Day 31: End of month one

As of this morning, I have 11 followers of this blog (thank you Jazek) - one more and I equal Jesus!

This is the end of the first month doing this photo a day experiment and so far it's been a lot of fun. Roll on month two.

Day 30: Public Toilets

Public toilets in Portobello. A certain mystic charm.

Day 29: Catcher in the Rye

This is my tribute to J D Salinger whose death was announced today. One of those books you keep in your back pocket at 18, along with Jack Kerouac's On the Road, as you down a bottle of Liebfraumilch and fancy yourself a beat poet.

Screwy supermarket logic of the day: Buy 4 batteries for £3.09 or buy 8 for £3.00. I enquired how many I needed to buy in order to get them all for free but neither of us could do the Maths.

Day 28: The journey home

Empty bus and metro tumbleweed.

Day 27: The Road

I went to watch The Road this evening.

The book was one of, if not THE, most profound and extraordinary that I read last year - beautifully written, heartbreaking, terrifying. It's not an easy read emotionally, in fact it's a distinctly uneasy read and although it might be set in a post-apocalyptic USA, I couldn't help but feel that the existence of living hand to mouth, possessionless, hopeless, insecure, fearing gangs and bandits that roam the streets hunting for human prey, is not such a futuristic image for some people in this world.

The film is very good but I fought back tears so hard I ended up with cramp in my throat. There is a more hopeful message to the film than in the book, I feel, and that's OK.

This was a paragraph from the book I wrote down when I was reading it back in October.

"He carved the boy a flute from a piece of roadside cane and he took it from his coat and gave it to him. The boy took it wordlessly. After a while he fell back and after a while the man could hear him playing.

A formless music for the age to come. Or perhaps the last music on earth called up from out the ashes of its ruin. The man turned and looked back at him. He was lost in concentration. The man thought he seemed some sad and solitary changeling child announcing the arrival of a travelling spectacle in shire and village who does not know that behind him the players have all been carried off by wolves."

Day 26: Rudeness

I was blissfully unaware of the double entendre hidden in my handcream, until a colleague pointed it out. Are there any more puns out there I wonder, that I have just failed to notice?

My, my - this is a very bodily functions orientated beginning to the week.

Day 25: Screenprint of Dog and Man

This is not what you might think.

It isn't a particularly good photo, I admit, and doesn't really do justice to the screen print Fran made this weekend. But the story is funny.

The screen print is of a photo taken by a 7 year old who wanted a picture of the dog. Little did he realise, with the eyes of a child, how adults might come to interpret the picture. Rude man and disgusted dog it might be called. Or Peeing man and embarrassed dog, maybe.

The man was buying ice-cream from a window out of shot and the dog was looking longingly at the beach he wanted to play on.

Day 24: The Great British Bus Blog

At the top of the Blogger screen there is a little button called 'Next Blog'. Pressing this can take you on a very interesting journey through the Blog-o-sphere, to places far far away.

This week I stumbled upon a blog that I don't think could even be comprehended in any other country. When you next find yourself in a foreign country, talking to a local, try describing the Great British hobby of, well let's give it the elevated term, 'Transport Appreciation' - Trainspotting, Planespotting, Busspotting to you and I. I guarantee it will be met with very blank looks and perhaps a little incredulity. The sort of incredulity that leads to jail terms if you happen to loiter around Greek airports.

Now this much maligned and mocked hobby has many dedicated followers and none more so than the Great British Bus Bloggers who stare down their naysayers and detractors and continue blogging the livery types and timetabling of British buses across the land. On their blog they talk of the complaints and intimidation they have endured from their colleagues who feel that photographing buses and drivers and noting down their comings and goings is an infringement of their civil liberties.

I think the Great British Bus Bloggers should be applauded if for nothing else than this. Very few people are able to combine their 9-5 (or in this case their 7.03-16.22) job with their other passions and interests in life without the one impeding the other. I suspect for these guys, the one facilitates the other, their passion in the subject enriching their job in a way that their colleagues may not understand nor indeed trust. My God, we may have actually met the only happy bus drivers in Britain!

So I may not understand it and I may also suspect (sorry guys!) that if you ever tried locating this eccentric British pastime on the autistic spectrum you may end up with a nasty twinge in your neck, but despite this I salute you, Bus Bloggers of East England, for your (in the words of George Galloway, who only used it to scunner the interpreters) 'indefatigability'.

So here's my homage to you. A Lothian livery No 34 next to the Edge of Darkness (on so many levels).

