Under conditions of day-to-day repetition it’s nice to have reasons to select shots. This mirror selfie makes it because I realised it has become the 42nd self-portrait to feature on here — and the number 42 has been highlighted whenever and wherever it appears. So you can now see that I am in sore need of a haircut, like many other people. There are worse consequences of the present farce, of course.
It was my last scheduled teaching of the semester today. Normally we would have concluded this significant moment in the academic year by some kind of group photo, as on 4th May 2018, and said our goodbyes, at least amongst those I will not be supervising over the summer. There can be none of that this year. I sit in a room and talk to a laptop for an hour and twenty minutes and take questions here and there and that’s it. I do plenty of distance teaching anyway, so it’s not that I’m pissed off about this as such — but I miss people, and if you claim not to, then I worry for your sanity.
A day on which I got plenty of work done, but which was of such profound photographic dullness that I was grateful for what opportunities arose. The only time I left the house was for my bi-annual teeth scrape at the dentists’, so here’s a pseudo-selfie in the waiting room. One of the few of my 3,000+ shots to come with its own frame, anyway.
It’s not quite the finale of Enter the Dragon but I still like this one. However, how come Joe gets on three times, one neatly in each third — and I’m only on once? Perhaps I am only part vampire. It would explain certain things.
In all the eight years (minus a week) that I have been doing this blog there have been various selfies and shots of Joe — but we’ve never been captured together. Until tonight. Other than the slightly grubby glass in which we’re being reflected, I quite like this shot. To the right, the ferals gather at one end of Halifax bus station, being told off by some security guard who calls one of them a ‘scrote’ every few seconds. Meanwhile I ponder the fact that I’ve entered the last week of my 40s.
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.
One of the things to admire about Australia is that it leads the world when it comes to the preparation and serving of a proper cup of tea. Always loose-leaf, always in a pot and thus with full ceremony: here, in ACMI (the Australian Centre for the Moving Image). I like the various circles on this shot. It’s also, technically, a self-portrait.
My last full day here in Melbourne — on this trip. I hope there will be more. A fine city.
So how do I feel at the end of 2018? Well speaking personally it’s not been a bad year but then again nothing has really been achieved in my life; jobs and projects both work and personal have just been going on all year without reaching any real resolution. But I did have a couple of very nice summer holidays in August (Channel Islands, Berlin). My favourite photo of the year? This one from the football at Flint on January 27th did get used in the Flintshire Chronicle the following Monday (Headline: “Pride in Defeat for Heartbroken Flint”) and was a real right-place-right-time moment; it also epitomises my year’s non-league footie habit. So I’m going with that one.
And today’s shot? It’s been a while (2015 to be precise) since I could raise it to go out on the evening of 31st December, so there wasn’t much to depict. But feel free to compare this with the shot remaining on the “About” page, showing me on day 1, 26/8/11, and evaluate what the passage of 2,685 days has done to yr. humble blogger. Wherever you are and whatever you might be doing in 2019, Happy New Year.
I’m on a three-day weekend (Thursday, Friday, Saturday). I can think of worse places to spend it. In the background: Red Screes, Caudale Moor, Thornthwaite Crag.
It landed on me. We communed for a minute. I took a photo, it flew off but it had done its job.
God, I’m getting grey. Slowly but surely.
