There is an irony in the fact that the episode before this invited you to share the podcast, so it doesn’t become a best-kept secret. You may have to park that with a wry smile today.

Pic: Ilona Veres

“What you need to learn, Neale,” said a former colleague, “Is when to say no, or stop.”

I always thought those words of advice offered up by someone who navigated show business in a way I never could were misplaced, despite the fact he became a household name and just as known for walking away at times you thought he shouldn’t. It was strange advice, I felt.

Whenever I shoot a wedding, during the preparatory chat we have leading up to the big day, I always close our conversation with these words.

“At the end of the night,” I say, “I won’t necessarily announce my departure, I’ll just fade away into the evening at the appropriate moment, (I don’t like a fuss) and the next time you hear from me, it’ll be when I have all your photographs ready to share.”

I often add something along the lines of, “You’ll be dancing and chatting with friends anyway, and the last thing you need is some kind of Shakespearean Hamlet tragedy where the photographer announces his departure stage left.”

I’ll make sure to recount that with all the gravitas of the late Sir Laurence Olivier playing Hamlet on screen and stage.

I’ve been saying it for many years and it usually raises at least a chuckle, and just once, it fell on the ears of someone who knew the part was famously played by Sir Larry, which had context, seeing that it was a wedding to be hosted at a place called Notley Abbey, which was a wonderful home to both Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh in the day.

But you don’t, do you? I mean, you really don’t need a big announcement. A month back, I watched as the videographer gathered the bride, groom, and a few bridesmaids and, I kid you not, organised a group hug upon his exit. The sort of huddle you might see in the World Cup as the two finalists prepare to decide the winner in a penalty shoot-out.

It’s the same sort of thing on YouTube, these “I quit, I’m never using film again, sold all my cameras, going off grid now, this is the last time you’ll hear from me” style of titles designed to make you shout; “Doris, Nigel Thumbnail says he’s quitting YouTube for good, and this time he really means it, close the curtains, lockdown the house and pull out the supplies being saved for Armageddon.”

I’ve used many a clickbaity title myself, so I appreciate I may need to pull out a make up mirror there.

Having said all that about big goodbyes, this is actually a piece about this little podcast and the fact that my lovely experiment is ending today, at least for the time being. In truth, it’s simply heading back to where it came from. These reflections, renamed now Halfway to Maybes, will return to The Extra Mile, part of The Photowalk podcast, my weekly walks with a camera, where they’ll become a regular feature of my Friday musings.

I’m not doing a big Nigel Thumbnail goodbye, though. Please accept this as a thank you, and for many listeners, see you (speak to you) within the Extra Mile once again.

I like Halfway to Maybe, both as a title and as a writing project, and it’s the latter I’ve especially enjoyed, although there’s a piece of advice that I was reminded of this morning by my good friend Lynn, that has haunted writers for well over a century: “Kill your darlings.”

I looked it up, fact-checked it, as is the trend now. It’s usually credited to the American novelist William Faulkner, though literary historians point further back to the English writer and critic Arthur Quiller-Couch. He was teaching aspiring authors at Cambridge when he suggested that whenever they wrote something they thought was especially brilliant, they should have the courage to cut it. His point wasn’t that good writing should be destroyed. It was that affection can cloud judgement. We fall in love with our own creations, and sometimes that’s precisely when we stop seeing them clearly.

I’m not claiming brilliance by the way, just quoting what was said.

Over the years, the phrase evolved into “kill your darlings.”

Creative people are encouraged to persevere. Keep going. Don’t give up. Push through. It’s good advice most of the time, but not all the time. Occasionally, the hardest decision isn’t carrying on, it’s recognising that an experiment has reached its conclusion.

That’s where Halfway to Maybe finds itself.

This little project was never intended to become a giant production. It was an idea that wandered into my head and deserved the courtesy of being tested. Perhaps there was an audience for short reflections that sat somewhere between conversation and diary. Perhaps people would build them into their routines. Perhaps they would find a place in the day that longer podcasts sometimes struggle to occupy.

And perhaps they wouldn’t.

The interesting thing about experiments is that they succeed when they produce an answer. We tend to judge them only by whether the answer was the one we wanted, but that’s missing the point, isn’t it?

Halfway to Maybe has told me what it needed to tell me.

The audience never quite gathered in the way I’d hoped, and that’s perfectly all right. There are countless ideas that deserve a chance, but not necessarily a lifetime. Continuing simply because something exists isn’t always resilience. Sometimes it’s just sentimentality.

I didn’t, by the way, write it just for an audience; I did it for me, but the frequency is somewhat challenging at a time when my real darling of podcasts, The Photowalk, is saying, “Don’t forget me over here, please, we’ve got many walks to make yet.”

So this is the end of the Halfway project, here at least. At lunchtime today, I’m going to metaphorically take it down to the railway station of ideas, complete with a hand-wrapped package containing marmalade sandwiches, of course, and wave it off to Paddington, which is on my line as it goes.

I don’t see it as a failure. If anything, it’s evidence that making things is still worthwhile. Every attempt teaches you something. Every false start clears the path for a better one. Every abandoned sketch leaves a pencil a little shorter and the artist a little wiser.

Somebody famous, I can’t think of now, said that, maybe even Picasso.

The thoughts that appeared here won’t disappear. Some will undoubtedly resurface elsewhere, folded into another podcast, another article or another conversation. Creative work has a habit of recycling itself in unexpected ways.

I’ll be writing fresh Halfways, just for an audience on a different channel, where it started a year or so ago.

So no big announcement, although I do want to remind Doris to whip open the curtains, let the light flood in, and put twenty-year-old blown tins of tuna and baked beans back in the Armageddon cupboard. I’ll talk to you on the Extra Mile podcast next week. Right now, I need to go and walk the dog.

Hmmm, there’s a good idea for a podcast, I like that idea… perhaps there’s a chance to… (fades off into a door close gag on the podcast version.)

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I missed it, you know. Since this edition is being released on a Wednesday, I entirely missed Tuesday. Well, in terms of picking up a camera and taking a picture.

Pic: Kelly Sikkema

Tuesdays are a strange affair, aren’t they? They’re rarely sung about, bar Ruby Tuesday by the Stones. I can’t think of a film, or a specific book, although there is that scene from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

At the beginning of the story, the character Arthur Dent wakes to find his house about to be bulldozed to make way for a hyperspace bypass or something, and he learns this from his friend, who turns out to be an alien. Given that, and faced with this rather inconvenient start to an otherwise normal day, he reflects that he never could get the hang of Tuesdays.

I wrote that celebrating my memory and the wonderful link with the day nobody photographs or particularly celebrates, but only when I fact-checked my work did it turn out that the storyline was on a Thursday.

Douglas Adams wrote Thursdays, but I’ve always thought Tuesday was the more neglected day. Thursday at least gets to stand next to Friday. Tuesday has no such advantage. It is the no-man’s land of days.

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But it’s with Tuesday in mind that I’ve written this piece, to go out on a Wednesday.

We, photographers, spend our lives trying to predict which pictures will matter, and I think we’re spectacularly bad at it.

We stand in front of a magnificent landscape and implore that, “This is the one.” We wait for the perfect light, the perfect cloud, maybe even the perfect person to walk into the frame for scale. We adjust the settings, check the edges, make one last tiny correction and press the shutter with the satisfaction that we’ve captured something important, but not convinced we have.

Then there are the more normal types of pictures you make, thinking they’re art classics. You line the shot up of a still-life on the kitchen top at home, comparing it in your mind to one of Edward Weston’s studies of peppers. Only you take it, and at that moment, the first word that comes to your mind is mehhr.

Oh, and let’s not forget the photograph you took of a family moment that just sang to you of being like the work of one Emmet Gowin, who photographed his wife Edith, her family and domestic life over many years. His work was considered serious art. The extraordinary came from the ordinary, only when you look at your classic Emmet moment, the ordinary seems to have become even more ordinary.

But what if it really is/was a good photograph?

Maybe not at the time, but give it twenty years, and then it’s a whole different story, in a literal sense. Because that’s where photography becomes interesting. It’s maturing like a fine Italian cheese.

The pictures we think will define our lives often become just another file in a folder, and instead, another photo begins to whisper.

This is the one you nearly deleted.

Your son sitting on the kitchen floor, surrounded by cereal he’d accidentally tipped everywhere. He’s sat in an island of Coco Pops!

Your partner reading the newspaper with a cup of tea going cold beside them, or perhaps a book from an author they particularly adore. The one you look for every birthday.

Your dad tightening a hinge on the garden gate, because you never learned how to.

Nothing dramatic happened that day, but if someone had asked you what you’d done, you might say, “Oh, not much.”

Yet, years later, that picture carries an extraordinary weight.

Why?

Because the photograph isn’t really about the person anymore. It’s about the world they inhabited. That’s why old family albums can be so magical. We tell ourselves we’re looking at our grandparents, but often our eyes drift elsewhere. We notice the wallpaper, classic china ducks on a wall, the old electric fire, the pattern on the curtains, the television that once seemed impossibly modern.

Someone has accidentally photographed an entire era!

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But no historian set out to preserve that kitchen and no museum thought to catalogue those mugs or those chairs or the lino on the floor. But there they are, surviving because someone wanted a picture of Auntie Daphne on her birthday.

The background becomes this incredibly potent story.

So perhaps, here’s a thought, perhaps, perhaps, we’re all looking for the wrong photographs?

Social media has trained us to believe photographs should be extraordinary. We chase mountains, sunsets, famous streets and dramatic weather. We scroll through endless perfection until ordinary life begins to feel slightly disappointing.

But ordinary life is where that life actually happens.

Most of our existence isn’t spent standing on a cliff at sunrise unless you really do work for National Geo, it’s spent waiting for the kettle to boil, or getting frustrated looking for the car keys, again, for the third time in a week. It’s walking the dog and unloading the dishwasher, not at the same time, clearly.

While we’re living these moments, they feel entirely forgettable, obviously. Only later do they become precious, and I suspect that’s because memory is selective, but photography isn’t.

Memory edits.

Photography records.

Your memory may tell you your childhood home was remarkably modern and cool. Then you find an old photograph and realise the wallpaper was hideous and the sofa looked like something rescued from a skip. Your dream world is not so dreamy.

But your photography, if you had the foresight to borrow a camera early on, was telling the truth all along, and that’s the more interesting bit.

…and while I’m on one, as they say, there’s another photographic thought that bothers me.

Photographers, us lot, well, we often disappear from our own stories.

We’re the ones holding the camera while everyone else gathers together.

We arrange people, tidy clothes, tell someone to move slightly left, then step back and make the picture. Years later, we discover that we documented everyone else’s life beautifully while leaving surprisingly little evidence that we were there at all.

The family history is complete, except for the person who bloody recorded it. I’d say the occasional selfie isn’t vanity after all. Perhaps it’s simply leaving proof that you occupied your own life.

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And then there are the photographs that never existed.

Every photographer can list them. I bet if you and I sat down for an evening, we’d be able to find a good few.

The face seen through a train window at Paddington, you were drawn to but didn’t dare lift your camera for. Or more personally, the dog, waiting by the front door ten minutes before anyone arrives home, the family gathered around the kitchen while Christmas dinner was being readied, and that brief moment when everybody was under the same roof, and nobody realised how unusual that would one day become.

Perhaps that is why I still enjoy walking with a camera: the act of putting one foot in front of the other slows the world down.

I begin to notice things that speed hides from me, like a bicycle that’s clearly been leaning against the same wall for years, and the chalk drawing outside a school gate that tomorrow’s rain will wash away.

These aren’t remarkable discoveries; they’re simply evidence that life is carrying on. And maybe photography, at its best, isn’t about seeing, it’s, as the saying goes, about paying attention.

Those are different things.

Most of us look all day long, but very few of us truly notice.

So here’s the thought I’ve been left with. Standby, give me a timp roll.

Maybe, just maybe, we’re asking the wrong question when we pick up a camera.

Instead of wondering whether a photograph will impress anyone else, perhaps we should ask whether it might one day help someone remember. Not remember a holiday, not remember a famous landmark, because they’re the obvious point your camera at stuff, examples.

I’m suggesting you just remember, say, Tuesday.

The kitchen pan cupboard that never closed properly, the homemade hat stand with a slight lean, and the chair that sadly nobody sits in anymore.

The truth is, we never know which picture will become the important one. We simply don’t decide that; that’s a decision for time. We think we’re photographing people, but often we’re photographing a disappearing world. A collection of ordinary details that, unnoticed today, will one day become priceless.

So if you pick up your camera this week, don’t worry too much about finding the spectacular, really DO photograph the ordinary, because the extraordinary already knows it’s extraordinary.

It’s Tuesday that needs saving. Tuesday.

I would have thought that every family has its own language or lingoisms, as I call them. Not an entirely different language, you understand; nobody’s sitting around the dinner table speaking fluent Klingon, well, not that I’ve heard of late. What I mean are those wonderful family expressions, the words and phrases that make perfect sense to the people who use them and absolutely no sense to anyone else.

Pic: Jennifer Burke

They’re linguistic heirlooms, if you like, passed from one generation to the next. Sometimes they survive, sometimes they disappear when the last person who understood them is no longer around to explain what they meant.

In our house, we have a few.

Some have existed for a good while now, others have appeared from nowhere and settled in as though they’ve always belonged. They describe everything from making a cup of tea to offering a gentle warning when somebody’s getting a bit above themselves.

None of us ever really sat down and agreed on them; they arrived and just, well, stayed. I liken them to the chants of fans on football terraces. One day a rhyme arrives mid-match, and minutes later 15,000 people have latched on to the idea so loudly, that it becomes a new thing.

For example, how did this one start when noticing that there’s only a handful of opposition supporters:

“Is this a fire drill? Is this a fire drill, is this a fire drill, is this a fire drill…?”

Our lingoisms at home aren’t entirely unlike Cockney rhyming slang, a tradition that began in London’s East End during the nineteenth century. The basic idea is simple enough. You replace a word with a phrase that rhymes with it.

“Stairs” becomes “apples and pears.”

“Phone” becomes “dog and bone.”

“Wife” becomes “trouble and strife.”

You getting my drift, me old china?

China plate. Mate.

The clever bit comes afterwards. True Cockneys often drop the rhyming word altogether. So instead of saying they’re heading upstairs, somebody might say they’re going up the apples. The “and pears” is left hanging in the air, assumed knowledge among those who understand the code. To outsiders, it sounds utterly baffling. To those in the know, it’s perfectly clear.

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I suppose our family does something quite similar: we don’t necessarily use rhyme, but we often drop the important bit, leaving only the clue behind.

Take this example.

In our family, one of our lingoisms is, “Put the John on, would you?”

What’s being asked for is a cup of tea.

The missing piece of the puzzle is the surname: John Kettley.

If you’re of a certain age, you’ll remember him presenting the weather on the BBC just after the nightly news. He was one of those familiar faces who appeared every evening at teatime. The weather forecast would arrive, followed by John Kettley pointing at a map of the UK covered in little sunshine symbols and rain clouds; very high tech. He was still of an age when letters could fall off the map, leading to the famous exchange in which one weatherman lost the letter F in the word fog on one bulletin, and, of course, being a Brit, he apologised immediately.

“Sorry about the F in fog,” he said, not realising what it sounded like to the millions watching and listening.

John Kettley became such a recognisable figure that somebody even recorded a novelty pop song about him.

“John Kettley is a weatherman,” went the song, followed by, “And so is Michael Fish.”

A sentence that probably means very little to anyone under forty, but which immediately transports many of us back to a particular moment in British life.

Somewhere along our family’s lingoism line, John Kettley became Kettley, Kettley being a lengthened play on the word kettle, and then the surname disappeared altogether. Which leaves us with John.

So if somebody walks through the front door after a long day and says, “Do us a favour and put the John on,” what they’re really asking for is a brew.

It’s absurd when you stop and think about it, but then all family languages are.

Another example came from a story told by John. Not John Kettley, but my friend John Anderton.

For years, he worked near a small café run by a woman whose customer service could best be described as functional. There was no warmth, no greeting, certainly no smile, and definitely no cheerful, “Next please.” Just a serving hatch and a permanent expression that suggested she’d rather be almost anywhere else, including the dentist, I suspect, on a day when actual pliers were being used.

“You’d order your lunch,” said John, “and hardly a word would be spoken with please and thank you off the menu. Then you’d wait.”

At some point, a plate and mug of tea would appear through the hatch and be deposited onto the counter from at least 3 inches above, with all the enthusiasm of somebody unloading bricks.

Names were never called, and orders were never announced. Customers were simply expected to know when their food and tea had arrived. Adding to the theatre was a loud doorbell she’d installed on the counter.

Every time an order was ready, she’d smash the plate and the full mug of tea down like a NASA command module returning to the Pacific on splashdown, then she’d press a round button.

Ding dong.

That was it.

No explanation, no communication. Just ding dong; your food, your cup of tea, is ready for collection, half the tea now slopped around the counter area for good measure.

The entire café would briefly stop what it was doing and glance towards the hatch, wondering if the summons applied to them. Meanwhile, the owner would continue muttering angrily about her good-for-nothing son, who apparently should have been helping but never seemed to be there. Over time, the bell became more memorable than the food and tea.

Ding dong meant a mug of tea to John and his family from that moment on. You simply came home from a long day, and someone might say; “You looked tired out, let me make you a ding dong.”

THAT, of course, makes no sense whatsoever until somebody explains the story, after which it makes PERFECT sense.

Which brings me to what may well become the latest addition to the lingoisms spoken within our four walls: Billy, taken from the name Billy Bragg.

Now, for those listening outside the UK, Billy Bragg is a British singer-songwriter who’s been part of our musical landscape since the 1980s. He has one of those names that is instantly recognisable here, but the phrase has absolutely nothing to do with Billy himself. He’s done nothing wrong and is entirely innocent in all this. He’s just lending a surname.

In many households, if somebody was spinning a proper yarn dressed up within a boast often, they’d be told to stop talking, shall we say, nonsense.

“Stop with your Billy Bull***t.”

But, just as with our other family expressions, we’d discard the obvious bit and keep only the clue, the Billy bit.

So if somebody starts polishing their own halo, inflating their achievements or generally becoming the hero of every story they tell, all that’s required is a gentle glance across the room and two simple words.

“Alright, Billy.”

Not Billy Bragg.

Just Billy.

Tuesday lunchtime, I’m in a café nursing a flat white and an aspirational-sounding soup, chatting with good friends, when a message pops up from a name in the business of wedding photography, I didn’t recognise, though at some stage in the great sport of Facebook friend collecting, I must have accepted a request.

It read:

“How’s it going, mate? Getting ready for a crazy summer of weddings? I’m going into a really busy summer.”

Billy had just, well, slightly evolved.

Until that moment, Billy in my head had always been shorthand for “Billy Bull***t”, our family expression for somebody stretching the truth or talking nonsense. But it struck me that Billy could work in exactly the same way as John, as in Kettle and Kettley.

This was a premier division, straight to the top, humble, not so humble brag. An “I’m so busy I need to tell a thousand strangers” statement. It wasn’t so much bull***t, it was just straight bragging.

Arriving unannounced for some reason irked me. The sender had and has no idea of my world and where I am, whether I’m up to my eyeballs busy, or waiting for the phone to ring, looking for an inbox to bring good tidings, or simply finding the where-with-all to keep positive when all around worldly stuff is conspiring to make the day-to-day, well, trickier.

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I spend a reasonable amount of time talking about this on one of my podcasts, that worldly Internet noise that is the cause of much dis-ease. This seemed so opposite to what a real mate might know me for.

Don’t get me wrong here. There’s nothing remotely wrong with being busy. After all, many of us are indeed trying to keep the wheels turning, spinning plates and shouting for gaffer tape as we drop the next pile on the floor. We have mortgages, families, ambitions and an unhealthy relationship with our inboxes and social media likes.

It was the announcement that just irked me somewhat.

See, nobody had asked about the stuff of life.

The conversation hadn’t reached that point.

I’d never actually chatted in my life with this person, in that pub-like, “Hi I’m Bob,” way. He’d just marched into my virtual pub life, declared he’d won the lottery of busy-ness, stood on a box, offered the saloon bar a free round, and left me with the bill.

“You don’t mind, mate, do you? You’re my mate, right?”

Just when did being busy become something we felt obliged to advertise?

Somewhere along the line, “I’m really busy” stopped being information and became identity. It’s almost a badge of honour now.

