Hello Everybody-Peeps, and welcome back to whatever this is. Let’s call it my self-centric thought omelette, peppered with a melange of images, served with tattie scones and garnished with pickle to finish. Delish, I’m sure you’ll agree….

This thought-omelette (I’m sticking with it, shhush) began a couple of years ago as a forum for me to airily describe a series of off-beat adventures with my camera around Brumtown UK. These were often focused on the pedestrian subway spaces I was documenting back then…. do check them out if you fancy a giggle.

Since that time the thought-omelette has gradually gotten ever more scrambled as I’ve found the freedom to chat ever more expansively about things that have occurred, all mixed up with gothic wails, Blumhouse moans and biblical gnashing of teeth, just for the hell of it. I’m not the most intellectually adroit or the wisest Walter on the estate, but I do like to gaze out my window and ponder, on occasion.

On a walk a few months ago, I walked down a street, cut off from its destination by HS2, and a wall of worn-out weatherboard. Graffiti daubed across it spelt out a simple message, ‘Stop the War’.

Which one, I thought, which one………?

Anyway, here’s a thing.

Being creative has, to my way of thinking, always been somebody else’s battlefield, a weapon that I’ve never had the ammunition for. Musically or artistically, I’ve never had that gifted eye or jilted tongue, and really, I’m just not that cool. In my thirties, I did discover that I’m relatively green fingered. My love for being outdoors helped to garner a passion for plants and growing stuff. The works of Piet Oudolf, Beth Chatto and Christopher Lloyd stoked the old grey composter and over time inspired me into making a garden based around the movement and form of perennial grasses in combination with drifts of vivid late summer prairie flowers. It was hard work but so wonderful to look at, it made my heart sing. I never once thought of it as a creative or artistic endeavour, though. It was about hard graft, blood, sweat, tears of determination, digging, growing, and making things happen.

At the end of a day spent tending to the garden I would sit on my doorstep, a cuppa in hand and just enjoy it all, watching life in the garden move and shimmer in the late afternoon sunshine, as insects and birds buzzed about. My family loved it too, especially during those warm summer months when the sun’s golden light infused the whole garden with a radiant glow.

Over the years my horticultural tastes matured and changed. I’ve long held a slightly obsessed fascination for Japanese Art and Culture, and after reading a series of books about zen gardens I set about transforming the prairie garden into a Japanese themed space. A book by Jake Hobson called ‘Niwaki: the Art of Pruning‘ was of particular inspiration to me during this time. Over the next few years I made a subtler space, filled with sculptures, architectural planting, gentler colours and spaces for contemplation.

Sculptural trees and shrubs formed the backbone in my garden, a pleasing series of cloud pruned shrubs with understories of quieter perennials. I used a mix of evergreens like Buxus sempervirens, Taxus baccata, Pinus thunbergii and Pittosporum tenufolium in combination with deciduous mainstays like Carpinus betulus and Corylus avellana, as the backbone elements of this garden. Some of these required pruning with shears, clipping them into rounded clouds or more geometric shapes. Others, like the Pine trees, need timely bud pruning to keep them small and densely formed. Pines require patience and time, but eventually they reward the eye with a distinctly Japanese flavour. As an aside, do be wary of Pine trees, they ooze sap like you would not believe, bud pruning is a hot, sticky mess when you get into it. Especially if it gets in your hair…..

My Japanese garden endures to this day, maturing like a wheel of cheese, crusty round the edge but still tasty in the middle. Some plants have done well, whilst others have been and gone. Such is Nature, even with my guiding hand, entropy will have its way, the work never stops. Time has pressed upon me too, I can no longer work the garden the way that I used too, a lifetime of back problems has seen to that. It’s forced me to take a more restrained hand on things, stepping back to let the fulsomeness of plants grow, noting the elements that need work whilst letting other plants have their way. Over time, things have settled, judiciousness abounds, everything is in its right place. It is most unlike me 🙃

During this time, other transitions took place. I got into photography. Those back problems led me, after many scans and delays, onto the operating table. It’s part of my well heeled Bio, my recuperation after the operation involved gentle exercise, walking and yoga. I started taking photos with my phone during those walks (to my febrile mind walking was so utterly boring without having something to do!). One thing led to another, bish bash bosh, a passion for making images bloomed…..

