Author: andy

Categories
End Memories

All round to Aunt Mary’s

This image of furniture dumped on a Glasgow street spoke loudly to me. I wondered about its previous life, the service it had given, and now with its back to the building, how it appears outcast, warned to dare not look back.

The scene brought back strong memories of nights at (Great) Aunt Mary’s in London. Mary lived in a tiny council flat, but that didn’t stop her entire extended family from visiting at the same time. There was never enough furniture and so kitchen chairs would migrate to the lounge and one was always stationed next to Mary sat in her armchair from where she would hold court. The TV might also be on playing to itself in the corner. They were fun nights, filled with stories and gossip, even the occasional song from my tipsy grandfather, rounded out with late-night white bread and tinned ham with mustard sandwiches. Pure bliss.

I’m fascinated by inanimate everyday objects that pass through our lives, eventually, warn out or no longer in style, they’re disposed of. When we cleared my mother’s house, she watched us smash apart reproduction furniture that nobody wanted. Something she once treasured and we could barely brush against without being yelled at, we were now dismantling with large hammers.

The scene above would have lasted just some hours, a transition from one state to another. It’s these brief moments that fascinate me. Chairs in particular tickle me. I hope one day to find the perfect 1970s metal legged, plastic topped school chair, preferably orange, and to take it on a tour to photograph in different locations. The chair would be from my own school days. I might even capture the scenes using a lens from the same era. I would imagine the hundreds of kids that sat on that chair and their different lives, and how not for one second they would have ever imagined its adventure some 50-60 years later.

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Categories
Memories

Saturday nights and Irish coffee

1970s Orange Coffee Pot

As a young child I believed fresh coffee set us apart from our neighbours. We were a cut above, after all, we were among the first to build a porch and not long after that an extension off the back of the house. Mum wanted to better us, and by the mid seventies we were on the up, and the neighbours had noticed.

What I haven’t mentioned is context. Mum and dad were early adopters of Margaret Thatcher’s right-to-buy legislation. We were the proud owners of an ex-council house with a felt roof in a post war new town. It didn’t take much to be posh in Harlow, especially in Pittmans Field.

None-the-less, fresh coffee was our treat, and the beans weren’t from the supermarket. There was a coffee roaster in town from where the heady smell of beans roasting lured Saturday shoppers. The shop was on a street called Little Walk, off Broad Walk, the main shopping street. Looking back I wonder if the street names were placeholders put there by a junior town planner and they stuck when the street naming committee had lost the will to live late one Friday afternoon.

I rescued several coffee pots from my parents’ house. Dad had passed away some years earlier and mum was moving up to Scotland to live with my eldest brother. The example above was made by Meakin pottery of Staffordshire. The iconic Studio range was the canvas for hundreds of designs. Many were gaudy flower prints but some captured the cool essence of the era as demonstrated by this beautiful plain orange example. How that long spout survived is a miracle.

Discovering the coffee pots at the back of a cupboard was like pressing the play button on a recording. The power of mundane objects to trigger such vivid memories amazes me.

Mum and dad liked to entertain and regular Saturday night visitors were my parents’ brass band friends, Charlie & Doreen. Charlie was a scientist at Standard Telephones & Cables, working at the forefront of fibre optic cable development. I remember him explaining how one day information would be transmitted through glass fibre cables using light. I had little comprehension of what that would mean, but it’s probable somewhere on their journey to your screen these words arrived courtesy of his work over 50 years ago. I have no recollection of what Doreen did but she could fill a room with light and laughter, and she was, I think, my mum’s closest friend.

So what about that coffee pot? The ritual of a Saturday night get together was Dad and Charlie sinking some beers and smoking cigars. Mum and Doreen would get progressively more giggly as they polished off a bottle of Scotsmac (a 15%ABV blend of sweet wine and whisky). Mum wasn’t the happiest of people so it was good to see her being led astray by Doreen. The sure sign mum was enjoying herself was when she would start smoking Doreen’s Senior Service cigarettes. To round off the fun, coffee was served and as was the fashion, that meant Irish coffee with another welcome shot of alcohol. Coffee was always served on a tray from a pot. It would mark the end of a fun evening, where I had been allowed to stay up and even enjoy a few shandies. And with the amount of cigars and cigarettes smoked, I had probably inhaled enough secondhand smoke to rank me as a smoker too.

