Annoying Man With A Camera

Saturday afternoon found me watching television after a long and heavy week at work. I realised very slowly that I was actually quite engrossed in Little House on the Prairie, and that I found it Gritty and Insightful. Both of these facts would indicate an altered state of mind, probably brought on by the heavy work week.

Who knows though, perhaps to counterbalance my reality, in another reality maybe someone was watching an Ibsen play and finding it fast moving and superficial. Go figure.

This week on returning from holiday, I managed to wrest the last ounce of life out of the week by working an enjoyable 7 days in the space of 6, that is, if you redefine the word 'enjoyable' to encompass a much broader spectrum of less joyful feelings, and as I did the same before I went on holiday, I've managed to claw back about four days from my annual leave, how clever is that, eh? The Tardis might be bigger on the inside than the outside but it has nothing on me when it comes to time management, where I can steal time and reallocate it cleverly from my home life to work. Time that perhaps I might have otherwise wasted in those 'primrose hours of dalliance'; evenings between 6 and 8; weekends; or those slack hours between 2 and 4 in the early morning.

I'm not bitter. Well, I can't really be, as it's only myself I'm answerable to, and as I broke the Working Time Directive last week, as an HR professional, not only can I NOT pat myself on the back for all that hard work, on Monday morning I'm probably going to have to have stern words with myself, and I may even find myself issuing me a warning.

Somewhere in that sentence the grammar just ran out.

So, whilst sat on the TV with two sleepy dogs on me, I suddenly, and possibly for the First Time, realised that I could be doing worse things with my time than taking photographs. I was brought up with a healthy guilt complex, as many English people are, that we're simply not doing Enough with our lives and we should be doing more. In between popping a casserole into the oven and cleaning the house, we feel we should be fighting world poverty or doing something about Kim Jong Un.

Thankfully Facebook has given many of us guilted armchair slacktivists (as I believe we're known) the opportunity to feel we can do just that by clicking firmly on a LIKE button, signing petitions, or engaging in hostile banter with a Trump supporter. In Perfect English, something which no matter what their political argument happens to be, they seem to be unable to reciprocate.

So when I'm out taking photographs there is a little voice in my head buzzing away like the Tinnitus of Conscience, saying "rather a waste of time this....... does anybody really NEED another photograph of a bee...... what difference will this sunset make to the national debt or the crisis in Korea...." and aligned closely with this is a very real voice that I hear when I arrive home and my partner comments rather sarcastically that "You can never have too many photographs of ducks, can you...?"

So, shock horror, watching Little House on the Prairie on a Saturday afternoon was the thing that forced me to realise there are worse things to do with my time than photograph stuff.

So I'm sad to say I don't know how it ended. Probably with that little girl running down the hillside pretending to be an aeroplane, in an era when aeroplanes hadn't been invented yet.

Back in the room.

Off I went with the dogs, and today has been a day of sunshine and showers. The dogs rendered themselves completely unphotogenic by plunging in muddy water and pestering little girls who will now Not Like Dogs, in the same way as they persuaded my workplace to amend their previously 'dog friendly' policy after one visit. So I was left finding myself something else to photograph.

Almost at the end of the visit, I stood under an oak tree that had been battered by showers earlier and around its roots were acorns, bits of twigs, and the occasional duck escaping from Dexter, so I picked up some of these acorns and then once I got them home, spent a small lifetime photographing them with tiny manual changes to the focus, and stacking them to get some close up photos that didn't show the shallow depth of field flaw you usually get out when you do close ups.

Life in miniature. Each of these pictures can be seen full screen if you click on them.

I am, however, running out of Saturday. I have had to factor in a number of mutually exclusive activities into the same time slot. First there is my recently re-started weight training programme, something to do with seeing that mass of bloated humanity on the cruise ship, oozing off the sun deck and into the restaurants, has made me get back into it. Secondly, I'm spending hours waiting while my computer to stack photos, during which time it can do nothing else, and thirdly, writing this blog on a different laptop, because of the aforesaid problem. And behind all that lies 'fixing' the shower, which has been putting out a faint electrical burning smell for the last day or so. Perhaps I'll leave that one till daylight when I don't have to do it in the dark...

Excuse me while I do a set of reps...

Thankfully Dexter is sleeping in the bedroom and hasn't cottoned on to my impromptu exercise routine. The last time I tried to multi-task and watch TV and do bench presses on my back, on the coffee table, he decided he'd just 'climb on' and lick my face in a leisurely way.

Who says guys can't do multi-tasking!

So that's Saturday taken care of, and alas, Sunday is also already pre-arranged, in the morning I will be walking the dogs, and electrocuting myself in the shower, and if I survive, the afternoon will be spent being an Independent Visitor, which in this case means going to a film with a 12 year old.

He's chosen it. I had rather hoped it would be Spiderman The Homecoming, but alas, it is Captain Underpants.

I may yet come to the conclusion that Little House on the Prairie is high art...

Until the next time...

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