The Mint/Crossbones

Prints of these images are for sale! The area around Borough Market used to be known as The Mint and was a notorious slum, heaving with crime and vice. The Bishop of Winchester had control of a small area in which prostitution was legal (and presumably grew fat on the taxation of the women's takings). The women who worked there were known as the Winchester Geese. When they died they were denied a Christian burial and thrown into a pauper's grave, which was uncovered during the 90's as excavation was underway for the Jubilee line extension. Pagans, the bereaved, women's rights activists, and sex workers have taken on the task of remembering those who are buried there and a veritable shrine has grown up. The self-styled caretakers want a permanent monument built but are being steadily blocked. The second image down shows the site of the mass grave. These are some images I took earlier in the year (around St. George's day, hence the red ribbon and flags). More info can be found here.

Bright Lights of the Big City

Took a stroll through Soho the day before yesterday, ancient and temperamental camera in hand, to try and shoot something that wasn't for school. I needed to loosen up the eye again. These few that are posted below have given me an idea for a new project. Soho is full of neon and I want to try and capture those garish and lovely colours in all their Blade Runner glory before the council finally succeeds in banning all the sin and vice from the centre of the city and making everywhere look like Clapham. So these are my prelim sketches. Hopefully I'll have more to post soon...

happy golden days of summer

The very talented Becci Cahill (third from left in bottom image) and her creative team and supporters outside the Arcola Theatre earlier this year.

Rosemary

Yesterday I made a mistake. I thought you could cross the roundabout and get across the road that way, but you can't. But on my way to my mistake I passed a rosemary bush and I brushed it with my hand. It was a misty day and I was wearing a fur jacket and a pink scarf and a short black dress and looked dishevelled and mistaken as if I had wandered out of a Brassai photograph and onto a roundabout in south-east London. The smell of the rosemary also seemed like a mistake, like it and I and the road could not all exist in the same place. Is it rosemary for regret or for remembrance?


Today my tooth aches with all the mistaken brushings of the past. I believe there is a hole in it that if I could stuff with a bunch of rosemary (which is sausage stew and gas fires and dumplings and crisp walks in brown woods) would be wholesome again.

Meat

Yesterday I used my teeth
To eat the meat of a little lamb
Tiny bones held in my tiny hands

Snow

We English do not know what to do when it snows. In the Past it happened more often - under the reign of the first Elizabeth the Thames froze to a thickness which allowed markets to take place on the ice rime. Dutch people (Lowlanders) must have taught them how to skate, who had been doing it for many years on their currentless and easily solidified canals. There was a miniature Ice Age in the early 19th century which is why paisley shawls came into fashion. Indian silkworms spitting thread to keep country ladies warm. The subcontinental sun, woven in, warning off the encroaching hail. Images of Darcy and Eliza Bennett battling off a woolly mammoth. Anne Elliott and her frowning aunt standing tall against sabre toothed tigers. But since those Industrially Revolutionising chimneys belched their blackness against the skies and all those dark satanic mills whirred into life, since Turner's rabbit outran the train to Maidenhead, we have had a temperate clime. Cucumber sandwiches and good manners don't go down well in extremes of heat or cold. They can't survive conditions too raw. So today we are huddled and complaining and none of the buses or trains work and it's back to shanks' pony and heavy carbs and fats. None of us have suitable shoes and the country has ground to a resounding halt.

Last night, nose pressed to window, a fox loped foxily across the park. The snow was virgin then and it was claiming territory. Wind around my neck, my fox. It's what you're for.

a photo in words

I can't scan it so I'll say it. Maybe you'll see it for real one day. Maybe it'll just be here.

The photo is from a day on the French side of Lake Geneva this summer. On the boat on the way over a sliding door closed onto the side of my head and I had to spend a lot of time looking across the lake and biting my lip because it hurt so much I thought I would cry in front of the whole crew.

The photo was taken some time after this and the pain had died away. This is important background since I was waiting for that time when 'after pain, a formal feeling comes' as E.D. says. This photo inspires a calm and a formal feeling like nothing else but the cessation of pain or nausea.

It is blue. The lake's edge seems to curve as if it is the whole horizon. The sky is a creamy blue. S and C are standing on a promontary of the wharf containing the small crisp white boats. You cannot see the boats in the frame but you can sense them. The lakewater is so clear that for as far out as you can swim you can see the bottom. You cannot see the clearness of the lakewater in the frame but you can sense it.

S and C stand on the promontary. It curves up from the bottom centre of the frame to the middle left. C stands in shadow, arm upstretched with unconscious grace to shade her eyes. You cannot see the detail of her face. S stands, hands on hips, turning to the camera with a smile. She wears a blue dress and sandals and a yellow headscarf that punctuates the scene, like a top note in perfume. The blue is the wood note and this the floral. The whole thing would smell like warm milk and salt if it smelled of anything.

Out of scene, I stood in the shade of a sail, balancing badly in my shoes. I was wearing a blue and white striped dress and had just discovered the taste of caramel and fleur-du-sel icecream. The air was the temperature of blood and the water was very cold. Soon we would cross back on the boat and picnic on French sausages and watermelons in the park near the centre for refugee studies. But for that little while they stood cupped in curves, C's arm, S's left breast, my spine as I bent to frame the shot.

I keep all three, C, S, and invisible I propped on my desk as a talisman against these grey winter walls. Against dark at four. Against rain. Against the hiss and rumble of the gas fire. The photo tells me summer is somewhere in the world, and it is good.