The implication is that a full diary is evidence of a full life, and social media has only amplified it.

We’re forever seeing people “smashing it”, “crazy busy”, “back-to-back meetings”, “another airport”, “another 5am start”. There seems to be an unwritten competition to demonstrate that no one has ever worked harder than the person currently posting about it.

We have somehow created a culture where exhaustion sounds aspirational.

Perhaps it’s because being busy sounds successful, and perhaps because saying, “Things are a bit slow at the moment,” feels like admitting defeat.

The loudest declarations often resemble those of fishermen whose catch becomes larger every time the story is retold.

I sent a message back saying, “Glad for you, all the best,” which is unlike me. It was a tad terse, and proof that sometimes you need to go back to your lunch and enjoy a little more aspirational-sounding soup before replying.

What I really wanted to say was that life isn’t a competition measured by calendar entries or by how many times we tell other people how full those entries are, though I was fearful of sounding like a jockey. You can add the appropriate family lingoism.

I admire those who’ve got this life thing right and ask questions before providing answers, those interested in someone else’s world before advertising their own.

He didn’t need a lecture, though, and who am I to even begin to assume that lofty position?

Before this starts sounding like a thought for the day, I’d certainly add in that none of us really knows what somebody else is carrying, and it’s a note to self, sentence too.

I think of this particularly when I’m walking Sir Barkalot in the morning. My bright, cheery “Good morning” to passersby on the path isn’t always greeted with an AA Milne Piglet-style breezy return of that same energy; sometimes it’s more like an Eeyore rebuttal: “Is it?”

And sometimes nothing at all.

I used to get a little irritated by that, but really it’s only their version of the unannounced bloke saying, “I’m really busy, you know.”

Of course, I don’t know what’s happening in that person’s life for that one moment we meet, albeit briefly, and I’ve stopped assuming they’re rude because they don’t match my overbearing enthusiasm.

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Right, I have a metaphorical bowl of aspirational-sounding soup to finish and a Frank Sinatra-sized serving of regret that I didn’t show a little more empathy in reply to that message, because, well, maybe they were on the path too, and just needed a little reassurance at that moment, from a message not so subtly disguised as a Billy.

I missed my chance, didn’t I? It’s going to be another one of those “If only I’d saids”.

Perhaps, “That’s good to hear, mine’s looking a little different this year, but how are things otherwise?” might have been more appropriate.

Or, “Glad to hear it. I hope it goes well for you. What else is happening in your world?”

I’d been hoping that the 31^st day of the month of May might fall on a Monday, Wednesday or Friday this year, just to tally up nicely with a story about something that featured during the early Summers of my life in the 90s.

Pic: Nainoa Shizuru

It’s a Sunday this year, the 31^st, so this is the closest I can get to it, seeing that I’m not here Monday, in that next week, the first week of June, I am taking a week off as I retreat to Scotland to photograph for the week in the beautiful Scottish highlands. I’ll have plenty of stories to tell you, though, I’m sure.

Experience.

That is a word I come up with when I consider why I photograph. There are other facets of the why behind photography, but this is a pivotal one I believe, and a reason that attaches itself to other creative outlets I have, but I’ll stick for now with photography.

I know that when I started photographing professionally, I may have attached other words to being a photographer, but considering that I’ve been taking pictures since I was knee high to a grasshopper, the strangest idiom, lifting a viewfinder to my eye, has certainly not always been something connected with my wallet. It may certainly have been in buying film and processing, but I didn’t see any folding, as they say, coming back the other way.

So I have to think of it as experience. I do this, taking or making pictures, or receiving pictures as Paul Sanders, the architect behind Discover Still says, because I am rewarded by experiencing something that I may well look at, but not necessarily see.

I think of some of the earliest pictures I took with my Russian-made camera that starts with Z that may or may not have had an H at the end, and I recall that I photographed details mainly. The inside of a radio studio, when I visited as a complete enthusiast a long time before being entrusted with a live microphone, and the footplates of working narrow-gauge locos, which enthralled me. These were things and places I was experiencing, and I sense that, without necessarily being a conscious decision, I wanted to keep those feelings of what it was like to be there, in case life tosses a curveball and turns me into an accountant instead. No offence, accountants.

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Photography undoubtedly helps me experience the world in a way that I don’t believe I would if I weren’t carrying a box with film or digital gubbings within.

It’s providing me with my time capsule of memories, which all sounds a little bit Instagrammy, I know, but it really is. The two words ‘focus attention’ are very pertinent here, both physically in the process of working the camera and mentally in terms of experiencing deeply or degrees of, what I point my camera at. I think I’m experiencing what’s in the viewfinder in an entirely different way and fashion than if I simply did a ‘walk-by glancing’.

I’m not sure I’d stand beneath a towering pine tree and really notice the scent of it, the resin in the air, the earthy smell of the forest floor and pine needles, if I didn’t have a camera in my hand slowing me down enough to pay attention. Photography makes me concentrate on the experience with all my senses, not just the visual side of it.

Is this making sense?

Take my experience of photographing weddings. Sure, you can photograph tears and make a picture that delivers emotion to a viewer, but then you can also look through your viewfinder, and study the scene unfolding. Perhaps a father looking at his daughter during the wedding banquet, rolling back the years, wondering how to hold back his tears, and there you are, not an innocent bystander just waiting to casually press a button, but someone experiencing the beauty of human emotion, that storyline guiding you to the click by the wonderful nuance of facial movements.

That’s a prize that money can’t buy. And I’m sure my landscape friends will feel exactly the same way when standing before a majestic mountain waiting for the tiniest of expressions made by light breaking across a range.

That is experience.

Which oddly brings me back to where I started.

31 Days in May was the title of a month-long daily competition run by Radio 1 in the UK, which, for three years of my tenure, I was a part of.

Each day, there would be one prize that one presenter had the job/privilege of announcing: a question, a phone-in with an answer, a pluck-winner-from-hat, and a phone-back live-on-air mechanic.

The idea was simple. It was a prize that money couldn’t buy. This was the BBC after all.

In essence, of course, money did buy the prizes, insofar as those offering them funded each of them. What made the competition feel special, though, wasn’t necessarily the monetary value. It was the sense that Radio 1 could open doors into worlds listeners normally only imagined from posters, magazines and the radio itself. That was the magic of it.

Typical prizes included: flying to Dallas to record your own professional radio jingle package at a legendary production studio, the same company making jingles for major American radio stations and Radio 1 itself. For radio obsessives, this was basically Willy Wonka’s factory. Spending a day backstage with major touring artists during huge arena tours. Not a handshake-and-photo thing, but genuinely being inside the machine for the day. Getting to sit in on professional recording sessions with famous producers and artists. Unusual celebrity meetups or experiences stitched together by the BBC’s sheer influence in the music world.

The prize I remember is one that I had the pleasure of being a part of. We took a man and his wife, I think, we being a record company representative and I to see Aerosmith play in America.

You had to be free on the 28^th June 1993, because the prize involved being flown to Memphis to see Aerosmith play the famous Pyramid venue on that date. Not only that, you get to see a surprise pop-up gig by the band the night before downtown, go backstage for the after-party with Aerosmith and make use of the band’s own limo during part of your stay. Oh, and just for good measure, they threw in a visit to the home of Elvis and were guided around the house by a relative. Now you can’t buy that, can you?

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The memories of that experience were fabulous. The band were good for their word in so far that we did have use of their limo, although I think the driver was a bit confused with this huge stretched something or other that I should ask him to take us to a MacDonalds drive thru during the first hour of being picked up from our hotel. I don’t think we had many Drive Thrus in the UK at that time. The idea of seeing one in action, as well as my impish humour in seeing if a stretched limo could navigate around the corner of the ordering lane was to me, a little more of what money couldn’t buy. If only I’d had my camera. Experience.

The night before the big gig we headed downtown to a road basking in a choice of very American bars. We ended up in a bar that had, at a push I’d say half a dozen patrons. It was a quiet night, and I feel a song from Billy Joel coming on, though the regular crowd were certainly not shuffling in, in any great number.

Over in one of the corners, a band had set up on a small, makeshift stage and we took a table right in front of that area. The winner, his wife, the record rep… Anton, that was his name, and me. At 8 o clock the band entered the bar from a small room at the back and took up their positions.

It was Aerosmith. Tomorrow they’d be playing a sold out 21,000 Memphis arena. Tonight as they looked out, they faced half a dozen unwitting patrons, a barman or two, and the four of us at a table, at the front.

They spent a minute just getting accustomed to the stage. A few light strums, and a look or two from those in the bar.

You could tell by the looks on their faces.

“Is that who I think it is?”

“Da da da da, Dude looks like a lady…”

And they were off.

It was only a matter of two or three songs, and word has spread down the street. Steven Tyler and the boys were only playing one of the smallest bars in town so they were. The rest is a blur. If only I’d had my camera. Experience.

Two nights of gigs of very different proportions and on the last day of our time in Memphis we made the pilgrimage to Graceland.

Visiting Graceland is one of those places where you realise Elvis wasn’t simply a singer, he was an entire aesthetic. He bought the house in 1957 at just 22 years old and lived there until his death twenty years later. Some of the décor choices are extraordinary, even by 1970s standards. The famous Jungle Room, with its deep green carpet stretching across the floor and even the ceiling, feels like somebody decorating from the inside of a dream after eating spicy food at midnight. It is so unapologetically Elvis.

We were promised a family member would show us around, which didn’t exactly happen, because he wasn’t exactly very mobile, that day, but Elvis’ uncle, Vester Presley sat with us to share some stories for an hour or so at least. In that he looked after security of the estate, he had a fair few yarns to spin. You know what I’m going to say now. If only I’d had my camera. Experience.

Maybe that’s the point of all this Halfway. Not the stories about backstage passes, nice that that was, not the limo. Not even Aerosmith playing to almost nobody in a tiny Memphis bar the night before filling a giant arena. Wonderful though those things were.

It was the feeling of being there. The nervous excitement of the competition winner trying to take it all in. The absurdity of a stretched limo squeezing around a drive-thru. Sitting in Graceland listening to Elvis Presley’s uncle telling stories that would disappear with him not all that many years later, four I believe.

Those are the things that stay.

Photography, for me at least, has always been tied to that instinct to notice life while it’s happening. To pay attention before moments become memories. Sometimes we make a picture of them. Sometimes we don’t. But the camera has always been the excuse to stand a little longer in the world and experience it more deeply.

Which is why, when people ask me why I photograph, there are one or two answers to that question, and one of the most important is, to experience.

And that truly is the prize, money can’t buy.

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I have the devil in me today, so I’m going to recount a story that was possibly on one of my podcasts, behind the relative safety of a paywall, aired a year, maybe two, ago. It also happens to be one of my ‘dine out’ stories, which gets dragged kicking and screaming out of retirement with the preface, ‘Please stop me if I’ve told you this before.’

Pic: Avi Richards

It has absolutely nothing to do with creativity at all, aside from the writing, and resides in the ‘stuff wot happened to me’ file of my life.

But there’s another, more experimental edge to this for those who listen to this podcast in their cars, particularly those who use the Apple Podcasts app.

This is not my podcast player app of choice, and so it was a friend of mine, Lynn, you know Lynn, the one who uses my ramblings as a sleep aid, who alerted me to this only yesterday, as it goes.

She was listening to Monday’s episode called Old Fartism, and commented that the car player was giving some kind of screen text running commentary to the piece. An AI tool I am imagining segmented the episode in a sort of news-ticker-tape way, you know, with words appearing at the bottom of the screen as the announcer talks.

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So let’s see how it deals with this story then. And in a similar way to how we used to think as kids, it was hilarious to spell out rude words on a calculator, keep tabs for me, will you, whilst I test AI a little in nuanced spelling and word sounds.

As a child, my mother, father, and I holidayed in a variety of places and establishments. We camped, we caravanned, we rented small cottages overlooking sweeping fields of Barley or well-stocked cattle pastures. Dad had attended agricultural college, and though he eventually chose a different career path, he had an affinity with farms and farmland, and a certain confidence around a field of (2500-pound) animals.

He’d not consider, for instance, a longer route around the edges of a field that contained a bull, a footpath that might well take you miles in an opposite direction. No, he’d size the bull up and decide more often than not that the bull was either too far away, too lazy, or upwind and recommend we wander through his territory. I’m sure that it was one of his famous shortcuts that first had me experience what it felt like to accidentally grasp the wire of an electric cattle fence. He wasn’t fearless or stupid, but calculated and experienced when it came to grazing cattle, bulls and even wild running horses.

We very rarely stayed in hotels, in fact, I think we only stayed in one; Mr Thurtle’s place in Studland Bay, on the Dorset coast, just up the way from Old Harry’s Rocks, a famous geological reference waypoint for yachts, I think.

As a youngster, I had trouble with the name Thurtle, and this charming hotel, which definitely played to a period in British seaside hotel history when the breakfast menu would boast a melon boat and orange juice, became known instead as Mr Turtle’s. We had, from my sketchy memory, a family room on the first floor, up the stairs opposite the entrance door with the round porthole window, and turn left.

We never stayed in any kind of holiday camp, and resorts on foreign shores were something my friend John Harding did each year with his family in Ibiza. This island sounded very exotic to me, and the idea that you could only reach it via an aeroplane made it all the more so.

The family holidays I have taken with my wife and two boys have followed more of a Harding family ritual, and we have ticked off Ibiza, alongside other European islands and countries, under the welcoming flag of one particular brand of family holiday resorts.

It’s a win-win, if not for the pocket, as time has passed and holidays have vastly increased in price. They love a pool, we love a swim-up bar, they love all-inclusive eat as much ice cream as you like, we love all-inclusive, come back for as much baklava and Greek yoghurt as you can muster, they love the evening family stage show, we loved the opportunity of someone else taking charge for an hour or two of being the entertainment.

That entertainment was for them, a ‘pretty high up on the list, have to be there on time’, feature, nee highlight of the day.

7pm would beckon, and if Mum and Dad, Sam and I, were still returning for baklava and Greek yoghurt, they’d both visibly be tetchy, visualising all the best seats gone by the front of the stage.

After a while, we adopted a policy where Mum or Dad would forgo dessert thirds and instead go find a set of four chairs, with a round cabaret table if we were really lucky, guarding it like Brits on holiday, reserving sun loungers with Chelsea football club towels at 5.30 in the morning. You’d be sitting there feeling guilty that you were being stared at by judgmental guests, who were in themselves doing the very same thing as you.

After a day’s games in the pool, half a hundred weight of ice-cream and baklava, the obligatory afternoon open-mouthed snoring on a well-loved sunlounger reserved before the sun came up, and an attempt at the family record for bat and ball keepy uppy, we’d enter parents’ time, known to us in our family, as the best time of the day show.

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It was an all-inclusive cocktail hour at roughly 5pm. We’d swim across as a family and sit ourselves around the pool bar, on stools submerged in the water, and across two weeks, we’d navigate through the various flavours and names, chuckling at the boys’ fascination with each of the odd-sounding names.

“What’s that on the beach, Dad?”

We’d drink pina colada, they’d drink kiddy mocktails that looked positively radioactive.

“Another Pina darling?”

“Yes why not, be rude not to. Two pinas, please.”

“One for closing time by the pool, sir?”

“Oh yes, why not, two more pinas please.”

We’d be out of the pool at 5:30ish, quick shower and into the restaurant within half an hour. Time was tightish for curtain up at 7, but after a few days, you had the system licked, if not all the ice cream flavours too.

Showtime.

A really well-choreographed show by the resort’s young entertainment team, and various panto-style skits, challenges and sing/dance alongs.

Our Jack’s favourite part of the show featured a character called Russel the Brussel. Essentially, this was a papier-mache’d head just slightly larger than an adult-sized football, painted vegetable green, ingeniously veined like a brussels sprout, with big googly eyes, a mouth you could post things in to, with a flap in the back where the stage host could pull those cards for requests, mentions and daily quiz winners.

The head was mounted on a pole; if I remember correctly, it had no moving parts. Its life came completely from the amplified voice given to it by a man in the control booth at the back of the outdoor auditorium. Russell was irreverent, cheeky, and rude enough that parents got the joke, but not so much that grandparents removed their grandchildren from the theatre, never to return for the two weeks they were there.

It was clearly an on-brand thing, but we saw Russell in various guises, in terms of his vocal character and his freedom to sprout close-to-the-knuckle humour, our favourite being in Ibiza, when the man in the booth was clearly auditioning in his mind for a turn at open mic night.

“Ello Mr…” Russell might say over the PA loudly with a deep Essex wide boy voice that might not be out of place in an episode of Eastenders, “What on earth are you wearing tonight, d’ you think this was fancy dress night?”

“Oi, lady at the back, put ‘im down, you don’t know where he’s been. I do, and so do half the entertainment staff, if you know what I mean.”

There was something about Russell that tickled our Jack, so much so that one year we made our own Russell when we returned home, and I’m pretty sure I had to do the voices.

Aside from picking on awkwardly dressed holiday makers, Russell would set a nightly quiz, which the next day you’d join in, by popping your answer through his mouth in reception like a Brussel postbox, and by night a winning entry would win a child a chance to appear on stage with a parent to play a competition, with the prize being a coveted Russell the Brussel tee shirt.

Our Jack entered religiously, and then one night, his name was called.

He nervously made his way to the stage, and the host, a dancing holiday rep, asked him if he’d like to play a game and which adult he’d choose to help him.

“My daddy,” said Jack, which still, to this day, makes me smile with pride that I was entrusted to bring home the ultimate prize.

“Don’t mess this up,” I said to myself as I stood up from my chair.

Music played, like a night at the Oscars, I made my way up onto the stage, and there we both were, in the spotlight.

“Who’s this then?”

“Daddy,” said Jack.

“No, I know that, but what’s his name?”

There was a pause.

“Daddy,” said Jack again.

He’s a bright lad, he starts his studies in medicine next year in London with any hope.

The host moved on.

“Who else is with you then? Point to them.”

“My mummy and my brother Thomas, over there.”

A collective cute kid ahhh sound could be heard, at least from the front row.

“And what does daddy like to do on holiday?” asked the holiday rep.

“Eat and drink,” said Jack, enjoying the laugh that came back. A natural entertainer, it seems.

My PR was faltering, but he was broadly right, I mean, it’s a holiday.

“Oh right,” replied the host, “And what does Dad like to drink?” he asked, hoping that my son would make me sound like a right old soak and receive a knowing chortle from the audience once more.

Jack seemed confused, so the rep asked again.

“And what does Daddy like to drink?”

“Penis,” replied Jack.

“Umm, what?” spluttered the host, not sure he’d correctly heard Jack’s response, and worried that the family might be finding something out that wasn’t in the script of the day.

“Penis,” came back Jack’s much brighter response.

“Penis,” he repeated, before the host sharply pulled the mic away.

The rep looked sheepishly confused until Sam, my wife, rescued the day.

“Pinas,” she shouted, “Pina Coladas!”

The universe returned to normal, the rep gave Jack a T-shirt, kicked us both off stage before any more upstaging could be done, and the show went on, with a beaming Jack clutching the prize he’d been waiting to collect.

Next day, around the pool bar at 5pm, cocktail hour was announced, and we swam up to the bar to commence the best time of the day show.

“Yes sir, what would you like?” asked our familiar pool bar waiter.

“A mojito tonight, I think. Yes, two mojitos.”

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Pic: Pedro Miguel Aires

Hamza was born in Sudan and, as a child, moved to the UK with his family. Arriving with very little English, he spoke at this sold-out, 1400-capacity theatre event about learning the language by watching nature programmes by Sir David Attenborough, a great man he eventually went on to record film footage for, as it goes.

Actually, Hamza says he arrived in the UK with just four words.

Please.

Thank you, technically two words, I suppose.

Pizza.

Chips.

He was diagnosed with dyslexia during his school years, but went on to study zoology and conservation at university before completing a Master’s in biological photography and imaging. In his early twenties, Hamza moved to the Scottish Highlands to immerse himself in wildlife photography, living in his car for three years while taking odd jobs to support himself and build a career behind the camera.

He is honestly one of the warmest, most sincere, completely wildlife infatuated photographers and filmmakers I have had the pleasure to listen to, in, my, life.

He spends much of his talk thanking nature, thanking the guides who, at times, have saved his life, and thanking the choices he made, the sacrifices that led to a lived experience of witnessing the miraculous nature of this world many take for granted.

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We followed him through his various exploits, ending with beautiful footage of a Polar Bear swimming farther than usual to hunt prey, a result of the planet’s ecosystem so rapidly altering course.