One evening in March 1981, Doreen arrived home from work feeling unwell. Charlie told her to sit down and he would fetch her a cup of tea. When he returned she was dead. I wish in later life I’d had an adult conversation with mum about the loss of her friend. Doreen was special, she understood mum, so I can only imagine what the pain of losing her felt like and how I think it impacted the rest of her life.

I photographed the pot at the start of covid. The dark background was possibly a reaction to the time we were in, but how the image emerges from the darkness feels analogous to the sense of recalling memories. I have a print in the house and seeing it reminds me of good times, but like that spout, it also reminds me life is fragile.

Categories
Seascrapes

Captured

I discovered this beautiful object on a beach on Holy Island, Northumberland. From a distance it was an exotic sea plant of some kind, close up it is an entangled union of dried seaweed and the unraveled remnants of what looks to be rope or fishing net. This piece of sea junk is by comparison a tiny fraction of what is lost or discarded by the fishing industry.

As much as 2% of all commercial gear is lost in the ocean every year! Weighing up to a million tons, it is mostly lines and nets, but for perspective it is estimated the 2% includes 13.99 billion longline hooks and 25.4 million pots and traps — every year! For a visual comparison, in total that’s equivalent in weight to about 50,000 double decker buses.

The polymers used for nets and ropes take up to 600 years to breakdown. Known as ghost fishing gear, it entangles and kills up to 650,000 sea animals every year, which, according to the World Wildlife Fund, includes as many as 300,000 whales and dolphins.

Global currents concentrate floating materials in gyres; areas where circular systems of ocean currents rotate around a central point. It’s in these regions of floating garbage patches where a whole spectrum of plastics and other debris converge. The largest of these five zones is The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, with a mass of plastic estimated to be approximately 100,000 tonnes, equivalent to more than 740 Boeing 777s, and three times the size of France.

While the fishing industry loses around 1 million tons of gear annually, estimates of how much more plastic enters the oceans range wildly from 1 million tons up to and over 10 million tons. And while the accumulated plastic is being battered by the sea, and bathed in sunlight, it is slowly breaking down, shedding threads and flakes of plastic, and in-turn microplastics.

The definition of a microplastic is a piece of plastic ranging in size from 1 nanometer, 1/80,000 the width of a strand of hair, to 5mm. Microplastics are easily mistaken by sea creatures as food and affects the whole food chain resulting in larger predators ingesting an accumulation of plastic, a process called bioaccumulation. The majority of plastics found in fish are in their guts where, as well as physical damage, the degrading materials release toxins leading to issues including, neurotoxicity, growth retardation, and behavioural abnormalities.

It follows, therefore, that the world’s most powerful predator, humans, are also accumulating plastics in their bodies. What goes round, comes round – so to speak. Studies have found the presence of microplastics in supermarket fish but the source of fibres is somewhat closer to home. In a study, 80% of the microscopic synthetic fibres lurking in the flesh of fish were from clothes shed in washing machines finding their way into rivers and oceans.

Across Europe, waste water is collected and processed at sewage treatment plants. Left over sludge from the process is spread on farmland. In a 2022 study, scientists from Cardiff University and the University of Manchester estimated that between 31,000 and 42,000 tonnes of microplastics (or 86 – 710 trillion microplastic particles) are applied to European soils annually, mirroring the concentration of microplastics found in ocean surface waters. Other studies have concurred and include reference to synthetic fibres found in clothing. Microplastics in sludge are prone to being washed into streams and rivers during heavy rains. Water companies in the UK are also increasingly guilty of dumping untreated sewage directly into rivers.

What happens to the microplastics that remain on the farm field? Experimental studies in fully controlled environments have proven that plants can carry nanoscale (<100 nm), submicrometer (<1 μm), and micro-sized (≥1 μm) plastics from their roots to their leaves. In studies of food bought in markets, microplastics have been found in commonly consumed fresh fruits and vegetables. Further studies have shown that microplastics hinder plant photosynthesis which could lead to lower crop yields, threatening millions with starvation.

Microplastics are also in the air. Plump a cushion on your sofa and that dust you see in the sunlight will contain microplastics. They are all around us, and travelling thousands of miles on winds. Analysis of a core from Greenland’s ice cap showed that nanoplastic contamination has been polluting the remote region for at least 50 years. It lands everywhere, on the streets, on fields where animals graze, in our houses, and in our bodies.

