Personal Journey

My father died when I was 4 (1975), my mum died in 2012 and my sister passed away in 2015.

After my father died, my mother never spoke about him to us. My sister had more memories of him because she was six years older than me, but my memories were hazy, and a lack of conversation meant they faded over time. I found out after my mum died why she hadn’t spoken about him much, it was because she was still heart broken. She missed him so much every day that she couldn’t even bear to talk about him. I know this because of the words we found on his gravestone, which myself and my sister saw for the first time when we buried my mum.

After my sister passed away I realised I’d lost all immediate connection with my past. My grandparents were all deceased, and although my mother had three sisters I’d moved away from them a long time ago, and wasn’t really in touch with any of my cousins on a regular basis. Over the past few years, two more of the sisters have passed away, one very recently, leaving only a single sister remaining.

There’s really no one left who I can talk to about my dad, or in fact my mother’s life when she was young. I know almost nothing about either.

What I do have, are some photographs. Not many, and almost none of them are labelled or written on. But I do have some photos. I’ve been scanning an album today with Cyprus on the cover, made in Germany, and full of photographs of my dad, his army buddies, and some of my mum, maybe my sister, and other members of the family.

A lot of them are people I don’t know and will never find out who they are, mostly in the army. My dad was stationed in Cyprus for a while (it looks like my mum didn’t go), and Germany (my mum lived there with him for a while). I have no idea who took these photos, where they all are, or what year any of them were. Most of them I guess are the 60’s and 70’s, but one is from the 50’s and one has a car in it which looks to be 50’s era as well.

I’ve been meaning to scan these for a long time, but it’s meant,

  1. removing the photographs carefully from the album, but inevitably losing some of the photo corners they’re stuck in with at the same time
  2. spending a lot of time doing it

b) is easy to solve now I’m in self isolation, and a) I realised I’m the only person left in the world who I can ask for permission, so I gave it to myself.

Here’s my mum,

And here’s my dad,

They’re photos they sent or gave to each other, while my dad was stationed away (because they’re among the few to have something written on the back).

I’ve put all the images (or nearly all of them) on Flickr, and a photography forum I participate in, and some of them have been confirmed as Cyprus, which is good to know.  This is a post I originally made on the forum, but wanted to duplicate here for my own blog so that I didn’t lose it.

Lockdown

Well well, we’re locked down.  The UK government has finally decided to close all but essentially shops, limit gatherings to no more than 2 people (unless all close family), and fine people if they’re out and about without an important reason.

I’ve got 3 days left before I’m out of self isolation due to presenting symptoms, I just hope it was Covid19 and that you can’t get it twice so that I can stay confidently healthy.  I’ll just need to hope for the best on that front.

Plenty of folk will be chronicling this time, daily updates, isolation blogs and diaries and the like.  I don’t feel compelled to do that, although I had hope to do a photo journal of the outside world.  That’s probably scuppered now.  I will try and carry the little camera with me if I go out for essential supplies, and grab a few shots of nearly empty streets.

The World Has Changed

What a strange situation we find ourselves in.  Covid19 will change the world.

I’m pretty sure I’m on day 5 of my own personal infection.  Fever, cough, headaches, the whole set, but very mild.  Doing what we can to delay / limit Greté’s exposure but the physical separation is extra hard on her.  We’ve got enough supplies to get us through to the end of my isolation, and then we’ll just take it day by day.

Trying to do something with the hours we’re stuck in the house, scanning some old photographs.  Which has me thinking about family and friends.

Just a quick post to record the fact that I think I had the virus and this is day 5, because without this blog I’d have little chance of recalling my own life events.

The silence is delicious

For the past couple of months or so we’ve been able to hear water moving through the cold water pipes in the kitchen and bathroom.  Turns out, as I previously posted, it was caused by a leak in the pipework outside of the property.  It’s now been repaired, I’ll probably post a blog when it’s fully finished, at the moment the path still has a hole in it.

