They said it could never happen. The Lake District run dry. Without rain for more than 3 weeks, becks and streams have almost lost their source. Some houses and pubs, fed only by natural streams, are running out of water. Baths are out of the question.
I have had ‘Nick’ working with me. His photography, about landscape and wildlife is special. He wants to lean about ‘people photography’ (that’s why he is with me). Is the purpose of people photography to dress them up , or strip them naked – get to ‘who they really are’?
The investigative current affairs programme screened on BBC 1 painted a quick portrait of a World Cup tournament (the one I went to for 5 weeks) as being one big drunken fight club and confirmed the English to be the yobs of the World unable to respect any hosts. It was not like that. Watch out for my book, in November.
The story of Saint Maria…
On the web there has been this ‘nude story’ without explanation under the guise ‘Environmental Nudes’. Here is that story behind the pictures. A sort of fairy-story really, with some audience imagination much needed…
Maria grew up in the south of Portugal. In part of the Algarve. A beautiful unspoilt area. She lived with her family and her animals on a house on the edge of a small town. She weaved in and out of greenery, shrubs, trees, being so small. She could see the sea and she could feel the heavens all around. A beautiful place to grow up. She lived there with her parents and her grandparents, and various animals – but particularly a parrot, which landed on her shoulder and talked to her even when she could not see it. And she had no reason to be unhappy there. She was most unhappy.
But, as things happen, she began to sense a world out there. A calling. Rather than to the big city, as might have been her calling, it was to ‘God’. The God she read about and admired. So strong became the calling and the urge to see God, she decided when she was big enough, to join the monastery as she called it. The nunnery or the convent came the correction. It was clear it was right for her. So off she went. To a special place way up north past all of Portugal and into North-west Spain, near Santiago.
And life continued in a way as it had left off. She was happy and surrounded by a new family whom she admired. And there again was nature and greenery. And there again was the heavens all around her. And there was love.
Life went on in this way, in her new monastic garden for years and years and yet more years.
One day, whilst fulfilling her chores – clearing up after the public visitors, she picked up a newspaper… a headline caught her eye… it was about the raging fires that had consumed her part of the Algarve, back in Portugal. She read that this year was the worst yet – that the fires were happening every summer – indeed not now just in the summers but from March onwards. Her eyes widened in disbelief. How could she not know about this? What was causing them? She read that southern Portugal and Spain was getting warmer every year and that the Sahara was effectively crossing the sea and continuing into Europe. Including the Algarve. This troubled her. She read on ; fires were engulfing whole farms and planes and helicopters were being used to bucket in water from the sea to dampen down fire after fire. She thought of all that she had left behind in the Algarve and felt a great sadness. She read that people and animals were being driven from their homes and out of the Algarve. That wildlife and vegetation were disappearing. She read about ‘global warming’. She felt a responsibility about the place where she came from.
Although it had been many many years, and she calculated 25 summers and winters since she had left, she felt she must go back and help in whatever way. She simply had to be there. And so she asked the head sister if she could go away for several weeks to visit ‘home’. No came the reply. Again she asked and again it was No. The following day she asked again and the response was firmer still. NO. She did not know this but secretly the sister in charge had a similar situation in her own life 25 years before and she was not allowed to leave. In her case it involved her native Romania. But Maria did not know any of this. She just sat there in the garden of the convent puzzled and trying to work out why she was not allowed to leave, not even for a day or a week or a month.
One day soon she decided she would go anyway, and out of the convent she slipped. She walked and walked and walked. After many days she had walked down through Spain and into Portugal and after a few days more she noticed more of the country she had seen in her youth. She was getting nearer home. The trail was hot and dusty. Nearing home she saw the sea and the cliffs and down below the beach and the bay where she used to swim. Hot and dusty and a little grubby from her journey, she climbed down the steep bank to the beach and, leaving her habit on some rocks, went for a refreshing swim in the clear waters. During her swim she saw visions from her past and it was as if she had never really left that life behind. On returning to her clothes… they were gone. Presumably swept away by the tide. Having no clothes now, and few branches or leaves with which to dress herself, she wondered what to do. Figuring herself not far from home, she decided that she would simply walk home as she was. Without her clothes. And as she started walking it felt better and better, like when she was a child, in these parts.
