Category: images

The day started foggy, a chill in the air. I love the way that the fog mediates the colours of autumn with its cool silvery filter graduating the warmth of orange and yellow from distance to foreground. Secondborn liked the way, he said, the fog made the trees huddle together.

Recent times have been substantially fogged by financial worries. To say that I am not good with money is a monumental understatement. Only someone with the economic sense of an underdeveloped sea cucumber could hang around for three months after losing their job attempting to bring up two children on their own without any maintenance or other financial support.

Eventually, however, back in July, even the limited intellect of the sea cucumber grasped the concept that the savings would one day, very soon, run out. That was three months ago. Today, after the culmination of a series of mind-blowing encounters with the British benefits system ranging from the ridiculous (why was all my paperwork returned to me recorded delivery at the end of August without a word of explanation and without having been sent on for processing? why, once the paperwork finally made it to the right place was my case mysteriously marked “closed” without any action having been taken on it?) to the sublime (the woman at the office rectifying the first mistake who worked through her lunch-hour and then, when we’d finished, told me to stand up because I needed a hug, which she proceeded to administer; the four people in two different departments at the processing centre rectifying the second mistake sympathetically, swiftly and efficiently) I and my children have finally been officially certified as members of the deserving poor.*

It’s only with the gaining of this extremely dubious status I realise quite how stressful the interim period has been. Without knowing when or indeed if any more money was going to come in we’ve been living as frugal an existence as I can manage. Most difficult has been trying to acclimatise the children, accustomed to years of double-income financially incontinent affluence, to more straitened circumstances.

But the silver lining of the financial fog has been the extraordinary pleasure that the simplest things have the power to convey. A glass of wine at a friend’s house? the taste is so alive, so present. A half-bar of favourite chocolate found at the back of a cupboard? never has the complexity of flavours been so good. The company, support and generosity of friends? Almost heart-breakingly lovely. Just as the near leaves in the fog are brighter for the presence of the cloud-dulled not so far away. Such an observation is, of course, a truism, but one difficult to grasp in theory and easily realised in lived experience.

Uncertainty is difficult to live with. Now at least there is a degree of stability and a financial framework, whatever its dimensions, within which to structure our lives.

When the fog lifted in the late morning the sun was low, golden and crisp with that watery clarity autumn light sometimes has. The leaves gleamed. But I saw them more clearly for having also seen them through the fog.

* Well, I was told over the phone this afternoon that the aforementioned certificate (and a cheque) would be put in the post the same day. So I don’t actually have it yet. But I live in hope.

Where to begin? what to choose? Love, laughter, light. Yet now I’m exhausted, sucked dry. It’s been a full-on, often difficult, tiring, emotionally draining six weeks and I’m so glad summer’s over.

So the tale of New York is the tale of looking.

It begins in London with A who said that, being hard up, I should of course go nowhere near B&H. And what might B&H be I inquired. The biggest, best and cheapest camera shop in the USA was pretty much the answer.

No no. Definitely I absolutely should not go anywhere near B&H. Ummm. Where is it exactly, just so I can avoid it?

I was talking energetically about B&H at supper a couple of days later in Manhattan. About how I really really shouldn’t, wasn’t going to go there. (Lobster salad at I Tre Merli down on Broadway. Yummmmmy. After the fancy exhibition opening on 5th Avenue. And the Wall Street banker who leapt into my cab on the way there – “you don’t mind if I share” he announced – and discussed Measure for Measure and sub-prime mortgage lending in an animated fashion.)

The next day the previous night’s diners were part of a greater assemblage in Brooklyn. And C, clearly sensing that my resolve over not going anywhere near B&H needed strengthening, brought along the paper catalogue. Because their host was a professional photographer and had several lying around. And leafing through the catalogue and seeing what was available, and at what price, and dividing by two to get sterling because of the current insane exchange rate was clearly going to ensure that I gave the place a really wide berth.

It was whilst I was indulging in a private spot of aversion therapy, slowly stroking a page in the Olympus section while moaning and whimpering, rather discretely I thought, that J appeared. A stupendous professional photographer. And also intimately familiar with B&H. We discussed, at length, which lens I wasn’t going to get. Which was this one.

The next day the phone rang. I forget whose phone, but somebody’s. It was J. “What time are you meeting me at B&H?”

Thus it was that I found myself that hot and humid afternoon in the extraordinary combination of paradise and militarily-efficient factory-farmed consumption that is the B&H super-store on 9th avenue between 33rd and 34th streets.