But I just wanted to quickly post about how insidious the sound was, something only made clear by its absence.  Obviously, when in the kitchen in the quiet moments or in the bathroom, the sound was very obvious and loud.  However, now that it’s gone it is hugely apparent that I could hear it even in a noisy house, and even in other rooms.  A constant background cavitation noise from the pipes.  Like an audible version of Chinese water torture.

I was in the bathroom earlier, and it’s silent.  So, very, very quiet.  It’s truly delicious.

Water movement

Looks like we might have movement on the water front.  Severn Trent are coming out, possibly Wednesday, to repair the leak in pipe between us and the mains.  Fingers crossed.  That’ll be an absolutely huge weight off my mind.  You can clear hear the leak from inside the house now and it’s getting louder – the sound of running water constantly is not pleasant when you know it’s basically going out of the pipe and in to the ground!

Memories are made of this

I don’t remember life events very well.  When they happened, what year, where I was, or in many cases, that they happened at all.  Reading back over blog entries really helps.  So I’m going to try and keep writing them.  I never thought actually keeping a diary would be useful, but I guess it would have been given how bad my memory appears to be for this kind of thing.  I can probably recall  the command line parameters for AIX commands from 1998, but not much about my life in that year (except obviously, I got married).

Fizz is back home.  She was in the vet’s for one night, and was much brighter the next day.  She didn’t really eat while she was there (and judging by the poo this morning, she didn’t shit while she was there either), but they felt that was more because she was stressed and unhappy with them, rather than unwell.  So we agreed we’d bring her home.  She’s mildly anaemic, and seems to have sporadic bouts of sickness which trigger the lethargy.  So we’ve agreed to manage symptoms rather than put her through multiple tests which might not help anyway.  She’s 16, and overall she’s happier and more active these days than she was a year or so ago (we’ve introduced an anti-inflammatory for her arthritis, and a laxative to help with ‘regular movements’, both of which have had a visible and positive effect on her behaviour).  We’ll keep an eye on her, and manage any symptoms and ensure she’s got the best quality of life possible for however long she keeps going.  At the moment, we’ve got no reason to doubt that could be a lot of years yet.

No progress on the mains leak, Severn Trent haven’t been back in touch and we don’t know what that means.

No progress on the wood repairs, the guy is waiting for a dry day to come and do the final sanding and staining.

I’m three or four weeks in to a new photography project, documenting the area in which I live.  You can see the album of hundreds of photos so far on Flickr.

Dear Diary

Over two years since I last blogged anything. So long in fact that WordPress is completely different. There’s some kind of weird block editor that I don’t understand. Why can’t I just write text in a huge box like I used to? 

Aha, installed a plugin to turn that off, and back to normal simple text input in a dialog box.  I guess they think people will only blog tiny missives these days, but I’m here for the epic long hall and the block editor does not suit!

This will be a rambling blog post with compressed and confused timelines, missing information, out of sync actions, and no conclusion.  You’re welcome.

There are always grades of discomfort, I think I might have blogged that before, and my life is easy compared to very many people in the world.  I don’t think I really understood privilege when I was blogging a lot a few years ago, but over the last couple of years or so I’ve come to understand it a lot better.   So I’m privileged, but as should be obvious, it doesn’t mean that shit doesn’t cause anxiety.  And so September, October and now November are the months that just keep on giving.  I’m blogging because I want to rant partly about work, and that means I can’t use Facebook (too many work colleagues), and I can’t use Twitter (240 characters).  So I need somewhere I can vent sure in the knowledge no one will ever read it, and so my personal blog seems like the perfect choice.  This is not going to be one of those posts where I focus on 3 good things and how lucky I am.  That’s never the person I’ve been.  I can’t fight against it really, I’ve always looked at the problems and thought about the issues, and that includes my own life.  It’s what made me excellent at my job in technical support, but it comes with a burden that it’s hard to see the good things amongst the broken.