Before not too long the road turned and led to the garden of where she had grown up. Here was spare by the ravages of fire. By the ravages of an unnatural warming. But for how long? At least she was home.
I have gone on my annual holiday, which includes blog-leave, with my family to the sea, where I grew up.
Our 80th consecutive summer’s holiday to the same English seaside town has come to an end. Although we have part two to come in September. Part One involved swimmers and non-swimmers in our family (some on life-rafts) catching the offshore “Jet Stream” water current around the Peninsula and whizzing along, waving to people on the shore. Water beautifully clean and warm. No sharks.
A sudden call-up to the Parliamentary football team, to play alongside MPs from Westminster against UK counterparts, in Cardiff, before the Charity Shield (Chelsea and Liverpool), has me score the only goal of the game in beating hosts Wales. Kenny Dalglish’s Scotland lift the trophy. My victory celebration?... a rousing version of “Sweet Caroline” (that well-known diamond of a football song) back in the Hilton Hotel in the early hours, a self-satisfying act of self-congratulation!
The war makes me unhappy.
I gave my credit card details and, to check I was in safe hands, insisted the operator give his Christian name. I am Hindu he said. I apologised, saying I didn’t mean anything by it. He agreed. I then asked him again for his first name. Multi-cultural world… no longer Little England, I keep being reminded. Thank goodness.
Our new website www.footballphotographyandtheworld.co.uk is up and running, check it out.
The issue with the web is making it appealing, but also accessible. There are pictures there which might want to be used and bought and pay me back for all my endeavour over a great many years. The ‘keywords’ mechanism therefore is causing us great excitement. It’s how a person will find a picture. I am at my desk looking at image after image trying to define what its chief features are.
Having done the keywords for a picture, I am then doing the caption that goes with the picture. Apparently it should take a thousand words to match the picture!
What have I learnt in a year? Perhaps we all ask ourselves the same question on New Year’s Eve. But a birthday is more about ‘you’. I learnt so much between birthdays 4 and 5 for instance. But, come 45, what is there left to learn? That’s it : I have learnt that I know absolutely everything… there is nothing left to learn or experience.
A quick analysis of the pictures on the website suggests that my obsessions-cum-recurring themes are (across ‘football’, ‘music’, ‘people versus place’ and ‘environmental nudes’) (and I will show off that I am worldly by trying to express them in French) :
La place spirituelle
Les jouers eux-memes
Le jou simple
Les supporteurs, La famille
L’etablisment, Les dissidents
Humilite d’humeur
L’amour et l’hate
Le sexe
Le monde sensual
La nature
Le surpris, l’inconnu, le mystere
La musique dedans et dehors
Les couleurs et la variete culturel
Le ‘sense of belonging’ (not sure how to translate that)
If I could put my favourite songs (of the moment) on my website so that you could hear them as you surfed, they would be :
Caravan by Van Morrison
Wake Up Everybody by Harold Melvin and the Bluenotes
Harvest For The World by The Isley Brothers
Feather Blue by Mary The Faerie
Blue Bayou by Linda Ronstadt
Summer Breeze by The Isley Brothers
Sweet Caroline by the Northern Ireland football crowd (impromptu version)
Burns’ Supper by Linda Ronstadt
Bees Wings by Richard Thompson
She Gives Me Religion by Van Morrison
Wake Me Up When September Comes by Green Day
Into The Mystic by Van Morrison
It’s looking good isn’t it?
A music festival in the heart of Belfast, Northern Ireland. Who would have thought it some years ago? Let the healing continue.
Travel on to (London)Derry to see if ‘my’ Gretna can overturn the 5–1 deficit from the first leg of this UEFA (European) Cup competition.
