Easter 2024

As advertised, we spent Easter in mid-Wales, a habit we broke last year for only the second time in something like forty years. I can't even remember why, now. Perhaps someone else had booked our usual rental, and we couldn't be bothered to look for another? Perhaps we just felt like a change? Whatever, life in the Marches went on without us. While we were away several pubs, shops, and restaurants changed hands or went out of business, yet more farmers seemed to abandon the idea of raising sheep, and someone had taken the trouble to put up some 4G masts, with the result that, miraculously, we were able to ignore our phones because we wanted to, and not because they were unable to detect even a hint of a signal. I suppose that last, at least, counts as an improvement.

I decided to try something a little different with the photography this year. Apart from the fact that my partner's walking capacity has been curtailed by a mild but prolonged case of "long Covid", after a bit (whatever fraction of forty years constitutes "a bit") you do start to repeat yourself. We did manage to get out when the weather allowed, and I experimented with long-lens shots (mainly using the crazy zoom built into the Panasonic TZ70), as well as with a 60mm supplementary lens for the iPhone. Naturally, this led to a higher number of "misses" than usual – never has the old adage that "you can't beat physics" seemed more appropriate – but also some interesting "hits". I will probably have some things to say about this in a future post.

Despite the fact we've been using the same cottage for quite a few years now, I had never explored a nearby church which is, like a lot of ancient places of worship in "Celtic" Britain, situated on top of a mound with a churchyard full of very old yew trees. I've probably mentioned this before (and, let's be honest, after sixteen years of blogging there is very little that I haven't mentioned before, and probably more than once) but the prominent, treeless mass of upland known as the Radnor Forest is alleged to contain within it the last dragon in Wales, sleeping away the centuries. Surrounding the Forest in an apotropaic ring are four churches dedicated to that Satan-stomping archangel Michael: Llanfihangel Cefnllys, Llanfihangel Nant Melan, Llanfihangel Cascob, and the one near our cottage, Llanfihangel Rhydithon. [1]

The legend states that the dragon will awake if any of the four churches were to be destroyed. Now that's what I call an insurance policy (or is it extortion with menaces?). Like so many parish churches, though, the original structure at Llanfihangel Rhydithon seems to have been replaced or at least extensively remodelled in the 19th century; I wonder if the dragon might have stirred in its sleep for a moment then? As the door was locked when I visited I couldn't check out the interior, so I picked my way carefully around the jam-packed churchyard, which is still in use, and where there are some lovely 18th century tombstones with "vernacular" carving and lettering (all in English, none that I could see in Welsh).

Easter in Wales is all about the unpredictable weather, of course. In the past we've had snow, dramatic inversion fogs, and blazing sunshine – sometimes all in the same week – but this year we had the classic British springtime "sunshine and showers", although some of the showers were rather heavier and longer-lasting than any "shower" is supposed to be, and the sunshine rather fleeting. Oh, and there were strong, gusty winds, which (partly) accounts for the softness of some of these photographs.

Something our Bristol flat and this mid-Wales cottage have in common is elevation: the flat is on the fourth floor of a block perched on the edge of the Avon Gorge, and the "cottage" (actually a barn conversion) is tucked into the NW shoulder of the Radnor Forest. At both locations this means that you can see the next wave of weather coming in from a distance just by leaning out of a window: it's one of the reasons I have come to like using a long lens in this landscape. What? Oh, relax, you hair-shirted landscape puritans... I'm not aware of any law that says you can't do landscape photography in your pyjamas...

1. Llanfihangel in Welsh is the equivalent of "St. Michael" (but, no, Marks & Spencer did not label their own-brand apotropaic underwear "Llanfihangel" in Wales). Quite why an angel gets to be a saint, too, is an interesting question, but we of Baptist heritage do not trouble ourselves with such stuff. It is curious, though, that a high-street retailer could use that name as a brand on their very mundane (but very reliable and comfortable) lines of clothing without protest from the saint-importuning community. Maybe M & S socks and knickers were given a free pass in an encyclical? (De Subuculis Soccisque, perhaps?).

Post 2K

We are now back from our traditional week in mid-Wales, with its usual mixed bag of weather. I'll be posting something about that soon, for sure, plus some photographs. But first...

I sometimes refer to mid-Wales as the Land the Internet Forgot. Which is not entirely fair: the fact that our favoured cottage rental has no WiFi might have something to do with that impression, after all. But the complete absence of any sort of phone signal had always been a challenge or a blessed relief, depending on the nature of your needs and your susceptibility to the pester-power of email. So it was a surprise, to say the least, to find that this year a one-bar 4G signal was frequently available indoors, occasionally swelling into an intoxicating second bar. So on 3rd April I was tempted to take a quick peek at my blog stats, and I noticed a figure that immediately made me take a screen shot.

Check it out: can you see it? No, not those sixteen disciples followers: I have no idea how they got in, as I thought I'd shut that door quite firmly (I am, after all, just a very naughty boy). And, no, not those viewing figures, either, which are surprisingly high, but almost certainly in large part the record of visits by various robots and fleeting drive-bys from people looking for camera porn. No, it was that number, near the top! That's right, you've got it: 1999 posts.

Which means that THIS is post number TWO THOUSAND.

As an instinctive contrarian, I thought it would be a suitably low-key – not to say meta – use for this anniversary post simply to mention the fact that it is an anniversary post, and leave it at that. What, you expected there would be cake? Fireworks? A specially-commissioned piece from a prominent contemporary composer? If so, I suspect you haven't been coming here for very long, have you? Or, as people like to say these days, have you met me?

TBH, this satisfyingly round number should really have been racked up a few years ago. When I started blogging in 2008 I was aiming to post something nearly every day. I kept that up for a while, but subsequently my efforts seemed to stabilise at around a dozen posts most months, with a break during the summer. Then, latterly, I started to slow the pace to about 1.5 posts every week. This was partly due to declining energy on my part (and a sense that I had started to repeat myself), but also because some regular readers were complaining that they couldn't keep up and were letting posts go by unread. Noooo! But, point taken. After all, even the likes of Marina Hyde only publishes a couple of times a week.

