Godalming...

Kipping in Godalming this evening; it seems a very pleasant spot. I’ve booked the Romahome in for a service tomorrow (I’m only five miles from where I bought it), and I’m having a wander along the main street. The Star pub, near the church, has good beer; other pubs have beer gardens and some imaginative swearing. I’ll need some food soon…

Hartley Wintney...

A long weekend with my sister, in the village of Hartley Wintney, in Hampshire. It's good to be in one place for a few days, to 'recharge the batteries' (mine... not the Romahome's) and eat proper food. Just finished editing pix, and, once I've given the vehicle interior a bit of a clean, I'll have to make a start on my writing commitments for the month. Exciting times...

Another day, another stately home: the Vyne...

A great day's cricket...

I’d planned to watch the morning session of Ashes cricket yesterday, from Trent Bridge, having found a congenial pub in Marlborough, with free wifi, where they were showing the cricket on a high-definition TV. But once the Australians had been bowled out for 60, in 18 overs, I knew I wasn’t going anywhere for the rest of the day.

A couple of other guys kept me company, as the Australian wickets fell, including the cricket coach from Marbborough School, who said he’d coached Michael Atherton in years gone by. Hilariously, he criticised the half dozen poor balls that the England bowlers sent down (once a coach, always a coach, I suppose), as Stuart Broad finished his morning’s work with the amazing, unrepeatable figures of 8 for 15.

Other guys came by, to see how England were doing. They needed to be reassured that the Australian collapse wasn’t some joke being played by Sky, and that it really happened. Then England batted, and Joe Root went to his hundred and beyond. Like all good batsmen, he scores his runs quickly while, paradoxically, never looking like he’s in a hurry. He’s still in, no doubt hoping to score so many runs today that England won’t need to bat again.

It was probably the best day’s cricket I’ve ever seen, and having some good company made it almost as good as being at Trent Bridge…

Marlborough Man...

Ended up in Marlborough this evening: a handsome town with a broad main street (like a Wiltshire version of Bedale). As soon as I parked, I met the eye of a guy who gave me a withering look… like I was somebody he knew who owed him money. Thirty seconds later, a woman stopped me and asked “Ian?” “Sorry, no”, I said. “It must be the sunglasses”, she said.

I used to have a doppelganger when I lived in Peterborough. He was called Roger and, to judge from peoples’ astonishment, Roger and I were practically identical… except he seemed to be more popular than me. “Hi Roger”, some guy would say, clapping me on the back, “let me buy you a beer”. A couple of times a week, for about a year, I was mistaken for Roger, usually in one Peterborough pub or another. It was no great privation; I was just curious to meet him. My questions were batted away. “Oh, Roger comes in here a lot” or “I thought he’d be here this evening”, or, more unnervingly, “He was here ten minutes ago”.

With my history of poor mental health, I did start to get rather paranoid. Finally I shaved my beard off. That should do the trick, I thought. Next night, in the pub, some bloke gives me a friendly punch in the ribs. “Hi Rog”, he said, “you’ve shaved your beard off!” I can’t remember how it all ended. Maybe Roger left Peterborough before I did… or maybe Roger and I were one and the same… and my sanity was even more precarious than I imagined…

Great Chalfield Manor

The weather forecast said ‘cloudy all day’… but the sun shone this morning. Just the way I like it too: through broken cloud, which, when pushed along by a steady breeze, as it is today, changes every composition in the space of a few seconds (sometimes just a fraction of a second). With the camera mounted on a tripod, I can lock in my chosen composition… and just see what happens within that rectangular picture area. Something is lit, then falls into shadow as the sun picks out something else. People enter the composition, interact with the property and each other, then make their exit, like actors on a Shakespearean stage. I hold the infra-red shutter release in my hand, with my thumb on the button… so I’m ready whatever may happen. It the scene is slightly theatrical, it’s largely unscripted, or, like some Pinter play, the actors may be told to improvise.

Gardens do seem to have a staged quality of inventive artifice, with nature bent to the houseowner’s will. I’m in the gardens of Great Chalfield Manor, in Wiltshire, where bushes are trimmed into geometric shapes, cut to allow garden paths to go straight through. Other plants are trained to create bowers and tunnels. Flowers are restrained in their beds and borders. Nature has to serve a grand idea and be orderly, malleable, supordinate; Nature must know its place. The saving grace, for me, is that these particular gardens are not too grand; they’re on a human scale, with the formal elements softened by their proximity to a river that flows along the bottom of the garden, with a pair of swans in residence and woodland on the opposite bank.

I took plenty of pix. Three people sit on a bench, surrounded by flowers, so I asked if I could take a few pix. If people are just part of a composition - walking in and out, I don’t generally ask permission. But if the people are the picture’s main subject, I think it’s only politeness. About once a year, someone says “Don’t take my picture”, but most people are fine. I told these three people they looked “perfect”; a little flattery is a useful camera accessory. I gave them my card; if they email me I’ll send them the best pic of the bunch…

Stones...

Spent yesterday morning in Lacock taking pix with and without people. If they notice me at all, passers-by assume I’m waiting for people to vacate my composition… when I’m really just waiting for one person, or two, or three (no more than that) to walk into shot in a visually interesting way.

Later in the day I spent a couple of hours photographing the standing stones at Avebury: an ancient monument held in such high regard by the locals that they built a village inside it. The village pub, the Red Lion, actually boasts about being inside a World Heritage Site! On a sunny Sunday, people were picnicking around the stones, and a guy with dreadlocks was playing a bongo. An hour later he was wandering down the road, looking disorientated.

I’m ambivalent about the ‘power’ of standing stones; my feeling is that all places are sacred or no place is. For a World Heritage Site, Avebury hasn’t been served too well over the years…

The first image...

Busy taking pix while the light is good. A busy day of photography (500 pix?) might be followed by two days of picture editing. I generally take three shots of everything: one ‘correctly’ exposed, according to what I feel at the time, plus one stop either side. This gives me the option, while editing, of picking the best of the three exposures… and deleting the other two. It’s a way of working that would have been rather extravagant in the days of film.

In the history of film there’s no more important place than Lacock, where I kipped last night. William Fox Talbot was the first person to fix an image into a sheet of coated paper (though French historians would disagree, citing Daguerre instead). That first image of 1835 depicted a window of his home, Lacock Abbey, now looked after - as is the whole of Lacock village - by the National Trust…

Angel in the grass...