I am, as anyone who’s read this blog will know, terrible at owning a house.  The last few months have tested that to the limit and continue to do so.  We noticed some woodlice in the corner of the dining room, we knew what it was, rotten wood, we just weren’t sure why.  But dealing with that takes energy, and the last three months have been low energy periods for us for several reasons.  So we didn’t deal with it straight away, and then it started preying on our minds, making it harder to sleep, consuming more spoons, adding more to the cup, whatever metaphor you prefer.  Eventually, Greté found enough energy to contact a handyman on Facebook, and it’s being handled.  Never as bad as you fear, but never as easy as you hope.  It’s half fixed, but now we’re waiting for some dry weather for the guy to finish the job (for which he’s already been paid).

There’s also a leak in our mains water supply.  A good few weeks back now we noticed that the cold water pipes were making a noise as if someone was running a tap.  Initially, I didn’t think much of it, but then I began to think about what it might imply before finally realising it probably meant a leak.  At first, I assumed it was in the house, and so I spent 3 hours one night, until 2am, because when else do you panic about this stuff than at 11pm before you go to bed, trying to find it.  There wasn’t anywhere in the house that obviously had any water leak.   I formed the view the leak was outside.  What followed was is rather frustrating.  We had a British Gas appointment to check the boiler anyway, and they provide plumbing repairs and quotes, so we asked them to also ‘check the plumbing’.  The guy who arrived thought he was only here to find a plumbing issue, Greté managed to get him to do the boiler service, and he agreed he thought the leak sounded like it was outside in the mains pipe.  He had another guy come the next day, from Dynorod (who I think British Gas own) to confirm that, and he did.  There was some confusion that included being told if we signed up to the extended home care agreement it would cover the problem.  So we signed up.  We them had an appointment scheduled for many weeks later for Dynorod to come and ‘find the leak’.  However, before that occurred, Dynorod called us to say it wouldn’t be covered because the cover only covered internal pipes.  Many furious conversations later didn’t provide any progress.  I then called our insurance company, but their ’emergency cover’ line told me because I’d already had a plumber look at it, they wouldn’t cover it, even though they literally just listened to a pipe.  Our regular buildings insurance doesn’t cover it (most likely) because it’s wear and tear.  But they advised us to ring Severn Trent first anyway, which we did.  About three weeks had passed now, with the sound of water leaking in to the ground present in the house all the time.  We also asked Dynorod to come and quote in case we needed them to do the repair.  A lovely lady at Dynorod rang us the day they were supposed to be here, to tell us they were running late and to berate us for getting them back when they said it wouldn’t be free.  I explained we were getting them back to quote, and that if they didn’t arrive soon we’d have to go out.  She told me she could quote and we never needed them to visit anyway, at which point I was pretty pissed off.  So, anything from £700 to £2000 depending on where the leak is, but that’s open ended if access proves hard.  Meanwhile, Severn Trent have now been twice, once to confirm it’s a leak (sounds like it), and once to put a boundary box outside the property, and a meter to measure the rate of loss.  Now however, upon ringing them today, they’re not sure what’s happened, who we may or may not be passed to, and what the status is.  So several weeks after first hearing the noise, we can still hear it, and there’s water leaking in to the ground somewhere between us and the mains.  It’s like water torture for real.

In Tesco car park, sometime in the last two months or so, it’s a blur, I was slowly reversing out of a parking bay when someone drove in to the back corner of the car.  Their passenger side front corner impacted my passenger side rear corner.  The insurance company didn’t even bother debating it, I was reversing so my fault.  I would maintain I checked, it was clear, I reversed slowly, and someone travelling too quickly drove in to the car.  However, I’m now £300 worse off (excess) and we’ll see what it does to the premium.  First insurance accident claim we’ve ever made, since Greté started driving in 1997ish.  Not a big deal, but I’ve never had to deal with car insurance companies, and my natural ‘must follow the rules to the letter’ behaviour gets in the way when those rules are fucking unclear and contradictory.  Just another spoon theft I don’t need.

