Yesterday morning it was cold and the duvet felt even more snuggly than normal, so I thought it would be nice to write my blogpost while sitting in bed with Alain. I assembled my laptop, my phone, my Big Camera and the associated cables; got myself comfortable with a cup of coffee; and pushed the “on switch”.

The black screen just looked at me.

I had allowed the battery to run down to zero.

When we came from England we brought two UK-EU converter plugs, and two of those extension cables where you can stick multiple plugs into. Depending on exactly how many electrical appliances you bring, this may or may not be enough. But perhaps critically, it is not the number of appliances that can theoretically be plugged in, but the number of rooms that these items would be spread over that is important. 

I moved everything to the Piano Room – any room that has two pianos is a Piano Room, even if other people also use it as a study, and there is washing hanging out to dry in it – and started the important process of transferring photographs from devices to the laptop while starting my blogpost.

I had started photograph-sorting again a few weeks ago; and in navel-gazing philosophical moods I ask myself what the purpose of taking photographs is. I learned quite a lot about taking photographs from a microscopy technician type person at University: and there the obvious answer is “to collect and show information”. I would take a lot of photographs in attempt to build up a picture of what reality was – perhaps even doing some sort of counting (how many cells had pink stain, how many blue; what proportion of the image was taken up by dead cells), and then select a small number of these photographs as representatives to show to other people (talks, posters, research papers).

There are obvious limitations of this approach! And I think that we are all aware of the type of selection bias inherent in choosing what photographs to take, and then we even do a second selection process of which to keep!

Looking through my photographs, it becomes clear that I have two obsessions:

1. Birds. Don’t misunderstand: I am not a bird-watcher – if you want to know what “that specific bird” is, you need to ask someone else.  But there is something about them – perhaps a freedom, a type of beauty, a transience of the moment.
2. Reflections. On a very basic level, I am fascinated by the fact that you can see what “isn’t there” more clearly than what “is there”. 

Which means that I have hundreds of photographs that do not show the reality of a human life, interspersed with a few images taken on special occasions…. Actually, there is another subset of photographs – I am not sure what we should call this set, but it contains images (normally taken using the phone) that say things like: “looks at these cute baby shoes!”.

Yesterday, Little wrote her letter to Santa, so I wrote one too!

Dear Saint Nicholas,

I hope that you are well. I am okay; but I know that I have not really be all that good since we last spoke! It is quite cold, and you are very busy with the new generation, so I will understand if you are not quite able to visit me this year.

If, however, you have time, I would love to see you. Mostly to talk about what it is like to be you – to be the sort of person that can give freely and generously without needing acknowledgement. What is your advice for dealing with disappointment: that I have been disappointed, and that I have disappointed other people.

I also have questions regarding overcoming the difficulties associated with being in more than one place at a time.

With love and thanks,

Bronwen