was chipped and in some places dented with bullet holes when i saw a relief of a man in doublet and hose.  that’s a bit weird i thought, in amongst all this arty farty new-vo.  then i noticed the name gresham.  well that’s not hungarian either, in fact it’s thomas gresham and i knew about him because i studied literature and life in shakespear’s england. so i felt i had a kind of national duty to see what my countryman had inspired.

the place was pretty much deserted.  it looked as if there had been shops there in better days, but not any more.  the glass dome was missing panes, pigeons were using the corridor as an indoor arena and water was dripping from somewhere. it was ace.

it had been built by the gresham insurance company in the early 1900s when hungary had a coast line and a kaiser.

but then it was 1992.  the seats in the parliament were still warm from the asses of communists, english was as rare as hens teeth.

it looks like this now.  i’m not sure i would be so welcome these days.

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i’m small time, nothing too exciting, nothing too strenuous, nothing to much really.  i don’t make huge demands, my biggest dream is one day to live in a house with a garden that is big enough to grow food in. and to own a cat. so that’s two dreams really.

i like small time things, things that don’t change the world but make me thinking about it slightly differently.  one of those things is smoke magazine. it’s about london and it costs 2.90 an issue.  it’s sold in art galleries and also used to be sold by borders, though not by hatchards, but hatchards has been shit since they blocked up the windows in the art department, so who cares that they were too toffy nosed to stock it.

today, i bought a copy, i was in the photographers gallery, looking to buy some 35mm film because calumet and snappy snaps were closed and i wanted it NOW.  in the end i thought i’m not paying that much for film and anybody who does is a pillock and went to look at the magazines where i found smoke and bought that as the photographers gallery cannot put some kind of gullibility tax on that like they do with their poncy film prices.

and there in the back was the sorry tale of how smoke was to fold, or at least be put on ice.  it’s basically down to local book shops folding and also the fact that borders has gone.  i’m particularly sad about borders because they stocked so many magazines, including smoke but also Ag.  i never bought one book in borders but i spent quite a lot of cash on mags.

i hope they fix something.

here is the site:

http://home2.btconnect.com/smoke/index.html

I went on a train, from halifax to vancouver.  actually i got on in tronto and went east then west, but that’s beside the point.  I’m one of those people who look out of the back window instead of the front and I’m pretty sure this was taken earlyish in the morning in october somewhere in new brunswick in 1990.

Canada is big.  You probably know that already. it  took me nearly a week to get from toronto to jasper.  this may have something to do with me getting off at winnepeg though it also may not.  my abiding memory of winnepeg was the wind being channeled down the street, a few native americans providing me with a sterotype example of lying in the gutter pissed and a chinese boy in the youth hostle with a packet of cinnamon buns.  he ate one while reading his paper and then kept looking down at the other one until he gave in and ate it too, slowly, very very slowly.  took about half an hour for him to do that.

i met some great people on the train.  mostly people who were afraid of flying or friends of people who were afraid of flying.  the bar keeper was from chittagong and was very fond of cricket.  one night we had a sort of party with bought in beer and something called alcool.  the next morning one of the men who had a very american name that i can no longer remember, was scraping his teeth with an asprin because he said his hangover was so bad, it made his teeth hurt.

i always woke up early, went to sleep early, in my sleeping bag, sitting up, as best i could.  so like I said, this would be the dawn one morning, somewhere in new brunswick if i remember properly.

it was a good trip.

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that may not be true, however, most people can but they don’t.

we went to spain about 2 years ago and i took my d70 and a very wide wide-angle lens.  because i’m lazy, i left the camera lying on the floor a lot of the time becuase there is simply so much up in spain to see and although i can look up, after a while it starts to hurt.

that said, some of these pictures are more down or along than that.  still, I like shaun of the dead and due to the repeat policy on ITV2, I practically know it by heart, especially the bit about dogs.

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i like growing things that I can eat and animal justice is a bloomin marvelous ep.

I love the seaside.  it must be growing up in the midlands.  in a town without even a river. I love the smell and the sound. I like the tacky places and the poncy places. Scarbrough is one of my favorite places because it’s got everything from chips and sea food to donkies and slot machines. the sand is lovely too.

The sea is the same everywhere you go.  Some places it’s warm some it’s not.  Some places the tide barely goes anywhere in others it goes out for miles but it’s still the sea.  I’ve always found it kind of weird that different oceans have different names, where are the borders?

People can’t stop themselves from staring out to see, maybe we are all looking for the checkpoint.

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apart from winning a merit and courtesy badge at school and to be honest, in mrs haynes class it was more of a lottery than an actual reward, i’ve never won anything at all. i’ve not won anything today either, but i did get commended by the LPA for six pics i entered in the urbanscape competition. which was very nice indeed.

here they are.

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had an interesting discussion on flickr.  John@ asked me what was so special about the light leak and i told him nothing, i don’t actively seek light leaks, they just appear when i use the lomo or the kiev.  he said it was a good composition, which i have to say i kind of agree with as i spent a bit of time framing it and it’s certainly not the only shot but it was spoilt with the leak.  although I don’t totally agree that the leak spoils the photograph, i do think that it’s more jackson pollock than ingres and i’m the sort of person who prefers the stiffness of ingres to the random splatter of pollock.

so i got thinking about the lomo itself.  given the opportunity and the commission, i’d always use the lomo. I agree with John@ that the lens is rather amazing if a little tricky. I am really pleased with the way the grain of the wood and liquidity of the paintwork on the door look in this image.  I really like the way the background seems to almost swirl and there is something a little bit off-key about the colours themselves.

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