Day 23: Sunshine on a rainy day

Sometimes it's best if you just don't leave the house. I spent most of this grey, rainy Saturday sitting under a duvet watching season 1 of the West Wing. By 4 o'clock I thought I really should just go out and get some fresh air so decided to go pick up Fran from her screen printing course at the Printmakers. Boy, was that a BAD idea.

I got there early, decided that what this day needed was some abstract optimism and then got thoroughly distracted creating sun pictures (like this one) out of the rain on the windscreen and a street light ahead.

In the intervening minutes, I managed to set the car alarm off about 5 times, then the car just refused to start. I thought we'd somehow disabled the engine by setting the alarm off so we phoned Mr Bill Brunton (henceforth known as Guardian Angel No. 2) the VW dealership in Portobello to ask how we re-enable the engine.

He diagnosed a dead battery and then came in his car all the way into town to help restart it. On a Saturday evening. Refusing any payment. The man is a legend and a very nice bottle of Malt is heading his way.

Day 22: Sunset in Portobello

Tonight's sunset was pretty amazing, no?
Sort of like Armageddon, only friendlier.

Day 21: Big news

Big, big news, today. I just found out that this photo I took in Nepal on the EBC trip in October has been shortlisted for the Wanderlust Travel Photo of the Year award in the category of 'Travel Icons'.

I am totally, totally chuffed to buckets as apparently they receive over 6,000 entries each year and only 10 pictures are shortlisted in each of four categories.

So Friday 5th Feb I go to London for the awards ceremony and a Meet the Experts drinks reception. As it's on the shortlist, the photo will appear in the Wanderlust magazine, The Independent newspaper and be exhibited at the Destinations Travel Show in both London and Birmingham - so you know what, I already feel like a winner.

Having said that, however, please think happy thoughts for me anyway, on the 5th Feb because of course, I'd love to win the category and pick up the first prize of a photography trip to Ecuador.

Day 20: Fur Sale

I wasn't sure if this was simply a pun or indeed a sale of animal pelts - perhaps I should have just gone in to see for myself - Doh!

Day 19: Tree in the park

I love low winter sunlight and the long shadows it casts. I can't decide if the picture reminds me more of the Timberland logo or (god forbid) that of the Conservative party. Or maybe it just looks like a tree.

Day 18: May the force be with you

And they held aloft their light sabres from every window!

Day 17: Miracles at the Dean

Took this photo of the Nathan Colley installation on the front lawn of the Dean Gallery today.

Had a bit of fun in Photoshop to make the picture more dramatic and to make the text more readable. If it's still not clear, it reads

There will be no miracles here

Hope you like it.

Day 16: Foodie night

Some pictures from last night's rather tasty dinner. Langoustine and avocado salad followed by fillet steak in a stilton sauce.

I then had a dream last night, which I'm blaming on the blue cheese, where a woman with a cartoon head of Albert Einstein was tattooing the word 'Mum' into the palm of my hand.

Analyse that!

Day 15: Mad as a hatter

I bought the New Scientist a couple of weeks ago and keep bringing it out when on the bus. It's brilliant, I've learned all about The Peter Principle - which I may come back to in a later blog - high frequency, low-arousal religious rituals and their opposite counterparts. I also learned about the theory that Professor Charles Dodgson aka Lewis Caroll wrote Alice in Wonderland partly as a satire on the 'semi-colloquial', 'semi-logical', new fangled contemporary maths professors he had to endure, with all their new fangled reinterpretations on classical mathematical theory, at Oxford.

Take the Mad Hatters tea party where the Hatter, the March Hare and the Dormouse are stuck at the tea table, because they have fallen out with Time, who now won't let them move the clocks past 6 o'clock. They are stuck at the tea table, constantly moving round to find clean cups and saucers. This is an exploration, apparently, of William Rowan Hamilton's work on 'quaternions'. Where, after years working with three terms but could only make them rotate in a plane, when he added a fourth term (which he called Time) he got the three-dimensional rotation he was looking for. (I'm afraid my brain is not able to put it any better than Melanie Bayley, who did the research so I'm just paraphrasing her).

However, I like the bit where the Mad Hatter apparently pokes fun at an aspect of quaternions which says that x=y is not the same as y=x. When the Hare tells Alice to 'say what she means' Alice says that 'at least I mean what I say, which is the same thing'.

"Not the same thing a bit! Why, you might just as well say that 'I see what I eat' is the same as 'I eat what I see!'"

This seems entirely sensible logic to me. Am I missing something?

Anyway, I'm not sure what mathematic concept is being satirised by padlocking the Mad Hatter to a bus stop, so any thoughts greatly appreciated.

