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in this direction take manichaeism for example according to wikipedia it taught an elaborate dualistic cosmology describing the struggle between a good spiritual world of light and an evil material world of darkness through an ongoing process in human history light is gradually removed from the world of matter and returned to the world of the divine no naughty stuff please we re manichees anyway this is just a roundabout way of saying that i ve recently returned to making some digital images no wait don t go yet and in the process had something of an insight into the way my imagination works the key word here is imagination while acknowledging that photography is perfectly possible at night for me it is essentially a daytime activity when out and about i carry a camera or my phone i see something that tweaks my aesthetic sensibilities i take a photograph if the resulting image works for me i may well share it with you here look at this real thing that grabbed my attention now it is often said that a dozen photographers confronted by the same scene will make a dozen rather different photographs i m not sure how far i believe that in reality it is surely more that out of a dozen different photographers eleven will probably walk straight past something that will nonetheless deeply fascinate one of them here look at this real thing that grabbed my attention is the essence of photography whatever degree of heightened individual sensibility may be involved it is always essentially reactive you don t dream up a photo persian wars to construct something out of nothing even when collaging together some ready made photographic parts is a very different activity your imagination is performing an active engagement with your aesthetic sensibilities or a looking within to use a metaphor it s more a case of here look at this unreal thing that i just made up this imaginative engagement may not actually take place at night although for me it often does but i think it is very like dreaming out loud and as i have belatedly come to realise my imagination is rather dark or rather it tends to go to dark places and bring back some disturbing trophies whereas others who have also chosen to face the challenge of a blank canvas will fill it with images and colours that are manifestations of light whether this is because their imagination encounters something shining within or out of a fear of the darkness lurking there i couldn t say clearly light is not the same thing as banal just ask semele any more than dark is necessarily profound but given the choice it seems most people would prefer to hang something brightly colourful and uplifting on their wall or failing that something banal dark and slightly disturbing not so much in the past i have sometimes referred to a sort of heavy breathing that some artists and writers resort to as a substitute for genuine profundity ted hughes can be a terrible heavy breather for example by this i don t mean the sort of heavy breathing that results from strenuous exercise or so i m told but to the sort of nuisance phone call which i imagine is now obsolete where the caller would simply breathe heavily into the microphone of their handset with the intention of scaring or upsetting the recipient it occurred to me as i was assembling various scenarios onto my blank digital canvas that i might be doing something of the sort myself like those lurid imaginings of a hellish afterlife painted onto mediaeval church walls with the intention of scaring the bejesus out of simple folk of course this darkness can be very appropriate for example in my series illustrating william blake s proverbs of hell but as a sensibility i concede that it s not calculated to win friends influence people or even get my prints onto a gallery wall in the end i may be stuck with it as i suppose i must be one of those people who find the world of darkness and dreams more congenial to their imagination but i thought i should at least try forcing myself to go the other way let there be light well almost it s light it s colourful but that tree does look a bit trapped in there though doesn t it and are we outside looking in shivering in the snow but talking of snow crossing morris minor i know not exactly brightly colourful and uplifting but neither i hope banal but these do feel more satisfying and sit much more happily in my comfort zone somewhere between light and dark not what you d call sunny but not really the stuff of nightmares either in the end as i say i m just dreaming out loud if i ve started to snore just give me a nudge posted by mike c at 22 58 7 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest wednesday 29 april 2026 ch ch changes sometimes i m sure this blog does veer into the lane labelled too much information after all why should anyone care about a succession of just so stories about me my rather uneventful life and my inconsequential opinions so be warned that this post is an edited extract from an ongoing project of life writing and there s no need to read it if you re not as interested in my life as i am although if your life has been even slightly similar you might enjoy the resonances also note that some of what is in here has been recycled from previous posts apologies if you find yourself experiencing déjà lu and the editing may have given a certain sense of disjuncture in places all is true but names may have been changed to protect the innocent the guilty and those subject to a not proven verdict evidence if you ve ever done any programming you ll be aware of the concept of epoch time that is a more or less arbitrary start date from which all other dates are calculated generally by the number of seconds elapsed since or before the chosen zero point it has always struck me as highly appropriate that in the unix operating system and thus much programming the epoch date is january 1st 1970 my personal epoch may have begun technically early in 1954 but my own real life as an independent human being began in 1970 if ever there was a good time to be sixteen debatable 1970 may well have been it in the sense that some people in the 1940s had a good war i had a good sixteen of course no year stands in isolation everything that happens during a calendar year is the result of what happened in the preceding years or is preparation for the future also when you are of school age life follows the rhythm of the academic year so the year i am remembering is really a fuzzy subset of the school years 1969 70 and 1970 71 divided and capped by the long vacations of summers 1969 1970 and 1971 in my case this span marked the transition from the end of compulsory education when by far the majority of my contemporaries left school to find work to the minority pursuit of voluntary sixth form studies ah we few we nerdy few we band of brothers for me those years were the fulcrum around which my life turned when the prospects of a wider world finally came into view in the years before about 1968 i was a quiet obedient and introverted boy who did well at school and to the best of my memory never gave my parents the remotest cause for concern but the onset of my adolescence coincided with the turbulence of the late 1960s and some unexpected changes in our family circumstances that began my transformation into a more troubled and questioning youth at that time we moved from our three bedroom semi detached council house into a fourth floor two