Fizz has been unwell for a few months now.  She had full on heart failure a while back and we got to her to the vets and essentially saved her life.  Since then, we’ve been extra vigilant, as you might imagine, and are managing her thyroid issue, and several other conditions.  Over the past month though she’s had another serious health scare, and a couple of periods of extreme lethargy, including yesterday.  We felt we might lose her overnight, but this morning she seemed brighter.  We took her to the vets at 6pm today though, to be safe, and they’ve kept her in overnight for more tests.  She may be anaemic which has many possible causes.  She’s 16, and we’ll need to think carefully about how we manage her quality of life in the face of any new challenges.

Work is bitter-sweet.  There’s some good news coming for me personally, a new challenge, new opportunity, but it’s amid a complex, ego-driven, murky, cost-saving-focussed organisational battle.  People are burning out, and being burned out.  I look around and wonder if this is what failing organisations look like, but we refuse to believe it.  Or maybe I’m just more exposed to it now that I have an increased level of involvement in senior management.  Who knows.  I still manage to leave it behind when I get home, for the most part, which is a bonus over the job I had before, and some days it’s so terrible it’s truly funny and easy to rise above.  But I hate when people suffer, and I see a lot of suffering, and some days it saps energy I need to use to be taking care of Greté and the shit above.  When work consumes too many spoons, the balance is broken.

Greté continues to suffer at the hands of the DSS, in parallel to suffering at the hands of her health issues, one of which is literally suffering of her hands.  Around this time last year we got the regular invite to fill in the WCA form, which we duly did, and we waited.  We got an appointment in January for the face to face assessment,  and then last minute it was cancelled.  Apparently, they didn’t have ‘anyone with the specialist skill required to assess her’.  Okay, at least they were honest.  We waited for a new appointment.  And waited.  And waited.  And finally in September, we received this,

Your appointment at 2.45pm on Thursday 17th JANUARY has been rescheduled for Monday 16th of SEPTEMBER

Literally nine months.  Greté called them on the Friday before to ensure the recording equipment was available as instructed, to be told that it was being rescheduled because they’d got the booking wrong and hadn’t lined up a doctor.  For. Fucks. Sake.  They moved it to October 8th, making it nearer to ten months since the original invite and pretty much 11 months since we’d filled in the original WCA.  In that eleven months, Greté’s health has gotten worse, and medication has changed, and and and …

Anyway, we attended, the assessment went ahead, the audio recording equipment (actual C90 tapes) failed just over half way through but we got through it.  Ultimately, on October 24th Greté received the notice that she’d been placed (kept) in the ESA Support Group.  That’s the group that means you do not need to seek employment to continue receiving the ‘benefit’.  No indication of when that will be reviewed next, when we have to start that whole dehumanising process all over again, but it’s done for now.

Tragically, we won’t soon forget the date Greté got that news (which is bitter-sweet in and of itself).  It was also the day we found out that our dear friend, Lynda, had passed away overnight.

We’ve known Lynda for a long time, and I’ll keep personal details out of this entirely to maintain her dignity.  She lived with and in-spite of multiple serious medical conditions, she gave no quarter, she smiled and never stopped.  She didn’t fight her illness, nor lose to it, she rose above it in life knowing the inevitable conclusion.  We will miss her forever.

None of these issues individually are unmanageable.  Some are tragic and heart breaking, some are annoying, some are frustrating.  But at the same time, grouped together, with some of them being a constant nagging worry / fear, sapping energy and spoons, they’re impacting both mine and Greté’s mental health in ways neither of us need.

We’ll be okay, we’ll get through.  I have a good credit rating, there’s equity in the property, the vets are looking after Fizz, and we’ll be able to handle anything which transpires, but fuck me it feels hard sometimes.

