Dad Club

I mentioned in a previous post the idea that pretty much everybody has unrealised ambitions. Never getting scouted for a professional football career, perhaps, despite two outstanding seasons in a  local amateur team; failing to write a prize-winning novel (or, more likely, to finish any novel at all); never getting a cabinet post (or even winning a seat on the local Council) despite years of scheming and collegial sabotage; or even just to ride through Paris in a sports car, and so on. You cain't always git what you want... I suppose an important part of any ambition is that you have to know what it is, even if that knowledge is relatively content-free. You can want to be a doctor or the owner of a bookshop without much idea of what either job entails. Ambitions can be mutually exclusive, too: did Tony Blair want to be the singer in a band or to become Prime Minister? You certainly can't be both. Yet, anyway.

If I think back, what I really wanted to be when I was a kid was the David Attenborough of the Zoo Quest TV series or, failing that, the Gerald Durrell of his various creature-catching books, which were my main reading-matter at age ten, after I had been given The Bafut Beagles as a school prize. [1] I suppose I assumed there was a job called "naturalist", but had no idea of the job description or the credentials required beyond a beard, a way with words, and suitable knees for shorts. But by the time I was of an age to flaunt those credentials my ambitions had changed. Mainly, I think, what I wanted was to write the sort of book that would cause women to pester me with their attentions. So, sadly, having a beard (tick!), a way with words (tick!), and suitable knees for shorts (tick!) were now irrelevant, and having failed to publish any sort of book didn't help much, either.

One ambition I certainly didn't have as a young man was to be a father. I sort of assumed I would probably become a father at some point – although TBH I was mainly haunted by the worry that I might become one by mistake – but it had never really figured high on my "bucket list", as people say. And yet, as it turned out, becoming a father at the relatively late age of 37 has probably been the single most fulfilling experience of my entire life. I have loved being a father, with all its ups and downs, far more than any other identity I  have worn over my seventy-two years; which is just as well as – unlike, say, "student", "librarian", "photographer", or "blogger" – this one is permanent and non-negotiable.

It is easy for other identities to get swallowed up by the all-consuming role of "parent". I'm sure this is the main reason some suffer from an "empty nest" crisis when their children leave home, especially in the case of those for whom becoming a parent had been high on, if not at the top of their list of ambitions, and who had not really developed any competing identities before starting a family when still quite young. Middle-age can be enough of a crisis in itself, without suddenly realising that, without any children around, you have no idea who you really are, or what you might have been. Which is one very good reason for becoming a parent later in life, I suppose. It worked for us, anyway, and I like to think it worked out well for our children, too.

Given justifiable claims that we still live in a "patriarchy", you'd think being a father would be a pretty well-defined job. "Here you are, son: these are the rules of Dad Club. Pay particular attention to the sections on Dad Jokes and Dad Dancing..." But "being a father" is actually a very fuzzily defined condition, on a spectrum ranging from irresponsible absentee through unapproachable family CEO to the annoying sort of kidult dad who wants to be his children's best friend. So you pretty much have to make a role up for yourself, and find a way of dealing with the helplessness, guilt, and irrelevance you feel as you watch the woman you love go through trial by childbirth. 

I found myself happiest somewhere towards the "hands-on" end of the spectrum. There is a practical man inside me, a maker and fixer, and having children to entertain was all the encouragement he needed to come out. When the kids were small, I really enjoyed the endless improvised making of props and playthings with card, scissors, and tape, whether it was an elaborate crawl-through tunnel of joined-up cardboard boxes or a carefully painted and fitted Power Rangers mask made from robust watercolour paper. It was a bit like being a primary school teacher with a class of just two. Or perhaps more like home-schooling, where the only lesson is always Art & Craft. But I'm afraid putting up the occasional shelf, fixing a dripping tap, or redecorating the bathroom just don't hit the same spot, and Mr. Inner-Fixit does have a tendency to put his feet up and put those jobs off.

So being a father is an occupation with an open and evolving job description. The world has changed a great deal in the last 70 years, and it's impossible to know what part any one of us has played in bringing about those changes. I certainly make no grand claims to agency, but I can claim to have participated in a quiet revolution that has been reconfiguring the acceptable spectrum of paternal masculinity, and I take some pride in having nudged that dial, even a little.

[Waits for the jeers and loud scoffing noises of the mothers out there to die down]

If you want evidence that things have changed, just look on any high street, and count the men pushing prams and pushchairs. Not so long ago in Britain, for a man to be seen out with a shopping bag, never mind pushing a pram – or, bloody hell! Carrying a baby in a sling! – would have been like being caught trying on a dress. [2] Even when I was a child the division of labour around "man's work" and "woman's work" was still strictly gendered: not even an unemployed man would have been expected to take on any of the burden of housework or childcare. No wonder so many of my friends' mothers seemed always to simmer with barely repressed frustration and anger. I remember hearing from a girlfriend how her mother had exploded over the weekend, and thrown the family Christmas tree through a window. I don't recall now whether the window was open or shut at the time.

