Happy Christmas

Wishing You A Merry Christmas

Wishing You A Merry Christmas: As in the past few years I’ve produced a digital Christmas Card for my many on-line friends, including all the readers of this >RE: Photo blog and my over 4,000 Facebook friends.

The picture isn’t perhaps very Christmassy, but then neither are many on the actual printed cards I’ve receeived. It’s one of a number of pictures I took on a couple of visits with friends to the West Norwood Cemetery this year when we largely followed the Discovering Britain walk created in collaboration with the Friends of West Norwood Cemetery.

It took us two visits, as on the first visit in July we got halfway round and were at the furthest point from the cemetery entrance when the heavens opened for one of the most torrential downpours. We sheltered for some minutes under a tree before walking under our umbrellas along the paths which were now small streams to the exit. By the time we reached the bus stop it had almost stopped raining but we were quite wet and had had enough for the day – and took a bus to the The Holland Tringham in Streatham where we drank a toast to the artist.

We returned in September, when the weather was a little kinder. It had been bright and sunny when we arrived at the Greek section of the cemetery but soon after we arrived we had to shelter under a tree for a few minutes. But I think the rain made many of the monuments look better.

West Norwood Cemetery, West Norwood, Lambeth, 1991, 91-9k-62

I’d visited the cemetery years earlier in 1990 and made quite a few pictures there, around 40 of which are on Flickr, mainly from the Greek section, starting here.

But the picture I printed for cards for a few friends, mainly photographers was this one of a shop window taken during our Christmas walk in December last year, which began with a short walk around the City of London and a visit to Leadenhall Market and a drink in a pub there before going a short distance away for a meal.

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Wishing You a Happy Christmas

Just a few of my Christmassy pictures from over the years. Today I’ll be having a quiet Christmas at home with a few family members. Well, fairly quiet as we usually sing a few carols in the evening, rather boisterously. Fortunately for them our neighbours are away visiting family elsewhere.

I looked through some of the older files on my computer a couple of days ago and found these – and scheduled this post. Some of them are images I’ve used in Christmas Cards in previous years – and one a few friends got this year.

Wishing You a Happy Christmas — *Shop window, 1988*

*More Santas and Mama Santas from Fathers4Justice 2005*

For many it hasn’t been a great year but perhaps this will be one of the better parts of it. I hope you can enjoy Christmas.

Happy Christmas to all readers of >Re:PHOTO. My wife and I still send Christmas Cards, actual cards rather than e-cards, put into envelopes, stamped and posted, or put through the doors of nearby friends and neighbours.

Most of those cards are from Traidcraft, an organisation that is “pioneering the future of fair trade. Traidcraft stands for changing peoples’ lives through trade, saving vanishing traditional skills from extinction, and celebrating a world of creativity and culture.” Linda sells their products in the local area on a non-profit basis, and we eat and drink many of them, though use rather fewer of the craft products. And when I say we still send cards, its Linda who writes almost all of them, most with a personal message which sometimes gets rather long and for a few is in a foreign language.

But I also like to send my own personal cards to a few friends, mainly fellow photographers – and also usually use the same one of my pictures on an e-card on social media. But this year I found it very difficult to select a suitable image, partly because I spent the first four months of the year still more or less in isolation because of Covid.

Even since I went back to work on May 1st – I just couldn’t bear to miss another May Day – I’ve still been very much cutting down on the events I photograph, going to take pictures less frequently and largely only covering those causes I feel most strongly about. I’ve always liked to use recent pictures on my cards, so there were rather fewer to choose from.

At the start of my Covid isolation in March 2019 I stopped updating My London Diary. I had nothing to write and post in it. And although I have gone back to work I’ve not felt able to resume posting on that site. Part of the reason is simply that the web site is filling up and I am close to the limit of the number of files that it can handle, 262,144. To continue with My London Diary and this blog I would need to move to a more expensive solution, and I may in any case soon have to delete some older content. In past years I’ve always used pictures from My London Diary on these cards – but this year there were no new pictures on line.

So this year I chose one of the many pictures I’ve made on my walks and bike rides while I’ve been isolating, a winter scene from Staines Moor, a mile or so from my home. Not Christmassy, but at least it has snow.

i hope you have a good Christmas.

Christmas Greetings

I’m writing this a couple of days before Christmas, as I hope not to be spending much time on my computer on Christmas Day, and certainly not working on it, though of course it won’t be Christmas as usual.

Here is the picture from the Christmas Card picture that I’ve already sent to some of my photographer friends (other people get more normal cards from Traidcraft as they might not appreciate some of the things I’ve chosen some years.)

I had to use a picture from December 2019 as I’d not been out to take any suitable images this year.

I hope you’ll all have a good day; at least I think mine will be a little more relaxed than usual though of course I’ll miss seeing family members; doubtless some will appear on Skype. But it isn’t the same.

I’ll still drink a glass or two of a decent wine and still decline the Chrismas pudding in favour of some ice cream, perhaps with some homemade bamble sorbet. If the weather is fine the two of us here will perhaps go for a walk after our Christmas dinner. We certainly won’t watch that speech, in line with my Christmas tradition of avoiding it for at least 60 years.

And perhaps we will look at some photographs or watch a film. And try hard to avoid the tedious jollity of Christmas radio (and TV) programming. It won’t be a bad day here even if there is much we will miss. One thing I’ll be glad to miss this year is the travelling, not on Christmas Day itself but usually on the days before or around the New Year, long journeys in over-crowded trains.

So my best wishes for today to you all. And let’s just hope that things will soon be better.