Mass Effect (again again)

A friend of mine has been discovering Dragon Age and then Mass Effect for the first time.  It’s been pleasing to see how much he’s enjoyed all the games, even though some of them are pretty long in the tooth these days.

It also inspired me to go and play Mass Effect 1, 2 and 3 again (I’m about 10% through ME3).

It’s a bit depressing how badly Andromeda stands up to Mass Effect (certainly 3) in terms of story and emotional engagement.  The side stories in Mass Effect 3, the overheard conversations, are heart achingly tragic and poignant.  And they’re not even part of the overall story, you can’t even always influence them.  There’s a elderly lady in one location trying to contact her son, who’s in the military.  You don’t know if her son is okay or not, but you know she’s got memory issues, because she’s confused and doesn’t realising she’s been having the same conversation for several days.  You get the conversation in snippets, and the response from the woman she’s speaking to is so real.  There are loads of conversations like that, moments, ‘real’ lives, telling a story of people affected by war.

Andromeda tried, but it missed, and I guess while it’s mechanically a good game, it just doesn’t have the heart present in ME3 (BioWare have form here, DA2 didn’t have the same heart as DA1).

Anyway, just a short post in passing – Mass Effect, the whole trilogy, is still worth buying and playing if you’ve never done so.

Diabetes

I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in 2005.  In the 12 years since we found the right level of medication, the metformin dose I’m on has never changed.  Until today.  Up from 1500mg a day to 2000mg a day, with a promise from me to the GP to also lose some weight with my intent being to reduce that dose again.

Ever since the accident last year, and to be fair, for a short while before it, my sugar has been creeping up and my HbA1c’s getting worse.  I’ve had a couple of ‘soft’ attempts at getting it back under control, but not enough to offset the changes, and so it’s time for a bit of focus.  I don’t want the change to be permanent, I want to be able to reverse it, and I’m going to try hard and delay the ‘inevitable’ slide towards insulin for as long as possible.

It remains to be seen whether my will power will be strong enough to actually lose weight, but I’m going to give it a shot.

I’m pleased the GP was once again willing to work with me, rather than simply sticking me on a new medication or insisting the change was larger and permanent.

Interesting, the only reason I know it was 2005 when I was diagnosed, is because I read back and found the blog posts where I started talking about it, which is a sign I guess that I should blog more often, not because anyone reads them, but just because writing this stuff down is useful for my own memory.

I don’t need your consent

Note: As of the 5th August there’s an update to this post, after the instagram posts, right at the bottom.

I’ve been taking photographs in public places (often called Street Photography) for around three years.  I’m as surprised as anyone that I’ve discovered an interest in documentary, social, street, urban whatever you want to call it photography.  I truly thought I’d take up photography and spend my time pointing expensive long lenses at wildlife, and expensive macro lenses at other kinds of wildlife.  I even blogged about it here.  I’m no good at it mind you, but I’m still putting in the effort and practice and hopefully over time I’ll improve.  I don’t feel that I have a very artistic eye, and so a lot of my photography is workmanlike, technically okay quality (focus, exposure, framing) but not necessarily always very interesting.

Anyway, that’s mostly an introduction.  In the three or so years I’ve been doing it, I’ve not had any trouble.  I even took photographs of armed police officers, and had some conversations with them, and never had any trouble.  It can be daunting, pointing your camera directly at strangers in the street.  Of course we don’t think twice about taking a photograph of friends or family and getting a few straggling strangers in the background, or taking snaps of attractions or tourist views, and again, catching a few strangers in the frame.  It’s different though when you know you’re pointing your camera at someone you don’t know, and they don’t necessarily know you’re taking a picture.