That said, in common with quite a few post-war working-class families, my parents seemed to have developed their own home-grown progressive theory of parenting: there was little smacking, much kindness, and bemused indulgence of my somewhat Martian personality. Times were changing. Mum was out at work part-time as soon as I started school, and full-time before I was eight. The money was welcome, of course, but I think Dad recognised that she needed the independence and a life outside "family" rather more. At home he was not some remote, unapproachable patriarch hidden behind a newspaper, never to be bothered with silly kid's stuff, but was always available, whether to help me in my efforts at drawing and painting, to patiently explicate the lyrics of the songs we would hear on the radio, or to play ball games in the back garden. Although it is also true that he had never cooked a meal in his entire married life until Mum had started to disappear into dementia, when he did finally figure out how to use a microwave oven.

1932: my paternal grandfather almost pushing a pushchair

In the 1970s some of us felt a rising wave of change – a metaphorical wave powered by the very real energetic output of angry young women – and began to push (or to be pushed to push) at the boundaries of our inherited ideas of masculinity. I am talking about housework and childcare here, not trying on dresses, although it's true that in 1972 I did once encounter a home-town friend on a remote Greek beach wearing his partner's long red Laura Ashley number in order to alleviate all-over sunburn, and to my surprise I learned not long ago that at least one college-era friend has since changed from Matthew to Matilda.

To arrive at Oxford University in the early 1970s – at that time an epicentre (or, perhaps more accurately, a distribution centre) of radical new ideas – meant that, for me, a traditionally-raised boy from a very ordinary family, the "learning curve" was dauntingly steep, and beset with pitfalls, tripwires, and the occasional landmine. I was constantly putting my foot in it, on it, and through it, when it came to the manners and shibboleths of my chosen new tribe. But I'm a quick learner, and it's no exaggeration to say that I entered university as one person and left as another. This was not without cost: I fell out of phase with old friends, and for many years felt at odds with a world where so many old certainties had turned out to be lazy choices, and not the eternal truths I had been led to believe.

So becoming a "hands on" dad may have come more easily to me than to many. Changing nappies, getting kids ready for school, or waking in the small hours to calm the big anxieties of small children simply became part of my daily routine. More than that, though, these small but significant things, taken together, felt like a rite of passage into a fully adult life. Although, as I never really enjoyed the bedtime preparation rituals, for example, I agreed to do all the cooking instead; no small undertaking, as anyone who has tried to keep up with their children's ever-changing food fads will attest. This was a deal which suited us both – my partner has never enjoyed cooking as much as I do – and still stands to this day, despite the fact that our "children" are now in their 30s and living busy lives in London (I really ought to check the wording of that contract). Somewhat annoyingly, though, for their one-time bespoke short-order cook, they are now truly adventurous diners who will eat, or at least try anything, up to and including durian-flavoured ice cream.

Sometimes a pram just can't get you where you want to go

Inevitably, though, there are problems when fundamental changes happen in a society which has not planned for them. Double income households with children have become the norm, pretty much as a financial necessity, and are no longer confined to the poorest families who need the cash or the professional classes juggling two careers. But small children still need to be looked after, and long and frequent school holidays – not to mention parental absences due to work commitments – need to be accommodated. Contracting this work out to childcare professionals is not cheap, whether in the home or a commercially-run nursery – it can eat up an entire second salary – and comes at an emotional cost, too. Which is why so many boomer-generation grandparents have found themselves back on a childcare duty roster, rather than out in the world enjoying a carefree retirement. So much for having "eaten all the pies".

As it happened – and I appreciate how infuriatingly privileged this will seem to many – my job entitled our children to attend a subsidised and well-staffed university day nursery from a very early age: six months! Obviously, this was an enormous benefit. My partner could pursue her nascent academic career and I could spend every lunchtime with our kids until they started school, sharing a meal and then, as they grew, taking them for exploratory walks around the campus. I loved taking them through the landscaped grounds, usually ending up in the Valley Garden, back then an Edenic, post-human spot, with ruined greenhouses, overgrown taxonomically-arranged plant beds, and gigantic, fairy-tale Gunnera manicata plants along a stream that would flood after heavy rain, turning the valley bottom into a marsh. We would gather fat windfall apples from the abandoned orchard and check on the progress of the frogspawn in what had once been an ornamental pond. This, now I come to think of it, laid the groundwork for what were to become my lunchtime photographic expeditions, daily walks which continued right up until retirement, fifteen years later. See my book, The Garden.

Unless you are wealthy enough and ideologically inclined to abandon your children into the "care" of private boarding schools – unimaginable to me, I have to say – there does come a point when the relative priorities and practicalities of both parents' working lives and ambitions have to be assessed. So I persuaded my bosses that it would be the progressive thing to do to allow me – a key member of the technical and middle-management library staff, even if I say so myself – to go part-time at work. This was a very unusual request at the time, not least for a male member of staff, and they did take a lot of convincing. But, as I have often said, whereas my partner's star was clearly on the rise, mine had chosen to stay in bed, so it was not a difficult choice to make. Whatever ambitions I might once have had, career-wise, were spent. Besides, as the children grew older and more independent the more time I would have to pursue my own real interests and unsalaried ambitions at home.

In those days, the 1990s, I would collect them from school in the afternoon, and I was often the only man waiting in the school playground; being rather older than most of the mothers, some barely more than children themselves, I was presumed to be their grandfather. Sometimes I was also an awkward – and not entirely welcome – male presence at occasions like birthday parties. But I was not there to make any point, other than the fact that, unlike some families, our kids had two fully-functioning parents rather than the conventional one and a bit. I suspect – indeed I hope – this may have caused some righteous questioning in some of those other households. "OK, Darren, how about I wash the car this afternoon, and you take Jimmy to that little shit Luke's party? Hmm? I'm sure it'll be fun! Isn't that what you said?"