No, they couldn’t. Derry banner read “Gretna, you should stick to weddings”.
One of the things I wanted answering during the summer in going to Germany for the World Cup was, (as well as are we the best fans or the best team) how could Germany fall under Hitler’s spell ? On Channel 4 last night was a documentary about the Nuremberg Trials, centered around Hitler’s Number 2 Goerring. So persuasive was Goerring’s manner that, whilst in captivity, awaiting trial and then execution, he managed to charm the American guards into giving him things. Indeed the cyanide that escaped him from the gallows. Bizarrely the American soldiers kept asking for all the Nazi war criminals autographs. Goerring, for his further part, kept maintaining that Germans “would think of us as heroes in 50 years and appreciate what we were trying to do”.
No, they don’t.
The scene was set for the Grasmere Sports, the parent of all such sports gatherings. Fewer crowds than yesteryear (when grandstands were erected on the showground) – but more intimate. Particularly the Cumberland wrestling ring. A very attractive lady caught my eye, sat on the benches, watching every bout; withstanding the heavy rainshowers… she simply pulled her mack up over her head. Then, blow me, there she was suddenly, in a black t-shirt and shorts, ready to wrestle!
And Jack, my nephew , came third on the U17 Fell race – almost to the highest point on the horizon. He has two more years to perfect his technique.
Postscript : I read to you the Cumberland & Westmorland Wrestling Correspondent’s review in the Cumberland News, centered on the Grasmere Sports : “Eight Breton wrestlers, including a girl called Fred, have lit up the wrestling events over the busiest weekend of our season.
All of them are excellent wrestlers in our style which is quite different to Gouren, their own jacket style of wrestling, and two of them, Tudy Le Meur and Mathieu Le Dour produced moments of brilliance which verged on the impossible.
Le Dourin the final of the All Weights at Bellingham particularly seemed able to lift and twist from any position. That form continued at Grasmere, and Keswick where he also won to oohs and aahs from the crowd.
Le Meur is a hanker, which means that several wrestlers thought they were winning as Le Meur fell backwards under them, only for him to disappear and swing up on top as the coiled spring that he calls a leg came into play.
Once the hank is wrapped round the opponent’s leg it is nearly impossible to remove, and when he sees his chance the chip is immediately in play.
Not only did the Bretons have great success over the week-end, but they also made our wrestlers raise their game.”
Roger Robson goes on to describe the bouts, finishing with :
“... In a busy week-end my other unconnected memories are of Stuart Mason injured with a broken collar-bone (get well quickly); William Hayhurst keeping the two stars, Jack Brown and Ben Brocklebank at bay to win the Under 12s; Craig Ridley hanking opponents at Silloth and Keswick after observing how the Bretons did it; the marvllous fun at Bellingham with so many Novices giving their all; Fred (Frederique Nouvel) winning in style five times; two Grahams, Brocklebank and Benson, improving every time I see them; and that massive crowd circling the ring at Grasmere.”
The highlights of Reading-Leeds on the tv (I wasn’t there this time) revealed a truly exciting and happening gig (of the year?). But I can’t buy into this myth that Muse are monumental and headliners. They are pompous, boring, crap basically – and not the sort of thing this country should boast about (and if I ever had to photograph them I should for once be at a complete loss). The Artic Monkeys however with their Mardy Bum ‘n’ all…
After what will be a 3 year absence from the exhibitions circuit, I have decided to take my work on the road again, offering at least one exhibition to the publicly-run Museums and Art Galleries of the UK. And beyond. Touring again from the end of 2007.
Will the tour be the environmental nude stuff? Or the festival work? Or the Cumbria Surrounded epic? No, not yet. It will be “Best of Football” which I am tempted to call “(Imagine) A World without football”.
Walked to the Lake in the dark. No swim! Summer almost gone. See you when September comes.
In the midnight game of football in the garden, not a single goal was scored, whilst several players came in black and blue from the ball hitting them in various places.
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