Blog archive January 2020
<< December 2019 / March 2020 >>
23.01.20 / 03 / rebuilding smallfire.org
My spare time atm is taken up by rebuilding smallfire.org. I abandoned it in about 2012 and was thinking of taking it down last year, but a couple of random strangers emailed me about it and said, no don’t do it, one had just published it in a book - and I thought actually I can do a much better job now, the constraints on photo size and numbers have all vanished.
But there’s a lot of rescanning, and a lot of images that were never seen, and certainly not at a decent size. The site is coming up to 20 years old, and my photos are in many cases the only record of what happened which is a scary thought. I wish I had taken far more photos earlier. I can’t believe it’s so long since things like Vaux. Grace is 26 years and counting...
23.01.20 / 02 / barcelona
The consolation was Barcelona itself. Of all the places I have visited and worked, it is my favourite and the one I would like to live in. The city is vibrant, beautiful, safe and walkable. People are friendly. The weather is always pleasantly warm and sunny, except when storms come in off the Mediterranean. The food is good, but oddly limited compared to London - you eat basically the same things at the high end or the low. Nothing beats sitting at a table in the street, in the warm evening, with good wine and sea bass while the life flows around you.
23.01.20 / 01 / 2019 review
2019 was not a good year. The Barcelona project was so stressful I kept having breakdowns. Eventually I had a health scare with high blood pressure - which turned out just about OK, but my employers agreed I needed two months off. Which got deferred for almost two months - I finally got July and August off. Didn’t go away because I realised that I needed to rest quietly at home and have some kind of healthy routine. At the end of the break my family took me away to Harlech for my 60th birthday.
So now Barcelona is ‘finished' but still has issues dragging on that have kind of spoiled the end of the project for me. My current project was supposed to be a lot easier on me - but it’s gone snafu and the key person is off work indefinitely since Christmas with a very sick child. The circumstances are very unfortunate and it's nobody's fault. So I’m having to take the responsibility and workload that I was adamant I would NOT take.
The other big stress is my mother. Her mental health and ability to cope is eroding, it worries me and I just had a miserable Christmas at her house dealing with her issues. Many of which are ‘pre-existing conditions’ that Dad used to deal with. Now I think I know why they used to row in the kitchen. So between work stress and Mum stress I’m really not in a good place.
I will close the smallritual blog this year - I don’t use it now and it’s quite expensive to keep going. I will put the content onto smallritual.org. Given that ‘comment is dead’ I can just use the home page of smallritual.org as a blog if I feel like it - which is what happened in the beginning anyway.
My real blog is my Flickr feed, on an almost daily basis. I said almost as soon as I started blogging that I really wanted to blog with pictures, and that is what has happened.
