Photos for A Town Unlike Alice

23 1 2010

I've secured my photographer by cooking him meat and potato pie - a northern speciality - and leaning on my daughter Kitty his girlfriend, Sam is buying a super new camera and we're going to prowl round the borough with me pointing out wildflowers, graffiti, traffic intersections, trees and wild birds, and he'll take professional quality photos, that's the theory. Wildflowers in late January early February? Red dead nettle, chickweed and speedwell come to mind, and alder trees with male and female flowers scattering auburn scales over the asphalt pavements, all there if you know what to look for and we have marshes close by with ducks, cormorants, geese, moorhens, coots and reed warblers and wagtails, sometimes I see a heron flapping great wings lazily above the rooftops. It's a country childhood thing, I grew up on farms in the Fens and north Nottinghamshire, my Dad was an agricultural scientist working for what was then the Ministry of Agriculture and both my parents taught me to identify different wild flowers, trees, birds and other wildlife, if you're observant and can put a name to what you see the habit of observation is rewarded andf intensified. Sam can take a superb shot of a wild flower but he has no idea how to identify it so he misses things I'd notice, he's going to find himself crouching in the mud when I find red dead nettle or others, they aren't spectacular they are modest, little and low. But to compensate, this borough is rich in trees both inherited from the original farmland like black poplars, planted by farmers to mark the boundaries of farm and marsh, planted by the council like whitebeam, cherries, alders and both birch and silver birch, and self seeding like scruffy clumps of sycamore and buddleia. Sam can stand tall and direct his camera heavenwards when he takes shots of the trees and winter is a good time, trees stand revealed with their scaffolding bare to the weather and the shapes are characteristic, beautiful cantilevered structures.

As the T-shirt Kitty bought me proudly proclaims, never underestimate the power of a sick mind! I wear it as a statement of fact, my mind may have had its ups and downs but that in no way affects its power to think and observe, nor does it diminish knowledge acquired in childhood and the delight that natural things bring. Even when I was in hospital trying to starve the evil out of myself I loved walking in the grounds and woods, charms of goldfinches used to feed and fly in the woodland borders, magpies used to fly in ones which I thought very mean of them, at times I was quite unhappy enough without having one for sorrow forced on my notice, there were yellowhammers, assorted tits, chaffinches and hawks overhead keeping their eyes peeled for the next meal. keeping one's eyes peeled always struck me as an extraordinarily violent way of putting it!

Sam will get credits all over the website for his photos, as he'd doubtless bitterly remark, there's no such thing as a free lunch but after he's grovelled in the mud for me I'll make sure there's a nice meal as a reward, and go round the shop for some real ales for him. Lots of his photography can be found on flickr, he calls himself Samwise, he regularly sells work to magazines and newspapers. Trading favours is part of the culture in this neck of the woods, as it is all over the world, not what you know but who you know if you want a job done or can offer to do a job. You can't put a price on goodwill backed by expertise or access to a man with whatever at wholesale costs, or something left over from a previous job, or the plumber you know from round the pub turning out on a Bank holiday and not charging Bank holiday rates to fix that spouting pipe. I've met some real gentlemen who regard me as one of us not one of them because we use the same pub, gentlemen careful not to use abuse about nutters and careful not to frighten me with the harsher sorts of pub banter when I'm not well, far kinder to me than some of my graduate acquaintances who use abuse constantly and will apply my diagnosis to insult people they don't like. Curious. They'd slit their wrists rather than use racist abuse and quite rightly so, they're blind when it comes to abusing the most vulnerable members of the community, and sneer at cockney culture and comparatively less well educated people, what they don't realise is that it makes wonderful copy! As I say, never underestimate the power of a sick mind ho ho.

Anne Rees