Just back from lunch watching the first half of Villa versus Newcastle at my local. (Joey Barton is a dirty…) I live dahn Sarf now so there were about five people apart from me interested in the Midlands against the North-East dotted around the fairly large TV room. In walks a big black Senegalese bloke […]
Read MoreThe latest political scandal uncovered on BBC Radio 2 news this morning was a Conservative MP being “late to declare hospitality from McDonald’s”. Imagine an Italian person hearing that report and trying to make any kind of sense of it at all.
Read MoreMick Hartley links to a Times report of a “serious” novelist suing the proprietors of a neighbouring factory because the fumes it produced so affected her concentration that she was reduced to writing genre fiction. It’s not just a funny hook for a news story; it’s a delicious illustration of how class and status in […]
Read MoreThank you to Beardsleys and Counsells for their hospitality and generosity. Oop North, they know how to enjoy themselves, but local children don’t have it as good as my niece and nephew: fattist oppression in action
Read MoreFIRST ANTIQUE DEALER: Do you have a double-U-double-U-double-U number? SECOND ANTIQUE DEALER: ? FIRST ANTIQUE DEALER: An, er, Internet address?
Read MoreBeachy Head[click image to enlarge it] I was eating breakfast in an hotel in Cambridge the Saturday morning after I shot that college ball. A tall, intense-looking man with a beard sat down at a table nearby. He pulled a hardback book out of his briefcase and began underlining paragraphs heavily with a soft pencil. […]
Read Morethe middle of nowhere[click image to enlarge it] [A dirt track in Wales exactly seventy-five miles from the nearest Starbucks. POOTERGEEK is laden with three cameras, several lens bags, and a tripod. He is trying to open the gate to a field full of sheep by pressing a London Transport Oyster card against the hinge […]
Read MoreIt is an important day for Britain. Since the abrupt collapse of our manufacturing base, our economy depends heavily upon fictional characters. Together, Lara Croft, James Bond, The Teletubbies, Simon Cowell, and Harry Potter now account for 43 percent of GDP. From time to time, J K Rowling dials 141, calls Buckingham Palace, and mutters quietly: “I […]
Read MoreA couple of weeks back I attended one of the two “reasonably smart” evening occasions that PooterGeekers kindly invited me to in response to my appeal so that I could test out some wacky lighting techniques. This was photographing various Latin American performers at a Cambridge college ball. I’m sure you’ll agree such a setting […]
Read MoreThe front page of today’s Argus features this headline: Today’s Argus street placard features this headline:
Read MoreLast Friday I found myself stuck in a room in a Cambridge college waiting to do a photo job so I took Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations down from a shelf and, as an intellectual dwarf perched on Hindsight the Giant, sneered at it. Certain things he said appear absurd in the light of certain experimental […]
Read MoreDid anyone else hear that BBC news soundbite from a representative of the emergency services reviewing the effects of the sub-tropical storms that hit parts of the UK this week? Amongst other things, he described them as “very, very frightening”. If so, did you manage to resist singing, “Thunderbolt and lightning / Galileo! / Galileo!”? […]
Read MoreI admit that I have, in the past, given my readers the impression that the more genteel half of Brighton & Hove is a sleepy, geriatric, upper-middle-class, conservative place. Indeed, one resident commented here: After all the effort I’ve put into making Hove sound like the hipper and more cosmopolitan sista of Brighton, you’re making us sound […]
Read MoreFoolishly allowing himself to be provoked by the skeptical taunts of Professor Cho the experimentalist, Professor Hawking chooses the annual NASA barbecue as the occasion to collect on one of his bets.
Read MoreThe official name for the place where I live is “Brighton & Hove”. A friend of mine was recently asked at interview to characterize the difference between Brighton and her non-identical Siamese twin town and came up with something along the lines of Hove being a respectable older aunt and Brighton a wayward younger sister. […]
Read MoreThis is a surprise: The UK must not shy away from trying to resolve international crises despite the “terrible misadventure” in Iraq, a report from charity Oxfam argues.
Read MoreMy dad has long been associated, as a member and officer, with the largest UK teaching union, the NAS/UWT. Indeed, in classic working-class northerner style, he first had a heart attack as he arrived at a union conference. Equally typically, after it was initially misdiagnosed by a junior doctor as a digestive problem, he just […]
Read MoreSUCCESSFUL LOCAL FEMALE PHOTOGRAPHER [looking down her nose at trade mag]: It’s amazing they still do ads like that in this day and age: women in bikinis standing in the darkroom doorway. POOTERGEEK: It’s post-feminist, innit? Those are ironic tits. SUCCESSFUL LOCAL FEMALE PHOTOGRAPHER: Just for once I’d like to see a man in a […]
Read MoreLater, on the Wedding Photography Blog, I’ll be explaining how you can obtain a photo like this yourself, using an old camera, a wind machine, and a stuffed Westie on a stick.
Read MoreJogging from the bank yesterday evening to catch Richard Brincklow‘s in-store performance at Passenger‘s launch of their new single [buy it now!*], I stopped to photograph this: Regulars will know that I am not an admirer of Banksy’s work, but circumstances and the shrewd planning of the staff at artrepublic temporarily turned the 2006 effort […]
Read More“Chippy!” is the cry of a winner in the lottery of birth losing an argument. There’s a scene near the beginning of Casino Royale in which Vesper Lynd practises some amateur psychology on 007 as they sit opposite each other on the Eurostar. She says something like: You’re Oxford, but not from money, hence that […]
Read MoreI’m sitting here eating a microwaved vegetable biryani in front of my computer, having returned from a Ginsters-fuelled morning shoot of a band at Shoreham Airport, a cute, art deco building surrounded by dodgy Italian mopeds of the sky—not just propellor aircraft that look like they are powered by elastic bands, but helicopters that were […]
Read MoreRichard Brincklow leads a jazz trio called Sesame Forum. They have a Sunday afternoon residency at The Brunswick in Brighton. The weekend after next, The Brunswick is hosting a jazz festival, featuring people who you might have heard of, like Liane Carroll, who won Best Vocalist Award at the 2006 British Jazz Awards and is […]
Read MoreSorry it’s been quiet here. I’ve been busy and ill (again). There’s always The Brighton Argus to cheer me up though. And its front cover story today is about a “masked raider” being identified by his distinctive smell.
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