Country Road, c1978

Our wee road as it wss in the late 70s, complete with lovely stone whitewashed pillars::

The Young Fellow

 It was the Young Fellow that brought Famous Clare around the other day - they're an item, y'see.  Far too young and far too good-looking, the pair of them:

Famous Clare again

She called again and I took her photograph again:

Rank Audio Visual

Nope, you haven't come to the wrong place, it's just a colour print from back in the day:

A little dark this one but that's me on the right talking to some dude from the RAV/Nikon stand.  I've no idea where this was, although it might have been the photographic shop The Brother worked in as a Saturday job for a while.  I worked in a different photographic shop on the other side of town, by the way.  I was probably drooling over a F2AS or something - still a camera worth drooling over, of course.  Way, way beyond my budget and the guy probably knew that but he still seems to giving me some of his time anyway.

Both The Brother and I did colour for a while - The Brother was more into his Cibachrome (prints from slides) while I was more into printing from colour negatives.  The output from the Cibachrome process seemed to be a lot better quality than my efforts - that I do recall.

I've been a bit brief with my posts recently as I'm not here - I'm in Bath, at the old Mineral Water Hospital getting some intensive physiotherapy and hydrotherapy for a couple of weeks.  The Min as it is affectionately known in Bath, is a centre for the diagnosis and treatment for ankylosing spondylitis and while it's tough being away from the family for so long it really does help me manage the disease.  It has a fascinating history, The Min - sited just up from the Roman Baths in the centre of Bath and opened in the early 18th Century.  You can read more about it here.

One too many

While it looks like yer man here has had one too many the truth is he always looks like this:

Given the lack of available light, I had to set the 'Blad on a chair and hope for the best.  We were long past the hand-holding stage, as we were down in the bowels of Rathlin Island's best (and only) museum.

Autumn light

The sun was coming in through the kitchen window the other day and casting an interesting light on the door:

I snapped it up on HP5 using the rangefinder and printed it on Adox paper.

National Prison Museum, Drenthe

Earlier this summer (as you know if you've been paying attention) we visited my old Uni mate who now lives in Drenthe - somewhere in the middle of The Netherlands.  One of our little trips out was to the National Prison Museum, aka the Pauper's Prison:

It was a fairly sobering experience, as you can expect.  While it started out as a good and honest venture back at the start of the 19th Century it ended up something a little different.  From what I could glean of the whole thing (which may not be that accurate given both my understanding of the Dutch language and the state of my hearing at the time - my tinnitus was playing up, badly) the initial idea was to provide quality accommodation for the nation's destitute and at the same time give them land enough to grow crops and provide for themselves.  Sounds OK so far.  The authorities rounded up people who looked like they needed rounding up and brought them to this purpose-built camp...they would now have shelter, heat, regular food and do honest toil on the land to make the whole venture self-sufficient.

It quickly became the place that no-one could leave.  Well, perhaps not strictly true as we read it was possible to buy your freedom but I got the impression that rarely happened.  So it became more of a prison than a place of refuge.  Inmates were allowed to marry and have children but there was a pretty strict regime of early morning starts, long hours of manual labour, a fairly institutional environment, meagre rations and basically not a lot else.

Nowadays the whole complex is given over to a museum dedicated to the lives of the people who lived there.  Some of their images appear on large displays in the courtyard that you can see in the photograph.  The 3 cards below each photograph give basic information about the person - name, height, weight etc as well as where they were from.  I suppose we should be thankful we have their photograph - it certainly makes the whole thing more personal.  But there's a terrible sadness in their faces - they were street beggars to begin with and then became inmates in a place where there was no freedom and very little free will.  They had hard lives, these people.