But kids quickly grow up and start building their own adult lives. It's the "journey" we're all on, after all, and for them, as it was for us in our own day, leaving home is something that can't happen too soon. [3] So the hands-on stage of being a parent doesn't really last very long. Tweenies and teens are far too busy inventing themselves and figuring out how, where, and with whom they might fit in out there in the wider world to require much attention from you. But I am so grateful that ours grew up before social media had parasitised young lives so completely.

Plus, let's be honest, to have finally become little more than a 24/7 cash machine, taxi service, and short-order cook does get old very quickly. But this awkward last phase is just nature's way of putting a cordon sanitaire between you and any unhealthy nostalgia for those adorable but long-gone little toddlers. You might shed a sentimental tear when you find those old photographs in a drawer, but then you recall the night your daughter called you [unpleasant names] for chucking some boy out of her bedroom at midnight, or came home incapably drunk at 3 a.m., or... Well, any parent will know the sort of thing I mean. These teen-parent traumas do make letting go rather easier.

But, if you're as fortunate as we have been, such memories are anaesthetised, if not entirely erased, by the knowledge of the delightful and responsible adults your children have since turned out to be. You might even allow yourself to reflect that things have turned out pretty well, family-wise, even though you say so yourself. It seems that, after all, the best ambitions are the ones you didn't even know you had, until you finally realise in retrospect that you had been working towards and have finally achieved something perfectly ordinary and yet totally remarkable. Wow, did we do that? Well done, us!

So wear that Dad Club tattoo with pride, but do go easy on the Dad Jokes, and please avoid any further dancing in public at all costs.

1. At that age I was immune to Durrell's condescending humour, verging on racism. I read his best known book, the autobiographical My Family and Other Animals many, many times, cover to cover, at bedtime for years. As a keen collector of moths, fossils and any natural historical debris that came to hand I was Gerald Durrell, in my dreams, at least. When they were of a suitable age, I gave copies to my children, fondly anticipating having to retrieve the book at night from across their sleeping faces, as my parents had. But: they found it unreadable, and I can understand why. The archness of Durrell's writing belongs to another era; what was once a model of imaginative writing handed out as school prizes has become irretrievably class-bound, its voice toe-curlingly patrician and smug. Just like the real Gerald Durrell, in fact.

2.  See this recent SMBC cartoon: Invisible...

3. Although I read that the average age to leave home is now 24 and even older in the case of young men. Something to do with all those pies we boomers are supposed have eaten...

A Wide Game

I realise that to some this is heresy, but I like to crop my photographs. Not, in the way of most wildlife photographers, in order to isolate some tiny area of interest in a vast sea of indifference (although I have given that a go, too, as in last year's post Go Large), but to try out "aspect ratios" other than the standard 3:4 or 2:3 delivered by most cameras. You've probably noticed that I have a particular liking for the square, but I am also attracted to "panoramic" formats, most recently a more extreme, almost cinematic 6:17 crop across the whole width of the image. It doesn't always work, but when it does I like the result.

Obviously, this seems to work best with strongly horizontal compositions, and I'm drawn to those with a strong central element, or at least something eye-catching going on in the middle. This may be because I envisage using them in a "layflat" book, where a degree of symmetry about the central fold works nicely, or it may simply be that the standard advice to place key elements of interest artfully off-centre actually unbalances an image made within this format. As always, like the Pirate's Code in Pirates of the Caribbean, any bits of compositional advice are more by way of guidelines, than actual rules...

With limited height to play with relative to the width, one danger is that the detail can seem a bit too densely packed in. In particular I was conscious of the slightly claustrophobic lack of sky in those first four, so I sought out some more "airy" images to work with:

N.B. that storm over South Wales, seen from Clevedon on the other side of the Bristol Channel, is no exaggeration. Newport and points east were taking an apocalyptic pounding back in August last year, while we stood marvelling and completely dry at the end of Clevedon pier.

I did also try converting some into monochrome, but with less satisfactory results. Some work well enough, and have their own strengths, but for me the colour version is always stronger. I suspect I'm just not sophisticated enough for black and white...

 

Of course, there's no reason not to crop in order to isolate some small area of interest, especially given the remarkable ability of today's software to enlarge ("up-rez") an image without discernible loss of quality. Walking through the Sports Ground this week, for example, my eye was caught by the way the afternoon light was falling on the renovations taking place on the ski slope on the opposite side of the valley. So I took this photograph:

Meh... Too confusing, and the main attraction is relegated to support-act status. But with a tighter crop and a modest 1.5 times enlargement using Topaz's Gigapixel it becomes this 6:17 "panorama", entirely compatible in size, resolution, and aspect ratio with the images above, and (to my eye) a much more compelling picture:

Back in the days of film I did have a bit of a fling with "proper" panoramic imaging. I actually owned one of those Russian swing-lens Horizont cameras that record a 120° view onto 35mm film. I think I was probably inspired by Josef Koudelka's work with a similar camera. Basically, the lens actually rotates using a geared mechanism, rather like a scanner, producing a very characteristic distortion, especially if you haven't levelled the thing properly. It's a very different "look" to a simple narrow and wide crop, and not one I enjoy much these days: that exaggerated panoramic sweep quickly becomes its own cliché, and tends to dictate the sort of subject matter that is suitable.