I try and be socially aware.  I avoid taking photographs of people I consider vulnerable, the definition of which is mine and mine alone.  I work hard not to take photographs of people ‘just because they’re attractive’.  I don’t take photographs for the most part of isolated children.  I take a lot of photographs in Old Market Square, and there are often kids playing in the water and fountains in the summer months, and I am aware of that and it informs where I point my camera and what I shoot.

However, I also know my rights as a photographer in the UK (but I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice).  They boil down to this – and I’m going to state them quite coldly.  I don’t need your consent.  If I’m in a public place, and you’re in a public place, then in general I don’t need permission to take your photograph, or a photograph of your children, or anyone elses children for that matter.  There’s a right to privacy within UK law, and that means that in some situations a photograph could be inappropriate despite the notion of it being a public place.  For example, photographing someone entering or leaving a family planning clinic could ultimately be an invasion of privacy.  But, within the bounds of decency and privacy, I don’t need your permission.  I do need your permission to use the images for ‘commercial’ purposes, but again, that’s actually a limited range of uses applied to advertising a product or service, or similar use.  I can take photographs all day of people in the street and publish books full of them and never need a model release form.

So I’ve never had any trouble.

Until today.

The Nottingham Beach is on again this year.  The council and am event company work together to turn the Old Market Square into the seaside.  There’s sand, water, rides, arcade machines, fish and chips, donuts, slushies, ice cream, it’s great.  The kids love it, families love it, and it’s always busy.  This year is no exception.  I went into the city today hoping it was going to be very sunny with heavy downpours.  I definitely get my best shots when people are surprised by sudden rain and go running.  Sadly for me it stayed dry, although I guess the families preferred it that way.  I hadn’t taken any shots of the sand area because there weren’t any interesting compositions and it was mainly just families having a good time.

I was speaking to Greté on Facebook messenger while eating a sandwich, telling her about the rides and the food stalls, and I said I’d grab her a few shots so she could see what the place was like.  So I took some of the fish and chip stand, the donut stand, the slushy stall (including a security/event management guy, and the lady running the stall since that were standing in front of it).  I turned, took a couple of the sandy beach, two of the water, and a couple of those inflatable ball things you can stand inside.  I was, as ever, conscious of the kids, and so I took wide angle shots showing the whole area.  I then wandered around a corner, decided not to take a shot of the surf machine (wasn’t running) and was about to leave, when I heard someone shout ‘oy’ behind me.

The guy from the slushy stall strode towards me, shouting, “You can’t take photographs here”.  I told him I could because it was a public space.  He switched immediately to, “You can’t take photographs of kids without their parent’s permission”.  I said sorry again, but I could do exactly that, although I hadn’t been.  By now he was beside me and made his first grab for my camera.  I stayed calm, held my ground, and said that once again, I knew my rights, this was a public space and so I was within my rights to take photographs.  We exchanged those views a couple more times, with him forcefully telling me I wasn’t allowed to take photographs of kids without their parent’s permission.  He made at least one more grab for my camera during this period.  After a couple of minutes, and me once again saying that I could, he said, “Let’s see what the police think then”?  I said I was more than happy for them to be involved.  I think that might have been the first moment where he wondered if he was on the right side of the conversation.

He picked up his radio, but before he could say anything, he caught the eye of an older member of staff who came over.  The first guy explained what had happened, I explained that it was a public space and I was within my rights to take photographs.  The first guy went off on his tirade about me taking pictures of the kids without permission, to which I said I didn’t need it but hadn’t been anyway.  I then tried to explain four times why I was taking the pictures, that my wife had said she wanted to see what the place looked like.  Each time I got three words into that, the first guy talked over me saying, “What are you, a nonce”?  Eventually, I just held the gaze of the second guy, and he got the first guy to stop talking.

The second guy then asked if I would show him the photographs I’d taken.  I know my rights, he can ask that, but he’s got no power to force me to do it.  However, it made no sense not to comply unless I wanted this to escalate further which I didn’t.  So I showed him the shots – about 10 of the Nottingham Beach, and then as we went further back doors, doorways, manhole covers, graffiti, you know, the normal kind of holiday snap.  Eventually he said something, I can’t remember exactly, but it was clear he’d seen enough and wasn’t worried.  The first guy was still unhappy, so I offered to delete the two images I’d taken with him in, I showed him me deleting them, and then I left.

