The Dinner

Crazy crazy life.

I'm knackered. Had a crew around today, making a mess of my lovely house.

We were pretending my place was a student flat. I cooked breakfast for everyone. At 11.30am. Probably a bit early for students really.

Anyway, I saw these pics and thought they fitted today's theme rather well.

The inaugural dinner at our London flat, about ten years ago.

It was Indian from around the road. We didn't go back again. Ever.

And this was the lounge. With flatmates. And flatmate's sister. And flatmate's girlfriend. And awesome furniture. It was quite a nice flat actually.

Then we moved out and Girlfriend and I did this, amongst other things, while other flatmate and his girlfriend moved to a different part of London altogther, and had to put up with Girlfriend and me constantly crashing at their place/lovenest.

The Hairy

This comes up in conversation every now and then. Especially when I haven't shaved for a few days. Here we have "Self-portrait with facial hair, London, England, 8 May 1997".

I arrived in London on 29 November 1996, worked a month, then ran away to Scotland for Hogmanay. I can't remember when I stopped shaving, but it was around then. I spent a couple of weeks in Scotland and a couple of months in Ireland, before getting back to London early April.

I got another bar job - cos they're really easy to find - and spent about four weeks in the middle of Soho serving mainly really boring folk. The manager fired me for not doing tasks he never told me to do. But he was a prick, a racist bigot, who happily tipped the beer drippings back into the kegs, and poured cheap spirits into expensive bottles. I was happy to leave.

At the beginning of May I got another bar job - cos they're really easy to find. This time in Battersea/Lavender Hill. I stayed there until it was time to go to Copenhagen in June or July.

The above photo was taken the day I moved to Battersea and shaved. It is the result of five months growth. Sad. Really sad.

And the hair and the glasses are pretty ghastly too.

Oh the humanity.

The Autobiography

Distilling my life (incompletely) down to thirteen photos.

I shot these in 2002, possibly inspired by (or indeed inspiring) my work around this project - which itself is an incomplete (and somewhat fictionalised) distillation of my life.

It would be interesting to grow this - throw in Thackeray Street, Lord Street, Anderson Park, Birdwood Grove and any number of other locations relating to moments of varying significance.

The Blur

I've no idea why I took these shots. Don't even know where they were shot. I'm guessing Leicester Square. Maybe it had something to do with this. It was a long time ago. You can't expect me to remember everything. Anyway, they're quite cool.

The Big

The Casal

In London, there's this club called the 12 Bar Club. To say that it's small but intimate would be to state the blatantly freakin' obvious. Being a bit of a music appreciator, I'm always on the look out for new artists. Amongst those I 'discovered' during my time in London was Neal Casal. Although an American, Casal played London - the 12 Bar Club to be precise - while we were there. It was a great gig from memory. People who can do the solo voice and guitar thing, do it well, and do it entertainingly are few and far between.

I don't know why, but I'm sure I had a great reason to take my camera along. Consequently, I took some photos. The first of only two times I've done gig photography.

As you may be able to make out, the club is on two levels - one about six foot, three inches above the other!! Small but intimate, see.

The opening act was a six or seven (or eight) piece band called Lincoln, from memory. (Look, I'm not going to go rifling through my old journals and scraps of paper just for the purpose of fact checking okay!) They could barely all fit on the stage, but they also put on a damn fine show.

As it happens, I bought my first Neal Casal CD late last year - it's a good one too, complete with DVD. And while on the topic of DVDs and people who can do the solo voice and guitar thing well, check out this one.

The Tulips

Continuing with the Valentines Day kinda thing (you know, hearts and flowers and that kind of stuff), these tulips were shot in my flat in Hornsey/Crouch End, London in 1998.


Clearly I had no idea what I was doing. This, above, is the only decent shot amongst them!!


But they're nice flowers, and behind my cold, hard, cynical exterior, I am actually a bit of a dumb romantic at heart.

The Couple

This week I had the pleasure making a new friend - well we met a year ago, but didn't really hang out any that time. It was lovely. It was surreal. It was funny. It was sad.

Sad because she doesn't live on these shores.

By odd coincidence, as regular viewers may have noticed, I've been scanning my London stuff. For some reason the same woman (though not the one mentioned above) keeps making appearances in the shots. I'm still trying to work out exactly why. Maybe it had something to do with us going out, I really don't know.

Anyway here are some of the more interesting ones. I hope she doesn't mind.

The Monopolist

When I was living in London, years ago, I started a project. It was the first proper photographic project I ever started. And it set the pattern for subsequent photographic projects, i.e. a massive and gross failure to progress happily towards anything verging on a satisfactory completion.

Needless to say, this project was rather uninspired, as was the day I started photographing. But here are all the images - in the order taken, which is not the correct order, but I'm too lazy to do that, especially when there are images missing, and some duplicate locations.

Always start as you mean to go on I always say.