Anyway, there it is. Two thousand posts. Who'd have thought it? No wonder I'm feeling tired. Just think, though, if I'd put  all that effort into writing fiction I'd have completed ten utterly unpublishable novels by now... But I'm pretty sure even most published novelists don't chalk up 7593 comments, or 20,000+ reads in a single month, however illusory most of those reads might be. I'll take that. And I should offer my sincere thanks to those of you who have been stopping by to read my ramblings over the years, despite my efforts to discourage "followers" (how did they get in here?). Here's to the next thousand! (Really? You do realise you're seventy now? Ed.)

Southampton Squared

King Edward VI School

I'm working on a book (yes, another one) that will pull together some of the better photographs I have made here in Southampton. I'm hoping it will also serve as an attractive – nay, compelling! – portfolio / exhibition proposal, as I am feeling the need to show some work locally, something I haven't done for a very long time. Actually, TBH I'd be glad to get work on a wall anywhere at the moment: it's been a long time since I showed more than a print or two anywhere. As I always say, I'm so glad I didn't try to make a living like this, and would strongly advise anyone not hell-bent on living the hand-to-mouth bohemian lifestyle against it: get a proper job, dreamer. Or marry someone who does have a proper job, and treasures your head-in-the-clouds take on life...

In the spirit of "show, don't tell", here are a few of them (there will be about eighty in the finished book). To impose a certain uniformity I decided early on to crop everything square. It's also an opportunity to tighten all the compositions by a couple of notches, which never does any harm, in my view.

City Cruise Terminal

Crosshouse Road

Calshot Beach

Ocean Dock

Western Docks from Shirley

Mountbatten Retail Park

Abandoned sofa on Burgess Road

Holyrood Church ruins

Electricity sub-station, city centre

We will shortly be heading off for our traditional Easter break in mid-Wales, so posts here will be paused for a week or so. Here's something, though, that any fellow walkers in possession of an iPhone may find of interest. Someone mentioned the other day that the "Health" app pre-installed as standard on iPhones (it's the white one with a little red heart on it) works as a pedometer if you carry it with you (well, obviously... It's not magic). But, here's the thing: it has quietly been monitoring and quantifying your footsteps ever since you bought the phone... No, really, it's true!

You may find this an alarming intrusion into your privacy, but I was fascinated, not least because I had no real idea of how far I would have to walk to manage the infamous "10,000 steps", or how many steps I was racking up on average on a routine basis. By taking a slightly roundabout "scenic route" from home to the University Post Office and back on Friday – about 4.5 miles – I did just over 10K steps according to the app, which, when I compare the phone's figure with a rule-of-thumb metric based on my height (about 2,300 steps per mile), seems pretty consistent and is therefore probably reliable, even if only in a "close enough for jazz" kind of way. It will be interesting, I think, to see how some very 3-D Welsh hill-walks will compare, step-wise, with the 2-D distances measured on the map.

The Wanderer's Wetware

I don't think anyone suffers from the illusion that this is, in anything other than a very vague sense, a "photography blog". It is a blog about whatever I happen to feel like writing about, and it just so happens that I often feel like writing about photography. But this post is definitely one for the camera buffs: the rest of you may be happy just to look at the pictures, or to sit this one out altogether. 

Some photographers value brand loyalty, as if it were a mark of integrity: "I married Nikon, and never fool around with other brands, however attractive they might be, or however badly Nikon keeps letting me down". Others go even further, with the "one camera, one lens" approach, under the curious belief that their "vision" – actual or metaphorical – is adequately matched by just one particular optical combo. "Yep, I'm a hammer guy: to me, everything looks like a nail!" In a world of overwhelming choices, I can see the attraction of choosing a single blinkered path, or buying into a single "system", but it's not for me. I may have remained loyal to one life-partner for half a century, but when it comes to cameras, I'm The Wanderer (that is, the 1961 hit from Dion, not the Old English poem).

In a previous post, I mentioned that back in 2014 I was transitioning away from cameras that used the "Micro Four Thirds" sensor to the larger Fujifilm "X-Trans" sensor. But before that I had been using Canon film SLRs and then DSLRs, as well as various Olympus cameras, film and digital. Mustn't forget my medium-format film cameras, either, Mamiya, Fujifilm, and the extraordinary, combat-ready Koni-Omega Rapid... I could go on. In fact, my photo-philandering has often run in parallel, as well as serially; luckily, cameras are easy-going devices, happy to share a bag. Once I had begun using them, however, I was sufficiently convinced by the outstanding qualities of the Fujifilm X-Trans "system" that the Micro 4/3rds cameras and lenses (mainly Panasonic, but also Olympus) would remain in a cupboard for most of the next decade.

Then, more recently, and much to my own surprise, I became convinced of the virtues and above all the sheer convenience of iPhone photography, and the Fujis started to join the Panasonics in the cupboard much of the time.

But there's a cyclical pattern at work here. Inevitably, after a while I realised how far the limitations of the iPhone had begun to define what I felt able to photograph. It was partly the camera's "noisiness" in low-light situations, but above all – for me – it was being stuck with a permanently wide-angle view of the world. I did try using one of the supplementary lenses made by Sandmarc that gives a narrower, 60mm-equivalent angle of view but, although the image quality did not suffer as much as I feared, it just felt a bit silly, having this weighty chunk of glass hanging off the back of my phone. The phone had suited the sort of photographs I had wanted to take for several years – in a way, it was my own "one camera, one lens" experiment – but it seemed my internal weather had changed. I still wanted convenience, yes, but image quality and flexibility of angle of view were equally important.