bedroom flat in a six storey council block known as chauncy house one of the first edifices built in the new town of stevenage which has since been demolished it is strange to think now of that vacant space in mid air that was once my bedroom and the site of so much teenage hope anxiety excitement and tedium my parents were good law abiding people very typical of the aspiring working and lower middle classes of the time who having grown up in the pre welfare environment of the 1920s and 30s and endured long wartime years of military service and the subsequent deprivations of rationing were committed to doing nothing very much other than to enjoy the peace and material bounty of the 1950s and 60s and to reap the benefits of conformity a telephone a fridge a washing machine a car and for my father promotion from the shop floor into an office job which meant driving into work and wearing a suit rather than riding the bus and pulling on overalls by 1970 they had also come into a new role as devoted grandparents my sister having left home and married in something of a rush five years before we spent an awful lot of weekends visiting her in a succession of locations as she and her husband raised their two girls while pursuing teaching careers finally fetching up in deepest darkest norfolk having always having felt something of an outsider in my family my sister and our closest cousins were all the best part of a decade older than me i now began to feel distinctly surplus to requirements if i m honest at that age i found my parents and family deeply boring and worse clearly intent on cramping my style as the temptations of teenage life beckoned i could not wait to leave home however it had always been clear that education would be my route out of the tedium and limitations of an ordinary life in a small town so leaving home would have to wait until i had got a decent set of exam results in my back pocket i had never doubted my abilities in the exam room and as it turned out not without justification i finished the academic year 1969 70 with eleven o levels eight at the highest grade true i did also fail one so called additional maths partly as a deliberate protest at having been made to do it but mainly because i am profoundly mathematically challenged but that was a decent haul by any standards i remember buying a bottle of cider and drinking it in the sun to celebrate sitting by myself on the grass beside the town centre pond where eight years earlier i had often gone fishing with my best friend from primary school who may well have been somewhere else in town celebrating his final release from school in his case a secondary modern into the real world of work but that is to jump ahead in many ways one of the most important shaping experiences of that time was for want of a better word romantic for an entire year from easter 1970 to easter 1971 i went out as we used to say with one of the most vivacious and life enhancing girls in town how on earth did that happen well there were two necessary preconditions i ll need to back up a bit more i used to walk to school in the morning and back again in the afternoon usually in the company of my closest friend of those years alan who lived nearby he d call at our flat and we d walk the familiar mile and a bit that took us out of the new town and through the streets of the old town to the back gate of our school which had been founded in 1558 as a classic shakespeare era grammar school on the great north road it had been substantially refurbished in the 1950s to accommodate the new town population as a state boys grammar and then in 1968 had become a non selective comprehensive school after lessons ended at 4 p m we d walk back alternately talking earnestly and joking tastelessly as teenage boys will now as it happened a coach that transported the girls back home from their own grammar school situated at the other end of town often pulled up just as we arrived at a particular point on the route and a few girls would disembark they would look straight through us as we gawped while the seated occupants waved and made various other gestures at us and one of them would then walk diagonally across a scrubby patch of grass to her house on the far corner i thought she was awesomely unattainably attractive and although i didn t know it then her name was jane the second thing was that our school took part in an annual exchange with a boys gymnasium the equivalent of a grammar school in what was then west germany stevenage was partnered with ingelheim am rhein a pleasant small town situated in wine growing country on a bend of the rhine between bingen and mainz and home of the boehringer pharmaceutical giant we would alternate home and away exchanges and at easter 1970 those of us who were studying german were hosting the second visit of our exchange partners in our family homes easter that year fell in march and it was cold and snowy by then we knew each other well enough to acknowledge that most of us were in utterly incompatible pairings the single thing my partner achim and i had in common was that unusually for both towns our families lived in a flat so once the easter break had begun we d all go our separate ways and meet up in more congenial groupings mostly the german lads seemed to like hanging out together at the bowling alley or the swimming pool there wasn t much else to do in stevenage on a cold day after all in the evenings though there were parties and youth clubs and the occasional concert i found i was more than ready to come out of my swotty shell and discover night time social life so that was where all the girls had been hiding one friday night soon after that break out easter in a scene worthy of gregory s girl i was in the undercroft a youth club situated in the crypt of a church when a girl came up to me and asked my friend wants to know would you like to go out with her i glanced over at her friend and nearly fell over it was her the girl from the school bus asking me if i wanted to go out well yeah i s pose why not apparently it had something to do with the lurid green straight leg cord jeans i was wearing although it was possible she hadn t been looking straight through me all those times at the bus stop after all my life changed quite apart from having a steady girlfriend i now found myself included in a magic circle of boys from the boys grammar with girlfriends from the girls grammar as some of those girls were sisters of older sixth form boys whose families lived in the more upscale parts of town of which there were few and all previously terra incognita to me it was like gaining entry to a secret parallel universe it was great i was suddenly visible somebody in what seemed at the time like a highly sophisticated milieu how i ever managed to concentrate on those upcoming o level exams is a mystery it helped that jane was not yet 16 her parents insisted that she be home by 10 30 11 00 at weekends when her mother would make us milky coffee in the kitchen before leaving us alone for a while in their front parlour i don t think i had ever before been quite so profoundly happy as when walking that mile home from their house sometimes at midnight when all the town s streetlights switched off simultaneously a magical moment and no one has ever made milky coffee quite like jane s mum then in the long summer of that year i had two memorable holidays the first was a week camping in california with friend alan no not that californi...