In the early days of digital I did also have a brief enthusiasm for some panoramic stitching software (Panorama Factory, I think it was) but, as you can imagine, getting a suitable row of images to "stitch" together successfully is very dependent on the use of a tripod, plus ideally a special head that rotates the camera around the lens's "nodal point" [1] and, well, that's just not the way I like to work. Besides, as I say, "real" panoramas get quite boring after you've seen a few, even in the hands of a master like Koudelka. I much prefer the natural, undistorted perspective of these "letterbox" views.

1. Apparently, what you really need is "the point of no parallax", which is subtly different from the actual optical nodal point of a lens, but frankly I don't care what you call it, or which it is, I'm still not going to lug a tripod around, either way... 

What Is The Point?

Given the many causes for anxiety out there in the world, I mainly try to keep things light on this blog: a bit of photo-phluff, some personal stuff, nothing too rough or off the cuff [Oh, do stop it. Ed.]. TBH I'm mainly equipped and inclined to entertain, not to inform or educate: I'm not the BBC.

But... Six months ago I did post some thoughts on AI (Nisi Dominus Frustra...). Now, although we are still at the stage where "AI" is essentially just a catch-all term for various ways of mining vast stores of data and sticking the results together in a convincing way, it's clear there are issues here that are not going to go away, and that will become more urgent as the technology either improves or, more likely, its bubble bursts; either could be catastrophic. The main, admittedly pedestrian conclusion I came to was this:

When, I wonder, will it dawn on them [employers and investors] that the pursuit of efficiency, productivity and profits by automation and the elimination of expensive, fallible "human resources" is not the point? That people are the point, and not the problem? Not any day soon, it seems. 

As the TUC’s assistant general secretary, Kate Bell, said recently:

"AI could have transformative potential, and if developed properly, workers can benefit from the productivity gains this technology may bring." She added: "The alternative is bleak. Left unmanaged and in the wrong hands, the AI revolution could entrench rampant inequality as jobs are degraded or displaced, and shareholders get richer." (Guardian, 27 August 2025) 

Cleverness unconstrained by wisdom may yet be the downfall of our species. AI might usefully be regarded as humanity's attempt to outsource our own most distinctive feature, perhaps best represented by that traditional cartoon of a man sawing off the very branch he is sitting on. Over my working life I have witnessed several waves of happily-employed, ordinary, decent people being made redundant and their lives rendered purposeless by technology; some of it, I'm ashamed to say, implemented by me. It sometimes seems that clever technologists will not rest until the last opportunity to enjoy a meaningful life through work has been eliminated.

Obviously, a "wot I fink" piece on a blog that, without exaggeration, is nothing more than a tiny slip of paper hidden under a small rock in an enormous quarry full of similar rocks is not going to be changing any tech-titan's mind, but we do what we can, don't we? Besides, I expect the collapse of the global economy will make the case more effectively than I can. However, I thought it might be worth adding a few words about my point that "people are the point".

I've been watching episodes of Digging For Britain, a BBC TV series of round-ups of the latest archaeological discoveries, presented by my second favourite professor, Alice Roberts. Fun as they are to watch, the episodes are quite formulaic. At some point, Prof Roberts will kneel, Hamlet-style, in the dirt beside an excavation and – gazing at some skeletal remains or some time-worn and rusty bling, buried by or dropped from the leaky pockets of our forebears – she will deliver some well-informed words about prominent supraorbital ridges and worn joints. But, unlike Hamlet, she can have no idea whose remains or lost property she is contemplating.

Similarly, in that graveyard scene we hear Hamlet reflect, "To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why, may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till he find it stopping a bunghole?". In imagination, yes; but archaeology instead finds a bunghole, and is unable to hazard any guess as to whose dust might be filling it. It's a roundabout, one-way trip from corpse to clay – apparently a cloud of red Saharan dust is due to pass over us in Britain this very week – and imagination is all we have to link Humpty Dumpty with the mess of eggshell unearthed among the rubble of what seems to have once been a wall. [1]

But surely few things are as poignant as the ruined skeleton of some unknown individual, interred with varying degrees of ceremony centuries or millennia ago and now exposed to view on a popular TV programme – bad teeth, characteristic syphilitic bone damage, and all – simply in order to be cleaned  up, measured, analysed, and stored in a box in an overfull warehouse somewhere. To this favour we must come...

So, as we get older, those of us prone to fits of reflection may find ourselves wondering, what is the point of all this?

Me, too! Apparently it was made by CPO, Worthing, UK (poster bottom left),

who seems to take August off

Generation upon generation of suffering humanity – and the skeletal evidence demonstrates abundantly that this is more than just a trite expression – have been comforted by stories about an afterlife to be enjoyed in assorted Happy Hunting Grounds or, for the wrong 'uns, frightened into better behaviour by the prospect of Hot Hells of Eternal Torment. The point was to ensure you got the right stamp in your eternal passport, as determined and supervised by the Belief Police. It's hard for us 21st century sophisticates to grasp, but those beliefs were real enough for, say, 16th century sophisticates to literally go to the stake over them. You? No, me neither.