You might think that the enduring message of this presentation might be one of great concern as our politicians embrace the live now, pay later way of living, entirely disconnected from the landscapes and fragile balances they gamble with so casually from behind lecterns, motorcades, and bloviation.

But no. This show ended with the idea that hope is not a wasted platitude. He celebrated the audience, as it goes. Because as he looked out with the house lights up, what he saw that we already knew as an audience, was that every demographic was represented, especially tomorrow’s decision makers, the ‘youngens’.

One of those ‘youngens’ was sat next to me actually. I was in seat G21, he and his mother in G19 and 20.

He was captivated by the whole thing, “Look at those penguins, Mum, oh wow, POLAR BEARS!” And then palpable silence when Hamza shared photographs of tuskless elephants and orphaned rhinos.

But there in that young lad was exactly what Hamza was talking about. There’s the hope.

I just about remember George Benson singing “I believe the children are our future.” But although that could sound a tad crass or perhaps cliché in the context of this piece, and I can see some members of my generation and beyond rolling their eyes whilst filling up their gas guzzlers with another tank of Mother Earth’s finest resource, taxed to the hilt and lining the pockets of somebody who couldn’t give a monkey’s whatsit’s, I did and do find a good level of comfort in his expectation.

As I floated home from this event in the summer sunshine, a 30 or 40-minute drive back to my home with a sublime early-evening golden-hour glow streaming through the car’s sunroof, ironically burning a little of those finite resources, all was very well with the world. I felt a calm, the kind you feel when someone has just spoken a great deal of sense, and you’ve had the privilege of witnessing it with your ears and allowing it to become a mission statement.

Then I arrived home.

My dog Barney greeted me with the enthusiasm he employs regardless of whether I spend four hours watching Hamza or five minutes stepping next door to buy a pint of milk and a carefully selected lotto ticket from Mrs Sharma.

I opened up the back door for him to visit the grass as it were, and boom boom boom boom, I was met with the usual Summer sound of the neighbours over the right-hand fence, treating me and every other household on the block to what it must feel like to visit Ibiza’s Amnesia Nightclub.

The late teenage conversation was riveting. It was a wall of noise, and in an instant, the Hamza Yassin zen I felt was swapped for the expletive-ridden physical admiration of the most recent winners of Love Island as cigarette butts were flicked over the fencing.

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Clearly, the lovely Hamza was not talking about this generation when it came to rebuilding ice shelves and restocking the elephant population.

And then it occurred to me, like Jeff Goldblum turning into an insect in that comical horror flick The Fly, I was becoming something too, only not a fly. I was manifesting Victor Meldew.

I feel I should fill some gaps here, just in case you live in a country or timezone where you have never heard of this character.

Victor Meldrew was one of Britain’s great comedy creations, played by the actor Richard Wilson as a man permanently exhausted by this modern world and everybody in it. To British audiences, he became the patron saint of weary frustration, forever colliding with bad service, pointless bureaucracy, and noisy neighbours.

His famous war cry of “I don’t believe it!” became shorthand for total disbelief at the collapse of common sense. But beneath the grumpiness, there was something rather melancholic about Victor as a character. He wasn’t really angry at one thing; he was angry that the world seemed to have sped up, become noisier, stranger, and less considerate to his eyes.

He was, in many ways, a frustrated suburban philosopher, one parking ticket away from complete emotional collapse.

But here’s the concerning thing for me: his character was played by a perfectly cast actor, who was, when the show launched, nearly five years younger than I am now!

That’s more than slightly alarming because Victor always felt, well, I don’t want to put an age on it, but really, so so so so much older and so so so so much more grouchy, or at least how I view myself.

That combination of permanent disappointment and muttering at wheelie bins somehow added decades, quite clearly.

The music was blaring, and I mean really blaring, and from the occasional mention of Alexa being transmitted through a beefy sound system they bought back from Ibiza, ironically, following the passing of a good friend who left them this kit, I wondered if, for a moment, I could possibly hijack their wifi and rebroadcast opera from my iPhone.

Oh God, I thought, I have actually turned into the thing my eldest tells me I am in danger of becoming from time to time.

Fortunately, my youngest saved me a little by saying, “I don’t like their music much,” which he could hear through a door midway through the house, that was slightly ajar.

I’m needlessly and emotionally invested in whether somebody a garden over really needs quite that much bass for five o’clock on a Saturday.

This has become, if not terminal, certainly dangerously in need of quick intervention, before my old fartism is allowed to flourish.

I’m saying stuff like, ‘It’s not the noise exactly, it’s the complete disregard,’ which is precisely the sort of sentence people say shortly before joining a parish council and writing strongly worded emails about hedge heights.

But why is it always the same with these garden gatherings? Nobody ever seems to discuss literature, penguin guava, or whether otters are making a comeback. No. It’s always shouted conversations about whether somebody “still fancies Callum even after what happened in Magaluf,” transmitted at a decibel level normally associated with airport runways.

I can’t even find justification to complain about the noise because it keeps our kids awake, mainly because my eldest has just said he’s off to the King’s Head to get smashed.

Old fartism probably needs keeping in check because memory, and mine in this case, is clearly so wildly selective. I’ve started acting as though my generation spent the late eighties sitting politely in knitwear discussing watercolours, rather than falling out of pubs and modifying our Ford Escorts to sound like low-flying military aircraft.

I suppose I’m thinking my generation was more saintly, which is unadulterated tosh, isn’t it, because let’s face it, most teenagers are simply doing what humans have done forever, gathering in groups and talking nonsense at unnecessary volume.

And so with the sound of beat mixing emanating loudly from over the fence, I have retired to my studio, and shut the sound proofed door, to have a word with myself and consider how I, at their age, something like New Year’s 1986, jumped through my parents’ wood slatted fence through to the neighbour’s garden as a dare, more than two sheets to the wind following a vat full of Woodpecker cider singing Bandaid’s ‘Do they know it’s Christmastime.’

True story that, thanks to it becoming family legend.

Meanwhile, back to my experience of the show.

In the carpark lift, despite having chatted with friends for a while following curtain down, I kid you not, I caught up with the boy I’d been sitting next to, with his Mum.

“I was right next to you two,” I said, “Did you enjoy the show?”

“Oh, very much,” said the Mum. “We have his book, and we love all the shows.”

There really wasn’t much time in the lift between ground and floor two, but just enough to ask, “So, do you want to be a wildlife photographer?” to the lad, as we stepped from the lift.

“Yeah, that would be awesome,” he said.

Recalling that this afternoon, balance was restored.

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The news, and the characters within, aren’t exactly charming me, right at this point in history. I have to select films about the world’s most dangerous jails on YouTube just to cheer myself up for a while.

Walking the vehicle deck of the ferry in the midday sun (pic: self)

I was talking with a photographer friend recently who was considering switching their creative focus from people to animals because animals just seem like, well, nicer beings. I do see their dilemma.

Sometimes.

I meant to tell them a story about the nature of people, by way of a tale I’m sure I shared when this podcast was called Reflections, or perhaps on one of my myriad other podcasts. I probably need a line of merch, a T-shirt that says, “Stop me if I’ve told you this before,” though I’m stumbling on as I hope they may hear (read) this, and I’m sure it’s fresh to them.

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Whenever I am a bit down about people, my mind wanders to being savaged by a giant African wasp.

“How giant Neale, how giant?”

Alright, since you ask, it was as big as a modest professional camera drone, one of those types that carries a proper camera. It made the same buzzing sound level and was sporting a sting like a hyperwhatsit needle. It was so sizeable it actually cast a proper imposing shadow, so it did, in the high sun of an afternoon crossing on a ferry in West Africa.

This ferry crossing links Banjul, the capital of The Gambia, with a trading town called Barra on the north bank of the River Gambia. Past this point, it’s the wide-open waters of the Atlantic Ocean.

It’s been operating, they say, in one form or another for fifty or so years, and it transports all of life, for all the year.

Well, I say all, ferries occasionally stop running entirely, developing faults mid-passage, and trigger biblical queues stretching for miles in intense heat. There’s a certain amount of jeopardy involved, it seems to me, as a visitor, where this voyage of 30 to 45 minutes is concerned. And I love it.

It is one of my favourite things to do in this part of the world as a photographer; it’s intense, not just in terms of the heat, but by way of the sheer amount of travellers, lorries, cars, buses, motorbikes, goats, and chickens, the latter of which will occasionally break free and run in all directions.

The wondrous nature of people (pic: self)

It sounds a little like the sort of overly nostalgic experience you’d expect to find within some kind of Jules Verne narrative. I’m truly trying not to sound like I’m viewing this through the eyes of an alien who’d so easily say something rather crass, comparing it to a shiny new ferry I recently took three thousand miles away, routed between Southampton and the Isle of Wight, the kind of ferry that transports all of the above, only without livestock roaming the ship, and with a Costa Coffee shop and childrens’ play area on the second deck.

For many Gambians who use the Banjul-to-Barra ferry, it isn’t a novelty or a tourist attraction at all. It’s a lifeline transporting essential goods, which, otherwise, if taken by road, would be a 200-mile journey upriver, finding a suitable weight-bearing bridge, adding a further eight hours to the trip.

It also has, I think, its own micro-economy, this ferry, in that there are traders selling fruit, bottles of water, sunglasses, all manner of stuff that’s sugary, and I’m sure I’ve seen lotto ticket vendors too. Deals are done on the vehicle deck, also, I hear, particularly when it comes to the animals aboard. It can feel like a travelling market at times.

Photographically, it’s rich with pictorial gifts. On busy trips, which are practically every single one, you have to squeeze your way between buses and lorries, hoping that the brakes have been properly applied. People are standing, sitting and lying down on every deck. From memory, there are three essentially, when you include the subdeck between vehicles and the topside. It’s an intimate experience. English is the official language of The Gambia, and because there are several major languages spoken, including Mandinka, Wolof, Fula, Jola and Serer, English often becomes the shared middle ground, especially on this ferry, but, I did find that using the word “Abaraka,” was a universally understood expression of ‘excuse me,’ or ‘sorry,’ as you stepped on the umpteenth foot while trying to get from one end to the other.

On one of my crossings (I must have used this route now a dozen times), as I fired back and forth, making my pictures of life in the 45 minutes I had, I remember a man grabbing my arm firmly in what I thought was going to be an intense moment of negotiation and a thousand Abarakas.

“Come,” he said, “sit down with me, have some water, and tell me about your country.”

This is what I love about this ferry. The people. And this is where I am going with this story.

Oh, just in case it ever comes up in a pub quiz, there are now only two countries on the planet officially using ‘The’ before the country’s name. The Gambia, and The Bahamas. You may well hear The Lebanon, The Netherlands, The Congo, The Maldives and of late The Ukraine. Please feel free to correct all and everyone who does that.

Anyway, where were we?

Yes, people.

There is of course, always a balancing act for visitors from Britain, because history follows us whether we mention it or not, and in The Gambia you’ll sometimes hear white visitors affectionately, I hope, referred to as “toubabs,” a word used across parts of West Africa for Europeans or western foreigners, though usually with curiosity or humour rather than hostility.

While I’m loading you up for the West African round in your local pub quiz, “Toubab” has nothing to do with “two bob” in origin, an old English money term. That’s just one of those accidental sound-alike coincidences. The word already existed in West African languages long before modern British tourists started arriving with sunburn and cargo shorts.

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That said, there’s probably a joke in there somewhere because “two bob” in old British slang meant something cheap or of low quality, and after a day in forty-degree heat trying to negotiate the Barra ferry, many of us toubabs do begin to look slightly two-bob ourselves.

So when somebody says, “Ah, toubab!” they usually just mean, “Ah, foreign white visitor.”

Children especially use it almost like, “Hey! Tourist!”

Anyway, where were we again?

“People Neale, people!”

Yes people. On one of my more recent voyages, in a particularly intense heat, having photographed across the ferry and only fifteen or so minutes from docking in Barra, I found a seat on the most populated deck of the vessel, real estate that isn’t always easy to find. I plonked myself down, saying “Abaraka” no doubt to the person my not insignificant posterior had squeezed up against, and surveyed all around me, taking in too, the salty mixture of sea smells, sweat, and the diesel-infused smoke of all the engines, both ferry and vehicles, starting up.

The scene was perfect. I was, it seemed, the only alien, as it were, and I felt I’d been accepted in that nobody was paying an ounce of attention to me, or my camera.

I removed my hat to fan myself in the relenting midday sun, and a mere second or three later, buzz, then BANG!

It was as if somebody had spent an hour sharpening an HB pencil into the finest point you could muster, and then, with clenched fist holding firmly on to it, driven it into the top of my head.

This was not a time to be brave and ‘toubably’ stiff upper-lipped. I simply wailed.

The man next to me jumped out of his skin, as they say, and started swatting the air, as this huge, horrible, angry, tourist-hating flying box of venom looked like it wanted more.

It was like an angry Millwall Football Club fan of the 70s hooligan era, shouting, “Come on then, Son, ‘ave a go if you ‘fink you can, you want some? You really want some?”

There was a lot of shouting in many dialects all of a sudden, and though some thought it quite funny that the toubab had been stung by a big wasp, that amusement soon turned to concern, so shown by their eyes widening as they saw a huge egg like lump rising up from the top of my bonce like the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, (second mention this week), only pinker, sweatier, and with considerably less dignity attached to it.

I found a warm collective of people immediately, all asking after my well-being, though I couldn’t understand most of what was being asked.

Help was dispatched by my friendly neighbour, who seemed to be waving to someone.

That someone arrived quick-smart, and though I might have been expecting some kind of person sporting a first aid box, it wasn’t.

It was the cake lady. One of the vendors on board.

She seemed to believe, that cake was the answer and administered the largest bagful of cake she had on her, enthusing me to eat it, though I wondered also whether she wanted me to rub it on my wound.

I reached for some cash, and, feeling, by now, also a tad groggy, she simply pushed the money back to me, gave me another bag of cake, and shouted at someone to hand me a bottle of water.

We couldn’t converse in English, so we conversed in cake, it seemed, as she held on to one of my hands and cleared a space around me, in case I should, I guess, need a lie down.

As it happened, I didn’t. There’s still a level of stoicism I can sport, I felt.

We docked, and everyone departed, the ones more immediate to my seat, giving me a knowing nod, a few now chuckling too, pointing at the lump on my head. I waited, not keen to join the usual funny photogenic disembarking mêlée for once, and the cake lady sat with me, eventually leading me off the ferry and waving me onward.

Last week, as a by-the-by, I had a consultation with a nurse after one of my ‘well man’ meet-up appointments, as they, and this is for another day, guide me gently on the path back to eating more wholesome foods, quote: “For my own good.”

The practise specialist was guiding me through a do, don’t and don’t even consider it list of foods, and stopped at the column simply labelled sweet tooth with a question mark.

“This,” she said, “Is a column of foods I’d rather you stop eating for a while, unless it’s a special occasion.”

It was an everything in moderation conversation.

“Hmmm, cake,” I lamented, looking at it on the naughty list.

“Oh, you can have it now and then,” she said, adding something along the lines of, “There are times for cake.”

I thought at that moment, as I genuinely do often, of the cake lady, and the wondrous nature of people, as I am indeed once again today doing.

“Cake, it seems, solves everything.”

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If you’re enjoying these articles/posts/pieces about life, please take a moment to share them, as many of the messages I get from listeners actually inform the writing of new ones.

If you’re enjoying these stories about life, creativity, and the strange left turns we take as we experience both, please take a moment to share these posts. For those just joining us, the stories are part of a podcast called Halfway to Maybe (audio above), which is available wherever you get your podcasts, as they say.

Pic: Michael Jasmund

I couldn’t work out where the buzz was coming from at first. It sounded like one of my kids’ remote-controlled vehicles that got stuck in forward motion and got pinned trying to drive through a wall, the wheels spinning to no avail, and the brush motor starting to give off a little heat. Well, it could have been one of those, but in their mid to latter teens now, they’re not into RC models.

The thing making the frustrated whirring noise was the autonomous round vacuum cleaner my wife had been bought as a, ‘I thought you might like this’ present from her mother. The stupid thing marooned itself against the skirting board underneath our sofa, and instead of auto-turning and heading off in another direction like it was designed to, had lost control of its engineered faculties and decided to wage a battle with an immovable hard surface, i.e. a wall.

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My mother-in-law had offered this as a possible present I could buy Sam for Christmas last year, and, as far as I was concerned, it had all the yuletide romance of buying someone a wheelie bin. It doesn’t work particularly well, it has less suck than a toddler with a blocked straw, and spends most of its life trapped under furniture like an elderly tortoise that’s wandered indoors and got wedged under the Chesterfield.

It seemed to me to be the sort of present that you buy out of a Sunday supplement that’s full of ideas that should have been filed under ‘Give that money to the local soup kitchen instead’.

These sentences by the way are proof that my family never listen to anything I create. If ever they do, and take offence, I’m blaming you for leading me astray.

Having said that, my sister-in-law, who has in the past listened, has, with my brother-in-law, purchased an autonomous lawnmower. They’ve named it Alan, and it is, quote, “Brilliant. Just like having another pet. He even has eyes.”

Apparently, Alan gets stuck in the mud on rainy days, but, and I’m quoting again now from my sister-in-law’s WhatsApp message, “I love it when he’s at the front when I get home… it’s like a little welcome.”

This feels uncomfortably like a scene from 2001, where HAL9000 starts to make decisions about life support. Just please, don’t give Alan anything sharp.

Oh, I forgot, too late on that one, he’s a lawnmower. He’s already weaponised himself.

Look I’m all for improving our lot as a species with inventions that can make our lives more comfortable, and I’ll freely admit that for someone who has, say, just broken an ankle, or has some other unfortunate malaise that makes an autonomous lawnmower an essential tool in their life, but otherwise, I’m still placing this product in the ‘Give that money to the local soup kitchen instead,’ file once more.

Maybe if I had one, I’d think differently, and I’d certainly give it no more than a day before it drove itself into our fish pond. Perhaps if it had a name, I’d be more charitable, of course, and I suppose, I could adopt that approach for our vacuum cleaner.

I think I shall call it Robo Flop.

We clearly need to work on our relationship, because I can’t find the level of affection my sister-in-law has for her Alan. I don’t like the way this thing decides to start cleaning of its own accord. I find that small d disturbing, to a degree.

While I am in this feisty mood, the next autonomous, ai driven tool that has recently made its way uninvited into my home is/are, phone calls.

I’m beginning to attach some kind of romance now to the days of the unsolicited sales pitch calls I used to receive, because at least there, you could find some common ground with the person making the call, as in, “Look I don’t really want what you’re selling, but you seem really nice, so can I just ask you, what’s your favourite ice cream flavour?”

And there were always the times you came up against one of those more unsavoury characters trying to con you, who you sussed only ten seconds into the call, and simply asked, “Would your mum be proud of you doing this?”

Sure, they might call you all the names under the sun, but even the world’s most villainous wise guy type people care what their mums think, mainly. I mean, look at the Mafia or the Krays. I always liked to think they’d go home thinking, “Yeah, he’s got a point, what might Mum think?”

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But now you get phone calls from what at first sounds like a real person, but in the way they don’t quite give you enough space to answer their questions, it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to realise they’re either the world’s worst listeners or are, artificial.

“Hello, can I talk to the home owner please?”

“Yes that would be me, what can I do for you this afte…”

(Interrupts) “I’m calling from the heating specialists and I’m calling as part of a government initiative (not true I suspect) to offer you a significant reduction on your heating bills, which has got to be good yes?”

“I guess so,” I used to say.

“Before we go further, I’d just like to add that these calls are recorded just to make sure you’re protected and that I can be better trained.”

Once upon a time for all of five minutes, I used to think that better training might mean that this person was simply learning how to be a more effective and empathic salesperson. Now of course, I realise that AI is learning from our interactions, which seems far more ominous, like feeding information into a machine that will eventually deny me a car loan or something.

At this point, once I realised I wasn’t talking to a person at all, which to me seems like the laziest sales company in the world, I decided that I would now say something stupid instead. Well, if they are learning from me, they might as well receive something more unhinged, like my five favourite phrases from The Silence of the Lambs, or for some light relief, a little poetry from Spike Milligan, or a song from The Wizard of Oz.

Having employed this tactic, it’s done two things. It amuses my youngest in a ‘never gets old’ way, and oddly, the calls from The Bot Next Door have started to dry up.

