An Addiction

The picture above won't turn up in any book or exhibition, but taking it - and a few others that are not much better - almost cost me a hospital visit.

It was taken in the early summer of 2025 at Port Mulgrave, in North Yorkshire, a long-abandoned small commercial dock. It can only be accessed by a steep cliff path, and against all sane advice I headed down to take some pictures. On the way back it all got a bit much, and I ended up trying to climb a stony section on my hands and knees. It was an unedifying sight, and a somewhat salutary lesson for me.

So why did I do it? For the same reason that I have spent the last few years taking thousands of other pictures, pretty much irrespective of my state of health, and before that many years of writing journalism and fiction, not to mention making a handful of documentary films for C4 and BBC Scotland,.

The reason that I exist forever in transmit mode is, I think, obvious enough. I'm trying to create my own 'alms for oblivion', because as Shakespeare's Ulysses goes on to say, 'The present eye praises the present object.' In other words - and the Bard expresses both the thought and its implications perfectly - whatever we do in life is very soon lost and unremembered. I read somewhere that most folk are totally forgotten within three generations.

Now there's a cheery thought. And I've heard that they make for excellent blog posts....