Countless thousands upon thousands of bodies have been laid to rot in peace in that most secure of storage facilities, the solid ground of Britain itself. Every episode of Digging For Britain shows that, once you scrape the surface to start work on something like a new housing estate pretty much anywhere on our islands, ancient burial grounds will be revealed. Call for the archaeologists! But for all their efforts, we have little to no understanding of what beliefs were held within those empty skulls, not least those found in so-called "deviant burials" – heads ritually decapitated, and placed in the grave at the owner's feet – but we can be sure that what we're seeing is the work of the Belief Police, keeping society in check by enforcing certain useful shared fantasies about an afterlife, however bizarre.

But, to return to Hamlet, his most famous soliloquy becomes rather meaningless, once that "dread of something after death" has faded away. [2] Quite apart from a precipitous decline in religious belief, we are the first generations to know – as a matter of plausible scientific fact, not baseless belief – that our planet itself will be rendered uninhabitable in about a billion years by the sun's expansion, if not sooner, and that beyond that lies the prospect of the "heat death" of the entire universe. I mean, really, sub specie aeternitatis, and minus any belief in an afterlife, what is the fucking point? So go ahead, Hamlet, mate, pick up that knife and make your own "quietus". Why not? Even though you've never carried a fardel, whatever that is, in your entire privileged (albeit fictional) life. BTW, seen Ophelia lately?

Which is all pretty depressing. But enter humanism – hooray! – stage left, to rescue the idea of there being a point to it all, after all: people.

Alice Roberts happens to be one – a humanist, that is, as well as a striking example of a people – and is in fact a past President of Humanists UK, who define a humanist as someone who

Trusts to the scientific method when it comes to understanding how the universe works and rejects the idea of the supernatural (and is therefore an atheist or agnostic)

Makes their ethical decisions based on reason, empathy, and a concern for human beings and other sentient animals

Believes that, in the absence of an afterlife and any discernible purpose to the universe, human beings can act to give their own lives meaning by seeking happiness in this life and helping others to do the same.

Which is, admittedly – compared to the Nicene Creed, say – a bit on the woolly side. I mean, how are your Belief Police ever going to interrogate, torture, and execute people with that comfy chair of a catechism? Nonetheless, I suspect that considerably more of us in Britain are passive signatories to a humanist manifesto than to the stated beliefs of the Anglican Church. I mean, when you look an obviously brilliant man like former archbishop Rowan Williams, you have to think: Seriously? This is the imaginary ladder you chose to climb, all the way to the top? Idiotic hat and all?

So, look, I know you don't really expect me to divulge the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, at least free of charge (although I can reveal it's not "42"). But I will simply repeat my previous conclusion, putting it like this: the pursuit of maximum profit in the most "efficient" (i.e. people-less) way is a theology, and essentially anti-humanist in its disregard for "human wellbeing". AI is just the latest attempt to extract more profit for a few at the expense of the many under the false manifesto of "doing away with tedious, repetitive tasks", supposedly freeing us all up to be, I dunno, poets or something. And yet at the same time AI dangles distracting and supposedly time- and effort-saving baubles in front of us, saving us the tedious, repetitive chore of actually creating anything; "Hey, AI, write me a poem in iambic pentameter rhyming couplets about Rowan Williams' dark night of the soul after he met Alice Roberts". This is consumption disguised as creativity. Getting bored with that yet?

But the sort of work that 21st century sophisticates might regard as tedious and repetitive, dangerous even, is not necessarily seen that way by the people who actually do it, provided it is reasonably well-paid, comes with a pension, plus some flexibility in hours and time off. Not everybody wants to sit at home all day or in an office looking into a computer screen. As I wrote in a post, Trouble, all the way back in June 2009:

It's easy to dismiss the likes of the BNP across Europe as merely the ignorant politics of an underclass of unemployables – alienated, tattooed, violent, foul-mouthed and hedonistic – who resent the arrival of successive waves of the eminently employable; most recently, le plombier polonais. But the rise of this new underclass is really the bewildered, self-harming response of a vital stratum of our society to its perceived abandonment, and it's a shocking development to anyone who grew up in the working class of the 1950s and 60s. It didn't used to be like this.

"This" needs to be taken seriously. Very seriously. Above all, there has to be meaningful, decently-paid work (skilled and unskilled manual work, for the most part) for the legions of young, strong, not particularly bright people born in this country, or there will be trouble. Lots of trouble.

Or, as perhaps more succinctly put by Raoul Vaneigem:

Down with a world in which the guarantee that we will not die of starvation has been purchased with the guarantee that we will die of boredom.

The Revolution of Everyday Life

1. I notice many diggers on the programme wear ironic t-shirts, some bearing this definition: "Archaeologist: someone who does precision guesswork based on unreliable data provided by those of questionable knowledge".

2. I've mentioned this before, but as an ultimate example of meaninglessness, consider the fact that the words "To be or not to be: that is the question, whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune ..." can – improbably, unbelievably, outrageously – be arranged into an anagram: "In one of the Bard's best-thought-of tragedies, our insistent hero Hamlet queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten ..." (The author of this anagram has apparently been identified as Cory Scott Calhoun). Actually, it does have a meaning of sorts: get a life...

More Mysterious Barricades

As will be obvious to anyone who has been visiting this blog for a while, I am something of a connoisseur of barrier-tapes, fences, and improvised obstacles of all kinds. I can only speculate why this is the case. Do I feel shut out or shut in in some literal or metaphorical sense? Not especially. Do I have gnostic intimations of a hidden reality beyond this one? Kinda sorta, usually on wet Mondays. Have I been blocked by circumstance, background, and prejudice – not to mention personality, preferences, and life choices – from achieving significant goals in life? Well, no more than most (which is to say: yes, of course...). We can't all be [insert your own unrealised ambition]. Although I think my problem (or saving grace?) has been more that I never could settle on which of a number of unrealised ambitions I should have pursued relentlessly and ruthlessly, with no regard to the consequences to the health and happiness of friends, family, and the world in general. You're welcome!