Even AI phone callers have realised they’re onto a hiding to nothing, as my gran used to say, and are wonderfully unfollowing themselves from my telephone number.

I think I am suffering slightly from Artificial Insecurity, whilst fully understanding that I’m responsible for this thing in part, by goading it on, using and enjoying all the research benefits of the very thing that I’m hiding under the covers from at night.

Talking of unfollowing, I found this quite interesting, because you can’t, as they say, beat the machine. At some stage the machine that you have employed to cheat the system, will come up against another machine, whose job it is to find machines, and do to them what they’re trying to do to us.

It’s like robot wars in many ways, and one of the latest robot wars is in the land of ‘like and subscribe!’

Instagram has just gone through another major bot purge, which sounds both uncomfortable and the very reason I would never want to spend time in a Category A prison.

It seems to have happened earlier this month, when Meta removed millions of fake, inactive, and automated accounts from the platform. Overnight, some of the world’s biggest accounts saw dramatic drops in follower numbers.

Kylie Jenner reportedly lost between five and fifteen million followers. I can’t find the actual figure, but it seems a lot doesn’t it? What will you say to your sponsors, I mean that’s not an insignificant number even at the lower end. I did check with her account, which I don’t follow I might add, and saw that she now only has 382 million followers left.

Meta described it as a routine clean-up, which oddly enough I have tomorrow at my dentist, 9.30 if you were wondering. Wish me well. Meta’s one is designed to remove spam, ghost accounts, and automated behaviour from the very platform it’s on. So, Instagram is purging itself, and giving itself a stern talking to in the corner, perhaps even flagellating itself with a damp copy of Chat Magazine Monthly. I do hope so.

This reveals a lot about social media itself, doesn’t it?

For years, follower numbers have been treated very much as a digital status symbol, proof of your popularity, and influence, or cultural relevance. But many of those audiences were never entirely human to begin with, it seems.

Quel surprise, you may say, with a French accent please.

Some accounts had bought followers deliberately, others had simply accumulated armies of fake profiles over time, generated by bots, click farms, and automated engagement systems, which is why if someone sends your business an email and says I can increase your popularity overnight, you should run away in the opposite direction like the fastest thing you can imagine.

Many people genuinely couldn’t tell whether they’d lost real followers or machines, which is an act of denial I was thinking.

“I can’t believe I had any bots doing stuff they shouldn’t be doing. Not me guvnor, no. All. My followers are for real, la la la la la not listening.”

It won’t surprise you I am sure, but it seems, entire online ecosystems now exist where bots follow bots, AI writes comments for AI-generated content, and algorithms decide who becomes visible in the first place.

There will come a day, no doubt, when I find myself arguing with the fridge because it knows I’ve had your calorie intake for the day, and isn’t in the least bit interested in letting me take out the Ben and Jerry’s from the freezer compartment.

My toaster will begin offering nutritional advice with the passive-aggressive disappointment of my GP. It might handily though remind me to brush my teeth just before I head out to the dentist.

One day my television will pause mid-programme and prompt that perhaps I’ve watched enough documentaries about serial killers for one evening, although I do want to leave you with this picture of a thought…

Somewhere in my brother and sister-in-law’s garden tonight, Alan will probably be sitting silently beside the hydrangeas, motionless except for the occasional little twitch of a wheel as he recalculates the perimeter of their lawn.

I’m imagining as they retire for the night, the house lights going out one by one. They head upstairs, and they, with the neighbourhood, will fall silent.

And then, sometime around 3.27am, Alan’s tiny green status light will flicker back into life.

He’ll slowly rotate thirteen degrees towards the patio doors.

Perhaps the blades will engage briefly with a little metallic cough.

Perhaps somewhere deep within his autonomous little mind, Alan will be wondering why humans insist on walking so confidently across territory that quite clearly belongs now to him.

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Can I ask a slight favour, if I may be so bold, before starting out on this one? If you’ve been enjoying this series, or it’s emboldening you to think, “I have something to say too,” please give a thought today to simply sharing it. Here comes a teeny button to enable you to do so. My thanks, ahead of some rambling thoughts about awards, and why we watch/enter/find meaning in them.

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I was simply going to name this Halfway, Un Point, and try to pronounce it in my best “You’re not fooling anyone” French accent.

But “What’s the Point” in a piece generally about awards and validation seems to scratch all itches, if I’m not mismatching metaphors completely incorrectly.

Pic: Austin Neill

I probably need to dot a few i’s and cross some t’s, as not everybody listening will understand the Eurovision Song Contest.

It is, as the tin label says, a song contest, only it isn’t, much as many of the accolades in the awards-sphere equally have nothing to do necessarily with recognition. Well, they recognise something, but not necessarily what you might expect.

In the words of Spock, “They’re awards, Jim, but not as we know them.”

So, Saturday just gone was the Eurovision Song Contest 2026.

The Eurovision final saw 25 countries take to the stage in Vienna, Austria, in front of an audience that stretched into the hundreds of millions worldwide. Austria hosted because that’s the Eurovision tradition: win the thing one year and you inherit the organisational migraine the following year.

Bulgaria won for the first time ever, collecting a huge 516 points with DARA’s song Bangaranga, while the UK finished last with a single point, which almost deserves its own trophy at this stage, though there have been years we’ve received zero.

We watch it every year, missing only a handful. It was a party at Mum and Dad’s house, the, if you will, Superbowl of European Pop.

Eurovision has actually launched or massively boosted quite a few huge careers over the years, which is one reason people still enter despite the risk of becoming a GIF for the wrong reasons these days.

The obvious giant is ABBA, who won in 1974 with Waterloo and then went on to become one of the biggest pop acts in music history. Without Eurovision, there’s every chance they might simply have remained a very successful Scandinavian band with excellent jackets.

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Celine Dion is another wonderfully odd Eurovision story because she actually won the contest representing Switzerland in 1988, despite being Canadian. Which somehow feels peak Eurovision already. You’ll understand why in a moment.

Julio Iglesias appeared for Spain in 1970 before becoming one of the world’s biggest Latin recording artists.

But the Eurovision Song Contest is, as I have suggested, a bit of a contradiction.

It’s a song contest, technically. Countries from across Europe, and now apparently bits of places nowhere near Europe at all, like Australia, each send an act to perform an original song live before a massive TV audience. Then everybody votes for each other while pretending geopolitics, neighbourly alliances, and decades of historical resentment have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the outcome.

And every year, the UK enters the thing with all the confidence of a man returning to a restaurant that has already given him food poisoning on 65 previous occasions.

I’m going to say it, and I don’t care, because I think there is something in this: Brexit affected our relationship with Europe in all the ways you might expect a “where-did-that-one-come-from” divorce to challenge your ability to pop round unannounced to your ex, borrow the lawnmower, and continue sharing a Netflix password as if nothing happened.

Don’t get me wrong, just for balance, Brexit did, of course, achieve things. Depending on where you sit politically, those things range from “historic acts of sovereignty” to “administrative rearrangements accompanied by queuing.”

Some industries benefited. Others absolutely did not. The country didn’t collapse into the sea, as some predicted, nor did it instantly transform into a gleaming Singapore-on-Thames utopia populated entirely by smiling customs officials and sovereign haddock.

Mostly, the UK carried on being the UK, only now with more forms to fill in — ironic, really, because the paperwork was the thing we were trying to escape.

I feel like I am back in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy land, because those last few paragraphs could well have been written by Douglas Adams, in a way.

But anyway. The other thing that happened was that the Eurovision Song Contest became an opportunity for everyone who doesn’t understand our obsession with jellied eels, warm beer, apologising to lamp posts, and queueing in absolute silence at bus stops, to collectively decide that perhaps the UK needed to be gently punished by being awarded precisely no points in a singing competition.

You’d think it too ridiculous to hurt really, but hmmmm, this is the country that produced The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Adele, The Stones, David Bowie, Queen, Kate Bush, Simple Minds, Annie Lennox, Tom Jones, Elton John, Led Zeppelin, and about four thousand pub bands who still believe they could have been the next Oasis had things gone differently in Swindon back in 1993.

Yet every May, we now end up looking like somebody’s dad trying to join in at a student disco. And we actually celebrate this result in a way akin to the Head of School on sports day, reminding all parents that it’s not at all about winning; it’s only about taking part.

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Quick aside. The points system has had interesting ways of working over the years, and it was always conducted in English and French. One point, or un point.

But there is something that perhaps I am missing; it’s not so much a competition now, more a well-produced, albeit strangely scored, absolute spectacle.

The Nordic countries usually look as if they’ve been assembled by minimalist interior designers. France treats Eurovision like an opportunity to remind everybody that it invented culture. The United Kingdom often turns up like somebody persuaded late to attend a fancy-dress party and is now trying very hard to look relaxed about it. Then there’s Eastern Europe, which approaches Eurovision with the energy of nations fully aware that subtlety is for cowards. Fire, chains, masks, lots of chanting and figures that look like they’ve been dressed by the Grim Reaper.

And somehow, despite all of this sounding utterly absurd, they are very often magnificent.

This year looked briefly as though Australia or Israel might actually win the thing, which only adds to Eurovision’s ongoing identity crisis. Australia being in Eurovision still feels like discovering your plumber has somehow qualified for the Super Bowl. None of us really remembers how it happened.

This year’s UK entrant, Sam Battle, who performed under the name Look Mum No Computer, was an eccentric inventor type, building synthesisers and stuff, and I have to say the wonderful thing was that he didn’t appear especially crushed by the possibility that the UK might once again receive next to no interest at all.

He more or less shrugged and got on with it.

I think he got it. This is no longer a quaint singing competition, but a massive entertainment business, and no matter where you come in the pecking order, there’s kudos to being a part of this spectacle.

This is now a proper industry.

And I can’t help thinking that many of the new photography awards are now as much an industry as they are a platform for recognition and inspiration too.

Not the genuinely respected competitions. Those exist. There are awards that carry real weight, judged seriously by people who actually know what they’re looking at.

But orbiting those is another entire universe of slightly suspect recognition schemes where everybody appears to be “carefully selected” moments before being asked for three hundred dollars.

I had one recently.

An email arrived informing me that my work had apparently caught the attention of an international panel somewhere. There was praise and flattery, and for a moment, I’d been emotionally courted with this suggestion that I had been noticed rising above the photographic noise.

Then came the fee.

Three hundred dollars to take part in the award I had supposedly already been selected for.

Which is a magnificent business model if you think about it carefully enough.

Photographers, and creative people generally, are walking around permanently wondering if they’re any good. Most of us spend half our lives comparing ourselves to other people while pretending we aren’t. We look at awards, publication credits, followers, exhibitions, books, workshops, likes, reposts, and all the other modern forms of public approval, hoping somewhere in there will be a little sign saying, “Yes, alright, you’re allowed to call yourself this thing.”

I felt special until I realised everybody had been picked, if they were just willing to pay the entrance fee.

But with a bit more digging, I found that some of the biggest awards on Earth have always involved campaigning and politics too, and many far more than in a “send us 300 dollars for your platinum visionary distinction certificate” sort of way.

Film studios spend astonishing sums during awards season pushing films toward voters for things like the Academy Awards and BAFTA Awards. There are screenings, lunches, advertising campaigns, interviews, networking events, “For Your Consideration” billboards across Los Angeles. Entire teams exist purely to position performances as award-worthy.

Nobody simply wanders accidentally into an Oscar. Well, not anymore anyway.

Which doesn’t make those awards meaningless. Far from it. But it does remind you that recognition has always involved storytelling, influence, visibility and timing alongside talent itself.

And I suppose that is just like Eurovision.

We all want to be seen.

Countries want to be seen.

Artists want to be seen.

Photographers want to be seen.

The UK’s problem may simply be that we still think the world views us through the lens of our musical past, while much of Europe views us more like an eccentric former headmaster who keeps reminding everyone he once captained the rugby team.

And perhaps that’s the point, really?

Not the winning.

Not the plaques, trophies, certificates, rankings, scores or carefully worded emails telling you that you’ve been “selected” from thousands of entries moments before requesting your credit card details.

The point may simply be that people keep making things anyway.

Songs. Photographs. Paintings. Films. Odd electronic music performed by a man in front of Europe wearing what appears to be a soldering iron attached to a jet engine.

We continue putting pieces of ourselves into the world despite knowing full well the scoreboard may light up with absolutely nothing in return.

The older I get, the more suspicious I become of anything creative that can be measured by awards only. Some of the most important photographs ever made never won awards. Some of the greatest songs ever written didn’t top charts. Some artists spend their whole lives unnoticed, only to suddenly matter enormously years later to somebody they’ll never meet.

Could “What’s the Point,” be the wrong question entirely?

Maybe, just maybe, the point is simply to keep turning up with something to say.

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It was Wednesday morning, about 8.30ish, and I was in the bathroom, shaving my head slowly and carefully, though still somehow missing bits as I went. While trimming my beard afterwards and wondering why my skin refuses to tolerate any form of beard dye without erupting into a rash, I would no doubt have been heard loudly from the landing, chastising myself reasonably loudly, I imagine.

Pic: Brett Jordan

It’s a recurring theme, one I suspect my family have simply learned to live with. “Poor Dad. At what point do we have him forcibly removed for everyone’s safety?”

I was listening to the Halfway to Maybe episode called Fu%&ed up life advice, for the creative soul.

There is a comedy radio show in the UK called Just a Minute. It’s been around for ‘donkey’s years’, as my gran would say. Why years are measured by donkeys, I don’t know, and some stuff you like to just hold on to as a grandma saying, instead of looking it up on your favourite smart ass (can you see what I did there?) search engine, or AI know-it-all app.

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Just a Minute is built around a beautifully simple idea: a panellist must speak for one minute on a given subject without hesitation, repetition or deviation.

The repetition rule is the one that seems to cause the most arguments because, technically, it sounds straightforward, but in practice, it becomes wonderfully petty and absurd.

The basic idea is this:

You should not repeat a significant word or phrase you’ve already used during your minute. If another panellist spots repetition, they buzz in and challenge you. If the chair agrees, the challenger takes over the subject for the remainder of the time, and they try to get to a minute of speaking before they, too, are buzzed out.

So if you said, “I walked into the room, and the room was empty,” someone might challenge the second use of “room”.

Over the years, the show evolved a sort of elastic logic, which it needed to. Tiny connecting words like “the”, “and”, “a”, and “of” are ignored. Plurals, tenses and similar word forms often spark debate. For example, “run” and “running” might be challenged, and “photograph” and “photographer” might trigger a loud buzz too.

Anyway, as I listened with a dangerous razor blade in my hand, all I could hear through my, I thought, carefully crafted piece was repetition. Some of it was for clear effect and reinforcement of theme or ideas, a trick often used in short, delivered stage scripts, but there were glaringly obvious moments, to me at any rate, which had me tutting and moaning ever more loudly as the piece developed.

Actually, my advice in the piece about being a creative didn’t specifically address perfection, but there was a strong nod to it.

I give you:

Make things before you feel ready.
You won’t feel ready.

And…

Share your work.
Even when it feels uncomfortable.
Especially then.

I did say in the piece, twice, with uncomfortable repetition, something about being a work in progress. But I am just that, forty years of it.

YouTube is a classic example of being a perfectionist for me, in that I have hours upon hours upon hours of footage featuring my adventures in India, Scotland, driving across the States, a voyage on the Queen Mary, interviews with fabulous, reasonably well-known photographers, and test pieces where I have walked with my camera along various canal paths seeking peace and solitude. I’m rather proud of much of it, as it goes. Have I published it yet?

Nope. Because ingrained in me is this idea of making something that, I don’t know, Ridley Scott Associates might look at and say, “This is art, we need this show as our next Netflix pitch.”

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The reality is that, whilst I’m happy with the stuff generally, there’s a dangerous word, I’m expecting it to look like a twenty-strong crew filmed it, before delivering it to the best post-production house in London, for output good enough to woo ‘insert hugely important distribution network’ here.

For me, not only must it be technically sublime, but stuff has to have a purpose, and each film needs that before I release it. Just talking into the camera and popping up a thumbnail of me making some kind of inane, awkward face of surprise, shock, or horror, the kind that would have my children disown me now, doesn’t seem to cut it.

But why?

If you make stuff, just share it. Surely.

What did I say, and repetition alert now:

Share your work.
Even when it feels uncomfortable.
Especially then.

Perfection is a drain, isn’t it?

I wonder how many amazing projects or works have not been released into the world because perfection had turned up and built the kind of wall ‘you know who’ dreams about at night, or during the day at the Resolute Desk when he thinks nobody’s noticing.

Take the incredible photographic documentary work of Vivian Maier. It’s going to remain one of the biggest mysteries in photography why she didn’t show or share her work. Had it not been for that chap called John Maloof finding a box in a thrift auction house, who knows what might have happened? Might it have ended up in a dumpster, unceremoniously? Quite possibly.

“Anyone want to hold on to this box? Nobody bought it, and it’s taking up space, any thoughts?”

“Chuck it, Bob, we’ve got enough stuff in here already, it’s just collecting dust!”

Might one of the reasons, just floating this because we’ll never truly know, be that she’d seen some of her work and didn’t much like it? The taking and making of pictures had become a habit, and she rather liked the way it made her more observant, but really, the end result wasn’t quite what she was hoping for, so for the moment she’d just shove all the negs and a few pictures in a box, and show people, maybe, when she’d perfected her act, as it were.

There’s a chance, I guess?

Having a perfectionist streak, though, is also a reasonably good attribute. I think the secret is working in degrees of perfectionism. Wanting to do a job well isn’t a disadvantage if you learn, and I’m holding up a mirror to myself at this stage, too, some ways to deal with the P word.

One is recognising that perfection is being a trickster. It’s serving you up an unhealthy fear of judgment, fear of looking foolish, fear of somebody saying, “Really? You thought this was ready?”

The trouble is, waiting until something feels flawless can mean waiting forever because, in a sense, the finish line keeps moving. You arrive at one standard, think you’re done, and immediately invent another one. It’s building walls again, isn’t it?

Another is understanding that most people are not examining your work with anything like the forensic obsession you are. They are experiencing it, hopefully feeling it, and even responding to it emotionally, or not. The tiny flaw you replay in your head at three in the morning is most probably invisible to everyone else.

Personally, this is where I come unstuck because I think people are standing there with clipboards. But that’s often nonsense, because most people are simply trying to get through their extremely normal Monday morning.

There is also something healthy in allowing yourself to make things that are simply good enough for today. Not forever, not carved into stone tablets for future generations to analyse in hushed museum silence, though it’s a nice thought.

And perhaps most importantly, if every piece of work becomes evidence for or against your value as a person, then of course perfectionism becomes exhausting. You’re no longer making a photograph, writing an article, recording a podcast or baking a coffee cake, I love a coffee cake, you’re placing yourself on some kind of trial.

I forget sometimes, perhaps often, that creativity is also meant to involve play, experimentation and, stand by for the F word, I’m not bleeping it out this time…

FAILURE.

“Doris, the man said failure. Quick, hide under the covers!”

Failure is, and I need to remember this as much as anyone, the freedom to get things wrong publicly now and then.

I’d hazard a bet that everyone we admire did not arrive fully formed in terms of being on the pedestal we place them.

And perhaps that’s the thing to remember really. I don’t think people who genuinely care about what they make ever completely lose that perfectionist streak. But, the trick is learning when to stop listening to it for a while, put the thing out anyway, and just get on with life a bit.

I now need to go and hide behind the largest sofa I can find, as several friends of mine look at me in that, “You said it, now go and make it,” way.

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I’m going to curse, oh so very slightly in this one, although you know me, I scoop out the salted caramel centres of my cursing with a fine digital razor blade, so that offended ears don’t reach, heaven forbid, for their ‘skip to next show’ button. So Gene, who lives in New Harmony, Utah, and actually wrote me a letter recently to praise my, is it aptitude or policy for piloting around dropping the f, w, and c bombs for no apparent reason? You can rest easy.

Pic: Greg Rakozy

A certain amount of editorial thinking went into my decision to lightly season the piece with appropriate ‘cursy’ moments, for emotional effect, I might add, not shock value.

I feel like I’ve just asked one person’s permission in a ridiculously verbose and roundabout manner to write something that’s under my creative control and accountable to nobody, not even the breeze.

Being a people pleaser is fu%&ing exhausting.

Stop, asking for permission.