Over a lifetime our bodies accumulate a cocktail of toxic oddities, through pollution, what we eat, and complex chemicals used in just about everything manufactured. Our bodies can tolerate a lot but scientific research does point to evidence of resulting illnesses in the population. But when up against many of the richest corporations in the world, change is inevitably slow. Nothing though can be more alarming than a 2024 study reporting the levels of microplastics discovered in brain tissue. All the samples included some plastic but 24 of the 91 samples were 0.5% plastic by weight; about 7 grams in an adult brain, equivalent in weight to a plastic spoon. More concerning is that’s 50% higher than in samples from 2016, which is similar to the rate of rising concentration in the environment. Returning to the sea, seabirds have been found to have brain damage similar to Alzheimer’s as a result of plastic pollution.

In terms of the all-round damage we are doing to our planet, it feels as though we accelerating towards the end of the road. We are said to be in the Anthropocene epoch, a period defined by human influence on the earth. Mother nature will always win, but like any loving mother she can also forgive and give us another chance.

We’ve all heard the saying that the rain forests are the lungs of the earth. Trees do a great job of absorbing CO2 and providing up to 28% of the oxygen we breathe. In comparison oceans absorb heat, CO2 and provide us with as much as 80% of our oxygen.

The oceans are already under considerable stress. Not quite dying yet; ocean eco systems are being destroyed, food chains are being disrupted, the chemistry is changing, and temperatures are rising. In our rush to save the world, mankind is scouring the globe for precious materials to feed the electric car revolution and to further provide for electronics industries. The seabed beckons prospectors to mine untold bounty. World authorities will wrestle with the pros and cons of this and the miners will promise little to no damage to the environment but the world is littered with the toxic legacy of our exploits. Imagine what will happen thousands of feet below the surface where no one can see.

For sure I’ve lived a life of waste. Possibly not as much as others, but plodding along as a regular first-world human I’ve done my damage from the moment I arrived in 1963. I recently held in my arms the newest arrival to our extended family. At just a few weeks old, I couldn’t help but wonder what the world holds for her, but more than anything I hoped humanity gets its shit together!

Do I still like the object I found on the beach? Yes. Now it has meaning. I can still enjoy its happenstance beauty; mother nature sculpted it for me. I’m also reminded to tell this story to others, and to be mindful of the little things I can do to improve our environment.

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About

My Story

As a boy I was inspired by my father’s Halina 35mm rangefinder camera. To me it was a piece of fine engineering and I felt privileged whenever dad let me take a picture with it. I was sad when doing some research for this to find that Halina cameras were considered poor quality; no matter, it set me on a path that has lasted a lifetime. Thanks dad.

The youngest of 3 boys, I grew up in Harlow, a post war new town just north of London, built for families displaced by the London Blitz. Dad was a bricklayer, so moving to a town-sized building site was a clever move. A clever-mum-move as we later learned.

Childhood was good, we weren’t rich, but we wanted for little. School was ok. I was an average student. I leant more towards creative and the making subjects, but oddly I also loved maths and English. It took me many years to appreciate my special powers.

I had little idea of what I might do as a career. A foundation course at art college would, I thought, provide the answers. I liked the discipline of graphic design, looking back I was already tapping into a skill set I was as yet barely aware of. In my work today creativity is not just about making nice things, rather it’s an aid to analysis, intuitiveness, planning, and problem solving.

The fine art element of the foundation year was mostly life drawing, which didn’t excite me. But there were moments where the freedom to experiment gave me a glimpse of another self. The purpose of the fine art department was to nurture candidates for university courses. In the late 70s about 1-in-8 youngsters attended university. The number from working class backgrounds would have been fewer. Culturally I was programmed to want to work and so it was logical to follow the vocational option of graphic design.

From college I made it into several London design and advertising agencies before starting my own design company in SoHo, London. From humble beginnings I enjoyed a great career with clients in America, Sweden, Germany and the UK. I’m thankful to my younger self; he made a sensible decision, which served me well.

But what could have been? The advent of digital reignited my love of the camera and in recent times with less to cloud my mind I’m thinking again about that other-self I glimpsed all those years ago at art college. This project is an aid to help me gently explore who that might be.