These past few weeks I’ve been busy preparing for the new academic year, which for me at least involves a growing number of anxiety dreams and mild Sunday afternoon panics. In the midst of this annual prepatory ritual my wife and I took a short weekend trip to see some friends, which involved a couple of nights in a swanky hotel on the immediate outskirts of Milton Keynes. Once touted as the city of the future, MK might not be many people’s first thought when it comes to desirable minibreaks, but needs must and all that. From Leicester it's a little over an hour by car, and despite the usual jokes about the city’s lack of charm and swarming roundabouts, it was turned out to be surprisingly pleasant. A quick glance at Google Maps provides an interesting aeriel view of city planner’s once grand ambitions, with housing estates fanning out into the spaces between what were once a loose collection of villages. There's a logic of community building at play, but like the promise of vertical communities that once accompanied marketing for highrise apartment blocks, the reality is somewhat less than awe-inspiring. Closer to the ground, the concrete bowls of manmade lakes and local canal bring a welcome distraction from buzzing roads.
For the trip I took a selection of cameras in the hope that we might take some meandering walks, although a spell of bad weather quickly put that to the sword. I also packed my new medium format camera, a Bronica ETRS, but again the opportunity didn’t really present itself. I also packed my Canon T90 and Fuji XT-10, which are now part of the EDC.
Reading-wise, I’ve found myself wading through various critiques of President Trump’s tenure as Commander and Chief, most recently Bob Woodward’s book, Fear. I find the entire Trump operation most alarming, and in some small way these books help me feel slightly less queasy. Woodward, a hero of mine ever since I watched Robert Redford rushing in and out of the writer’s pool in All the President’s Men, has put together another very readable biography, and one made all the more compelling given the controversy surrounding its publication. I’ve also picked up William B Irvine’s book On Desire, along with Mick Cooper’s Existential Psychotherapy and Counselling , subjects which I find particularly fascinating. When my father died in 2008 I found Yalom’s Existential Psychotherapy strangely reassuring. I didn’t want or feel the need for a religious connection, and in any case I do tend to treat such things with a certain amount of suspicious disregard. Yalom’s book was something else entirely; rooted in science and existential philosophy, which has always held a certain gloomy appeal, Yalom offered a wonderfully humane and intellectual take on what ails us. Existential depression is something that I recognise in my own wonky thinking. As the bright early morning summer light begins to dim with the onset of autumn, such thoughts are harder to shake, especially at commute time. The odd thing is that the thoughts occur unbidden, and rather than being something grand or melodramatic, they tend to manifest as fleeting almost absurdist reflections. The trick is to try and quickly change gear before those thoughts swell into the entire frame. A colleague describes me as a high functioning pessimist, which I think very fitting. “Melancholy” is a rather stuffy and unnecessarily frilly word, but a good one. I’ve noticed that more than a few of my photographs could be filed under this heading. I’ve also noticed that I rarely take photographs of other people - almost never in fact. This is partly out of choice and a concern about an individual's consent, although its more that I prefer to photograph the non-human – trees, open spaces, weird and unexpected finds, that kind of thing. I still have no real idea why any of this such be of interest to anyone else. So much photography just seems to be leftover noise from other people's routines.