So I succumbed to "photography as window shopping" for a while – like biscuits, a temptation best kept well out of reach – and started to look for very small, high-quality cameras which could either take interchangeable lenses or had a built-in zoom; second-hand, of course, and knowing full well that this was likely to be one of those triads of choice: convenience, image quality, flexibility – pick any two. All of which seemed to lead inevitably back in the direction of Micro 4/3rds and Panasonic.

Now, whenever possible, I buy stuff from a reliable used-camera site like MPB or Ffordes, but if what you're after is scarce and you're willing to take a risk on eBay, as I am from time to time, then real bargains can be had. So last year I eventually found what I was looking for: a Panasonic GM1 on eBay at a reasonable price (in Italy, in fact), which is the smallest Micro 4/3rds interchangeable-lens camera ever made (and the body really is hilariously tiny, about the size of a pack of playing cards), together with its dinky little collapsible 12-32mm lens, and a supplementary grip.

Despite its diminutive size the GM1 is an excellent camera, yielding the same image quality as a full-size camera with the same sensor, and I'm not surprised they're hard to come by, although not as scarce as the elusive GM5; much the same camera, but with the desirable extra of an electronic viewfinder. You could almost hear the ironic cheers coming out of the camera cupboard as I dusted off the old Micro 4/3rds lenses. Add the equally tiny and collapsible Panasonic 35-100mm zoom (equivalent to a 70-200mm lens in 35mm terms) and you have a perfect "travel" kit, so light and economical of space you scarcely know it's in your bag. Convenience, image quality, flexibility: sometimes, it seems, you can pick all three.

But, as I say, these things are clearly somewhat cyclical and unpredictable, just like the weather: no doubt I'll be returning to the Fujis or moving on to something new in due course. They call me The Wanderer...

But the real bargain I picked up along the way, surprisingly cheap on eBay, was a Panasonic "superzoom", the TZ70 (ZS50 in the USA). I was looking for a more camera-like substitute for the mad Canon Zoom monocular that I was playing around with earlier in the year. The TZ70 has an even more insane 30x zoom, equivalent to 24-720mm in 35mm terms (that's "pretty wide" to "blimey!" in lay terms). It's small, flat [1], light, and easily as pocketable as the Zoom. It's image-stabilised, too, and even has a little viewfinder so you can steady it further by pressing it against your brow, in classic style (essential at the longer end of the zoom, even with stabilisation).

But the main thing is that it's great fun to use, which to my mind is an important (if subjective) attribute, often overlooked in detail-obsessed reviews. I really enjoy being able to stand on one side of a wet and muddy field or a busy road, and zoom in to compose a nice conjunction of elements on the far side. "Foot zoom" be damned: if you get up close you quite literally can't see the wood for the trees. Best of all, the combination of deep depth of focus (small sensor) with flattened perspective (telephoto lens) is a good match for what my eyes tend to spot and isolate within any scene in front of me, far better than a wide-angle view. Which, of course, is also available at the other extreme of this lens's range, should I feel the need, along with everything in between.

Sure, that triad of choices does come into play with the TZ70: it offers convenience and flexibility, but at the expense of technical image quality. Without doubt – in comparison with the GM1, say – this camera's IQ is somewhat less than stellar. Which you would expect from such a crazy lens stuck in front of a tiny sensor, even if it is badged "Leica" [2]. But the lesson it has reinforced for me is the importance of recognising the difference between photographic qualities and pictorial qualities. In the end, I'm looking for pictures, not opportunities to demonstrate or test the outstanding metrics of my camera.

Camera reviewers obsess over "sharpness", for example, as if this were an absolute, as if a soft or grainy picture is inherently inferior, pictorially, to a sharp picture. I suppose to many the ideal model of photography is a perfect pack-shot or a studio shoot for a glossy magazine: the more flawless, the more like a perfectly clear window onto reality, the better. But our own inbuilt optical system of "wetware" doesn't actually care about any of this (see the post Cambrian Specs). Otherwise, how could anyone ever have celebrated generations of iconic photographs made with fast, grainy, "soot and whitewash" 35mm film? Or admired Impressionist paintings, come to that, or the likeness of a lion, scratched onto a cave wall with a burnt stick? In fact, the brain actually seems to get more pleasure from joining the dots, as it were, than from gazing passively through some simulated window. [3]

Quality-wise, I should say, we're by no means in Krappy Kamera territory with the TZ70. However, I won't pretend that I haven't had to do a fair amount of work on the raw files (What? JPGs, you say? They're not bad, I suppose, but I never use JPGs, given the choice...). Besides, this work "in post" is, for me, a large part of the pleasure of photography. I discovered some very neat new tricks when wrestling those truly awful Canon Zoom files into submission, for example: nothing stimulates creativity like the challenge of making a useable sow's ear purse. [4]

So, I hope that the pictures on this page (all TZ70 images) demonstrate that you can have all three elements of that aforementioned triad – convenience, quality, and flexibility – for very little money, provided most of the "quality" is supplied by you and your own optical wetware (with a little help from some decent software), and doesn't depend on the camera's mechanical contribution alone. If you're not convinced, well, I'm still having a lot of fun wandering about at the wetware / software / hardware interface we call "photography", looking for pictures.

1. Unless you accidentally turn it on, that is, at which point it's a case of "Is that a camera in your pocket, or are you just (very) glad to see me?"

2. The ongoing relationship between photo-legend Leica and electronics giant Panasonic is a curious one, but really only of interest to students of business economics and the psychology of "branding". From a photographic p-o-v, suffice it to say that a miniature 30x zoom is unlikely ever to appear on any actual Leica camera.

3. My (not very thought-through) theory of visual art is that it is humanity's attempt to reverse-engineer pareidolia, our brain's tendency to see faces and other meaningful images in random patterns.

4. For non-native speakers: "You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear" is a venerable English proverb, presumably dating from the times when a sow's ear might be something to be found just lying around looking useful, in an ugly kind of way, and which typifies the paradoxical self-evidence of folk-wisdom (a.k.a. "the idiocy of rural life"). See: "a watched pot never boils", "all things come to those who wait", etc. If you say so, Gran!

