Monday, June 27, 2005

Move Over Magnum

Listening to - My Perfect Cousin

Couldn't decide which was better so you get both of these.

  

And finally, this is me ...



I am now sufficiently different from this photo for me to feel that you will not be able to recognise me. Guess what type of camera I was using. Actually I had two and a video camera and they were heavy, though not as heavy as some things that people have to carry.

The monkey is just about to steal the pen in my top pocket. It could have been the roll of exposed film that was in there as well but I was lucky.

Others taken at the same time.







Photography surfeit has been prompted by my daughter and me visiting the house of E. Chambre Hardman at 59 Rodney Street in Liverpool. I was expecting it to be a pokey, little place and instead found an airy, three-floor town house which has been well looked after and restored. Hardman and his wife Margaret made their living from portrait photographs of everyone ranging from actors at the playhouse (they were 'recommended' to go to him) to the many people in uniform who passed through the city. However, their real passion was landscape photography. He took the famous picture of the Ark Royal just after its undercoat was completed. Every weekend, the couple would travel into Wales to take photographs; the owener of the chip shop would remember them coming in late on Sunday evening to get their supper until one day he turned up on his own his wife having died the previous week. They famously never threw anything away and the National Trust were met with tins exploding in the pantry cupboard.

I have to say that my daughter was extremely well behaved and interested throughout what was an hour plus tour. Worth a visit if you are ever up here. She got all the quiz questions (though I had to ask a few questions for clarification).

Big news is that I won't have to travel into Liverpool very much any more. The team in which I have worked for nearly twenty years is being scattered across the North West meaning that I no longer have to travel to this historic site. I am not going to be on my own at my new site as some of the crew are also going there but it will be a wrench.

So many things to mention and none of them have stayed in the place in my head they should have done. I am whistling through On Seeing And Noticing by Alain De Botton (who after all is Swiss) while itching to get back to the Ancestor's tale. OSAN being philosophy prompts many thoughts and as usual I cannot put them down here with any eloquence.

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