There is something slightly hazy about this old scanned negative. Something slightly hazy about the four pensioners. They were sat in Eastbourne, a town which is often referred to as "God's Waiting Room" because of the preponderance of pensioners. I wonder if they are still sat there now, a third of a century later.

I saw this advert in the Huddersfield Examiner and it seems like a bit of a bargain to me. Whilst the bottled Pale Ale seems to be selling at 4/- a pint (that is four shillings or 20p to those who are too young to be reading this blog), the cask conditioned India Pale Ale … Continue reading Progressing Favourably On Cheap Pale Ale

Just Published News From Nowhere Magazine February 2015 AVAILABLE FROM THE LULU SHOP

My eighth found dollop of history (50 pence from the second hand shop) features a 1917 vintage postcard from Dover. Most vintage postcards date from the first decade of the twentieth century - the age of the postcard collecting boom when hundreds of thousands of cards were sent, received, and carefully added to postcard albums. … Continue reading A Dozen Dollops Of History 8 : Maudie’s Better For The Rest

One of the great delights of digital photography is not simply that you can capture a moment in time but the details of the capture are recorded forever, carved in digital stone, etched in acidic metadata. This photograph was taken by me at 15.58 on the 13th April 2005 in Budapest. Ten years on, is … Continue reading Etched In Acidic Metadata

Two images from a scan of 35mm black and white negatives that I took some time in the early 1980s. The location is the south coast of England, I suspect somewhere near Eastbourne. Isobel did a short locus at the hospital there whilst still a medical student and we stayed down there together at the … Continue reading With Judge Judy In Eastbourne

The problem with scanning old slides is that they usually have acquired a layer of dust thick enough to protect them from a moderate arctic breeze. You can carefully airbrush the dust specks out, but on the whole, life is too short. Better to leave them in place - it's what Georges Seurat did after … Continue reading With Georges Seurat At The Bull Ring

It was the great French photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, that described photography in terms of the "decisive moment": the ability of the camera (especially of the new lightweight cameras of the 1930s and 40s) to capture a precise moment in time and demonstrate that, in one way or another, all moments are decisive. I know that … Continue reading A Decisive Moment Outside The British Museum

Can there be a sadder sight in all the world than that of a derelict pub? Fallen statues of fallen leaders I can take. Crumbling abbeys amidst pastoral settings can have a special beauty all of their own. Demolished hovels giving way to new houses can give you hope for the future. But a derelict … Continue reading No Sadder Sight Than A Derelict Pub