Publishing for Pennies

Forgive me if I've mentioned this once too often, now, but back in summer 2014, alongside my second solo exhibition at the FotoForum gallery in Innsbruck, Austria, I was pleased to be offered a 10-day residency. I was accommodated in a hotel in a village called Mutters, situated a few miles up an alpine valley from the city with a convenient and regular rail service, and had been invited to photograph whatever I felt like photographing. As I was also taking (slightly) early retirement that summer, aged 60, it felt like a suitable capping-off of my life as a wage-slave, and with any luck would mark the start of a late flourishing as some sort of artist.

I had a great time wandering about in the city-centre and surrounding area in the guise of "a tourist from Mars", and as a solid outcome I was able to put together two Blurb books: one which compiled the blog posts and photographs I had published during the residency, and a further, later volume which assembled the actual eighty or so photographs from my exhibition.

Compiling that second volume was actually only made possible some years later, as most of the files for the exhibited images were lost when a backup drive failed, and it seemed the DVD backup copy I had sent to Innsbruck in case of postal mishap to my prints in transit had been discarded. However, to my enormous relief and gratitude, FotoForum director Rupert Larl found them again in 2020, when clearing out his own computer files when he retired, and sent them to me.

Here are both books rendered as Issuu PDF flipbooks (as usual, click the central circular device to see the book in full-screen mode):

At the time I was transitioning from a series of cameras – mainly Panasonic, but also Olympus – that used the "Four Thirds" sensor (in the so-called "micro 4/3rds" configuration) to the larger Fujifilm "X-Trans" sensor. In fact, it was just before leaving for Austria that summer that I had bought my first Fuji camera, the X-E1 with its surprisingly superb "kit zoom" lens. But I was still getting used to handling it and, as it seemed rather too bulky and heavy for my trip, I decided to stick with the totally familiar, smaller, and lighter Panasonic G3 with its own excellent kit zoom. So, for those who care about such things, all of the residency photographs and a high proportion of the exhibition photographs are micro 4/3rds images. In fact, a surprising number of the latter were actually taken with that pocket rocket, the tiny Panasonic LX3; not a micro 4/3rds camera at all, but an all-in-one zoom compact with a bright Leica-branded zoom lens and a comparatively tiny 1/1.63" sensor. I think you'd  be hard put to tell which is which, though, even looking at the A3-size prints I made for the exhibition. Make of that what you will, you pixel peepers and "full frame" fanciers! [1]

To return to the books, however. As I've said before, I decided to start putting my books on this blog as PDF flipbooks because, in common with the vast majority of self-publishers who use an "on demand" service like Blurb, I rarely sell any physical copies, but I'd like my efforts to be seen, at least, and this seems a suitable way to achieve that. I usually buy a few more than the mandatory single hard copy myself for my own use and to give away (as I did, for example, with the two Innsbruck-related books), but invariably precisely zero copies get bought via my Blurb "bookstore". But that is simply how it is: in time you come to accept the reality that, in an online world, people expect "content" to be free. But pity the poor authors, artists, and musicians who thought they might make a living by providing us with entertainment, information, and the occasional revelation. Dream on, guys.

It bears repeating that the great advantage of "on demand" publication is that you don't end up with boxes and boxes of unsold and unsellable books (see this post). I have so far produced 30+ titles using Blurb, all of which are for sale, but virtually none of which has ever sold a single copy. Alarmingly, if I had produced them as even very low-run editions of, say, 500 copies of each via a conventional self-publishing "vanity" deal, I would by now be sharing a house with 15,000 surplus books [2]. Although the truth is that without the option of on-demand publication I would simply have given up on the idea of making books altogether after the first few ventures proved to be a pointless waste of time, effort, and money. As it is, however, for a relatively modest outlay I have been able to compile a convenient and nicely-produced collection of my own best, carefully-sequenced work at home in book form, as well as donating a similar shelf or two to my old college library and elsewhere. I can live with the fact that nobody else seems to share my enthusiasm for my books; fortunately for me, as a retired professional with a decent pension, I can afford it, too. So ████ ███ ███ ██ ███ [Redacted. Language, sir, language! Ed.].

When it comes to the finances of real-world independent publishing, however, I was appalled to read this in the latest CB Editions Newsletter (March 2024):

Say the cover price is £10. Bookshops which have set up their own account with the distributor (in CBe’s case, Central Books) buy in books at a negotiated discount off the cover price. Most independent bookshops buy not direct from Central but from the wholesaler Gardners, which has a monopoly on this, and Gardners (quote from their website) ‘normally ask for 60% discount off the RRP’. Sometimes more. So in most bookshops a CBe book with a cover price of £10 will have been bought by Gardners from Central for £4 in order to reach the bookshop. Before passing on that £4 to CBe, Central will deduct their own fee (15% + VAT) and the sales agent’s fee (10% + VAT), which brings the amount payable to CBe down to £2.80. That’s my net income per copy, and I pay 10% royalties on that (I’ve already paid the author an advance on royalties when taking on the book, often £500). So CBe’s take is now down to £2.52. The printing cost is, say, £2.50 per copy. Which leaves CBe with 2 pence.

CB Editions is a one-man operation (the one man is Charles Boyle) producing a handful of books each year that feature well-reviewed, sometimes prize-winning poetry and short fiction. For a profit of 2p a copy sold, you'd think he'd be well-advised to pack it in; remarkably, he hasn't (or at least hasn't yet). If you buy your books directly from CB, of course, he makes rather more (in his words, "the difference between 2 pence and the cost of a flat white"). So I have two pieces of advice, or encouragement, really:

1. If you like unusual and beautiful books, books which were not produced according to some optimised sales formula or ghost-written for some celebrity, and think that the independent publishers who produce them ought to survive in competition with the giant conglomerates, then buy their books. It's that simple. Actually buy them! As in, give them some of your money... It's a win-win, after all. It sounds silly, but too few of us who could easily afford it actually do this.

