Twenties and Thirties, Or My Thirty Years

When I was a kid, seminal events like birthdays and Christmasses were spent in a blur of excitement, anticipation; a prolonged excuse to be spoilt and indulged. As I became a teenager and bolstered my affected disaffection with long hair and smoking and scowls, which was really no more than a foil because I was actually blissfully happy and fulfilled, even in a small town which contained young men who would want to beat me up at school or grown men who saw long hair and trucker caps as threatening to their tiny, comfortable view of what the world should stand for. I haven't spent as long in this small town for years - summers home from university were almost always spent, thrown away as times you were away from the big city itching to get back, and pretending you were more worldly-wise than anyone else at 18 or 20 or 21 was. So, I am writing after a week of hard, back-breaking work and a day in the sun today and after having revisited Richard Ford's Independence Day, and seeing that same great potential stretching out ahead of me, speaking of Fuji, darkrooms, staring through viewfinders and hanging work on walls.


Goodbye the Twenties. Were they roaring? Perhaps. What now, what next? I'll tell you; being an uncle, being a better person and making more of life's little things, like watching out for the person flying a bright green kite over the main road yesterday, it soaring over buses and lorries and white vans like a child's bright hope. Of life being able to soar, to blast and to give you a little bump into gear when you sit back, put up your feet and just let it happen for a while.

Goodnight.