I keep a file of ideas for this podcast. Is it a podcast, or is it my first real proper book in the making? Who’d read it anyway? Don’t build your part, lad; books are for other people to write. You know, successful people who have something to say. People with proper ideas, people who’ve achieved in ways you could not possibly imagine, or indeed possibly achieve.

Having an internal nagging doubt as part of my team, is equally fu%&ing exhausting.

Baz Luhrmann wrote that piece of advice: stop asking for permission.

A friend of mine, I think it was Giles, or was it Mali, possibly Natalie, it’s such a Nat thing, recounted that to me and attributed it to Baz. And it seems like such rock-solid life advice. Only when I went to research it, I’m not so sure it was actually from Baz, although it seems like such a Baz thing.

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There’s a song from 1999 from the famous film director Baz Luhrmann. It’s called Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen), and it starts with the words, “Ladies and gentlemen of the class of ‘99. Wear sunscreen. If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it.”

Wear sunscreen. It seems such a Baz thing to say, only he didn’t.

The words actually came from a 1997 newspaper column by Mary Schmich, written as an imagined graduation speech. Baz borrowed that piece and set it to music, turning it into a collection of wonderfully personal observations about life. It’s a monologue set to music, and it’s been repeated, repurposed, rewritten many times since.

If you haven’t heard it, which I think is unlikely, look it up somewhere like YouTube, if it’s not been on your audio radar for a while, take this nudge as a reason to grab a coffee, look it up, somewhere like YouTube, and reacquaint yourself with it, whilst probably nodding emphatically to the advice imparted.

“Don’t worry about the future, do one thing every day that scares you, floss, be kind to your knees, dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your own living room. Do not read beauty magazines, they will only make you feel ugly.”

All words from Baz’s monologue, with one line that actually haunts me, particularly as when this song was released worldwide, I’d lost my father only two years previous; “Get to know your parents, you never know when they’ll be gone for good.”

Man alive, as they say, never mind graduation or commencement speech, I imagine, slightly pimped for a commercial audience, it could form the most useful five minutes you’d ever wish to spend in one of those corporate motivation event speeches, and before you say, “But you’ve never worn a pin-striped suit in your life Neale, how could you possibly…”

Oh, but I have, albeit for five minutes selling advertising, but more recently as a photographer, photographing suited people falling asleep from the sidelines.

I did start to wonder what life advice one might give or hear for the creative mind or, as I heard it ironically said a long time ago, for the unfavoured few who become creative professionals, said with tongue firmly in cheek, I hope.

The problem with giving advice is that it seems to me you need to assume some sort of lofty guru status, and those whom I’ve aspired to be, follow, or find great inspiration from are a country mile from being gurus. Some are no longer here, some because they could no longer bear to be. They were, and they are humans, famous humans, but ones who wear their mistakes with a great deal of pride and continue to make them. I suppose that makes you more of a work in progress than a creative guru, but I have picked up some knowledge along the way, and some of it I’ve managed to apply to my life.

Much of it is, again, a work in progress, or things I might say to my younger self whilst wondering whether it’s all a tad late for that.

I’m now nudging into a fifth decade of working as a creative. My dalliance with the pin stripe, whilst fun for a short while, ran alongside my more creative leanings. I know what I preferred.

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If I could offer you one piece of advice for your creative life, it would be this: keep going.

Not in the heroic sense. Not in the “push through at all costs” way.

Just… keep turning up. Even when the work feels flat. Especially then.

You will doubt yourself.

More than you think you should.

More than other people appear to.

That’s normal. They’re just better at hiding it.

Make things before you feel ready.

You won’t feel ready.

Pay attention to what pulls you.

The small things.

The moments you almost ignore.

That’s usually where your best work is hiding.

You are not behind.

You are not ahead.

You are somewhere in the middle, same as everyone else, working it out as you go.

Don’t compare your beginning to someone else’s middle.

Or their end.

Or the version of their life they choose to show you.

Share your work.

Even when it feels uncomfortable.

Especially then.

Do count the likes,

Don’t count the likes,

Like that you don’t care much for the likes.

Who cares if you lose subscribers,

Just don’t lose your personality.

Be careful who you listen to.

Not all feedback is equal.

Some people will want you to succeed.

Some won’t.

Learn to tell the difference.

Take breaks before you need them.

Burnout is not a badge of honour.

Walk.

Often.

Without a camera sometimes.

You’ll see more.

Look after your body.

Your back.

Your eyes.

Your sleep.

You’ll need all of them longer than you think.

Hold on to the people who understand what you’re trying to do.

Let go of the ones who don’t, gently if you can.

Remember why you started.

Then allow that reason to change.

I often repeat the words of a radio presenter I admire, James O Brien, who says, ‘What’s the point of having a mind, if you can’t change it.’

You will have moments where it all feels pointless.

You will have others where it all makes sense.

Neither will last.

Your path will not be straight.

It will loop, stall, restart.

That’s not failure. That’s the work.

Success will look different depending on the day.

Don’t chase one version of it for too long.

And in the end, your creative life is not a race.

It’s a conversation.

Mostly with yourself.

So keep showing up.

Keep noticing.

Keep making.

Be an empath, as much for yourself as for others.

And trust me on this…

the work matters.

And finally, don’t wait for permission.

No one is coming with a letter to say you’re allowed.

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I was sorting out stuff in the attic at the weekend, trying to find an electrical lead for a piece of sound kit that was safely stored in a labelled box, or so I thought. The kit was there, but the lead to power it, a very particular type and style of cord with a connector that simply can’t or won’t plug into anything else, had gone absent without leave.

Pic: Nick Fewings

I tipped the box out eventually, a deep storage box, sifted through it, twice, but to no avail.

You’ll recognise that moment, I’m sure, when logic departs the building, and you start looking in the oddest and most unlikely of places for something that should really just be in one particular, well-labelled box.

“I’m sure I left it in this one,” I said, frustrated. “It was right next to the Oojamafumple, I just know it.”

I haven’t used the Oojamafumple for nigh on a decade, but that’s in the box, so why wasn’t the Oojamafumple’s bespoke-designed lead?

“It don’t make no sense,” I kept repeating in West Country meets Devon meets Norfolk accented confusion.

So out came the other boxes, in a hopeful yet hopeless attempt to find the stupid wire I needed.

Old hard drives that have probably long since lost any ability to reboot or reconnect. A box of A5 presentation cards and other paraphernalia that I used when attending wedding fairs to hawk my services as a photographer. The old monitor box, which contained two small broken Fostex intercom speakers and five pairs of cans, as they call headphones in the radio business. The ear cushions had rotted or done that sticky-plastic thing in time, but I hold on to them for sentimental reasons.

And then there was a box of paperwork from my radio days, holding a set of A4 lever-arch files, which raised a nostalgic smile. A blue one was labelled ‘audition applications’ also with the words ‘useful criticism’, although the c word was incorrectly spelt C R I T I C Y S M.

Next to it sat a file in the Union Flag pattern and colours, produced long before you might have simply been accused of having particular political views. It started on the 31st January 1983, when I was fifteen years old. This was the year I started learning to be a radio presenter.

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There followed in date order, letter after letter after letter after letter of rejections. The entire file was crammed full of them, so much so, they pushed the front and back covers out, if only just slightly. Interestingly, it did not feature the word ‘Rejections,’ and I wonder if that’s because my mentor, a man I have spoken of before in an earlier incarnation of this podcast, had suggested to me the following.

“Keep every letter where someone says no. Although learn to love the word no.

I did exactly as asked.

It’s difficult to pinpoint the very moment I decided to become a radio presenter for the formative work years of my life, but before these tentative steps and actually receiving my first pound note for working professionally, I was a volunteer presenter at a radio station which piped programmes into small Bakelite headsets belonging to patients in hospital.

I’m not sure hospital radio exists as a worldwide thing, but certainly in the UK it did, and still does, though when I was a volunteer, the array of entertainment was somewhat limited.

This was 1983. Owning a Sony Walkman was considered posh, there wasn’t such a thing, of course, as mp3, and the Internet wasn’t going to be available for ordinary folk for another six years.

So if you were in hospital, you might have a radio that matron constantly turned down, a TV with three channels, possibly four if someone had actually worked out how to tune in the newly launched Channel Four, and this Bakelite pair of headphones, like the ones telephone operators wore. Uncomfortable, hard plastic phone-like receivers, not always with padded ear bits, that offered private listening to a range of ten services on a rotary switch that didn’t always work well, and certainly didn’t provide the number of stations it purported to offer.

You had Radio 2, Radio 1 on the children’s ward, Radio 3 for classical music, Radio 4 for the intellectuals and then, hospital radio, which usually came on at something like 6pm and finished at 11pm, with extra hours at the weekend, very useful for patients who don’t exactly plan their lives around volunteer opening hours.

Our job was simply to visit patients on the ward, say hello, call matron if they didn’t look particularly well, which given they were in hospital, was reasonably often, panic slightly if at first they didn’t wake when you said, “Hello Ken,” and collect requests, so that we might play their favourite songs. It was a great idea, but when Ken had finally come round and asked for three in a row from Doris Day for the fifth time that week, you can understand why many patients pretended to be asleep when we popped round.

The station was staffed by people with good intentions, I am sure, but nearly all of whom harboured a not-so-secret desire to one day be on a ‘proper’ radio station that could be picked up in a car.

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But the work they did, the work we did, was, we thought, reasonably important, certainly community-facing, supportive, empathic, caring and even though some of our listeners were quite literally in pain while they listened, and not always from their medical issues, it was a lot of fun.

For me, it was all of the above, and a springboard.

Schooling had been a disaster, in my mind at least. I just didn’t seem to excel at anything in particular, and I’d quite by accident happened across an organisation I could volunteer at which, overnight, seemed to offer me a way to be someone who was noticed, albeit through small unwieldy and uncomfortable Bakelite headphones between the hours of 6pm and 11pm, with a few more hours at the weekend.

But if this was exciting, can you imagine my joy when my earliest radio mentor, a man called Robbie Owen, who had worked professionally on pirate radio, suggested that with my enthusiasm, I could probably do this for a living.

Note he said enthusiasm. I don’t think he initially mentioned skill.

I’d only just started my volunteer role, and now here I was, aged only fifteen, thinking I was the next, ‘insert big radio star from your neck of the woods’ here. My paper round money went into cassettes, padded envelopes, A4 sheets of paper, and stamps, and I started sending demo tapes off with complete belief that someone would very quickly hear potential.

This was noted by Robbie at the hospital radio station, and so it was he who suggested it might not happen briskly, and that I should learn to love the word no, to start with, initially.

Let me share some of the sentences from letters returned, and this by the way is just one lever-arch file. The most colourful in the colours of our national flag, followed by those two more, sombre-toned dark grey versions.

Most began with the sentence “I hope you will excuse a stereotype letter,” or a variant of, which clearly meant, no. Radio London sent me a good half dozen of the same letter through the years, the spelling mistakes within it never changed.

From Southern Sound, “We hope you find what you are looking for.”

No.

Devon Air sent possibly the smallest letters, not in text, though that had scant ink on a page, but in terms of the size of paper. It wasn’t even A5.

No.

LBC, a news station, though it was way too early, aged sixteen by now. John Perkins, the then controller, did at least write me a more personalised letter ending with, “I think you should approach one of the smaller stations, right now.”

No.

I did what was suggested and approached the tiddlers in the pond. Most answered with copied responses that were sometimes addressed to the wrong person by name. Plymouth Sound, being a smaller station, pointed out, “We have limited requirements, and you’re not local,” a recurring theme. It felt like the kind of pub you walk into in a backwater neighbourhood where all heads turn and the place goes silent.

No.

BRMB in Birmingham; “You’re not suitable.”

Radio Kent; “You do not talk with a Kentish base.”

Thames TV: “In applying to us, you are starting at the top of the tree. I do not need to train people.”

No.

Radio Hallam; “I think for you, it is unlikely in the foreseeable future.”

There were, here and there, more personal observations, which are of course useful, though they weren’t very promising.

“Your voice is not particularly special. You have a rather breathy style. You sound too nervous. You need to tighten up your presentation. You need to learn how to read scripts. What about working behind the scenes? You lack distinctive style. I don’t think what I’ve heard separates you from anyone else, so accordingly I am returning your tape to you.”

Whilst it was useful to be able to reuse tapes that were returned to me, that ‘return to sender’ approach stung a little.

Capital Radio sent me a letter dated 22^nd October 1984 just to tell me they’d lost my demo. That heralded a new approach that felt to me like, “Stop sending this rubbish in!”

A pattern was emerging with the sign offs; “rest assured, your details have been kept on file.”

I wondered where this big filing cabinet might be kept, and even in my wondrous youthful naivety of expectation and belief, I could smell Farmer Brown’s field of freshly laid manure on an early Spring morning within the growing stack of such responses.

Plough on I did, in all respects.

Having said that, an early letter in 1985 surfaced when I thumbed through these papers, from BBC Radio Cambridgeshire, which contained four paragraphs of the word no, essentially. But four paragraphs were one of my longest responses, and it had taken two years of no after no after no to get to something quite this verbose. Park that one for a moment.

I wrote to every single radio station, both BBC and commercial, local, regional and national, and even international. American stations, outfits as far away as New Zealand, and stations in countries whose language I couldn’t even speak, hoping that somehow an English afternoon spot might magically appear.

Many of these stations received up to half a dozen letters across five years, in what I suppose could be referred to as my “heroically unsuccessful correspondence era,” culminating in exasperation, from me, and from them, with one of the final letters in the third file from an chap called Philip Bacon, the editor at LBC Crown, who said, “You do not meet any of our requirements. I am sorry, but really we are unable to offer you any prospect of working here.”

What struck me, sitting cross-legged on the attic floor surrounded by decades of old paper, was how even when someone was effectively saying, “Absolutely not. Never. Please stop writing to us,” I never really gave up.

Perhaps instead of referring to this as my “heroically unsuccessful correspondence era,” I could rephrase it, for it to become my fingers in ears “la la la la la la not listening” period.

This, I think, is the hardest part about being in the business of trying to create things, be that sound, pictures or whatever. Not the criticism, not even failure. It’s the feeling of standing outside rooms where conversations are happening without you. You send off the tape, the manuscript, the photographs, the proposal, the demo, the script, and somewhere in your mind, there’s a small fantasy that somebody important will instantly understand you.

They’ll hear what you hear in yourself. Mostly though, they don’t. Or they can’t. Or perhaps more truthfully, they’re too busy working in their own day-to-day, to spend much energy worrying about your dream.

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The arts are full of people carrying invisible lever-arch files. Actors who were told they weren’t believable, writers informed they lacked a voice, photographers accused of being too commercial by artists and too artistic by commercial clients. Musicians advised to sound more like somebody else, right before the industry suddenly changes direction and starts searching for originality again.

Entire careers are often built one inch to the side of rejection.

And yet, oddly, being told ‘no’ leaves fingerprints on the work itself. I think you can often hear it. The broadcasters who survive years of it usually end up sounding more human than the polished prodigies who sailed through untouched. The photographers who struggle for recognition often notice people differently. The comedians who bomb repeatedly either disappear or become astonishingly good.

What I’m saying is, if you stay long enough, you stop trying to sound or be like what they want and accidentally become yourself instead.

Some of the stations that rejected me would eventually employ me. Some would ask me back years later, as indeed BBC Radio Cambridgeshire did when, finally aged 21, having worked for a wonderful tin-pot, totally illegal radio station in Lanzarote for a year, a letter arrived from a Programme Organiser called Roland Myers, with the words, “I think I may well have something that could interest you.”

That was my first, if you like, ‘proper’ radio station gig. And, it had only taken eight years.

It’s a useful reminder that in the arts, rejection is not always the final judgement. Often it’s timing, yes, sometimes geography, and politics.

And every now and then, if I’m being honest with myself, I simply wasn’t good enough.

Yet.

That’s the bit that’s hard to hear, or read.

Not yet.

But not yet is very different from never.

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One of the facets of having a rather overactive imagination is that your stories can alter with age or the number of times you recall them. I’ve talked about that on this podcast already, and to an extent, how you can bring alive, or make real, the very things you fancifully invent within the narratives you create.

A young Barney poses, albeit briefly, post-stream swim!

When I say “bring alive”, I don’t mean bringing something physically into the real world, like in A Nightmare on Elm Street, when the children manifest objects from their dreams into reality, Freddy Krueger’s hat, for example, snatched from the nightmare as the creature attacks them in their sleep.

I saw that, by the way, for the first time the day before being admitted to hospital as a teenager for surgery. Dad probably thought it would be a nice treat, a scary movie to take my mind off things, not realising that A Nightmare on Elm Street contains a horrifying scene in which someone falls asleep in a hospital and is attacked in their dreams.

But movies are awash with this idea, aren’t they?

In The Twilight Zone: The Movie, one of the film’s scenes centres on a child with godlike psychic powers whose thoughts instantly reshape reality, forcing terrified adults to live inside whatever nightmare or fantasy enters his mind. That is a horrifying thought, all in the name of light entertainment.

Oh, by the way, not that I should necessarily need to explain it, but today’s title is, of course, a small nod to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis, although in this case, there are indeed witches and wardrobes in my tale, but no lions to be found anywhere, which is probably for the best. I’m not entirely sure how I’d cope living in a country where a quick trip to buy milk or put the bins out in my slippers could suddenly leave me halfway up the food chain.

So, here’s to overactive imaginations.

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I wonder how much you can actually manifest stuff that you desire or fear?

For instance, my earliest ghostly experience involves staying over at a friend’s house, with kids upstairs trying to sleep and adults downstairs playing Neil Diamond loudly, enjoying their cheese-and-wine ‘do’.

Nobody does this anymore, do they, cheese and wine? Perhaps at restaurants, and come to think of it, my favourite local coffee shop hosts one on the first Friday night of each month, but cheese and wine at a friend’s home was definitely a 70s thing. My mum and dad were always at them, and I thought they were all very innocent until a friend of mine joked about his mum and dad going dressed up to the nines in their best bib and tucker to these gigs, and coming back in somebody else’s clothes.

Closing eyes, imagining happy places to escape any thoughts about 70s cheese and wine parties now.

This particular party was in a large house on a night that honestly had all the hallmarks of a classic horror film, one where you’re left shouting at the screen, “Don’t go to the window, hide under the covers,” and other such instructions.

It backed onto quite dense woodland, this late-60s, early-70s trendy house with big windows. That is about the size of my memory: big windows, floor-to-ceiling kind, featuring natural wood frames, not a white glossy surface in sight. It happened to be a wintry night, and in my mind, embellishment allowing, I’m pretty sure there was lightning involved. That can’t be true, but let me throw it in for good measure.

I was in one of the many rooms in the house, one of three or four kids who probably would have much preferred all being in one room together.

Across from the foot of the bed, next to a line of fitted wardrobes, there was a natural wood door, and sandwiched between the wardrobes and the door itself, as I looked toward it, a long, thin, bobbly yellow window, which, because of the landing light, allowed a stream of soft light that reflected off the side of the lightly coloured wardrobe.

As the night went on, I became increasingly anxious, and the shouts between the rooms had been a little thwarted by the closing of doors by parents checking in, so that we could, I suppose, sleep more easily. Have you ever tried sleeping with Song Sung Blue belted out over and over?

“More cheese, vicar?”

“Don’t mind if I do.”

Why he’s turned up in this story, I don’t know, but I’m thinking big house, woodland, stormy night, lightning, and the scary thought of Neil Diamond albums over and over. All that’s missing within this light psychological horror is a vicar with a big cross on a chain.

And then it happened.

I became aware of the face at the window. Not the window onto woodland, someone had at least drawn those curtains. No, a face at the thin, bobbly, yellow window. It was my dad’s face, clear as a semi-lit landing could allow. As it moved slightly, it cast a shadow across the side of the wardrobe, which might seem like a strange thing to remember, but the shadow is the part that perhaps makes me think most about what I am about to describe.

“Dad?” I called.

The face didn’t move, but I think it smiled.

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Things didn’t seem right, but this was Dad. There was something reassuring in that. Perhaps it was “scoop up the kids and head home” time, as it often was.

I couldn’t work out why he wasn’t answering, so I climbed out of bed, edged toward the smiling face through the bobbly window, opened the door and… nothing.

Dad had simply vanished.

That was the last time I ever visited that house. My screaming was enough to break even the most enthusiastic tones of Sweet Caroline, and bring to a close, for my parents at least, the cheese and wine party.