2. Whenever possible, buy books direct from the publisher's own website. Sure, small independent bookshops are (were) a fine thing, but they rarely if ever stocked the Really Good Stuff, and TBH their days are numbered in the unfair, asymmetrical warfare with the likes of Amazon. Game over. But we need to keep good books alive at source.

For photography, check out Kozu Books, for example, or Atelier EXB, or TIS Books, or Peperoni, or any of the dozens of small, independent publishers struggling to survive out there. You'll be amazed at the quality and range of what is being produced, mainly for love, not money. Although (full disclosure) I should warn you that this can turn out to be an addictive pursuit. Did I mention that we've got a lot of books in this house?

1. For the uninitiated, "full frame" is the confusing name given to a sensor that is more or less the same size as a 35mm film frame. Now is not the time to discuss this, but you do have to wonder how long it will continue to make sense to treat 35mm as the measure of all things photographic. It has already begun to remind me of the more abstruse imperial measures we had to grapple with in primary school: acres, bushels, furlongs, and all the rest of it. The fact that there are 1,760 yards in a mile is permanently burned into my memory banks, along with the number of gills in a pint. A very long time ago I "went out" with a girl named Sandie Gill, and her father had named their house "Pint Size" because they were a family of four (4 gills in a pint? I know...).

2. OK, it's true that we might well already be sharing our house with a similar number of books – I've never actually counted them – but at least these are thousands of *different* books...

Language!

The subject of "alternative cuss words" came up in a recent Language Hat post, and I was reminded of an ancient post of my own from 2009 which I thought I'd revive. Here it is, slightly expanded and edited to 2024 specs, as usual. You lucky people!

Gadzooks!

Our swearing is a good barometer of the sensibilities of our culture. A casual racial epithet becomes an unsayable, unforgivable insult. Yesterday's blood-curdling blasphemy fizzles out into a meaningless comic noise in a children's cartoon. I doubt anyone today would be much offended if I exclaimed "God's blood!" when I hit my thumb with a hammer, although they might be startled. It would have been a different matter in the seventeenth century, when I could easily have found myself having my ears nailed to a post (I have no idea how they did that... Maybe ears were bigger then? Or perhaps they used two posts?). I suppose in the USA, where the alignment of Christianity and respectability still seems (to European eyes) anachronistically close, taking the Lord's name in vain – not to mention other attributes or body parts – may still be quite offensive to some people. Although they've probably got over the ear-mutilating thing by now. 'Snails, I should hope so!

Fondness for one's unpierced ears may have been what led to the evolution of so-called "minced oaths", that is, allusive expletives used in place of actual offensive swearing. The pioneering classics are those musketeerish ejaculations like "Gadzooks!" and "Zounds!", but to an extent we're still at it, albeit unknowingly. For obvious reasons, a minced oath usually starts with the same sound as the "real" oath it masks. For example, all those strange exclamations like "Cripes," "Crikey," and "Crivvens" are clearly substitutes for "Christ!". Not so long ago in Britain the ubiquitous "bloody" was a genuinely taboo adjective, although no-one seems sure why: I have seen various explanations, including the suggestion that "bloody" is itself a minced-oath version of "by Our Lady". Hence the abundant use of adjectives like "blinking", "blooming", or "blasted" in the everyday speech of people averse to full-on vulgarity; "ruddy" is an unusual rhyming variation that was common in my childhood years, but seems to have fallen completely out of use. Interestingly, I suspect the relative paucity of exclamations beginning "sh..." betrays the relatively recent adoption of "Shit!" as an all-purpose expression of dismay, at least in Britain. "Sugar!" is the only one that comes to mind (although "Sh... urely not!" was my personal recourse when our kids were small).

Of course, any true puritan will find even a minced oath offensive, because it points pretty directly and transparently at the thing it purports to hide, like tight clothing or swimwear. But then the ability to find offence where none is intended is the hallmark of the puritan down the ages, from Cromwell to the Taliban and the extremists of self-righteous "wokeness". By contrast, a true innocent will happily use some of the merrier minced oaths, completely unaware of the big sign pointing at the taboo word they have, apparently, narrowly avoiding saying (and which, once upon a more genteel time, they actually might never have come across). Oh, fudge and fiddlesticks! I also doubt whether many who exclaim "Gosh!" or "Golly!" in an Enid Blighton-ish way, ironically or not, are either aware or care that they are thereby avoiding the Mosaic commandment (number three, in fact) against "taking God's name in vain". Really? My goodness!

I have never really understood the contemporary fondness for swearing among the professional classes, especially the claim that it is hypocritical not to do so and prissy to find it offensive when deployed by others. But, having grown up in a respectable working-class / lower-middle-class milieu, I will concede that I am not best placed, instinctively, to understand. I literally never heard my parents or the parents of any of my friends swear. Not once. It would have been utterly unthinkable, in the 1950s and 60s, for any halfway-respectable adult knowingly to swear in front of children, even if they habitually used "effing and blinding" at work. Similarly, we kids (who rejoiced in using "language" between ourselves) would never have sworn in front of – never mind at – an adult. I did once tell my grandmother, at the prompting of a friend, to "buzz off" (a minced version of "bugger off ," as I now realise), with the terrifying result that she chased me down the street, incandescent with rage. I received a rare smack that evening for my impertinence.

