People keep asking me how I am coping with the new normal.
I’ve grown a second-hand lettuce, shot an AK 74, and swum several miles in a paddling pool in the back garden.
There were 3 thunderstorms in 3 days (is that a Crowded House song?)
We rescued a pigeon from the wood burner chimney, and a swift that was stuck in the loft ladder.
We took my car to get the engine mapped. I met a man in the carpark who had lost his tooth on a chocolate digestive, and got photographed for Practical Performance Cars magazine (me, not him).
Adams friend’s wife made us face masks; mine has a lion’s face on, and Adam’s has his phone number.
I have worked. Work, work, work. Work.
I’ve been doing online portfolio reviews, (for Format Festival in the UK, and for the Griffin Museum and Photographic Research Center in the US) and, I presented an international photography award over Zoom with half a dozen cats in attendance.
Shutter Hub launched YEARBOOK 2020, showcasing over 200 brilliant photographers and creating a new publication and awards programme. You can see the full exhibition here.
We also created EVERYDAY DELIGHT (Windows Edition), showing in 20 locations across the UK (have a look and see if there’s one near you, here’s the full locations list).
Our TIME TO THINK exhibition made an encore in France this summer as Festival Pil’Ours took a year off due to the pandemic.
And our POSTCARDS FROM GREAT BRITAIN project is popping up all over Europe in Belgium, Denmark, France, Portugal and the Netherlands.
Turns out we have nine (NINE!) exhibitions across the UK and Europe right now.
Shutter Hub’s Projects Director, Jayne Lloyd, spoke to Newspaper Club in this brilliant article about our trailblazing use of newspaper print and the secret to our unconventional exhibitions (the secret is… we don’t keep secrets!)
And I got quoted by the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at Cambridge University in this short piece about EVERYDAY DELIGHT.
At Toiletries Amnesty we’ve teamed up with start-up Shower Blocks to help end hygiene poverty, been shortlisted for Entrepreneur of the Year at the National Hair and Beauty Awards, got featured by The Independent, and a recent survey showed that in 2019 we got toiletries to well over 250,000 people.
I dreamt about my friend Wendy. We were sat together at a café table, her husband Robin was across the room, entertaining people by reading the menu out loud.
I’d been to the kitchen and tried to make pineapple juice, and I brought Wendy this glass, mostly filled with foam and a little juice at the bottom. She never liked sweet things, but she picked up a spoon, shakily clank-clanking it against the side of the glass as she delved in through the whipped white foam, and then slurped mostly juice from the spoon.
She seemed to be enjoying it. I was pleased she liked it, and happy to be with her. She’s still alive in my dreams.
I’ve walked around the village, chased sleeping swans from the road, tended to my house plants, and stuck old stickers (picked up by my Grandmother on her travels in the 70s/80s) in the window of my 20 year old VW Golf.
And, unsurprisingly, I’ve spent a lot of time observing Tutti Biscotti.
