At the moment it is complicated. For some months prior to the lockdown I have been pursuing some art therapy. Painting. To try and address an issue that arose from a life-changing episode that occurred last summer and which is irrelevant here. It has been a great success, my mental health is slowly improving and it has breached a gap in my photography; I am currently in the planning stages for two big projects and am working on the material from a current project and which is scheduled to be exhibited in the UK in 2021. On top of this I am in the process of relocating back to my home town of Cleethorpes and have already shipped a lot of my resources back there.

The Covid-19 pandemic had another impact. I had booked flights in order to begin one of my projects, which was to compare a port in the UK with one in Europe that shares many similarities. I won’t divulge any more, suffice to say the flights were cancelled. Not only would it have been a start to some work, but also a chance to take a break. Never mind. So I find myself at home. Unable to go out and make photographs as I would like to, I decided to make some pictures with my not-so-great phone. As a further challenge I decided to make them in colour – a real diversion for me.

I started off by noticing little things I had previously not paid a lot of attention to: after all, my office wall is just a wall, the dining table and chairs are just that and anyway, who cares about the relationship between my feet and the front door? Yet in a – for want of a better word – meditative state, I gradually discovered another facet to the familiar world I lived in. And light was the catalyst.

The small garden, in which I sit to smoke, is full of potential too. Not that I have particularly done it justice, but that’s not the point (if, indeed, there is a point). It is high-walled, small. Claustrophobic, sometimes. Depending on the weather.

Since I first began making photographs back in the 1970s, family photographs have always been important to me and, interestingly, I haven’t done much of that recently. My daughter often comes with me on an exercise walk around the block. And she enjoys having her photograph taken.

The streets around me, usually insanely busy with traffic, are oddly quiet at the moment. As I have said elsewhere in this blog, my favourite time of the day is first light. When the streets are empty. But this is different. Just very strange.

And then there is the ‘selfie’ a modern art form in which you can realise yourself the way you want. I haven’t resorted to an app that puts cat’s whiskers on my face…

Ok, the confinement is slowly sapping away my motivation. I admit it. Soon it will be over and I will be hard-pressed to find some peace and quiet. And I will want some. Anyway, I’m going to the garden to smoke a cigarette and check out the shadows…..

Thanks for reading. The phone used is a lower range Vivo model. The selfie was made with my Olympus mirrorless camera….