There’s a point here, somewhere, I think. Where’s that thought unifier when I need it?

Mentally, those times before and after my operation, were probably the hardest of my life. Each day was a test of endurance, mind and body drifting from one opioid to the next, dreading the moments when the drugs wore off and the pain struck like lightning in the night. Those nights were the worst, I’d lie in my wife’s arms, literally bawling as bolts of lightning lanced through me, wearing me thinner by the moment. The agony was inescapable, a relentless enemy draining the life out of me. Consequently, I don’t like to overthink those times, even now, 6 years later, the thought of that pain makes me weak. My family make light of it, telling stories of when the opioids had me tripping the fright fantastic, hallucinating and raving. I was apparently very funny at times, my tongue waggling like a rabid dog. It must have been difficult for them, seeing me so utterly reduced, mad dog Dad. It’s weird for me, I don’t remember much about those brain-addled times; listening to my kids talk about it is like listening to anecdotes from someone else’s story. I wasn’t really there…

I don’t know whether those times changed the way I think or feel about things, but after the operation I was forced to make some serious life changes. No more heavy lifting or pushing, no more hours of digging, I had to be kinder to my body or I was going to wind up in an even worse state. Those endless days and cruel nights spent transfixed in agony had frightened me to the absolute core. So, I guess, changes to my mentality were inevitable.

My physical life changed overnight, I was pain free, but always with that absolute frailty now built in to my physique, a thumb in the dam, a surgical codicil, live within my means, or else. I had been so very low, steamrollered by pain, so perhaps in that state I was rendered receptive to the idea of being more creative. I don’t know. I’d always been able to make, craft, grow and assemble, but those things now had absolutes set against them. My Surgeon warned me on the day I left hospital, you can’t overdo those things anymore Mista, or you’ll end up back here, yelling in agony like him over there. The guy in the bed opposite to me, he’d had the same operation some 18 months before. Upon recovery, he carried on his life regardless, without a concerted effort to manage his now weakened anatomy. Men, we never learn. I don’t think I’ll ever forget his agonized screams.

Photography was, at first, a means to an end for me, a doing thing, a diversion. It gave me something to do, occupying my mind during those interminable, seemingly purposeless rehabilitation walks. Making images offered distraction from the trauma that I’d experienced, allowing mind as well as body time to heal. Amidst it all, I discovered the simplistic pleasures of composing images, seeing the world with fresh eyes, it spirited me away from the mundanity of traipsing towpaths and urban clearways. Photography offered the most unexpected of freedoms.

I won’t bore you with the entirety of my journey through that very personal northwest passage to becoming an image maker, but note that reference. Image maker. Even now, I still refer to this favourite creative endeavour of mine in less than favourable terms. Making not imagined, crafting rather than creativity. I’m very much a doing person, I need to do to learn, I’m quite process driven in that respect. Reading or watching is simply skimming the fat off the top of the milk for me, full fat is being involved and doing it (milking the metaphor, anyone? Anyone??? I’ll get me coat). Over subsequent days, months and years of graft, I’ve learned to be somewhat proficient in photography, I can get by and I’ve done my first 10 squillion photos and then some. Mistakes, yeah, lots, so many bad dreams.

Then, one day, much later, whilst out taking photographs, a friend said; ‘I love your Eye, and how you see the world. Your images are so imaginative and funny’. Wait, (first up, love my Eye!? get down, I have two!), what? oh EYE (second up, these brackets are annoying, stop it!). The things I heard in that sentence (which actually included more words but I only heard a few because, weird, (me and compliments are desperately estranged) were EYE and IMAGINATIVE. Another Bodkin chimed in with CREATIVITY, INSPIRING and ARTISTIC. Words that I’d never had applied to anything of my making were being gifted to me by my peers. I might have welled up, a lachrymose moment later in the day. A joyful one. I needed a lie down and some Horlicks.

I’ve had other compliments since, but you never forget the first time, perfect syllables of praise that are loaded with so much more than just words. All for something I had created, it was special, thrilling beyond words. And it stopped me in my tracks. For the first time in my life something that I had worked on, that I had made, was being seen and interpreted as an expression of creativity and referred to as artistic and imaginative.

