Smooth

Grimy

The best time of the year in many ways. The wind has stripped the leaves from the trees and the sunlight falls through the gaps.

Dreamy

I’ve photographed these angels many times, but not with a DSLR

Grumpy

Can’t make up my mind about this one. He (it?) has fallen on its side. The whole thing might be better rather than the ‘head shot’

The Hardest Hit

Betrayed

Relax. Impossible to do with The Coalition attack on benefits

Henry, Deptford, April 2011

Plates are so round except when viewed through water.

From above there were reflections from the water:

The willow pattern blue shows through when avoiding the reflection:

In the little hut at the back of the A.P.T. Gallery yard. Photographing for Sue Lawes Creekery2 installation at CREEKSIDE OPEN 2011 this week.

And did I get muddy?

More soon

Stop!

Read the mirror in the reception to find out what makes life worth living…

• Being with other people
• Swimming
• Listening to songs
• Dancing to music
• Bingo
• Walking the dog

Simple really. Except the service users will certainly lose some of these things we take for granted. More from Kate soon.

Another faceless service user

Heartbreaking

I was living on the Old Kent Road, next to the Dun Cow, a little bit further up the road from the New Cross end where the fire took place, so such a terrible event felt very close to home..

A week after the fire we turned up at a flat in Clapham North invited by a couple we hardly knew, casual aquaintances of my then partner. It turned out to be a dinner party and not only did I not know the hosts, I didn’t know anybody else either. Three other couples were partners in competing leading management consultancy or legal firms. So even after introductions I still didn’t feel as if I knew anybody else.

Talk naturally turned to the New Cross fire. The casual racism with which one of the party introduced it quickly developed into a into a shocking and callously racist dismissal of a group of young black people’s lives. It became obvious that we were having dinner with a nascent group of Mrs Thatcher’s yuppies. That we apparently shared their abhorrent racist views was their unspoken assumption.

Myself, I had recently been a supporter and marcher on behalf of the Anti-Nazi League and went to many Rock Against Racism gigs, worked in the public sector for a left wing local authority on behalf of whom the week previously I stood for a week on a freezing picket-line for no pay.

Initially I was shocked into silence because I couldn’t easily comprehend what I was hearing. This was the first time I had been exposed so *intimately* to such ignorant racist gloating, made so much more grotesque in the circumstances. My memories of the evening following this point are less clear. Unfortunately I had also managed to get more than wasted in a fairly short time. My default state at that age was relatively gauche and lacking confidence, but the enormity of what I was listening to and the complicity my silence conferred on every passing second meant that I *had* to say something.

I have no idea what I *did* say except that I upset the guests and hosts. Probably I just howled my disagreement incoherently. I got up and tried to make an exit, just as lacking in dignity, but at least I got out.

Through the fog of anger, pharmaceuticals, drink and embarrassment, I do have a recollection. It was thought by those attending the dinner party that I had very poor manners..

Which is probably why it is they and not me who are running the UK’s top management consultancies, legal firms or whatever.

I wonder if their views have changed in the last 30 years? Mine haven’t.

That is my rather peripheral memory of the New Cross fire. Even if a fractured recollection.