Meeting J just inside the “in only” door I checked my bag through the hole in the wall and we made our way into a vast tardis-like space crammed full of people and objects of profound lustworthiness. It seemed to my no-doubt saucer-shaped and therefore distorted-lensed eyes that it was a vast circular space full of aisles of miscellaneous stuff but with the walls showcasing every conceivable make/brand/model of photographic equipment. And lined with a huge number of people sitting at regular intervals behind the desk-like counter.

I headed on some sort of wobbly auto-pilot to the man seated below an enormous Olympus banner. “Excuse me,” I quavered, “do you…” “Were you given a number?” he asked, not unkindly. The mechanics of maximum cash-extraction began to be revealed.

First you wait in a line appropriate for the category of gizmo you seek, policed by a solicitous member of staff who moves you forward with maximum swiftness. As a sales assistant becomes available (the people seated behind the hugely long counter running around the edge of the store) their numbered light flashes. The person at the head of the queue is directed towards the appropriate place. The queue was long enough to allow J to whisper “see those Nikon lenses there? the huge ones? just out on the shelf like that? thirty-five thousand dollars apiece at least” and for me to marvel at their implausible hugeness but sufficiently swift-moving to allow of no second thoughts.

Sales staff number 47 was a cheery young man whose brisk efficiency and breadth of knowledge bordered on the brusque but never quite made it that far. Yes, they had the lens in stock. A skylight filter to fit? of course. Memory cards? a myriad different varieties and sizes. Was I sure I really needed that speed of data writing (casting a practised eye over my meagre megapixels resting on the counter before him), wouldn’t I be better off with the slightly slower but much cheaper model? As he spoke a green crate appeared beside him propelled on a conveyor belt emerging seemingly through the wall and in it appeared to be… a lens, a filter and a memory card. “Take this to the payment desk” he said, printing off a piece of paper.

J’s turn next, and a series of very technical queries about a Leica tripod mount and various other bits and pieces. “I can tell you what I know, but I have to tell you that I’m not tripods, I’m digital SLRs. If you want the best advice you should really go to tripods where they can give you the fullest information” said our helpful attendant. “This is the best service I’ve ever had in this country” said J as we made our way over to tripod territory, an island near the middle of the store.

As J consulted deeply on issues such as double threads and ball heads and similar tripodenalia I watched a procession of green crates bumbling and clunking up and around the store on the rollers of the conveyor, sometimes at waist level safe behind the counters, sometimes out of reach overhead. Clicketyclacketytrundlerundle they went, an almost continuous stream of spoken-for hi-tech representing a concomitant inflow of a river of the green and folding.

Next stop on the human conveyor belt of this process was the payment area. Significantly more urgent than the sales floor, customers were herded between metal railings before a high bank of tills. “Next, NEXT!” shouted the twitchy queuemeister urging us on, on to part with our cash. Pay. Receive paper. “I promise to give the bearer their small (or implausibly huge, for that matter) object/s of desire”. Follow the narrow pathway to the collection point and the human stream meets the conveyor stream: green crates clatter to their final destination behind the counter to have their contents bagged, labelled and hung on hooks to await their newly de-cashed now-owners. The disgorging is nearly complete… quick, quick, on to retrieve your checked bag from the other end of the hole in the wall and *plop* – out the out door and a safe delivery onto the street.

Such an experience requires the prompt administration of strong coffee so J and I retired to the nearest café and I unboxed and mounted the new toy. And haven’t removed it since. The observant (or at least the observant with a fast internet connection) will have noticed a stream of recent macro pictures appearing about the place. I’m still practising. But of course it’s not my fault. Blame A and C and J.

So I’ve left out the painting of the pug with the pearl necklace and the sashay teach-in and the “local”-beer-buying and scrapple-cooking and the gentle light from the coloured glass candle-holders slanting before the Buddha; the Texan BBQ theme restaurant, the dog wearing padded bootees for its evening walk, the touch of hands, the smiles, the coffee (good and bad), the cowboy boots with the real snake head on the toe; I haven’t mentioned poetry and multi-story wedding cakes, the gentle guttural sound of an old language by candlelight, food cooked by friends, music, the lost book of pictures which gave such laughter; left out too are the lumps and bumps of the grass in Central Park, the slow deliberate folding of sleeping mats, Mexican food, Malaysian food, yellow rubber gloves, the flutter of hands in flight, the new development on the limerick form and the challenge of rhyming “Abuja”, silent cross-legged forms silhouetted against the early light. I’m sorry. You can’t have everything.