NOT PROLIFIC...

I shot just a single roll of film between February and August this year.

Some of my favourite moments of this summer so far: midsummer's night on the Thames after seeing Patti Smith perform at the Royal Festival Hall, with her son and daughter as back up band; the cat in Parisian bakery window shot never gets old; a drink after watching Hiroshima Mon Amour (without subtitles!) at Le Champo; an unexpected bonus of a cancelled Eurostar train = an aperitif at La Buvette; and lastly, always and forever, the lido ♡. 

ONE OF THOSE POST THINGS...

I feel like posting a bit now I've got that off my chest! Anyway, this is Andalusia back in June - 2 midsummer days of hot white heat at a villa surrounded by wildflowers and mountains. The only neighbours for miles were a few shepherds and their flocks. The light was so strong that I was unable to take actual pictures with a camera before 10pm, when it was still light. We ate outside; dinners of barbecued asparagus and jumbo prawns, alioli and ridiculously cheap wine. Watermelon snacks, morning coffee walking around in my nightie on the white painted roof, from where the last photo was taken.

PYRE...

It was this blog's eighth birthday yesterday and I was unsure what to do. Throw a party, or a wake? I considered putting it on a boat, setting fire to it and pushing it out into the Serpentine lake to watch it burn from a distance while sipping Pimm's. Since the whole "all my images were irretrievably deleted by Google" debacle I have been feeling unenthused. But honestly, as I've posted here less and less frequently over the past year or so, except to link to articles I've written elsewhere, I've become stuck about what to do with this blog. Mired in indecision, I've done nothing. Do I end it, but leave it up like a flag in the sand, with its extensive archives that sometimes weigh me down with their sheer volume? Make it redirect to something new and fresh, which other friends have done with seemingly no separation anxiety? The thing is, I get attached. I'm attached to this blog! I want to do something new, but I don't want to throw it away. Neither do I want to just limp along with it, so that it becomes crap and feels like a chore. It doesn't feel like a chore (except the current task of re-uploading 3000 images) but it does feel like I'm long overdue for a change. Blogger itself will soon be defunct and I'm really not ok with this whole compulsory invasive syncing thing Google is pushing forward. I've made my Twitter and Instagram accounts private and did the same with Flickr when they recently "improved" it by destroying everything that was good about it.

What to do, what to do? I'd like to have something new and amazing and fresh - but my web design skills, such as they are, cannot translate the superfresh ideas inside my head into reality.

Er, halp?