There are a few things I’ve done in my life which I hate while I’m doing it, but keep coming back for more.  One was the sporting results website I ran while at university — for one long weekend every year I’d work 24 hours a day on the site, collating results, piecing things together, and doing some statistical analysis to predict what might happen, as well as being involved with the radio station, and even doing some overnight broadcasts.  I’d finish the weekend and collapse into bed for a few days swearing I’d never do it again.  Yet come the next year there I’d be there to do it all over again.  In the last year or so I thought about it  and came to a conclusion: I must enjoy it, even if I didn’t realise it, because otherwise I wouldn’t keep going back.

And I think sometimes it’s the same with my photography.

Read more…

Forgive me for a moment: for the first time I can think of in this blog I’m going to be political. I’ll try to be brief.

It’s not especially a secret that I’m a leftie.  I’ve not talked about it much here, but I suspect you could decode it from my posts, and especially via Twitter.  So it won’t come as much of a surprise that in the upcoming general election I’m backing Labour.

As the election looms it’s looking increasingly likely from the opinion polls that the UK will get a hung parliament on Thursday.  Accordingly the Queen would invite Gordon Brown, as the incumbent Prime Minister, to form the next government. It’s likely that Mr Brown would then approach the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg in an attempt to form some kind of anti-Tory coalition government.  For a moment I’m going to assume this happens — that the Liberal Democrats would rather form a coalition with the Labour Party than the Conservative party.

It struck me the other day while listening to Andrew Pierce and Kevin Maguire talking about the Labour leadership on the radi0, that there’s still a way the Labour Party can come out of this election (for a definition of “this” see below) with a strong mandate to run the country for another 5 years.  Let me explain. Read more…

The following weekend saw the annual Chinese New Year celebrations in London and another day out with my camera.  This one proved to be much more successful and significantly less painful.

Read more…

I was trying to sneak this in before the end of February so as to have posted something in February, but I failed.  I’ll have to make do with having started it last month, even if I only managed to finish it this month.  I was going to blame my lack of updates on a quiet month, but in actual fact there have been a few things I’ve mean to post about and just never got around to. In fact I’m still a blog post missing from Christmas: I had started writing something about Chrismas in Windows Live Writer — the offline editor I sometimes use when writing on the train — but that seems to have gone missing so I’ll have to start again.  I think I’ll make an effort to write a load of stuff this week. But enough of excuses, let’s write something worthwhile!

Read more…

I turned 25 in November.  I’m getting old.  Just before my birthday Miss D, Mr P, Miss C and I went out for a meal.  It wasn’t related, just an evening out with friends, but we did talk about it a bit.  Last year I removed my birthday from Facebook to see who would remember, without being reminded, that it was my birthday.  Very few people did.  I think I sometimes go out of my way to make myself miserable – this seems to be a good example. Read more…