Hi Again

Having made a pigs ear of my blog page design, I'll start again.

It's the end of January; a bad month unless you're still alive and relatively well. In which case it's a good month. It has its problems, not the least that it's grey, cold, wet and you're brassic. 

Let's forget January then.

I've just started on the Diversity project that has taken precedence over the Class and Faces projects that I was planning to do for the first Trimester of the course.  The first thing I did was to decide that I wasn't going to look at easy targets like inner-city deprived areas, Benefit Streets or refugees, but I plan to find out about ethnic, religious,
class, sexual orientation, political and other diversities within my own town, Devizes. Not much diversity, you might opine, but diversity and super-diversity has taken the place of the discredited multiculturality, so there's a lot of subtle differences in people's outlooks/beliefs than one would imagine at first sight.

I  thought that I should first find out the basic facts and figures about the Town By interviewing people who know -- people on the Town Council, senior police officers and church leaders, so I contacted Town Clerk Simon Fisher at The Town Hall, with whom I'd worked years ago making pictures for the Town Guide. What nice man! He gave me over an hour of his time last Friday and gave me a run-down of Devizes past, present and future. And I have to say that the future is bright for this little market town.

This is the man himself:

Simon gave me some addresses to contact, which I have done. Watch this space.

Meantime, at Richmond Athletic Ground near Kew in London, we spent the first of (I hope) many sessions photographing rugby matches. Why? Well, to reach UK minority groups -- Welsh, Irish, Scottish, where better to go than the locations where regional groups like those congregate? There's the pubs, yes -- but those maybe later; I opted first to contact the London rugby clubs catering for those displaced from their home regions -- London Welsh, London Irish and London Scottish.   The Welsh and the Scots responded enthusiastically to my initial emails asking for their co-operation though I'm still looking to hear from the Irish. We were invited to watch and photograph the game between London Scottish and Ealing Trailfinders on 27th Feb at Richmond.

First, let me advise you to ignore your sat-nav in favour of common sense when you're trying to get to Richmond. DON'T GO M4; take whatever route will get you onto the M3 and find it that way.

But we made it -- a few minutes late, wet, cold and a bit worried cos I was looking for a stadium but found a sort of 'community ground' with just one basic stand. However, the good news is that it turned out to be a great experience and an example of local support -- there might have been up to 300 people there, many of them supporting the opposition -- Ealing isn't that far away -- and the game was carried out in the best traditions of sport, none of your prima-donna football behaviour, nobody dived all afternoon and everyone respected the ref, never questioning his decisions. 

We weren't equipped to do top-quality sports photography -- Susie had the D3  with a 70-200mm lens and I worked the D800E and a short zoom, trying to catch individual players. 

Sadly, they were all too pretty! A bit of an overstatement if you like, but I was looking for typical Scottish faces, preferably muddy, a bit battered and if possible, a touch bloody. But this was the First Team, young, athletic and as fit as butchers' dogs, all of them. I found only one who looked like he'd been in a few Glasgow disagreements, but he was on the subs' bench and didn't take any active part in the game while we were there.

picture by Susie Bigglestone 

I think London Welsh has to right idea, in that they recommended that I should attend a Third Team game (they call them 'The Occies'  -- short for The Occasionals), who, I'm assured are 'all shapes and sizes' and might show a bit of character in their faces.

Our trip to Richmond on that grey, cold, wet day wasn't a great success as a photographic expedition, but  was thoroughly enjoyable otherwise. Gets you out of the house, y'know.

 liSSSSkSe inner-city deprived areas, Benefit ~Streets or