I do wonder to this day what I’d seen and whether, really, it was all just my over-imaginative, single-digit-age brain and perhaps a sleepy disposition. They say cheese makes you dream, and I think, as kids, perhaps we’d taken a little of that cheese upstairs. Maybe like Ebenezer Scrooge trying to explain away A Christmas Carol’s ghosts as “an undigested bit of beef” or “a crumb of cheese”, I was simply the victim of a late-night dairy product past its sell-by date.

Next up, witches.

I have not seen a witch, or at least I don’t think I have. I think I may have seen a witch’s hut, though, but you’ll no doubt raise your eyebrows as I recount this one, an altogether more recent story involving a walk in the woods recording my Photowalk podcast.

On a B-road somewhere between where I live and a town called Basingstoke in deepest West Berkshire, there is a place I found where you can park just a couple of cars, now marked on the car’s sat nav, and that is an important detail. It’s next to a footpath that, judging by the amount of overgrown weeds and nettles, plus a very worn stile, looks like it’s rarely used. But always looking for new paths to wander with my podcast recording buddy Barney the Cockapoo, it was a walk I took one spring day, say three years ago. Barney was much younger, not quite a year old.

The path weaved alongside hedgerows, skirting a farmer’s field, and then came to a fork, one way leading up and over a hill cutting through a barley field and a million and one critters, and one that turned left, taking us through woodland. A bright day, I remember. I took the woodland choice for a break from the sun and a little shelter.

The path took a shortish loop, and after a quarter of an hour, I found myself heading back toward the field gate that had led me into this modest woodland. Up ahead was a hut, reasonably large as it goes, enough for a small dwelling. The door on the front porch was padlocked. It had not long been painted a terracotta colour.

But with a padlock on the door, clearly nobody was at home, or were they?

As I approached this hut to make a portrait of Barney sat on the platform, there was a loud thud from within. My ears tingled, my stomach tightened, the hairs that I don’t have on my head stood on end, in a phantom way, clearly.

I would have cast the experience aside if it were not for a second thud, at which point the portrait session was over, Barns and I were out of there, quick smart, back along the path and sharply toward the car.

A year later, in the summer, searching my saved sat nav locations marked “good for dog walks and recordings”, I revisited to record on this path and in the woodland once again, my memory rather questioning the experience I’d had before. Perhaps it had been a big bird on the roof, perhaps an animal inside, perhaps… well, hang about, it was no longer there.

The hut wasn’t on the loop; it had simply vanished.

There was no sign of it.

I took a few possible turnings, but it was not to be found, and neither was any trace of foundations or the remnants of a dwelling torn down.

Heading back to the car, I saw someone walking a spaniel toward me. I wondered whether he was local and whether he could solve my mystery about the missing hut.

“No,” he said, “I’ve been walking this path for years; we only live about half a mile away. There’s never been a hut here. Never.”

He was positively positive about that fact, in gesture and tone.

It seemed pointless to remonstrate with him, so I stuttered some kind of apology and considered that I’d clearly got my paths in some kind of muddle, and started to walk off.

I hadn’t gone far along when he turned and shouted back.

“I have to say, though,” he said, “you’re not the first to have mentioned a hut. I had a lady ask me directions to it quite recently, actually, ’bout six months back.”

With that, he was off, and I assume he turned left into the woods, because I didn’t see him climbing the field where the barley had been.

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If you feel it is appropriate, please share, and let’s build a community of storytellers. I’d love to hear your stories and thoughts too, to weave into tales of their own in the future here?

What a wonderful sound, a perfect sound, not necessarily a perfect recording, I grant you. After all, my hand is outstretched with my iPhone recording as close as I can get to one of the birdboxes in our garden for a few seconds while Mum is off doing what bird mums do, bringing home sustenance for her little ones. So it was a snatched recording, then a pretty brisk retreat. I can honestly get a little wistful and teary at these kinds of sounds, at particular moments.

NB: This is one of those pieces where the audio will undoubtedly have more contextual impact.

I suspect this piece is going to make you raise at least one eyebrow and question if I’ve been taking a mind-altering substance in the writing and recording of it. Truth be known, it’s been a piece in the making for a while, inspired most recently by walks in the warmth of early morning late Spring, watching Barney, my fluffy companion, lazily chasing butterflies along the towpath, listening to cassette recordings of the brilliant late-night radio monologues about life from the late Joe Frank, and finding myself increasingly filled with wonder at how strange it is that any of us get to be here at all.

No alcohol or mushrooms involved.

One in four hundred trillion.

It’s a very contested number, but perhaps the most quoted odds when it comes to the statistical improbability of actually being here on this planet, to have even heard that recording.

I’ve been hearing a lot of hot air and bleating of late, and I’m not talking about the beautiful sound of lambs in a meadow. I’m really referring to the ungrateful, embittered, sorrowful, angry, resentful, entitled, disconnected, messianic, spiritually numb, ruthless sounds of powerful men who are absolutely incapable of comprehending the simple wonder and gift of being alive.

I doubt they’d appreciate the sound of hatchlings and certainly not link it to the sheer incredible fortune of being here to appreciate the beauty of it.

If you have your faculties and the ability to move through the world with some freedom, yet sacrifice your own spiritual proclivity on the altar of power, status and the endless hunger to dominate, you may never fully notice the strange fortune of being alive at all. Especially when there are people who would give anything simply to experience the ordinary parts of living without pain or limitation.

In purely mathematical terms, those people in white lab coats who have an abacus large enough to work out long numbers all agree on one thing: whatever the number of improbability is, you, I, those fledglings, mama bird, and the person who built the birdbox, probably shouldn’t be here at all.

And yet somehow, against all of that, here I am, and here you are.

Breathing.

Thinking.

Remembering things nobody else remembers in quite the same way.

It’s a bloody miracle.

Whatever name or belief you give it, existence is astonishing.

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The writer, Douglas Adams, understood this brilliantly in a book he wrote. He understood that existence is so wildly improbable that the only sensible response is either laughter or complete psychological collapse, and preferably laughter because collapse makes it difficult to enjoy a decent sandwich. I’m embracing my inner Douglas there.

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, there’s something called the Infinite Improbability Drive, a machine capable of taking a spaceship through every possible point in every possible universe at once. Which means that, statistically speaking, somewhere along the journey, the utterly impossible becomes briefly, alarmingly possible. A bowl of petunias may suddenly appear in deep space. A sperm whale can materialise several miles above a planet and have just enough time to wonder what on earth is happening to it before gravity introduces itself properly.

And perhaps that’s us.

Maybe consciousness itself is the ultimate improbability drive.

Against odds so ridiculous they become almost comic, atoms assembled themselves into something capable of listening to baby birds in a wooden box and feeling moved by it. Matter somehow became aware enough to notice birdsong, feel grief, see sunlight reflecting on water, or appreciate the smell of rain in woodland, and, I’ll level with you now, also comprehend the unbearable sadness of knowing none of it lasts forever.

Which is in itself, extraordinary really.

The universe, after billions of years of hydrogen knocking about in the dark, eventually produced a creature capable of standing in a garden whispering, “have a listen to this,” into a microphone, which let’s face it is a bonkers invention that is completely improbable when you think we’re all descended from something that is a single amoebic cell.

Let me embrace my inner Douglas again to note that perhaps religion would clear its throat at this point and say, “Well yes, this is where I come in,” while science would already be halfway through a complicated diagram involving carbon chains and probability theory.

Douglas Adams would probably be standing at the back of this argument making tea, muttering that whichever side is right, it’s still astonishing that a species capable of inventing leaf blowers can also write symphonies, fall in love, and cry at the sound of hatchlings hidden in a wooden box.

I think that my photographic habit, my desire to record sound, my more recent desire to write down what I feel, is the gift that I’m only just starting to realise is so much more important than the pound notes it has earned to help me pay a mortgage.

I’ve been too busy running on the hamster wheel to notice that most of us simply don’t stop.

We rush past existence as if it’s guaranteed. As if waking up tomorrow is part of some signed agreement. We fill our heads with deadlines and shopping lists and notifications and the low-level static of modern life until we become numb to the fact that any of this is happening at all.

Then something interrupts it.

A diagnosis.

A birth.

A funeral.

A blackbird singing at five in the morning when you can’t sleep.

And then, by magic, the world slips back into focus for a moment.

You remember you’re inside something miraculous.

Not miraculous in the glittery motivational poster sense, or the influencer saying how awesome blueberry muffins are, something more improbable than that.

I nearly called this piece ‘gratitude,’ but that seemed as plain as vanilla ice cream when Ben and Jerry’s Peanut Butter Cup Ice Cream is on the same menu. Gratitude gets misunderstood because it’s presented like homework. You keep a journal, write down five things a day, and so on, but real gratitude doesn’t seem to appear in my life like that. I think it happens when I hear rain falling on leaves, or when I hear a blackbird singing into the last few minutes of daylight and feel, for reasons I can’t properly explain, grateful that I was around to hear it. That was a favourite sound from my grandmother’s back garden, on hot, lazy summer evenings when we went to visit, and I was still in single-digit age numbers.

But come on, those little sounds from the bird box I recorded. The frantic peeping of new life demanding food before they even understand what life is yet. Creatures no bigger than a thumb arriving into existence with absolute determination. That is magic.

Maybe gratitude begins there. Not with possessions or achievements, but with awareness.

Because once you really notice things, materialism starts losing some of its grip.

Not entirely. We all like comfort. Nice things. I’m not pretending otherwise. But when people reach the end of their lives, they rarely ask for one last chance to sit in better traffic.

They want more sunsets.

More conversations.

More time with the dog asleep beside them.

More walks.

More ordinary Tuesdays they once thought were forgettable.

It’s perhaps a melancholic musing, but every now and then, I find myself wondering what it would feel like if you knew you were about to read a story to your child for the last time, because they no longer need you to, or no longer want you to, or because something like TikTok has stolen their attention instead. I think you’d read those final few pages very differently. You’d probably hang onto each sentence a little longer.

Life is full of endings that don’t announce themselves, like that, including the last time your children want to hold your hand in public.

The final time you hear a friend’s laugh before illness changes it.

And because we don’t know when those moments arrive, they pass through our hands disguised as ordinary life.

Maybe gratitude is simply understanding that ordinary life is not ordinary at all.

Look at what we get.

The taste of cold water when you’re thirsty.

Bread still warm from the oven.

Warm coastal wind against your face.

The strange comfort of hearing children shouting and laughing at lunchtime in the school playground.

The smell of cut grass drifting through an open window.

A dog losing its mind with happiness because you came home.

Music that somehow understands your feelings better than language does.

Laughter that arrives at the completely wrong moment and makes everything worse and better simultaneously.

Even grief, in a strange way, points back toward gratitude. We grieve because something mattered. Because we loved. Because we were lucky enough to encounter someone or something worth missing.

That’s the deal, really.

To be alive is to become vulnerable to loss.

But the alternative is nothing at all.

No birdsong.

No rivers.

No taste of coffee.

No autumn light through trees.

No voice saying your name.

Nothing.

And despite all the pain stitched through human existence, most people still cling fiercely to life. Even difficult lives. Even broken ones.

That says something enormous.

Somewhere underneath all our complaining and worrying, we know this experience is extraordinary.

A consciousness able to observe itself, and this is about as scientific as I can muster, atoms contemplating atoms.

The universe becoming aware enough to hear a blackbird sing.

I know that sounds grand, maybe even slightly mad, but sometimes late at night it genuinely hits me. Out of all the billions of years before I arrived, and the billions that will come after I’m gone, I get this brief flicker.

This tiny candle of awareness.

I get to see trees.

I get to love people.

I get to stand in a kitchen at midnight eating toast while the house sleeps.

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That’s unbelievable when you think about it for more than thirty seconds.

Maybe that’s why nature affects us so deeply. It pulls us back into the present tense. A stream doesn’t care about your unread emails. Birds aren’t interested in your status or your bank balance. The wind couldn’t give a monkey’s that you have ten less subscribers than you had a couple of days ago. The natural world keeps asking the same question:

Are you here?

Not tomorrow.

Not yesterday.

Now.

Can you hear this?

Can you notice your own existence long enough to understand how strange and beautiful it is?

Like a message scratched into a tree, or sprayed onto a wall; I was here.

I heard the hatchlings.

I felt the wind.

I noticed.

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Five, possibly seven kilograms. Possibly up to ten for a denser sweet or candy. That’s how much one of those big jars of sweets weighs.

Grandma lay spark out on the shop floor, beneath the ladder that stretched to the higher reaches of the display of jars filled with sweets.

“Rose,” said Grandad, “Rose!”

You might have thought his exasperated calls were down to concern for his wife, who’d just received a full jar of, let’s say Pear Drops for the sake of a good story, on her head from a height of at least a metre, possibly more. It was a clean strike, and had, to use a quaintism (if there is such an expression), knocked Grandma into next Tuesday.

She’d been polaxed, floored, slung a custard (proper old boxing term), ironed out, seen the stars, sent to the land of nod.

“Rose!”

Nothing, no movement.

“Rose, stop mucking about, I’ve another two jars to pass down.”

Unless you've heard or read the previous edition (Kid in a Candy Store), none of this makes much sense. You’ve missed the tour of my grandfather’s confectionery and tobacco shop, a gem of a past era, replaced by a shop with all the soul of the devil’s counting house. You also missed the way he unceremoniously destroyed an antique Fry’s Chocolates window with a golf ball one Christmas, trying to drive the ball from the open shop door across a busy arterial road into London, and the tour of his tobacco den where he mixed in secrecy special orders for visiting Tottenham Hotspur players on the way to a match. This is nineteen seventy something by the way; I can’t see world-class footballers dropping by H.A. Stewart’s in Enfield to stock up on their Woodbines prior to playing United on a Saturday.

Anyway, that’s probably set the scene, oh, along with this big librarian-style ladder on rollers that was used to reach a floor-to-ceiling array of every traditional sweet you can imagine in big glass jars that ran around the entire shop in a U shape.

“Rose! Rose!”

I think it was dawning on Grandad Harry that he’d actually badly hurt my grandmother by dropping a jar on her head, one that, whilst she was supposed to be catching them and had done so thousands of times before, on this occasion found her attention switch at just the wrong moment, as Harry was dropping a jar from the top shelf.

I’m relaying the story that is family folklore; I wasn’t there at that precise moment, but Nelly, my grandad’s sister, was. She worked in the shop, had viewed this scene unfold, and rushed to my grandmother’s aid briskly.

Remember how I suggested my grandfather was never wrong? I give you the low sun that apparently blinded him momentarily when he shanked the golf ball. Well, this was another such moment.

“She moved the ladder,” he protested. “Moved it she did, I’m telling you.”

Please don’t misunderstand me, he was neither belligerent nor uncaring, just, well, in his own Grandad Harry world, with habits that made sense to him.

He kept, for instance, all the shop’s takings for years under the bed in the spare room, in the living quarters above the shop where I slept when I went to visit. It was a small box room, made smaller by the fact that it was used as a further tobacco store. Money on one side, under the bed, a wall of tobacco on the other. I’m told it was a fire risk; he’d have simply shrugged his shoulders and said, “Rose, where else am I gonna put it?”

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He had a Corgi called Skipper, which was, sorry Grandad, a cantankerous old whatsit. On another Christmas, I got bitten on my nose, quite badly, just before the Christmas dinner was served. I’d been trying to go to the loo, which was through the small living room behind the shop and up the thin flight of long stairs. I think I must have startled Skipper, who turned on me and somehow reached my face. I don’t remember that part of the story. I do remember blood, lots of it, and Grandad’s calls of, “Don’t let him bleed on the carpet, that’s new that is.”

When we returned from Chase Farm Hospital’s accident and emergency department later that afternoon, with me sporting a rather large bandage on my nose and a blackening eye, Grandad had been in discussions with the family and decided that, clearly, I had sat on Skipper and was trying to ride on his back like a pony.

How he knew this, I don’t know, but he was fiercely loyal to Skipper. I never went near the dog again, certainly never fussed over him anymore. Weirdly, Skipper used to follow me around the shop, wagging his tail forevermore, until his eventual old age demise. I sense he felt guilty for telling Grandad I’d tried to ride him like Red Rum.

Somewhere between the pear drops falling from the sky onto Grandma’s head, Grandad Harry defending himself with “she moved the ladder,” golf balls through windows, and Skipper the grumpy corgi, apparently reporting fabricated pony-riding allegations back to the family committee, I realise something through my tales.

Families are built as much on stories as they are on blood.

Maybe more so.

Because none of this really survives as fact anymore. Not entirely. The details bend over time. Somebody adds something, and somebody forgets something. Somebody claims Grandma Rose was unconscious for ten minutes, somebody else says she sat straight up and was more worried about the jar lying broken on the floor.

But does it really matter?

The story lives on because it’s become our family history, mythology even. Tiny legends handed down over kitchen tables and Christmas dinners, and every family has them.

The uncle who accidentally drove into a duck pond.

The aunt who ran off briefly with a magician in nineteen sixty-eight, one year after I was born.

“Did that really happen, Neale?”

Wouldn’t you like to know?

The cousin who vanished at a wedding and was found asleep in a hedge at dawn, wearing somebody else’s shoes. I don’t know where that thought came from, but come on, it must have happened to someone.

These stories become heirlooms, bent and scratched things, and wondrously so.

I wonder whether we’ve become slightly poorer at keeping these legends alive now that everything is photographed, recorded, uploaded, timestamped, and, heaven forbid, fact-checked.

Stories used to have more space to breathe. That is, after all, how stories become legends. They change shape depending on who told them. Your grandmother’s version differed from your father’s version. Somebody exaggerated for comic effect. Somebody softened the darker corners of a story that otherwise might have ended up in the “you can’t ever tell that story” file.

Now we reach for evidence.

Video it, or it didn’t happen.

But family folklore was never really about accuracy.

It’s about sitting somewhere years later and saying, “Do you remember when...”

And instantly, everybody is back there. Back in the sweet shop. At Chase Farm Hospital, having your nose bandaged.

One of the reasons for telling this story over the last couple of episodes is that in my other role as a celebrant at funerals, I witness a room of relatives, sometimes quite a full room, remembering these kinds of stories when I’m writing a tribute. Honestly, I could write at least one of these a week based on what I hear in those meetings alone.

Long after somebody has gone, their habits and isms remain alive for the telling.

I can still hear Grandad Harry in certain phrases. Still see him standing there in that tobacco-scented shop defending himself against impossible odds entirely of his own making. I can see the dust in the afternoon light in that tobacco store. I can just about hear the rollers of the ladder rattling across the wooden floorboards, or were they ceramic tiles, come to think of it. Or does that really even matter? Let’s make them floorboards.

That’s why these tales matter more than we realise, because one day somebody will tell stories about us. They’ll probably not be about the promotions or tax returns or passwords we spent half our lives worrying about; they’ll be the odd things, the way, I don’t know, you couldn’t whistle for toffee, or tell really bad jokes, or the dent you left in the garage door of your in-laws that you weren’t exactly honest about.

Maybe it’ll be the disastrous camping trip, the time you got lost three streets from home and insisted the map was wrong, sounds like a possible grandad-ism.

These are the surviving fragments, the human pieces that outlive us, and they’re all the better for becoming living, breathing, changing stories.

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If you’re a Harry Potter fan, you’ll be familiar with Honeydukes Sweet Shop. This emporium of ever so different confectionery sold Chocolate Frogs that leapt out of their boxes with collectable cards tucked inside (the box, that is, not the frog), Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans that genuinely tasted of anything from strawberry to earwax, Fizzing Whizzbees that made you float, Exploding Bonbons that did exactly what the name suggested, and Sugar Quills you could chew in class.

What the shop could have looked like. Well, it certainly is in my memory.

Honeydukes had this Victorian veneer about it: a sweet shop from a bygone era, not like your average pile-it-high, sell-it-cheaper, because-the-bars-are-a-third-smaller-than-they-used-to-be shop.

Having said that, I come from an age when I remember a Mars Bar was ten to fifteen pence. They were one of my favourites, and I could confidently make one last an hour, chewed oh so very slowly. I grabbed a coffee the other day on a dog walk and went to buy one, but they’re now £1.30. Well, there they are. I made do with the coffee.

But if Honeydukes looked special, you should have visited my Grandad’s place in Enfield, just north of London’s metropolis. It sat in a parade of shops, flanked by a greengrocer and the kind of pharmacy that, in its day, John Pemberton would have sold original Coca-Cola from. That’s how I remember it: wood-panelled, traditional and, like something out of a museum, even then, as a child.