In Britain, and I imagine elsewhere, the true traditional swearers are all-male communities and the upper classes [1]. Naturally, you would expect the occupants of a barrack-room, being troopers, to be swearing like troopers; it would be disappointing if they didn't. That the likes of Winston Churchill also did and still do when at their ease can come as something of a surprise. But, as Terry Eagleton once pointed out in a review of Isaiah Berlin's letters, members of elite establishments tend to "mistake a snobbish contempt for the shopkeeping classes for a daring kind of dissidence." What better way to underline your distance from and contempt for the genteel classes than a judicious sprinkling of witty vulgarity? On the positive side, I suppose, to hear the ambassador say, "Well, that was a fucking débâcle, wasn't it?" – enunciated impeccably after a difficult meeting – establishes that everyone still in the room is an honorary equal, and indubitably on the same side.

Having gradually slipped over the years into unnecessary swearing, I decided to wean myself off it once we had children. Other parents we knew had gone down the opposite route, which was to inoculate their kids against a wicked world by freely sprinkling the taboo words (or a politically-correct subset thereof) into the family conversation. Call me old-fashioned, but I wince when I hear an under-ten say, "But I don't want any fucking cornflakes, Mummy!" I suppose if you live in London such prophylactic precautions may be necessary. Not in my house, though.

In the initial phase of decontamination, I was substituting the most kid-friendly oaths I could think of, which was effective, but did have some odd results. A 40-year old man roaring, "Sh...urely not! I've hit my silly old finger with the silly old hammer!" does admittedly make for an amusing spectacle (for the spectators, at least). Then, having trained myself not to swear at home by substituting nursery equivalents – supplemented in extremis by gritted-teeth endearments like "sweetheart" and "darling" – I found this had started to bleed over into my work life, which could get acutely embarrassing when, squashing down annoyance, I began to sound like some theatrical type: "You've entered the wrong code again, my darling! That's why your silly old terminal has frozen!" What a relief it was when the kids started to swear like troopers / fishwives themselves, and I could finally uncork years of suppressed profanity. Fucking hell! What a relief... Although, it has to be said, this was less of a relief for my staff.

But I do try to remain largely oathless – well, much of the time – and I must admit it feels right, if only because I would never carry myself physically in that sort of swaggering, bullying way intended to intimidate others [2], and I can see no reason to behave any differently in my language. If there is one thing the world could do without, it is people who revel in their own strength and inviolability without concern for the impact of their boorish behaviour on others. A society which is careless of the needs and feelings of the vulnerable or the old is a malformed society, simply. When it comes to language, even the prissily genteel deserve consideration. Well, a little, anyway. Sometimes. They are not my favourite people, I confess. Hypocritical ████s, most of them.

However, one argument against swearing that I can't accept is the assertion that it reduces one's ability to express oneself, by constricting the habitual swearer's vocabulary. Which is bollocks. Take, for example, this splendid concatenation, which many people claim to have heard, typically booming from somewhere like the pit of a car maintenance garage, but which is probably either apocryphal or somewhat embroidered: "Fucking fuck it! This fucking fucker's fucking fucked!" Meaningless? Inexpressive? Real or not, this is an exemplary demonstration, surely, of a single word's protean power, when used with conviction in appropriate circumstances. Accept no flipping substitutes!

1. True, I have no idea what filthy banter goes on in all-female company: "fish-wives", after all, were as proverbial as troopers for the saltiness of their language.

2. Sources close to this blog have pointed out the unlikeliness of this scenario, despite my imposing height of  5' 6" (168cm).

Absent Friend

Ingelheim Exchange, Easter 1971

(Mike, Steve, Tony)

Sad to say, one of my original crew of home-town "besties", Tony Collman, has just died. Most of us, I imagine, get to hear of the death of the friends of our youth belatedly, if at all, and with little or no awareness of who they became or what they did in the years after we chose (or drifted onto) our divergent paths through adult life. The person we remember almost certainly bears little resemblance to the person who has died, most likely in some town you don't know, and mourned by family and friends you will never have met.

This was not like that. Although, curiously, if I had never started this blog I would probably never have heard from Tony again after the last time we met in (I think) 1981, and I might never even have discovered he had died, unless it was many years later, as happened with another good friend, and no doubt with others I have yet to hear about. There seems to have been something oddly prophetic about Jackson Browne's "Song for Adam", from an album that was something of a favourite in our little small-town circle of friends:

When we parted we were laughing still, as our goodbyes were said
And I never heard from him again as each our lives we led
Except for once in someone else's letter that I read

Until I heard the sudden word that a friend of mine was dead.

Except we were not laughing, that last time. Tony had changed, and by no means for the better, it seemed to me.

But before getting to that, I should probably describe who this old friend used to be.

We attended a boys' grammar school in the New Town of Stevenage, 1965-72, that became a "comprehensive" in 1968/9. Tony, when I first knew him, was a mild-mannered, un-sporty, bespectacled boy who usually ended up without much effort somewhere in the top 5 ranked by academic ability in our year. His small size (that is, before a dramatic late growth spurt), heavy-rimmed glasses, and habitual briefcase led him to be given the slightly cruel nickname "Joe", because of his resemblance to Joe 90, the puppet character in the British children's TV programme of the same name. His mother Lena was a Jewish refugee from Nazi-era Berlin who worked for the same patrician chain-store, John Lewis, as my mother, and his father Jim was a bricklayer from London, a Communist, and a very tough customer. Necessarily, as he was the local organiser for the building workers' trade union AUBTW (later UCATT), and played a very significant role during the construction of our New Town.

Tony was by inclination a scientist, but also a very competent linguist, and we first became good friends around the age of 16 on our school's Easter exchange visits with our German twin-town, Ingelheim am Rhein. We shared a taste for intoxication, in-jokes, and improvised goofy humour of the sort that probably only appeals to smarty-pants adolescent boys. We had a lot of fun together, some of it quite foolhardy in retrospect, most notably when we hitchhiked from Amsterdam down through Germany as far as Munich in the summer of 1971, bonding over the sort of memorably mad (and sometimes scary) adventures you could have in those days as footloose 17-year-olds at large in Europe.

