july 2023
A holiday month! A weekend in Brixham and a weekend camping in a church. A week in France, where I shot several rolls of film of lighthouses on the Île de Ré and the same pictures that I take every year in Charroux - but this time with Haniah in them. I loved seeing Charroux for the first time through their eyes. I also loved observing those small but simultaneously enormous changes to a seemingly eternal village; the hostellerie has closed, the abbey pub has reopened, there’s new ownership of the village bar. Same old men having an espresso before work and betting on le trotter in the afternoon, just waiting longer for their change.
Can recommend that anyone as into lighthouses as I am goes to the Île de Ré, there’s a lot of lighthouses.
London for the rest of July. Beers in pub gardens, stinking bins and low conversation from cracked open windows on the walk home. My friend Rosie gives me a bag of fruit she couldn’t get through before a holiday and over the next week we eat them in a variety of ways: thinly sliced nectarine over morning yoghurt; slightly bruised segments in a picky tea; diced apples on pancakes; tiny glasses of freshly squeezed orange juice. Neither of us fancy the grapefruit. I am grateful for an abundance shared and spared the organic waste bin.
Whilst waiting for a coffee in the British library a student collapses behind me, and her teacher asks me to run into the exhibition to find an additional member of staff. I do run. It’s a poorly-lit labyrinth of stray pieces of material and sounds of the forest and confused members of the public engaging in overly-detailed signage. Round every corner looms another giant poster of a bat or interactive climate change related installation and for a moment it feels like I have stepped into some kind of fever dream or time loop. I eventually, breathlessly, encounter a school group reading about owls and a teacher who seems neither surprised nor particularly interested in this emergency and is certainly not prepared to run. By the time we get back to the cafe the student is sitting up and looking embarrassed, and I do not have time to get my coffee as I have a meeting.
I shot Danny & Ryan’s wedding at the beginning of the month, conveniently within a couple of miles of my flat.
There's this pure ghostly state of exhaustion. Exhaustion is so much like grief and grief is an exhaustion where everything is slowed down and so you notice the strangeness of every day life.
One of those quotes that gets to the very heart of an experience, from Kate Zambreno’s Drifts. Took me straight back to being an eighteen year old wading through grief from sudden bereavement and exhaustion from weekly all nighters; the world experienced through a grey veil punctuated by moments of surreal crystal clarity.
july favourites
book I read multiple pieces of memoir that I found annoying and pretentious but Drifts carefully sidestepped both of these qualities and I will read more of Zambreno’s writing
art a series of posters in the ruins of my favourite French abbey detailing expression of emotions in the middle ages
film Minari, fantastic and always great to see ground zero of popular TikTok sounds
performance Dear England at the National once again proving that football is the purest form of theatre
podcast The Secret History of the Estonia, investigating the sinking of a passenger ferry in the 90s which I am glad I did not listen to ahead of my own Baltic Sea crossing last summer
newsletter Hola Papi by John Brammer, an advice column I simply cannot get enough of