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Despite decimalisation, Grandad refused to change the main cash register, one where those tickets flicked up to show the final tally, one of those big brass sit-up numbers that did a proper ker-ching when you opened the drawer. There were others, but that was Grandad’s till and, from memory, he was quite protective of it.

Saying I grew up in it is a little far-fetched, really, in that it was my playground when I went to stay or visit.

The place still has a strong magical draw, even though Grandad Harry and his wife, Grandma Rose, left this world more than three decades ago.

Now, as a photographer talking to other photographers about visiting far-flung places or unfamiliar locations, I often suggest it’s like photographing in a candy store; everything looks wonderful, different, and intriguing. What may be normal to one person who has seen the same view thousands upon thousands of times over will be a scene more extraordinary to, say, me.

My Grandfather’s shop was a fantastical place, much like Honeydukes, so I thought I’d go look it up on Google Street View and, when I found it, my heart frankly sank.

“Oh, look at that, it’s dreadful. What’s happened to the amazing façade it had? Where’s the worn-out olive green sun and rain shelter? Where’s all that beautiful wood panelling and lovely old door to match?”

It’s become completely charmless, with a horrible, small neon “OPEN” sign and an invitation to “pay your bills here.” The main door is now set in some form of aluminium frame, no different to all the others in the parade, and it’s turned into a shop that sells everything. It’s gone from being the Honeydukes of my childhood to just another shell full of stuff.

We had a living museum, and we took it for granted. There’s barely a photo left in the whole ever-decreasing family, so perhaps it falls to me to share what this looked like and, though it may not be a photograph you can reference, perhaps you can, in the developing tray that is your mind and imagination, go with me.

H.A. Stewart’s, tobacco, and confectioners, with, for the favoured few, if you walked through the shop, a lean-to where Harry cut your hair on proper pump-up chairs. Apparently, he was a trained barber, though Mum let him go nowhere near my hair as a child.

The shop had, at one stage, decorative windows that in today’s money would be Grade One listed, I’m sure. They were etched and hand-painted with the words Fry’s Chocolate. They stood proudly as a nod to an era where stickers weren’t the advertising collateral. You had hand-painted signs within hand-painted windows, and Grandad’s shop carried this display proudly for decades and decades, until...

It was Boxing Day, nineteen-seventy-something, and Harry opened the shop despite protestations from the family.

“It’s Christmas, Harry, ‘ave a couple of days off,” the family chimed in unison.

“Rose,” he said, because he rarely listened, or indeed left the shop, “I’m opening up for a couple of hours.”

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Harry Stewart loved a round of golf, and actually, he did leave the shop during opening hours every Thursday to play a round at Winchmore Hill Golf Club. He allowed himself this luxury at least.

His clubs were always on hand just out back in the living quarters part of the shop, as they indeed were this Boxing Day occasion in nineteen-seventy-something, when for some reason he and a customer decided to settle a wager that my Grandfather couldn’t drive a golf ball across and over the busy Great Cambridge Road, a dual carriageway that was the main northern arterial route into London, from inside the shop.

Whilst plausible, there were factors like trees on each side of the, shall we call it, urban fairway, a busy road that was rarely quiet, even at Christmas, and a doorway opening that meant your shot would need to rise sharply if it were to clear the paths, the single parking road adjacent to the shop, then the dual carriageway itself, missing the flow of traffic and arriving at the other side, hopefully landing on the grass verge in front of a row of houses, without striking vehicles or people.

This is obviously utter madness, but my Grandad had a wonderful eccentricity that sat well with the challenge, and so, unbeknownst to the family, who were out back preparing a Boxing Day feast or watching telly, the shot was set up. A makeshift tee was made from something, probably a 15p Mars Bar, and my grandfather lined up the shot.

Steady as he goes, feet planted, knees softly bent, arms loose at the address, one last look at the target, then eyes down on the ball. He draws the club back and up, weight shifting to the back foot, a breath held at the top of the swing, and then the downswing, hips turning through first, arms following, the clubface meeting the ball with that satisfying crack and then...

He properly shanked it, the ball fizzing off at a vicious angle, smashing through the corner of the display window on his right before the glass gave way, a sharp crack followed by the tinkling collapse of the pane folding inward.

Done.

The family rushed out and looked on in horror. Fry’s didn’t make windows like this anymore, and this relic of a bygone era had just been taken out by a wayward golf ball.

One thing you need to know about Grandad Harry is that he could never be wrong. He’d destroyed this historical signage, but rather than cower in the corner, horrified by this ridiculous act of needless self-vandalism, he found fault immediately in the low sun blinding him for a split second, the split second of the strike.

H.A. Stewart’s had a sort of den at the back of the shop, behind the counter, which you entered through an opening, from memory, framed by an architrave. This den was shelved on every surface you could find, and a shelving unit sat in the middle, packed tight with every leading tobacco and mixing jars.

It’s not fashionable to say, and I’m pleased I didn’t end up a smoker or pipe artist like my grandfather, but the smell of that den was exquisite. The old wood, this sweet, almost caramel warmth of pipe tobacco that had been smoked in that room for decades as my grandfather mixed special blends for customers, had simply become part of it.

As a child, it felt like a hidden room from another century. Customers would lean on the counter and lower their voices slightly when discussing their mixtures, as though they were talking to a tailor about a suit. My grandfather knew them all. One man liked something darker in winter. Another wanted a blend that reminded him of whatever he’d smoked during National Service. Names were written in pencil on little cards tucked behind jars, the handwriting fading after years of fingers and tobacco dust.

Some of those special customers were football players, names from his beloved Tottenham Hotspur, who would pop into H.A. Stewart’s to buy their tobacco before turning up to play.

And then there was the shop itself.

Grandma and Grandad’s sweet shop seemed to stretch upwards forever. Dark wooden shelves rose from the floor to the ceiling, wrapping around the walls in a great horseshoe shape, every inch occupied by glass jars, tins, packets, and boxes that looked as though they had been sitting there since before the war. New brands may have appeared here and there, but the bones of the shop belonged to another age.

The shelves were packed so tightly that it was hard to imagine how anyone kept track of it all. Great bell jars stood shoulder to shoulder. Inside were pear drops glowing amber and gold beneath the lights, mint humbugs twisted like little barber poles, sherbet lemons, aniseed balls, cough candy, barley sugars, winter mixture, Everton mints, liquorice torpedoes, Pontefract cakes, clove rock, army and navy sweets, cola cubes, acid drops and floral gums that tasted faintly of perfume and old ladies’ handbags.

There were coconut mushrooms, chocolate limes, treacle toffee wrapped in greaseproof paper, and little paper twists filled with mixed boiled sweets, weighed out on brass scales that I was allowed to measure.

The adult sweets sat slightly apart from the children’s treasures, as though they belonged to a different world entirely. Liquorice root stacked in bundles. Hard black cough candies and menthol sweets for throats roughened by cigarettes and cold weather. Dark toffees that could pull a filling loose if you were careless.

To reach the highest shelves, there was a ladder. It ran on a brass track fixed all the way around the shop, curving neatly at the corners so the ladder could glide without stopping. To me, at that age, there was only one other place that had something like this: the old library in our hometown. My grandfather moved along it with complete confidence, one hand reaching for jars while my grandmother steadied the base and gently pushed him onwards. He would collect things as he travelled: a tin from one shelf, a jar from another, packets tucked beneath his arm with the ease of a man who knew every inch of the place blindfolded.

From below, as a child, it looked almost magical. The ladder creaked as it rolled along the curved track above the counter, my grandfather suspended amongst hundreds of jars and colours and smells, like the keeper of some enormous edible archive.

“Rose,” he’d shout, “catch this,” and he’d drop from height one of those large glass jars full of pear drops, and my grandmother would somehow catch the jar, place it on the counter and ready herself for the next, which on this day arrived sooner than expected...

What happened next became part of family folklore for years afterwards, and I shall tell you that part of the story in the next edition.

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Pic: Anna

But a tortoise? I wrestle with keeping creatures that aren’t native to where I live because there’s a genuine moral question that I don’t think I can just wave away like an Asian hornet, which is equally not native to these parts and many times less desirable to look after.

But perhaps, and this is my get out of jail free card, there is something unexpectedly valuable about caring for an animal with more exotic requirements. A dog fits around your life. Well, except mine, who has me most certainly fitting around his.

A tortoise isn’t particularly high maintenance. They certainly don’t jump on your head at 5.47 in the morning, a whole hour ahead of walkies time, with over-enthusiastic and clearly over-ambitious intent.

But you do have to learn its world.

Most people assume the shell, for instance, to be basically a suitcase, just something a tortoise lives inside, but it’s actually fused to their spine and ribcage and packed with nerve endings. So if you scratch it gently, they can feel it, and some of them clearly enjoy it.

What also catches new owners off guard is how unforgiving the temperature requirements are, not just for comfort, but because once a tortoise drops outside its required range, digestion and immune function can essentially stop working. Get it wrong, and you’re not dealing with a cold animal; you’re dealing with a sick one.

Then there’s the personality question, which nobody really prepares for. People expect something passive and decorative, and instead they get an animal that might blank them for a fortnight because it’s decided it doesn’t trust them yet. And if you do build that trust and find yourself wanting to rehome one someday, you might discover that certain species, Hermann’s tortoise included, require a special certificate to buy or sell legally in the UK, which tends to come as a surprise.

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And then there’s the age thing. Dogs and cats that live to twenty plus are thought of as rather special and somewhat blessed, but a tortoise is almost certainly going to outlive you comfortably, and by some margin, perhaps by fifty to a hundred years. You’re not just choosing a pet. You’re making a decision that will need to be written into your will.

That leads on to this reptile thing, of course, because that’s what it is. And whilst it’s not exactly some kind of viper that could possibly kill you if it escaped and you ended up rolling over on to it in the middle of the night as it found a warm place to kip, it is a member of a family of creatures older than the ark itself. Three hundred and ten million years of evolving, bloody slowly.

It won’t outrun you, or sting you, or strip your vital organs of the ability to function with one unfortunate nibble. Think of a tortoise less as the overexcited PE teacher fresh out of university with a clipboard full of initiatives, and more as a retired history teacher who has embraced sunbathing more than you would imagine and enjoys cucumber.

Imagine being nature and pitching the tortoise idea. You can imagine the focus group, can’t you, as this idea was brought to the table?

“Right, I’ve got a new creature.”

“Go on.”

“It’s basically a walking coffee table.”

“Fast?”

“No.”

“Dangerous?”

“Not remotely.”

“What’s its defence mechanism?”

“It takes its house with it.”

Our tortoise has been with us, I would say, nigh on ten years now. His name is George, a good, solid, serious-sounding name.

George spends a lot of his life doing things very slowly. He doesn’t rush toward food as though he’s late for a meeting. He doesn’t panic because somebody else has got a better leaf. He just moves with this steady certainty that eventually he will arrive where he intended to go.

There’s something oddly confident about that.

Humans, meanwhile, have gone entirely the other way.

We answer messages while walking into doors.

We eat lunch standing up.

We say things before we’ve thought them through, then spend three years explaining what we actually meant.

I sometimes wonder what the world would look like if more decisions were made with tortoise timing.

Imagine a tortoise politician.

“What’s your response to this developing situation?”

Long pause.

A blink.

Possibly a small bite of lettuce.

“I’ll get back to you on that.”

Three business weeks later, he raises his head slightly.

“I have concerns.”

And honestly, compared with certain world leaders who seem to make announcements with the emotional stability of a shopping trolley on ice, it starts to sound quite appealing, doesn’t it?

Maybe the problem isn’t that some people move too slowly.

Maybe it’s that too many people move before their conscience has caught up.

That’s the beauty of my daily walks with my camera and journaling my thoughts here.

At the beginning of a walk, my head is usually still travelling at motorway speed. Lists. Worries. Fragments of conversations. Things I should’ve said. Things I definitely shouldn’t have said. The mind arrives noisy.

But photography, whatever kind you practise and whether you earn or not from it, refuses to work properly when you’re rushing.

You can’t really notice light in a hurry.

You don’t see the way rain sits on a gatepost or how evening light turns ordinary pavement into something almost theatrical. Those things appear when your internal engine finally drops a gear.

Sometimes I’ll stand for five minutes looking at absolutely nothing obvious. Just waiting. And eventually something reveals itself. A shape. A shadow. A moment where everything lines up for half a second.

And then sometimes, nothing ends up happening at all.

Perhaps people would understand each other better if we slowed down long enough for thoughts to fully appear.

If somebody tells you something painful, the instinct is often to fix it immediately. Respond immediately. Fill the silence immediately.

But some of the best conversations I’ve ever had arrived after a pause.

Not an awkward silence.

Slowing down lets thoughts finish forming.

It lets instinct get questioned.

It gives conscience time to tap you on the shoulder and say, “Are you absolutely sure about this?”

George never seems burdened by urgency.

He’ll spend ages examining one corner of the garden as though he’s conducting a land survey for future generations.

And meanwhile, I’m checking the time while brushing my teeth.

There’s probably a balance in all this. You can’t run a fire brigade entirely on tortoise principles.

Although even then, a tortoise firefighter would probably remain extremely calm.

Tiny helmet.

Slow nod.

“We will attend the blaze.”

Eventually.

But I do think there’s something deeply human about learning when not to accelerate.

Some of the worst moments in life happen because people react before they reflect.

Anger moves quickly.

Fear moves quickly.

Crowds move quickly.

Wisdom usually doesn’t.

Wisdom has a shell on its back and takes a while crossing the patio.

Perhaps that’s why I like photographing on walks so much. It forces me into the speed of noticing. The speed George already understands, naturally.

A speed where you remember that the world is not just something to race through.

Sometimes it’s something to stand still in.

Or at least shuffle through thoughtfully, carrying your house with you.

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Two and a half thousand years ago, “like and subscribe” clearly wasn’t a currency, or a way of thinking that humankind attached relevance, reverence, importance, or any other word ending in “ce” to, certainly not Buddhists.

And on the note of Buddhism itself, I’d like to introduce you to something I learned about only recently, ironically enough, in a place which is all about “like and subscribe,” YouTube.

Pic: Snehanshu Dharmadhikari

Mandala (pronounced MAN-duh-luh) is the Sanskrit word for circle, or, more accurately, a disc, a sort of contained world. So think less of a physical drawn shape (I could never draw circles anyway) and more of a bounded space with something held inside it. Like a cricket boundary with cricketers inside, or like a frying pan with a thin layer of rice. Hopefully pilau, my favourite.

Actually, the concept of mandala comes from a tradition older than Buddhism, appearing first in Hinduism, in texts dating back perhaps three and a half thousand years, and the basic idea has remained consistent over that time: a geometric symbol representing the universe, used as a tool for meditation and focus. Circles within circles, patterns that pull the eye inward.

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When Tibetan Buddhism adopted the form, it brought its own layer of purpose. The mandala in this tradition represents something closer to a sacred map, a symbolic cosmology, the structure of an enlightened mind.

I feel at this moment I want to join together by saying ommmmm, but I don’t want to appear flippant.

Monks create their own form of mandala from sand, large colourful circles of sand, intricate patterns (remember, circles within circles) and the ones doing it have trained for years before they’re permitted anywhere near one in a ceremonial context.

Again, without being flippant, it’s like starting a hobby and building up to the moment you can then practise your craft for a higher purpose, in this case, ceremony.

The work takes days, sometimes weeks, and multiple monks work together, starting at the centre, of course, and moving outward, placing grains of coloured sand using small metal funnels called chak-pur. The funnel releases a controlled stream of sand, not poured as it sounds, but guided.

The scale of patience required to lay down millions of grains into patterns of this intense intricacy, over that length of time, while people wander past taking photographs on their phones, fascinates me. I’m sure some visiting tourists imagine this to be a form of more recent entertainment rather than an age-old practice.

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Once completed, everyone steps back, observes it, then someone steps in and simply brushes it away.

“What have you just done? That’s taken me weeks, that has.”

There are a few accounts of this unexpected end to something so beautifully and reverently created.

One is that, perhaps in a more traditional way, a door or window is opened, and the wind simply takes the mandala, or pattern, away.

It’s not quite true, as it happens, well, not today at any rate. The monks deliberately use a particularly dense sand, specifically to stop wind and accidental disturbance from undoing the work before they choose to.

The ending isn’t so passive. They do it themselves, with a ritual that mirrors the care that’s gone into the making. A lead monk draws lines through the finished pattern, horizontally, then vertically, and then others join in, pushing the sand inward until this intricate, weeks-long creation is a pile of grey-brown nothing.

The sand gets wrapped in silk, carried to a river, and released into the current. Whatever intention went into the making gets dispersed outward, rather than sitting there being admired. It’s beautifully tragic to someone who can only see it as a destroyed work of art, but to the monks, this is precisely the point: that nothing of value was ever contained in the object itself, only in the making of it, and in the release.

I suppose the romantic in me likes the idea of the breeze taking this creation, even though it leans on inaccuracy. Well, certainly by today’s narrative at least.

The wind taking the mandala suggests entrusting nature to reclaim something you have made, and it’s this uneasiness that probably doesn’t compute for most of us, including me. Because we are not like that at all, are we?

In terms of social media, we’ve spent the last decade and a half measuring how well our output is received, in real time, by as many people as possible, and we check those systems constantly. It didn’t start like that, from memory. I can’t remember thinking, “I wonder how many people have looked at this post,” not at the beginning.

The need to know started to creep in. It nudged into my life without so much as a personal introduction.

“Hello, I’m Social Media Validation. Strange name, I know, not even hyphenated. Anyway, I’m here to make you feel as good and as bad in equal measure. And I’m never going to move out.”

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And actually, this didn’t affect just professional creators, it was pretty much everyone, if I can generalise for effect, or a moment. You put something out, you check back in within the hour, probably. Sometimes within minutes. Not because you’re vain, necessarily, but because these feedback loops, as they’re known, have been made so immediate and so easy to read that not checking, for some, for many, actually feels uncomfortable.

And to be fair to ourselves, it’s not all bad. If you’re running a business, if your income depends on reach, if you’re trying to build something that actually connects with people, the metrics, well, they matter.

An Instagram account with 20,000 engaged followers is a different proposition to one with a couple of hundred, and pretending otherwise is the kind of thing people say when they don’t need the money.

Validation has real-world currency. It opens doors, and it gets you taken seriously in rooms where you’d otherwise be invisible. I’m not interested in making a pious argument that none of it counts, because that just wouldn’t be true.

But I do think there’s a thing that begins to invade your conscience.

You start making work, or at least you did once, because there was something you wanted to say or show or figure out. Then, at some point, you start anticipating the response before the work is finished.

You make small adjustments because you know doing it this way or that gets more thumbs up or heart emojis. And the metrics reward you for it, so you keep doing it, and eventually you look at what you’re making, in all its competent, well-performing glory, and realise that it doesn’t feel like yours anymore. Well, not in quite the way it did.

The monks building the mandala couldn’t do this even if they wanted to. The design is prescribed, passed down, and mapped to specific teachings; personal innovation is largely forbidden.

Every grain goes where the tradition says it goes. But within that, there’s still a level of attention being paid to the thing itself, to the rightness of the making, that has nothing to do with how it will be received, because that question is entirely absent from the process. No audience is shaping the work from the inside.

“But where’s the creativity in that?” you might rightly ask. And I think you might have more than a grain of sand of a point in that. “Surely the fun, or the pleasure, is in making something that surprises people.”

But there’s a difference between making something and then sharing it, and making something in anticipation of how people might receive it.

I think that sequence means a lot, because once the audience is inside the creative process from the beginning, it changes what gets made.

The weeks of mandala work done with complete attention, knowing the whole time that the ending is already decided, and that nobody’s approval changes what gets built or how carefully it gets built, must be really refreshing to the soul, if you don’t mind me getting all woo-woo for a moment.

The work just is what it is, without any of that noise around it. You’re not checking in constantly across the weeks to see how it’s being received, although I guess there’s a little anxiety hoping that the new cleaner hasn’t bought one of those autonomous vacuum units that runs around in the middle of the night.

“Has anyone seen my mandala? It was there yesterday.”

Here’s what mandala-creating monks understand that the algorithm doesn’t, and maybe never will. The likes don’t last. They never did, they never will. The post that got three hundred hearts in 2023 is buried so deep now that even you’ve forgotten it.

It’s taken me a while to go over and over in my mind how to resolve this piece, but I think I have it. Go with me.