At the end of our schooldays Tony went off to Bristol in 1972 to study Physics, and I (after a further term of study and two terms working as a teaching assistant) finally left Stevenage in 1973 to study English at Oxford. For the next couple of years we exchanged letters and visited each other and our friends who were also away at university, as well as those establishing various dens of iniquity back home, and probably spent rather more time entertaining ourselves than was compatible with serious study, certainly of lab-bound Physics, although less so of that slacker's degree, English.

Tony, Bristol 1975

(photographer unknown)

Then, somehow and quite quickly, it all fizzled out. Fast friends went their separate ways, and in those days of frequent changes of address (and no mobile phones or internet) communications would be intermittent for a while, at best, then cease. Around then Tony's hedonism and habitual mood seemed to have darkened in spirit; he went off to Egypt to teach English language for a few years and returned a different, more difficult and even dangerous man. Despite efforts to establish himself as a software developer and resorting, among other things, to taxi-driving, at some point he acquired a profound animus towards the police and other authority figures, resulting in a series of court appearances, fines and ultimately jail sentences, mainly for assaults (such as allegedly deliberately driving a car at two police officers). He also endured periods of homelessness, including a spell living in the woods back in Stevenage, where he was burned out of his encampment by young thugs. In his own words, he had "disappeared into the night" during the 1990s.

Eventually, however, the Stevenage local authorities found him accommodation in a small council flat, and he seems to have settled into a relatively contented life in the new century living on state benefits, helping to edit Our Stevenage, an online archive for reminiscences about the town's history, and pursuing his two enthusiasms, cryptic crosswords and the "abstract strategy board game" Go. As a fan of comedy, he would catch the train into London to join the audience for BBC show recordings: somewhere there's a video clip of his enormous beard getting noticed and riffed on by comedian Paul Merton and Private Eye editor Ian Hislop on the long-running TV show Have I Got News For You. It seems the idea of ever getting a job, never mind a "career", had dropped off his agenda altogether, along with any prospect of a family life: AFAIK he never settled into any steady relationships. That darkness seems never to have completely dissipated, either, but we won't go there: de mortuis nil nisi bonum.

But that is all retrospective knowledge on my part. Whatever did or didn't happen to Tony in the 1980s that resulted in his effective self-immolation in the 1990s – I can only speculate – his personality had undoubtedly changed from the brilliant, mischievous and essentially benign jester I used to know into a glum, paranoid misfit with a gift for alienating people (including most of his old friends from home and those he had made at university) and, even more puzzling, someone capable of occasional fits of violence. The word went out that, in the Byronic formula, he had become "mad, bad, and dangerous to know". I didn't have any more contact with him for the three decades after 1981, as I did have a career and serious family responsibilities to consider, and the few rumours that reached me were sufficiently troubling to put up some solid precautionary barriers.

Then in 2011, quite aggressively at first, he began turning up as a transparently pseudonymous commenter on this blog. After a spell of light skirmishing in public we began a wary email relationship – he was clearly quite bitter about the friends he felt had abandoned him, and I was nervous about bringing this volatile stranger back into my life – but things steadily grew warmer over the years. I started posting him the TLS crossword every week – he was an active and expert participant in various cryptic crossword solving and setting circles – and he clearly enjoyed inducting me into the baffling conventions of cruciverbalism, sometimes asking for help with the more recalcitrantly literary ones. Despite some occasional spikiness – he would vehemently reject any offers of financial help, for example – it seemed that the old friend of my youth could still be detected somewhere in the voice and personality animating these email exchanges.

Knebworth Festival 1973

(photo: Martyn Cornell)

However, I only actually met Tony once in these latter years when our friendship was reviving, and that was entirely by accident. To celebrate my birthday in 2018 we travelled up to London to meet our children at the Hayward Gallery for the Andreas Gursky exhibition there. On that day, behind the galleries and theatres on the South Bank, there was an open-air market selling food, and as we walked through I heard someone calling my name. It appeared to be an elderly derelict with a long matted and plaited chest-length beard sitting on a wall, eating a curry from a cardboard tray. My partner and daughter hurried on, but I was curious. I walked over, and asked, "Sorry, do I know you? How do you know my name?" To my amazement, it was Tony, utterly unrecognisable to me, even standing face to face in broad daylight. Given we had been in regular email contact for a few years by then, it was a very unsettling experience [1].

Anyway, in September last year he revealed that he had been diagnosed with Stage 3 lung cancer, had declined any treatment (wisely, I think), and been given "weeks to a year" to live. He asked me to keep it a secret from our mutual friends – I really don't know why, unless he thought this would be a suitable posthumous reproach for their neglect – and (with one or two honourable breaches) I respected his request. Which was not difficult, as in all honesty it was hard to think of many mutual friends whose contact details I still had or would be able to find who, sad to say, would be particularly interested in his state of health. As I say, from somewhere, somehow, he had acquired a true gift for alienating people.

Then, at the end of January this year, he was hospitalised with shortness of breath, and was discovered to have Covid. They put him into intensive care with an oxygen supply and intravenous antibiotics. He still seemed chirpy enough via email, though, and quite his normal self – he asked me to send the latest TLS puzzles to the hospital – so I agreed to set up a Skype video call. Sadly, this turned out to be a bit of a wasted opportunity, at least from my point-of-view. It was clear that there was much he wanted to say, but his laboured, widely-spaced attempts to speak between breaths kept getting snagged on some idée fixe about a locally-sourced brand of sausages. Now, I'm a patient listener, and I like a sausage as much as the next guy, but this seemed rather beside the point under the circumstances. It was such a bizarre contrast to the lucidity of his emails, but then I suppose he may well have been under heavy sedation. So I listened to him ramble on for an hour or more until some nurses appeared, made my excuses, and closed the session, feeling that this was not an experience I was in any hurry to repeat.

Nonetheless, the Covid cleared up and, after checking out his flat for fire hazards, a hospital-style bed was installed so that he could sleep upright with a supply of oxygen, and he was sent home on the 8th February. He had already asked me to post the next TLS crossword to the flat in anticipation of his imminent discharge, and on the 12th he acknowledged its receipt by email, as he always did.