Day 14: Cabbaged

Yes, this was tonight's dinner but I love the texture of savoy cabbage leaves so took a pic of it.

I was interested to try my hand at the sort of food photography that makes you want to reach into the page and eat everything that is there. However, this is, after all, a photo of a raw cabbage leaf so perhaps I will resist the temptation this time.

(I had pasta with pancetta, chestnuts and savoy cabbage in case you're interested - pancetta and chestnut being my favourite ingredient combo for January)

Day 13: That's your lot

Just liked the neon sign on the local fruit machine shop. Should have read SLOT but I preferred LOT.

Day 12: One lost dalmatian print bootie

They wear a better class of bootie in Bruntsfield.

What I want to know is who is going to tell the barefoot owner of this specimen, when she's older, that if it hadn't been for the making of her footwear, the story that we know so well might have been veeerrry different.

Do you think One Hundred and Two Dalmatians would have worked as well?

Day 11: Still life with gin and leather

I often find that when struggling for a subject to take a photo of in a day, a quick dig through the bottle recycling, stealing the sitting room door stop, placing them both on a piece of old wallpaper is always a good start. Don't you find that too?

So here we are, a still life with an empty bottle of Hendrick's gin and a giant, leather medicine ball.

Actually, I have to say that I've never really understood the attraction of still life. The notion of hanging a painting of two pork chops and a half eaten apple on your wall, well it eludes me.

Really the main reason for taking this picture today was that I wanted to try out some indoor lights that I bought last year and still don't really know how to use properly. The clarity in the picture really surprised me, so I think I will try this again. I'll work on my still life composition too and if I have any kind of Eureka moment on the subject then I will, of course, share it with you.

Day 10: Kite surfters are out

The snow is melting, the air is biting cold and the kite surfers are making the most of swell on Portobello beach today.

Day 9: Legacy

Yesterday put me in the mood for more nostalgia so I decided that today's photograph would be a bit of legacy photography. It is of a WWII ration tin that belonged to my grandfrather Spiller and the recipe book of Great Granny Bruckshaw.

Grandpa Spiller was a professional violinist and worked in the entertainment corps during the war, based largely in the Middle East.

On the tin it reads:

"Emergency Ration, purpose of contents to be consumed only when no other rations of any kind are procurable. To open, strip off band, insert coin in corner groove and turn. NOTICE: not to be opened except by order of an officer."

The recipe book is fascinating; full of newspaper cuttings from the 30s and 40s and handwritten recipes written with soft, delicate flourishes in beautiful ink copperplate . The page in the recipe book displayed here has recipes for amongst other things: Maids of Honour (whatever they are), Ground Rice Cake, Chocolate Cream Pie and Lemon Pineapple Pie.

There is also another page with the heading 'Unusual Vegetables' listing amongst other things; green peppers, egg plant, sweetcorn and pumpkin.

Day 8: Romanian Artisans

Today the picture is more about the thing itself. I wanted to include a picture of this because it's one of my all time favourite things. I bought it in a remote Romanian village somewhere on the outskirts of Cluj-Napoca but I'm afraid I can't be more precise than that. We had stopped at the home-atelier of this amazing carpenter who not only made huge pieces of furniture but also these small beautiful toys and games. There was only one road through the centre of the village and it was deserted. Suddenly, this odd little woman came walking up the street shouting very loudly in a language I didn't understand. As she walked, people in all the shuttered up houses along the street came to their front doors and listened to her as she passed.

Apparently, it turned out, that this was the woman from the post office, the town crier, passing on the telegram messages to everyone in the village. In a very public way, but maybe there were no secrets to keep in a village like that. I thought it was really amazing and this toy reminds me of that. And 15 years later it is still in as great condition as the day I bought it - and that's more a testament to the durability of the thing and the skills of the craftsman than it is of my ability to take care of things.

Day 7: Bokeh on the beach

I like this! I don't know why as I was taking a photo of the arcade and a very icy prom and just decided to adjust the focus to completely blur everything. It's a sign of a good lens that the bokeh is so perfectly round and I do love this 50mm lens I have, it's far better at taking pictures than I ever will be.

The focus is now on the circles of light; from the arcade, from the street lamps on the prom and from the... err... sewage works in the far distance. It's more like a painting this way and just goes to show that sometimes it's just best not to know how sausages are made.

Day 6: Gritty Knitty

As temperatures in the UK plummet, transport infrastructure goes into cardiac arrest, schools close, cars slide, kids toboggan; I would just like to pay tribute to whoever it is that lives by the philosophy that as long as our lamp posts and streets signs are cosy warm beneath their carefully knitted woolies, then rest assured... all will be well with the world.