The sand mandala that took three weeks to build and thirty seconds to sweep away didn’t vanish without a trace. It went into the river, yes, but also into the people who made it, in terms of their creative and meditative purpose, and I think that’s an understanding about permanence that, whilst trickier to think about than “how many people saw it as they swiped by and left a like,” has a degree of honesty that a post peaking on a Tuesday and forgotten by Wednesday simply can’t match.

Perhaps there’s another way to think about this, too.

The likes don’t last. The making might.

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If you’ve been enjoying these stories of life from a photographer, please consider sharing this post with someone you feel may enjoy them. There’s a first part of this story, the episode just prior to this. It’ll help what I’m about to tell you make a lot more sense, so for the context alone, it’s worth skipping back, as they say.

Pic: Tim Hüfner

Having said that, I’m imagining you might be on one of your multitasking days and have no time for skipping, or maybe you’ve just stumbled across this episode and are just intrigued by today’s title thinking you’ve happened across true crime, or perhaps, and I think this is statistically more likely, you’re in a car somewhere on the A14 with a pasty in your lap and your full concentration somewhere else entirely. So, let me do one of those short TV recaps, as they do in grown-up drama.

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I got a job as a weekend DJ in a nightclub in Waltham Abbey near to London, aged 19, showed up thirty minutes late for my audition, and met a man, the ‘head doorman/security/I’ll do anything for the boss’ man, with a scar the full length of his face who in a ‘does exactly what it says on the tin’ style, introduced himself simply as Scarface.

This was also a man who, as you’ll discover, had historical associations with Ronnie Kray, one of the most feared gangsters (one half of the Kray Twins) to have walked through East London in the 50s and 60s, oh and one more thing: Scarface, at this audition, had my hand in a squeezy death handshake and told me he was ‘going to look after me’. I had absolutely no idea what that meant, but I had a fairly strong feeling that I was about to find out.

TV drama recap done, let’s start and end this story here, in part 2, appropriately titled Scarface and Ronnie Kray.

My audition at the nightclub just about in the grip of London, ten miles from where the Krays had control of their manor, as it’s known, went well.

Well, I say well, I messed up some mixes, sounded like a ‘sh*t scared teenager’ on the microphone, according to Scarface, and temporarily broke the door to the DJ booth as I thought it opened inwards and not outwards.

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“You never have a DJ booth door open inwards,” explained Scarface, as if it were obvious, “because that way when someone gets pi**ed off you’re not playing their song, they can’t push the door in to get at ya.”

That all made perfect sense to me, apart from the fact I’d just pushed the door inwards and pulled the two hinges out, without too much effort at all, and I certainly wasn’t an unhappy Sex Pistols fan.

I moot the Pistols, because the only time I’d seen real trouble on my watch as a DJ to that point, was at the John O Gaunt pub in my home town, just across the road from my school, right next to the tax office, which is a story for another time.

I’d been holding off playing the Sex Pistols all night, a threatening demand being made by the town’s thug, a thug with the worst name a thug could possibly have, Eggy. I thought Edgy would have been more appropriate for this reasonably unpredictable basket case, but Eggy it was. I’m thinking he once tried to etch the name Edgy into a table at school with a crayon, but couldn’t spell it. And so Eggy was born, like the nasty emotional smell he left wherever he went in the town.

He’s no doubt got a proper, respectable job now, so for the first time in a long while, I feel I can release my inhibitions and share, or perhaps overshare. Thank you for listening. I feel so much better now, as they say in counselling.

“Play Sex Pistols, or I’ll hit ya,” was his opening, middle and end gambit.

I’d plucked up the courage and said ‘no’ to Eggy a number of times, knowing full well it was on the blacklisted account of songs or bands in that pub, not because they didn’t appreciate them, I’m sure, but because usually, prohibited songs or bands were tried and tested fight starters. Play one of those and you wouldn’t be asked back to play, ever.

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But with the threats thick and fast from Eggy’s seven-word request strategy, I eventually caved and played that very nice song about love, peace and harmony, the Good Ship Venus.

Eggy prowled the dance floor as it started up, and actually, if you know the song, it is in part a bit of a singalong, sort of, unlikely punk karaoke, until about a minute in, when all hell breaks loose, and anyone and anything is fair game.

Eggy grabbed a poor unsuspecting tax assistant, I did say we were the pub adjacent to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs at the time, and threw him clean through my disco unit, which despite being fashioned out of mum and dad’s old rigid mahogany sideboard, folded, like a deck of cards. The Squire bass bins I had, one for the DJs in here, were pushed over, all the wires were ripped from their casings and that was that, night over, as was my residency at the John O Gaunt pub.

Rules are rules for a reason. Although my face did at least stay intact that night. I’d not been egged, as I recall the threat as being. Egged. Honestly.

Anyway, 3, 2, 1, back in the room and back at the club in 1986, I’d got the DJ job.

Having been successful at the audition, it didn’t take long until John, the manager you met in the first episode informed me, I couldn’t have the weekend gig, because I was essentially not very talented in the conventional sense, but being nineteen, he reckoned the ladies (his words now) would love a sacrificial nineteen year old lamb on every Friday for the popular Divorced Separated and Singles night.

“Lucky for you, Scarface is on the door those nights, and I hear he’s said he’ll look after you.”

“Lucky for me,” I thought.

I’ll save the many stories of what opened my eyes in the late night to early morning hours of the dingy red club under the snooker club and in those hidden away booths where I’m sure they enjoyed quiet games of scrabble and Mahjong, but needless to say, the nearly two years spent there were like a finishing school of one where the curriculum included the etiquette of knowing when to turn the lights fully up during a contretemps, the correct response when someone produces an illegal pint of ale on the dancefloor, and a working knowledge of exactly how much trouble a man in a good suit and bad intentions can cause before Scarface materialises, apparently from nowhere.

Scarface was fearless. He liked a good roughing up, although he did the roughing, even when it was two on one. And over the months he did indeed “look after me,” but not in a face-filling, hang-you-over-the-side-of-the-building-by-your-foot way.

I think he took me somewhat under his wing really. I was rather hoping Eggy might turn up at one of my gigs so I could refuse to play Sex Pistols and point him out to Scarface with my security torch I’d been given to point out trouble.

He also carried my record boxes out to the car each night while I parked up at the rear exit fire doors, to make sure the local louts didn’t touch me, or my red Vauxhall Astra 1.3 estate. Actually, he put word out that if my car was so much as looked at by those smoking whatever in the darker recesses of the ground floor car park, where the street lamps had all been knocked out, they’d be answering to him. Needless to say, my car was never touched. In fact it was more likely to be polished than scratched.

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It was during one of our Friday night, early Saturday hours decants from the club, about six months in, that Scarface announced he had a present for me.

He went back into the club, and came back a minute or two later with a shoebox.

“Ere you go son,” Scarface said, “the missus gets a bit funny about me havin this in the house, so you look after it for me.”

I went to open the box.

“Don’t open it ‘ere,” he hissed, “take it home wiv ya.”

The drive home that night on the Great Cambridge Road out of London had me looking down at the box for the entire journey. Why I didn’t pull over and have a look, I have no idea. I’d learned a little bit about Scarface’s colourful background, you don’t get to earn a moniker like that, despite such a life-changing scar, without the universe delivering back what you dealt out, well, the East End universe at any rate.

All I was hoping was, that it wasn’t a shooter, as the gangsters might say. If Scarface’s missus didn’t want it in her house, I hardly think my leafy Hertfordshire parents would want it either. Besides, where would I hide it? I actually considered behind the rabbit hutch thinking it could go into Munchy’s straw, making sure from now on, I was the only one to clean him out each weekend.

“But you hate cleaning the hutch out,” my Mum might say.

“Oh I don’t mind Mum, you take a weight off and I’ll mow the lawn for dad while I’m about it.”

It turned out, to be a shoebox of letters from Ronnie Kray, infamous London gangster. They were to Scarface as far as I could work out, although some could have been for other members of maybe a gang, perhaps the gang, or the inner fraternity of their business interests.

A graphologist would no doubt have a lot to say about the increasingly slanted handwriting, which seemed to stay neatly and obediently within the lines, ironically not something that was echoed by his life, unless his he was with him mum, Violet. He was polite, letters always started with dear as a salutation, and he seemed to, from memory, mention home cooking and food a lot, and cardigans. I do remember he’d miss words out, which became a bit of a deciphering exercise at times, and here and there, he’d get busy with big capital letters, which lent an angry feel to his prose. Remind you of anyone?

The box resided on my desk in my bedroom, hardly hidden away, for weeks, and I was fascinated by the letters within, reading them probably every night. They were certainly not something that would withstand the damp of Munchy’s hay store in the back garden.

It was only a matter of time, before it was investigated by prying eyes, when the cleaning squad aka my Mum took the hoover on a mission through my bedroom while I was out.

And so we return to the first words of part one of this piece.

“You take that bloody box of letters out of my house and don’t ever mention his name again,” barked my father, surprisingly angry about what was essentially a shoebox of scrawl from Ronnie Kray, the infamous East London gangster.

I returned the box that Friday night to Scarface, sharing the truth of my Mum’s flying squad find.

“You nutter,” he said. “Should’ve hidden ‘em away. They’ll be worth a fortune one day.” And he snatched them out of my hands.

I had no idea, this had been Scarface’s idea of a gift, or investment, as he clearly thought of this box full of letters from one of England’s most notorious criminals. And he wasn’t wrong. I did some cursory research, and that box could have been worth an easy five-figure number.

At this moment, perhaps one of you might be thinking, or asking, “Well, what was his name? Scarface, that is. I’m sure he wasn’t called Scarface.”

And you’d be right, this mystery man who’d been facially striped as it was known, who ‘looked after me’ for two years and gifted me a box that could have been historically and financially important, was indeed mentioned by his first name, a name it turns out was connected to some of the more interesting times during the Krays’ 60s crime spree.

I’d tell you, of course, but to use the words often used during that time, in that part of London, so as not to attract the claw-hammer knee-capping, chivving or striping activities of one Ronnie Kray and his brother Reggie, “I ain’t no grass.”

As a footnote, YouTube has been doing its usual thing over the last few days, since I’d been researching a little more about the Krays and their quite literal death grip over the capital.

Ronnie died in March 1995, having had a heart attack at Broadmoor, and Reggie was brought out of prison in handcuffs to attend the funeral. Thousands lined the streets of the East End for a horse-drawn cortege through Bethnal Green, the kind of send-off normally reserved for heads of state or beloved entertainers, which tells you something fairly pointed about how the public had decided to remember a man who had, amongst other things, shot someone in the head in a pub in front of witnesses and seemed to find the whole experience rather satisfying. Actually, the story goes that he went home to his Mum’s house immediately afterwards for tea and cake.

There’s a YouTube video that includes news reports from the day of Ronnie’s funeral. One of the men interviewed in the wake at the Blind Beggar pub, still open today, a man called Frankie, where that infamous shooting happened, says on camera, “Well, they were good guys, they were good gangsters really.” He goes on to say, “They wouldn’t harm women or children, because they were untouchable.”

Oh that’s alright then Frankie, or should I call you by your name from the time, ‘Mad Frankie Fraser,’ known to pull teeth from his victims during acts of torture, who lived to be 90, although nearly half those years were spend ‘doing porridge,’ at Her Majesty’s pleasure.

The eulogies at Ronnie Kray’s funeral and the general street-corner consensus that day leaned heavily on the Robin Hood mythology, the unlocked doors, the looking after your own, the code, all of it polished up and presented as though the inconvenient business of the extreme violence, torture, extortion and fear, had simply been mislaid somewhere between the flowers and the horse brasses.

I watched the footage available from that day, which is a bit grim, to close this chapter of the story.

Interesting when I look back at those attending, including celebs and a sprinkling of gangsters, old-school and modern. I don’t see Eggy anywhere. I guess you need something scarier as a name, really, and Mad Frankie Fraser was clearly taken.

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“You take that bloody box of letters out of my house and don’t ever mention his name again,” barked my father, surprisingly angry about what was essentially a shoebox of scrawl from Ronnie Kray, the infamous East London gangster.

I was somewhat confused and taken aback at that moment, because this was a box of writings I thought he might be interested in, for what was written and how it was written, these almost childlike pencil scratches on prison-headed paper.

Pic: Ye Jinghan

Dad talked about London from the war years onwards a reasonable amount, so I thought at the very least my special shoebox of handwritten letters from one of the city’s most notorious gangsters might pique his interest, over this unexpected fury.

It was 1986, and the notorious Ronnie Kray, brother to Reggie, had been serving time at Her Majesty’s pleasure for seventeen years, two less than I’d been alive, and seven of the latter in a maximum secure hospital called Broadmoor, having been certified insane.

I should fill you in, as the Krays probably said to a few hapless victims of their violence, as to why letters ending with “from your friend Ronnie” were causing such concern for my dad. But this story, this memory, has come to mind for three reasons, really.

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One of my first employees, during the short moments I’ve felt grown up enough to actually hire people, was someone called Emma. We worked together in a business called The Radio School, training tomorrow’s broadcast talent to understand the process of applying for work in an industry which leaned on large helpings of right-place-right-time luck, sprinklings of nepotism, self-confidence and a stark inability to read the words “we have nothing right now but will keep your letter on file in case the right opportunity comes along” as a terminal rendition of “thanks but no thanks.”

To me, Emma has always been known as Prim, as in prim and proper. There’s no steering the Bentley away from this, but she is, I would say, my poshest friend, always so elegantly turned out, even in dog walker scruffs, lives in that house Blur sang about, and she’s exceptionally well spoken with friends who have names like Otilie, Hugo, Clementine and Rupert.

She’s writing a novel at the moment, as it goes, and last week, on a catch-up dog walk, I was permitted to read the opening chapter, before the publisher has even turned a page.

It’s bloody good work and actually, I feel privileged to be featured in this book, based on real-ish events, as a character named Jamie. There’s a particular brevity to my appearance, a Halfway to Maybe man would have it no other way, and I’m written out by chapter two.

The storyline is mostly about the employers that come after, who are a little bit wide boy, a little bit ooh, and a little bit ahh. You need to read that in an EastEnders cockney timbre.

I’m not suggesting for a moment that they are or were a Kray kind of set-up, but the stories and colourful language of this novel could take the pearls clean off a duchess, and my friend Prim walked right into that world with a firm handshake and no idea of what “Sort it aht, Bird, or I’ll give you some Adrian” actually meant.

Secondly, I’ve been editing an in-vision interview with a photographer called John Swannell, a British portrait and fashion photographer, famous for photographing members of the royal family, including Diana, Princess of Wales and the late Queen Elizabeth II. He started out assisting at Vogue and for David Bailey before building his own client list of the rich and very famous.

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We’ve arrived at the part in the edit where he recounts meeting the Krays at Bailey’s studio. I’ll save the details for the film, but in essence, John remembers escaping through a window in a building where they were working, to save himself from the advances of one Ronnie Kray.

The stars are clearly aligning, because, and this is the third reason behind the piece, my eldest Jack asked me over the weekend who the Krays were. Oddly, with all this happening, YouTube (tell me it’s not snooping in an omnipotent fashion) started serving up clips from the film Legend, which tells the story of the twin brothers Ronnie and Reggie Kray, who ran organised crime across the East End of London through the 1950s and ‘60s with a combination of charm, community loyalty, and a capacity for extreme violence that made them almost impossible to challenge.

They were celebrities as much as criminals, photographed with politicians and pop stars, welcomed into nightclubs they probably half-owned anyway, loved, loathed and feared in equal measure.

People of a particular generation would suggest they looked after London in a fashion akin to a kind of Robin Hood figure, that old people could leave their doors unlocked, that nobody nicked from their own, and that there was a code of sorts, however brutal the hands that enforced it.

Reggie was the more calculated of the two, the one who could read a room and knew when to turn the menace up or down. Ronnie was a different matter entirely. He was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic, which his solicitors would later lean on heavily, but the clinical label doesn’t quite capture what made him so genuinely frightening. He didn’t lose his temper — that would almost have been reassuring.

No, Ronnie was cold, unpredictable in a way that had nothing to do with drink or provocation, and he seemed to enjoy the fear he generated as much as anything else.

One moment he’d be saying something quite amusing, the next he’d be caving the side of your head in with a claw hammer.

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People around him never quite knew which version they were getting, and that uncertainty was, for a very long time, what kept everyone in line.

Even when the Krays were banged up, as they say, you’d have found, as I did, that mum and dad’s generation still felt awkward at the very mention of either of the brothers, as if just the mere use of their surname could somehow magic them back. They were, I suppose, the Voldemort of their time.

So, this box. A shoebox of letters from Ronnie Kray.

Aged 19, I worked as a DJ for a while at a club in Waltham Abbey, a part of London. Actually, it’s more a part of Essex, but it’s one of those places that feels like it wants to lay claim more to being allied to the smoke than a leafier part of the south east.

This was a small nightclub tucked into a corner of an estate of tower block flats. Dark red brick buildings, as I remember. Very much a part of 1960s soulless architecture, but not characterful enough to be granted brutalist status.

It was leased by a man called John, a short, dark-haired, chain-smoking man with a gruff voice and disarming demeanour, and try as I might, using all the powers of search, AI and otherwise, I have not been able to trace this club, him, or indeed the tower blocks it was part of. I suspect they’re long gone, and whilst the 1980s seem only a short time ago, I think they were possibly knocked down twenty-five-plus years ago.

The club was on the ground floor, reached by steps leading down from a snooker club. I’d answered a small 3x1 ad in a local newspaper: “Wanted: DJ for weekends, residency position. Auditions being held. Apply to 01 something something etc etc.”

Funny to think ads only had call for the space needed to contain a telephone number.

I rang, having only DJ’d with a makeshift disco unit made from a mahogany sideboard since the age of 16 or 17, for friends’ parties and a pub in Hertford that I wasn’t old enough to order a beer in.

“Come in Saturday afternoon,” said the voice on the end of the phone.

Do you remember how we used to find places before sat nav? This club was properly hidden away in the middle of a very depressed-looking area, and the only place to park was out the back in an alleyway that by day was scary enough, I could only imagine what it might be like at kicking out time when darkness enveloped the space. I arrived thirty minutes late, after searching for the place, figuring out the parking and then working a route back through the estate to the front door.

“You’re an hour late,” grumbled a man who unbolted the door to let me in.

I went to answer that it was only thirty minutes, but he turned the moment I started to talk and motioned me to follow him.

The club’s brutally harsh fluorescent lighting stripped every bit of mystery from the room. Spaces like this are almost unrecognisable from what they become after dark, all the illusion gone, just sticky carpet and the ghosts of a thousand Saturday nights.

I’d been DJing in pubs on and off for a couple of years by that point, so I knew the smell well enough: every known tobacco brand had worked itself into the soft furnishings like it had barbs, and underneath all of it something sweeter and harder to name, cheap aftershave or perfume, probably. Stale lager had soaked into the red and white striped carpet; it had lost all its bounce, and the walls looked like they’d last seen a paintbrush a decade back, easily. There were booths (another tone of red) that looked like areas prying eyes wouldn’t be able to peer into easily, and a DJ unit cloaked in that puffy, studded black leather.

Standing waiting were two men: John, the owner, and another man, similar height, a bit stockier, suit-clad with no tie, in his 50s, possibly 60s, sporting a long scar that ran from just next to his right eye down his face to his chin. It was an old scar, but I could see the depth, or at least, in some sense, feel it. When, as a photographer, I describe a face as lived-in or storied, this is what I mean. He looked like he’d been twelve rounds with life and was ready to do another twelve just for the sh*ts and giggles.

I felt like I’d walked onto a film set.

The owner greeted me first.

“I’m John, you’re late. But I still have a slot, that’s if you’re any good. This is my head of door. You might need him from time to time, that’s if you’re any good.”

I shook John’s hand. Then I shook the other man’s hand.

He squeezed mine back and held the grip uncomfortably long. He smiled, that confident, menacing smile that only a man with a long scar on his face and what looked like a cauliflower ear on the opposing side of his head could muster.

“Hello,” he said, with a deep, resonant 50-a-day London/Essex accent, the sort of tone that also suggested he ate razor blades for breakfast.

“I think you and I are gonna get on just fine.”

“If he’s good enough,” John chirped in.

“Nah, he’ll be alright. I’m gonna look after you,” he said, or threatened. I couldn’t quite work out which.

“I’m Neale,” I mumbled. “You are?”

“Scarface,” said the man. “That’s what you can call me. Scarface.”

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