It’s difficult to relay to you just how much that meant to me. To others, it may seem trivial, but to me, a working class lad, son of a painter and decorator, it meant the world. I realised that I was finally in the right place, where I needed to be. All that time wracked with pain, long nights of turmoil waiting for my op, those interminable rehab walks along the canals, it had all been fookin worth it! Yeah, so what if I can’t play jazz-flute, or write an elegy to a g-string or paint a squiggly line in my eye?!? I’m a photographer, I write with light.

Those walks, though, maybe there was something to them after all. Liberation, perhaps? I had stumbled upon a route through, to fresh thoughts and tantalising neural pathways.

I’m a firm believer that, whilst we move ever forwards in life, what we’ve left behind is never far from view. The past informs our present, every decision, every view. New meanwhiles leave us in new places and elsewhere, yet reciprocity somehow finds new ways to bring us back to the start, balancing our journeys in unforeseen ways, a stowaway memory hiding in plain sight. Karma can be a bitch, ignore it at your cost. That guy on my ward, screaming at the Nurses, he had been warned.

These last few years have been transformative, a creative renaissance, which sounds pretty cheesy, but for me it’s true. The simple joys of making images for the sake of it has evolved, a transition to a much more purposeful and rewarding practice. I’ve been taking photos to tell stories, capturing images that (I hope) express feelings or evoke atmosphere. I’ve done many of the things that other Thought-Omelettiers do, I’ve made books, staged exhibitions, held talks and walks, I’ve even won a competition or three. As a ‘creative’ I don’t think I’ve had a happier, more fulfilling time in my life.

Sadly, those goalposts really do move, don’t they? (heavens to Brown Betty, what is that smell?!? A distinctly whiffy, unwiped But, hoves into view). But, where am I going? What am I doing this all for? Where’s the end product?

(And, thought-omelettiers? Really? REALLY? Just stop it!)

I had that thing, you know, an attack of creative angst. My thoughts jangling like those cheap wind chimes all twisted up in your neighbours apple tree, how is it everyone seems to know what they doing, they’re pretty clued up, ambitions and destinations, they seem to know where they are going. Why don’t I know where am I going and is my lack of direction something I should really be worried about (answers on a Kiss-me-quick postcard c/o Muggins, please)?

In all honesty, I don’t know where I am on any given day as it is, so asking me where I am on some quasi-mystical creative journey is a bit like asking a Tory politician to feel your pain. I’ve never had that kind of built-in personal sat-nav that some of the more ambitious self-aware types seem to have. I’ve always lent into just DOING STUFF. And that’s led me to where I am now, which is definitely not where I once was or indeed where I foresaw myself going. If you’ve read through the depths of this Thought Omelette, you’ll doubtless be aware of this transition (it’ll be over soon, I have blankets if you’re getting cold….).

A chinwag with an esteemed friend on a similar matter still lends reassurance to this day. In essence they said, we’re all on personal journeys, whether they be professional, creative or philosophical. There’s no point in getting fixated on what the rest are doing. We start in different places, at different times, with different skill sets, for different reasons or motivations. Consequently, we’re all on different trajectories.

The point is, concentrate on you, the rest is just noise. I know it’s all common sense, my thoughts as I’ve already stated, are rarely deep or complex. Jush baye tankful I cun doy spelink anglish. Yeah

I’ve taken stock, I’ve looked around, I’ve noticed that things have changed. Which is quite surprising for me, I’m a bit slow sometimes. Writing about this journey helps me make sense of things, motivations, hair styles, pasta varieties, all the usual deep thinking omelettes. This Blog is on its Nth revision, because what I’ve wanted to say and the thoughts that this internal journey had provoked, has led me off on tangents that will (inevitably) become a different blog. Like a Eucalyptus, regular pruning of my text prompts ever faster regrowth.

So, to sum up, that’s my (abridged) journey so far. My story isn’t unusual, it’s a bit boring in all honesty, there’s definitely no plagues of frogs, aliens on tricycles or mysterious ritualistic killings, sorry. I guess I’ll have to save that for the next blog. Thanks for sticking with me to this point, you are kind and patient to humour me thus. You leave me at a rest stop, a waymeet, in a mindful disposition, conscious of my motivations, feeling thankful for my loved ones and grateful for the positive influences that have shaped my journey.

Namaste 🙏