My adrenaline was through the roof, and I was pretty fucking angry.  There are a number of reasons for being angry.  Firstly, 99% of the people in that location are taking photographs non-stop on their mobile phones.  Themselves, their kids, other kids, other people, without a thought in the world, and then posting them straight to Facebook or Instagram or Twitter.  I review every shot I take, and if I’m not comfortable with the content, or think that it paints people in a bad light, I don’t post it anywhere.  People with mobile phones sometimes automatically post everything to social media without even a second glance.  Secondly, and related to that, the only reason I got stopped is because my camera is large.  It’s not a long lens focally, but it’s a physically big camera and lens.  If I’d been using a smaller camera he wouldn’t have even blinked.

Street photography is important.  Even in an age where everyone has a camera with them, those cameras are increasingly turned towards the owners.  Even if street photography isn’t important, even if my photographs are worthless artistically and historically, they’re still mine, and I still have the right to take them.

Amusingly, I had completely forgotten that at the start of last week I changed the shooting mode on my camera.  My camera supports two cards, a CF and an SD.  For a long time, I’ve been using the CF card and running into the SD card only when the first is full, to give me a buffer in case I’m taking a lot of shots.  The SD cards are slower, so I don’t want to shoot to them constantly.  However, last week, after watching yet another YouTube video with someone saying ‘my CF card died’, I switched to dual card mode, where the camera writes a RAW file to the CF card, and a JPG to the SD card.  I had utterly forgotten this as I deleted the JPGs in front of the security guard.  Leaving the RAW files intact on the CF card.  Oh well.

When I got home I did some digging, and I can find no reference to the Old Market Square Nottingham Beach not being public access.  It’s possible I’m wrong, and that it’s designated as something else during the event.  I can certainly imagine the ‘bar area’ counts as something special, since it has to be licensed, but I believe I’m in the right about the other areas.  There’s unfettered access and no signage to suggest otherwise.  I also went looking for photographs of the beach online, and there are plenty, all of them including plenty of kids in the shots – because of course, the beach is full of kids.

I don’t need your consent, but I do have empathy, and I behave in a socially responsible manner.  But I’ll defend my right to take photographs in public.

For more information and advice about your rights – check out these links.

Lastly, here’s a few links to other photographs of The Nottingham Beach (none of these are mine).  I’ve avoided including ones taken by parents and then posted publicly to Instagram with close up identifiable shots of their children and other people’s children.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BW4cARvnaP5/

https://www.instagram.com/p/BW2rsSXA0ZA/

https://www.instagram.com/p/BWzqN2alEV9/

https://www.instagram.com/p/BWnSR7UHXdu/

You get the idea.

Update (5th August) – since writing this blog post, I’ve been in touch via e-mail and on the phone with both the event organisers and the agency they use for the staff.  In the first e-mail response from the agency which provides the staff, they lied about the interaction, making claims of events which didn’t happen and dismissing those that did.  The conversation on the phone with the individual from the event organisers was more constructive, and I understand his position, when neither side can present evidence he’s not able to decide which is true.  In a subsequent phone call from someone at the agency which provided the staff, it was clear that he’s going to back his staff, and while he apologised, he continued to use phrases like, “if what you described happened …”

Both of them insisted that they see a lot of suspect people taking photographs, and the police have warned them to be on the lookout.  I don’t know how true either of those statements are, but I’m more than happy to be respectfully approached by concerned staff and members of the public.  That’s a significantly different position from verbal abuse and potentially common assault.

I certainly won’t be spending any money at the event, and if you do go with anything larger than a smartphone, be prepared to justify your presence.