Many years ago now, in 2009, I made a little book I called The Mysterious Barricades, featuring photographs of various ineffective, odd, or imagined barriers I had encountered in the landscape. As I wrote then:

This series of photographs takes its name from a short keyboard piece by François Couperin (1669-1733), Les Barricades Mistérieuses. A recording by Angela Hewitt has been described as "a beautiful, undulating meditation on cycles of fifths and chord changes in B flat". No one knows to what the title refers, but I am by no means the first to borrow it, and it will resonate with anyone who has, at some time in their life, felt the frustration of unseen barriers, or encountered inexplicable or apparently pointless obstacles.

Now, I should confess that I first came across and appropriated this title after reading a description of that Couperin piece in William Wharton's novel Last Lovers. [1] It seemed a perfect fit for that series of pictures, which became one of my first Blurb books, and also one of the last uses I would make of my photographs made on film. I scanned the negatives, mainly colour medium-format film, converted them to monochrome, and imposed a circular framing onto them, in imitation of / tribute to Emmet Gowin's early work where he used a lens that was, technically speaking, too small for the 4" x 5" format, and therefore projected a circular image onto the view camera's rectangular negative.

However, my ability to convert colour images to monochrome at that time was nowhere near as good as it is now, and I was never very happy with the book, anyway, so didn't give it much exposure. Its legacy lives on, however, and I seem still to find mysterious barricades everywhere. The ones in this post are all from January and February this year.

As I have now reminded myself of that book, however, I decided to put The Mysterious Barricades onto Issuu as a PDF flipbook, which you can see by clicking the image below (as usual choose a "full screen" view, to lose the adverts, etc.).

Just for good measure, I have also added another little book of a similar vintage, which contains a mix of film images processed in the same way as those in The Mysterious Barricades and some early digital images, and which – ostensibly, at least – treats another subject that has attracted me over the years, crows. N.B. at the very end of this book there is a joke which – although long experience reveals that not many seem to find it as amusing as I do – is, in its way, a Great Teaching.

1. William Wharton, by the way, was a very fine writer whose work seems to have vanished from view. His first novel Birdy was once famous because of the film made of it by Alan Parker, but if you're looking for something new to read I'd urge you to try Dad or A Midnight Clear. Both outstanding books in my reckoning, FWIW. In fact, I'm going to dig them out and re-read them myself.

Didn't It Rain, Children...

 Despite the fact that it hasn't stopped raining for weeks – some parts of the West Country have had rain every day so far this year – we spent last weekend in our Bristol flat, really just for a change of scene. The drive on the M4 motorway was positively apocalyptic, however, both going up and coming back. At times, the intensity of the rain was astonishing: pounding on the roof of the car it sounded like gravel was being emptied over us, and even when it had slackened off the constant spray from the wheels of all the other vehicles was severely impairing visibility, with the wipers struggling to clear a view through the windscreen.

So the drive required complete concentration – there are some very bad and inconsiderate drivers out there, who have clearly never come across or understood terms like "stopping distance" or "aquaplaning" – but very occasionally I'd sneak a look sideways, and the contrast between the roiling tunnel of spray along the motorway and the placid countryside, with its intensely, um, saturated colours under a heavy downpour on either side was remarkable. Rain in a muddy field and rain on a busy motorway are radically different experiences, separated by a few yards and a fence. It would probably make a great drone shot, if drones can even fly in such weather.

Frequent spells of heavy rain do mean great clouds, though, much appreciated when I was out walking on the Downs or along the Avon Gorge. For a guy once notorious for the absence of skies in his photos, I've become something of a cloud fanatic. Unless there's something interesting going on up there, I'm less inclined to take the photo. Give me empyrean drama, please, not boringly bland blue or grey skies.

It's clear there is some sort of geothermal action going on in parts of the Gorge; I suppose the name Hotwells is a clue. It doesn't have to have been raining for large plumes of water vapour to rise up from certain spots in Leigh Woods on the far side of the Avon, opposite our fourth-floor kitchen window. When I first saw these I assumed they were the fires of people camped out in the woods, as they always seemed to come from the same places. Confusingly, smoke does also rise up from time to time, presumably from foresters' bonfires, but "steam is white, smoke is grey", I seem to recall someone, probably my father, saying at some point in my childhood. I remain puzzled, however, how even tiny individual clouds, barely more than wisps of water vapour, can be dark grey in an otherwise cloudless sky; I will have to look it up one of these days. Summink t'do wiv refraction, I expect. Maybe my old friend Science Man will intervene.

Of course, frequent outbreaks of heavy rain also mean that the few people out on the Downs – togged-up plodders with dogs, joggers, and the odd dogged blogging photog (heh, sorry, couldn't resist that) – have the entire space more or less to themselves. Even the designated viewpoints, normally busy with visiting sightseers, were deserted: you can just about make out the Clifton Suspension Bridge at the far end of the Gorge in the photo below.

