Much as I have enjoyed the hospitality of my gracious WordPress hosts, it’s just too much trying to raise two blogs, keep a house and run a business. The blog has been galloping on my main website for some time now. Why not check him out over there?

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Of course it wasn’t all cockles and cock-a-tails. Long periods at sea shoved about in the community petri dish.

I saw a road sign today I’ve never seen before ‘Adverse Camber’. A good phrase. Abject camber, I expanded as the bend worked against me. There were a few of those alright. The worst of times. Barely a third of the way around Africa and already the ship was leaning the wrong way to me.

In Walvis Bay I’d been plotting an 80km cycle along the Kalahari Highway for a beer in the last big town before the Angolan border 1000km beyond that. But when it came to it I didn’t have the heart for it. All the way to Namibia just to be irritable and disinclined. I managed to drag myself down the gangway for a run with the Mju before sailing. A deserted pier guano-caked was all I deserved that day. Runners know all about camber and nasty pulls too.

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Creative commercial photography in Northern Ireland

I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it.

Norwegians are fabulous. And what makes them so fabulous is that they don’t know that they are. Or if they do they don’t let on. They point a lofty pragmatism at most things and are generally nice and tall. And just when you begin to suspect that they are too sensible for their own boots you notice that their eyes are grinning so you’re not sure where you are. And they live in one of the most extraordinary landscapes in the world. It’s dark half the time and the beer’s a bit pricey. Oh and they do terrible things with knitwear and mustaches. But not all of them it has to be said.

And half the year it’s not dark. If you go far enough north into the land of the midnight sun, it simply refuses to get dark at all. It’s thrilling and rather handy, but also throws one right out of kilter. When we sailed north and the sun ceased to disappear the ship’s community would slip into an eerie un-routine. People fail to go to bed. Passengers dander about decks at all sorts of ungodly hours. Often dressed for bed. Which only adds to the confusion for everyone. Most inconvenient too for the Pakistani sailors trying to hose the place down in their itchy sweaters.

As for below decks. Well I have to tell you that’s a restless place at the best of times. All sorts of comings and goings. Stir in relentless daylight and it’s a pot boiler down there. Anywhere there’s a port hole there is sure to be a good time that refuses to extinguish. Crew wander alleyways not quite sure what to do with themselves. Avoiding good times or looking for one. It just seems a terrible shame to go to sleep.

By day we point at waterfalls in big anoraks and shake our heads at impossible log cabins perched on the foreshore of fjords.

Nossi Be, Madagascar. The pasajeros come back aboard tutting and form long queues to complain and pass the time before dinner. The Mud! They bunch together to mutter. The Uncomfortable Buses! An Inadequate Lunch Altogether. The tender ride was choppy and the people had no shoes. There There we say brightly. Soon be in Singapore.

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It’s a story by Frank Collymore from The Oxford Book Of Caribbean Short Stories. Is it true? I don’t know. There’s a little bit of truth in nearly everything isn’t there. Perhaps in this little chattel house. Out the road from Mullins Bay in Barbados, heading for Speightstown. I pass it and wonder who lives there every time. Such a preposterously small abode. One day on local leave we’re flip-flopping back to Bird and Delias. I’m admiring the blue house as we approach. Suddenly a preposterously tall man throws his bicycle against the white pickets and let’s himself in under the tiny front door. I’m quite thrilled. The tallest man in the West Indies lives in the smallest house in Barbados. Now what were the chances of that happening. I want to knock his door and demand to be asked in for tea so that I can look at him properly.

Chattel House is Bajan batter for small moveable wooden houses that date back to the plantation days. Chattel being moveable property of course. Assembled without nails and set on blocks rather than anchored to the ground they could be disassembled quickly by their working class occupants in the event of a dispute with the landowner. Then moved right along to the next place flat packed on the back of a cart. The original Ikea. There are wonderful chattel houses all over the island. Often carefully tended in terrible colours. Some people were meant to live alone and some Little Sheds were meant to move along.

Later we are chewing the jaw with Bird and Delia on the warm drive. The Palm trees look down sternly. Then like the fall out from a bomb blast that’s a hundred miles away there is a quiet implosion in the air pressure. A swoosh you feel rather than hear. Instinctively we all look up and two unseasonably large blue birds fly right overhead taking the warm evening air with them. Time stops. It’s a pair of parrots they tell us. Off to who knows where. Then goodness me if the tallest man in Barbados doesn’t cycle up the path and disappear around the back yard. It was turning into rather an unusual day altogether.

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Whilst we’re cross-processing our film’s I remembered my outdoor barbers from Acapulco oh about a hundred years ago.

I had to run the slide film through the C41 on board when the chief ‘tog wasn’t about as he didn’t like it. He caught me pushing this one. That was another 16 stone of Australian Ire my way then.

There’s Bergmans film of course, and Susan Sontag called the second section of her seminal tome On Photography “America, Seen through Photographs, Darkly” I’ve lost count of the copies this book that I’ve thrust upon wouldbe wantobe photographers, urgently believing that all photographers should read it. Although written in 1977 and imperfect, it is nonetheless striking and relevant.

Sontag’s “chronic voyeuristic relation” that photography causes society to have with the world could not be more pertinent as we wave our mobile phones at reality. Says the photographer stalking.

Crete. Cross-processed slide film.

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Oft quoted from Corinthians and interpreted that humans have an imperfect perception of reality. I’d say we make a decent stab at it considering what’s thrown at us. And what we throw at each other.

And some days we have a painfully lucid grasp of reality and all its grim carnival.

Barbados, West Indies. The Four Square rum factory. It’s my favourite rum. Spiced and Just Perfect with a fist of lime wedges and ice. It was late in the day and we were the only people there. There didnt even appear to be anyone making rum. Certainly noone that took issue with us wandering about the place. The light was about to fall right out of the Caribbean sky that way it does and was Just Lovely.

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I sailed with Pembo years later. By then Captain. Lovely chap, still mad as a hatter.

And then they made me swim. Swim! In that freezing bottomless ink. Well they didn’t make me exactly, but I was hardly going to decline after a visit and back to Hades. I pulled out an old F801 from under the stairs the other day. I thought it was long gone, it was my spare body. I’m sure it was the one I took under the rock of Gibraltar and it emerged sodden with rusty pink slime, never the same since. Mind you neither was I. I still feel a faint chill when I look at these photos.

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