Buskers have been around longer than most professions. We used to call them minstrels, but the whole singing for one’s supper thing is much the same as it was in the time of King Arthur. Fishmongers have been around for a while too.
This is a rare photowhack — the only photo taken today.
Apologies for introducing you to today’s defining event, the sub-conjunctival haemorrhage which actually feels fine from inside but all day made me look somewhat like The Terminator.
This is one of the few photos on the blog not taken with my regular camera; this is a selfie with the much inferior lens on my phone. But lacking the same ‘flip screen’ function as the phone means it was impossible to get the same shot with the camera. You may be regretting this.
I don’t often do work colleagues in their natural habitat but Andrea (who is Italian, so presents his name like that) made a fetching scene in front of a blackboard filled with stuff that I don’t really understand. I was a learner for an hour today.
Decided early on that today’s pic from the football was going to be a portrait, and in the end, the prize of being the model goes to Brighouse Town’s number 2, Rhys Jenkinson. He’s not looking stressed out at this point, nor should he seeing as this was towards the end of a comfortable 4-0 victory. Seeing as Brighouse should make the play-offs in their league this season, and I care about this, expect to see a couple more BTFC images before the next two weeks are out.
Well, I guess they have a point. Thanks to Lee (depicted two days ago) being vegan I have basically been vegetarian this week but that seems not to cut it for these people. I try, though.
My Manchester colleague Lee skulks around the Uni of Melbourne’s underground car park waiting to be picked up. So to speak. Melbourne’s seventh shot in a row, and there’ll be a few more yet: a period of stability, place-wise, after a long run of moving around — the period 8th March to 4th April featured 21 different places.
I wanted this week to get at least one of our Melburnian colleagues onto the blog and seeing as Linda has already made it — albeit a few months ago, in Manchester — here is Camille. But it would have been wrong, today at least, to depict her without daughter Gabby, who as she is on her Easter break from school, was obliged to join us today: but very welcome she was, including to the post-work drink at the Charles Hotel.
Flinders Street station is the main central railway station of Melbourne and a common meeting place — you meet ‘under the clocks’, a line of timepieces out of shot above. And this is why I was there, to meet my friend Mariam for a great lunch and a nice afternoon out. All these other people seemed to be doing the same thing.
My last day in Vietnam — this time — but I certainly hope there will be further visits. I have had a very fine few days and want to return. The day saw me do the one bit of work I had committed to while here, a talk at the RMIT Saigon campus, and this guy was setting up to film it; I like the random arrangement of table legs behind him, they give the shot some background texture.
The M in RMIT stands for Melbourne — and that’s where I’m heading off to next. Today is the halfway point of this trip as a whole.
This blog is both commentary, and record. So there is one part of me that regrets there is such a thing as ‘war tourism’ exists — that the dreadful conflict between the two parts of Vietnam, with the interventions of the USA, that lasted for some ten years from 1964 or so should now be something that people have come to feel is merely the background for a family photo. On the other hand — I went to the War Remnants museum in Saigon (or Ho Chi Minh CIty) today; I too was a war tourist. So should I feel guilty? The place was even-handed enough, there were some fascinating things to look at (most of all, the gallery of war correspondent photographs from both Vietnamese and European/American photographers), it passed most of the day. I learned, and that’s surely what matters. But could I stand and smile for the camera in front of a death machine? That’s something else.