But that's quite enough rain for now, thank you very much. Let's hope that those slick roads and puddled pavements don't freeze over, and some sunshine gets a chance to work its alchemy first, transmuting leaden skies into bright, beautiful cloudscapes.

Ephemeral

I was in the mood for a bit of experimentation, so I decided to combine into a single text the "two-part rant" Original Print that I referred to in a recent post, edit it a bit, and create a cheap Blurb booklet from the result. You can see it here on my Blurb bookstore, or (probably better) as an Issuu flipbook (go for "full screen" to lose the adverts, etc.):

This struck me as a neat way to highlight and preserve some of my better posts, particularly the ones that are text-heavy and argumentative; a sort of pamphleteering. With over 2,000 posts to choose from, there's plenty of scope for more of the same. It must surely be a troubling thought at the back of the mind of any blogger (or, these days, substacker) who has put serious time and energy into their efforts that they are only as permanent as the platform they're made on. As I've mentioned before, I do send a copy of everything I have self-published to my old college library, and – so far – they haven't refused to take any of them, but these 2000+ posts will sooner or later vanish, leaving not a rack behind.

Sadly, though, Blurb's high shipping charges [1] mean that even a very cheap publication becomes prohibitively expensive to buy – in the UK, at least – so I'll continue to offer free-to-view flipbook versions on Issuu of all my Blurb efforts. You lucky people! In some ways these are better than a paper copy, it's true, although how long either Blurb or the Issuu platform will continue to be available (or affordable) is anybody's guess. We live in an increasingly ephemeral world.

BTW, I added this little illustrative two-page Appendix to the Original Print text, which you may find interesting:

If nothing else, it suggests how much thought and work can go into creating a digital image from a simple starting point. Although in its final version this one is relatively simple – just five layers altering or adding to the original scraperboard image – more recent projects may have thirty or more interacting layers.

That is, assuming an image is not AI-generated, of course. I probably should have added a paragraph or two about AI image-generation to that Original Print text, but I've never used AI, don't intend to, and consequently have nothing of value to say about it, other than the well-justified fear that people who do use it will royally fuck things up for us honest hard-working digital picture-makers, simply by reinforcing the prejudice that already exists. Troublingly, I notice that in recent times ChatGPT is listed among the regular visitors to this blog. I also simply don't believe that I have had 14,800 genuine page-views in the last seven days. These surely must mainly have been robotic scrapers, spammers, and whatever other allied AI-adjacent trades there are crawling all over my "content". Similarly, it seems Chinese robots (at least, I presume that's what they are, not actual, you know ... Chinese people) can't get enough of my webpage, which I have rather neglected and has remained unchanged for quite some time: 74 visits from China in the past 30 days, for example, compared to 7 from the UK or 6 from the USA. Nothing new to see here, comrade robots, please move along.

So, when it comes to the urge to make something more permanent out of these blog posts, readers of long-standing may recall that back in 2020 I had begun to produce a series of "best of" publications (see the post Idiotic Hat Selections 1 & 2). However, I soon gave up on that vainglorious project, partly due to a complete lack of interest [sad face emoji], but also because I had found that it was possible to save an entire year's worth of posts, images and all, as a PDF file via various "blog to book" services; something, moreover, that I recently discovered I can easily do for myself and entirely cost free. [2]

Consequently, I began to save compilations of these PDF files onto DVD as The Idiotic Hat Annuals. See, for example, the 2018 post Ten Idiotic Years, marking this blog's 10th anniversary, with files made using a slightly unsatisfactory (but cheap!) "blog to book" service, which is now, inevitably, defunct. These DVDs will serve as a handy archive to set against the inevitable day that either Google withdraws the free Blogger service or I decide to stop blogging, whichever is the sooner. Although, in this ephemeral world, how long either DVDs or PDFs will remain readable is yet another digital "known unknown".

There's still really no long-term substitute for ink on paper, is there? How lucky we are that Shakespeare's chums decided to commit his plays to print, saving fully half – half! – of those 36 plays from oblivion: no First Folio would have meant no Macbeth, no Measure for Measure, no Tempest... By comparison, of course, a mere blog seems a little, what? Insubstantial? But then, as Dogberry says in Much Ado, comparisons are odorous, so, let's save whatever we can from the inevitable Great Digital Forgetting to come. Crank up the pamphleteering! [3]

DVD case insert (my design skills have improved since 2018...)

1. Before adding any "profit", a single copy of this 24 page, 13 x 20 cm paperback on "economy" paper costs £2.99. Excellent! But the shipping charge for a single copy is £9.99 (unless I need it urgently, in which case "priority" shipping is £23.99...). For two copies, the shipping charge is £12.23, and for five copies £18.95 (£41.92 priority), and so on. There are discounts for larger quantities – for example, to order 100 would bring the per copy price + shipping down to £3.21 – but that rather defeats the whole point of "on demand" publication: you would be back in the self-publisher's nightmare of having boxes of unsellable items under the bed, that you would have to market and "fulfil" yourself... Been there, done that: no thanks! "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity... What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?" (Ecclesiastes 1). That Preacher bloke knew what he was talking about...

2. Any bloggers out there who want to know how to do this? Just send me an email and I'll explain. It's very simple, and requires no technical knowledge at all, although it probably does require the use of the Chrome browser.

3. And FFS do something about those precious photos on your phone! How ironic, if our selfie-crazed generations leave fewer images behind for posterity than their great-grandparents did...

