As I was going to St Ives
      I met a man with seven wives

And I said to him, I say old chap, polygamy is not only illegal but also morally reprehensible! More to the point how on earth does a fellow deal with seven wives, one is surely enough? And why have you got so many cats?

Right so anyway as I mentioned before I’ve just moved house and this very morning I finished laying a new slate floor in our kitchen which has turned out right nice if I do say so myself.

Our boiler broke down less than a week after moving in so I decided on a particularly cold night I’d light a fire in the living room. I broke up some kindling and collected some logs from the log shed and set about making fire, the third manliest thing there is to do after using a chainsaw, or an angle grinder.

I arranged the kindling over some bundled up paper and put a match to it, hey presto, fire! Oh wait, why is all the smoke coming into the room – better check the chimney, oh, what’s this massive bit of foam blocking the chimney?

Cue me stamping all over the fire to put it out before smoking out the entire building. What a plonker.

Quite literally every room in the house needs some work of a lesser or greater amount, so I’ve become DIY man for the next few months. Naturally in light of all this DIY work and money that needs to be spent I went out this weekend and bought new gadgets. Why wouldn’t I?

For anyone that cares this is a Cambridge Audio Topaz amplifier, along with an iPod dock and some Q Acoustics 1020i speakers. I also have a Cambridge Audio Azur DAB tuner and a Technics SL1200 running through a NAD PP2 Phono Preamplifier. Christ that was exciting to write, I need to go for a lie down.

I actually am going to St. Ives later this year as well! Crazy times.

I now live in a different house because we needed a bigger one so lots of money changes hands and several months later we live somewhere with more space for me to fill up with camera gear and rubbish photos, yay!

I have no internet at home, and at the moment am in the middle of 75 massive DIY projects, so don’t expect to have any free time at all over the next few weeks. So apologies in advance for the lack of updates!

Anyone want to come and lay the slate floor in my kitchen for me? I can’t be bothered but it needs to be done by Friday morning.

Anyway here are some pictures I took a few weeks ago when I went to Brean Down. What I did was, I went to Brean down, with a camera, and I pointed it at things and took pictures. Crazy times.

A while ago I bought these things so that I could use the films inside the camera to make photographs. How clever I thought I was, buying cheap chinese film to experiment with to save money not using expensive stuff like Ilford film.

Christmas day rolled along and I thought I’d document it using film like some sort of artistic genius – a couple of weeks later I pop to the local film processing place and ask them to develop it. “What type of film is that” asks the man. Um….. “It must be C-41″ says I thinking at the same time “how could I possibly be wrong?”

Wrong I was – the processed film looks like this:

Believe it or not, although it looks blank there is actually something on these negatives. Trouble is you can’t pick it up with a scanner without it looking like a real mess – witness:

These look like something taken in 1820 with the first ever camera – and are rubbish. So now I’m left with 9 more rolls of this stuff and no bleeding idea what to do with it. Suddenly I find myself contemplating buying a home development kit and setting up a dark room…

Only a scant four months have passed since we went to Kenya and had a lovely holiday. At the time I shot a single roll of film through my Holga which is unusual for me because I was expecting to have used about 96 films.

Anyway, on to the point – I got the photos back this week. First up, this really hurts – partly because I have no memory of the camera coming open at any time, but mainly because I’m now utterly convinced that the photo in the middle would have been the best photo ever taken by anyone ever.

The ones either side don’t look that special, but I’m not letting that deter me from my belief. Moving swiftly on from my apparently never ending ability to make ridiculous mistakes with what is basically a very very simple camera, I did manage to get one or two that I liked. First up, hanging the camera out of the window of the safari truck I just did a hopeful shot to see what would come out.

I think this was taken on the first day, and was our first experience of what a lot of the roads in Kenya are like – red – and horribly uncomfortable. Next up, a random street scene in Kenya – like nothing I’ve ever experienced before or since.

This is a local shop – and is fairly consistent with all the other local shops you see when you aren’t in a city. Finally – out on the safari trail, a couple of shots that I feel OK about sharing:

I simply can’t understand why I didn’t take more pictures with the Holga whilst I was there – I guess I was too busy having a good time to think about it, most unlike me!