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February 26, 2023 ・ photo

A circular patch of trees at the very top of the highest hill for miles around.

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January 1, 2023 ・ Blog

A view down the body of a violin towards the violinist’s fingers holding the neck.

The fingers of my daughter’s left hand shift between positions on her violin’s fingerboard, moving with miraculous precision, stopping strings against the fretless board, fast and slow, and rocking them for vibrato. Trained over countless hours of practice and guided by her innate ability, they seem to have an unconscious life of their own.

And I watch, not quite grasping the relationship between her actions and the sound she’s making, and awed by her mastery of something far beyond anything I’ve taught her or know. 14 years from baby to near-adult; eight years from first picking up a violin. I know my daughter profoundly well in almost every other way, but she becomes someone new to me when she plays. I hardly recognise her, and it’s wondrous.

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December 11, 2022 ・ photo

Stockholm looked beautiful under frost, brief sun, and long darkness.

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November 13, 2022 ・ photo

A beautiful day. Falling leaves, slanted sunshine. Yellow, red, auburn.

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November 6, 2022 ・ photo

A very long time ago, while I was at sixth form college, I took a GCSE in photography. I loved it. I learned how to develop film, taking out a roll from my camera in the pitch dark, all by feel, and winding the film onto a reel. I learned about aperture and shutter speeds, using an old Nikon SLR that my dad gave me. I learned how to expose photo paper and burn in and dodge areas to make them darker and lighter.

I took a few rolls of film on a First World War battlefields trip and created a highly original piece of coursework featuring a lot of graves. Then I went to a local cemetery and took some more pictures of graves and made a piece of coursework which included the lyrics of the Smiths song, Cemetery Gates. I doubt I was aware of its pointed message about making original art.

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