Access All Areas

December 2013

I mentioned in a previous post that, following an external drive failure, I lost most of the image files I had made with a camera I had bought – second-hand, as usual, a Panasonic G3 – some time in the latter half of 2012, and which I was still using as my main camera during my Innsbruck residency in summer 2014. It was an excellent camera – still is – but shortly thereafter I made the move to Fuji, persuaded that the larger sensor would give even better results.

How much did I lose? Well, I save my files in monthly sub-directories ("folders", if you must), so there will have been something like twenty or more G3 folders on that disk, of which just four have survived, dating from October 2013 to January 2014. It was entirely my fault: instead of sending the failed drive straight to a professional recovery service, I attempted to do it myself. Duh. Luckily, some of the better photos have survived because I had saved them elsewhere; not least on the CD of exhibition-quality images I sent to Innsbruck in 2014 as a backup, just in case my box of eighty or so prints failed to arrive intact, on time, or at all. But many of the pictures you would have seen (still can see!) posted on this blog during those months from 2012 to 2014 have gone. [Sad face emoji...]

So I thought I'd take a nostalgic trawl through these surviving images, just to see what is still in there, and also what the subsequent decade-plus of experience in processing "raw" files might enable me to make of them now. At that time I was in my last year of working at the Southampton University library, and still taking more or less daily photo-excursions around the campus during my lunch hour. As so many have remarked, access is a photographer's most useful tool, and my staff ID card coupled with familiarity and curiosity were pretty much an "access all areas" pass and, if necessary, skeleton key. I doubt there were many people other than, say, the security and janitorial staff who knew the more interesting nooks and crannies of the Highfield Campus as well as I did in those days.

I'm sure I must have become a familiar curiosity on campus over the years, that bearded loony with the camera, although perhaps not on the scale of the sometime professor of mathematics who used to wander the place shouting incomprehensible greetings and occasionally losing his half-mast trousers, precariously belted with string. As a result, I rarely seemed to attract any unwanted attention when I was out and about, conducting my lunchtime photographic explorations in odd corners.

Graduation ceremony marquees, October 2013

I remember one day in April 2014, however, that was different. I was hunkered down inside my favourite telephone box one lunchtime, squinting through the viewfinder at the array of fresh tape-marks, stickers, and abrasions, all nicely backlit in the spring sunshine, when the door was pulled open. By malign coincidence, it seemed the one and only person on campus not in possession of a mobile phone wanted to use the pay-phone. "Sorry," I said, standing up, "I'll come out." "No, it's OK," he said, "I just wondered what you were doing?"

Now, I suppose it's possible that, from the outside, it may have looked a bit odd, suspicious even, to see a man squatting down inside a phone box. Phone boxes do sometimes get used for purposes other than telephonic communication, although rarely in broad daylight in the centre of a university campus. Nonetheless, it takes a certain kind of guileless curiosity actually to open a kiosk door simply in order to find out what someone who is clearly not on the phone might be doing in there. I must admit I was tempted to play the situation for laughs, but instead I waggled my camera, and said, cheerily, "Taking photographs!"  "But why? What on earth of?" he replied.

This is always a tricky one to negotiate. I could see he was genuinely baffled, and perhaps even concerned for my sanity. It's easy to forget quite how far beyond most people's conception of "normal" any photography is that does not involve close relatives, holidays, or safely-accredited subjects like sunsets, cute kittens, porn, etc. The beauty of a digital camera, however, is that you can show, not tell. "Here," I said, "Have a look", and put the camera into "chimping" mode. I showed him an image or two not unlike the ones below, taken a few months earlier.

I could see he wasn't convinced. Which was quite disappointing, and even a little insulting, so – with my best "Good day to you, sir!" expression – I firmly shut the door and carried on. There's none so blind as them as will not see, as the old folk used to say.

So, to double down on the nostalgia, this week I walked over to the campus for the first time in quite a while. I might look a bit scruffy and timeworn these days, but at least my trousers are secure. I used to go over there quite regularly as part of one of my walking circuits, but as the years passed I saw fewer and fewer familiar faces, and I began to feel like a ghost passing unseen through the lives of hundreds of young students, an ever increasing percentage of whom were now clearly Chinese.

This week I saw no one and nothing much that I recognised. "My" campus has pretty much gone: demolition and rebuilding have been non-stop during the past dozen years. The telephone boxes have gone, of course, but the whole look and feel of the place has changed, the way a house you used to live in will have changed after several subsequent inhabitants have altered and added and updated the place to their satisfaction. I remember hearing that the architects had been given a "nautical" brief (it's Southampton, geddit?) and much of the campus does now look as if various massive cruise ships have run aground. Of course, massive cruise ships actually look more like office blocks than ships, so that's perhaps not so surprising.

Oh, and my ID card no longer lets me through the library turnstiles. Do I care? I'm not sure that I do. To get in, I'd have to explain that, some twelve years ago, I was once a person of some substance hereabouts. "Cringe", is the word, I think. And besides:

Terrific... First you lose the TV remote...

Still, if you know where to look, there are still a few spots where the shop-worn pleasures of wabi sabi can be found; ageing 60s architecture, mainly – although the Faraday Building, once thought worthy of celebration on a stamp, is long gone – plus some tatty portakabins, that once served as stopgap offices, labs, and workspaces. No doubt they'll be gone soon, too. It may be some time before I come back again to find out.