There was then was an ominous silence, that stretched on and on for ten days. Nothing. Eventually I decided to ring the hospital to see whether he had been readmitted. But the doctor I spoke to informed me that, as I suspected, he had died. When? On the 12th February. I found this hard to believe: not so much that he had died, but that he had died ten days ago, on the very day that he had sent me that last email from home. But by checking his name, address, and approximate date of birth it was confirmed: yes, he was dead, or "had passed", as the doctor kept saying, as if he had been sitting some kind of exam.

So, there it is. To be honest, it's a relief no longer to feel conflicted about whether to make the trip up to Stevenage to say a final goodbye, even though I knew in my heart that was never going to happen. We always like to think we will "do the right thing", don't we? Despite knowing that we'll generally choose the comfortable thing instead. Less selfishly, it's also a relief to know he won't have to suffer the final painful stages of a terrible disease.

Tony sent me a selfie from hospital, an honest portrayal of himself in the gaunt days before his death, still with that matted and plaited chest-length beard, but it's not easy viewing, and so I choose to remember him as he was in summer 1971, a bright young man of 17 experiencing full liberty for the first time, with every prospect of an exceptional life of achievement and happiness ahead of him. That this was never to happen is, in the long view, perhaps just a simple twist of fate, an unexpected kink in the narrative, or even – as I suspect the later, belligerent version of Mr. Collman might have argued – just your opinion, mate. And who asked you, anyway?

Tony, Ingelheim, summer 1971

1. In a typical Collman move, when I emailed him to apologise about this the next day, he replied, "SO tempting to reply 'What the hell are you talking about? That wasn't me!'"...

A Second Lustrum of Calendars

Every year since 2010 I have produced a small number of copies of a simple spiral-bound A4 calendar featuring my own photographs or artwork, for distribution as a Christmas / New Year gift for close friends, family, and – before I retired in 2014 – my more esteemed co-workers. The numbers in those categories were never large, and are inevitably declining, so the costs involved in this largesse have always been manageable. The standard of art reproduction I choose is quite high (I use and recommend Vistaprint) so that each calendar constitutes a little portfolio of some of the better work I have produced in the preceding year. If nothing else, it's a nice way to be present in the domestic environment of some people I never get to see often enough.

It occurred to me – calendars being essentially ephemeral items – that it would be worth putting together a book to record some of them. So in 2019 I made a Blurb book with the title A Lustrum of Calendars (a "lustrum" is a fancy way of describing a five-year period, although it also had a more specific meaning in Ancient Rome), as I had decided to record the run from 2014 to 2018: the five-year sequence in which I seemed to have hit my calendrical stride most convincingly. To make the book more interesting, I also paired the calendar image for each month (on the right) with a photograph taken by me during that particular month of that calendar year (on the left).

Why? Well, a calendar picture is a very public kind of divination (a hostage to fortune-telling, you might say): in November you pick what seems like it might be a suitable image for, say, June in the following year, without any idea of what those few weeks in the future will be like, not least in the lives of those who will be living with that picture for the whole of that month. By pairing the two pictures I thought the book might suggest how each month in each of those five consecutive years had turned out for me, even if only as captured in a single photograph. I also thought it would be curious to see how often there might or might not be a connection of some sort to be made between the two images, the one as prophecy and the other as actuality.

This produced quite a big book of 134 pages, which in hard copy is inevitably also an expensive book. I had really only produced it for my own amusement, however, and didn't seriously expect anyone else to buy a copy (do I say that every time I make a book? I might as well...). So, now that another five years have passed, I have made yet another book for myself with an identical format and the unsurprising title A Second Lustrum of Calendars. But, in the spirit of my decision to use Issuu, I'm making it freely available as a PDF flip-book.

Here it is: you can either run it in miniature here within the the blog page, or – if you click the little circular device in the centre – you can go to a full screen view (recommended). From full screen press <ESC> to get back here on the blog.

Whether I'll still be sending out calendars every year until 2028 and then making a third five-year collection of them in 2029 when – with any luck – I'll be 75 and still "sound in body and mind" remains to be seen. It's remarkable how passing a milestone as predictable and inconsequential as a seventieth birthday can nonetheless compress, confuse, and complicate one's projections into the future. "Five years from now" – once the vast and storied distance between ages 8 and 13, or 13 and 18 – now seems both incredibly brief and alarmingly ephemeral as a span of time.

Kafka's very short short story The Next Village – which to a 17-year-old me seemed so hilariously surreal – now reveals itself as a glittering shard of cold-eyed, gritty realism:

Grandad always used to say: "Life is amazingly short. Looking back, even now, everything is all so closely crowded together that I can scarcely imagine, say, how a young person can make up their mind to visit the next village without the fear that – quite apart from any mishaps – even the length of a normally, happily unfolding life will be anywhere near enough time for such a trip."

OK, I exaggerate, but I recall writing in a post on that story in March 2009, not long after my 55th birthday, "is it not amusing ... that life, as lived, has an exponential quality which makes the banal, the eminently possible, as daunting as a trip to Mars?" Well, not so much amusing at 70, young 'un, as baffling. Why on earth would anyone want to go to Mars, anyway?

But if that vision of befuddled stasis seems a bit too comfily chair-bound, let me put before you another short, single sentence "story", one of Kafka's first published pieces, Wanting to Become an Indian, which embodies much the same idea, but filtered through Karl May in an exhilarating, ecstatic inversion:

If only you could be an Indian, ever-ready on a galloping horse, tilted against the wind, jolting again and again over the jolting ground, until you lost your spurs – there were no spurs – until you threw away the reins – there were no reins – and could barely see the land before you as smooth cropped heath, with the horse's neck and the horse's head already gone.

(my translation)

That's a vision of old age, too. Hoka hey!