Woke up at 4.50am with severe pain in my knee, so stumbled downstairs to get some paracetemol. It appears walking hard everyday for a fortnight and then stopping and sitting at a desk for a whole two days in a row is a bad recipe for a knackered knee.
What seems like a hundred years ago I fell and punctured my knee cap on a long twisted nail whilst climbing on some rocks. I was attended by someone from St John’s ambulance, who peeled back my trouser leg before swearing and tell me I needed to go to hospital. Occasionally it seizes up and I struggle to move around for awhile. Not that we’re going anywhere.
Today, then, photographic opportunities were few and far between and mostly consisted of what was on the sofa, or the windowsill, or eventually next to my computer. Gwyn who is in the shielded category continues to shield us using crochet hooks and carrot cake, it’s like being cocooned by the very hungry caterpillar, and nearly as colourful.
She has also managed to get some food delivered, in a reverse of what we’ve been doing for awhile, thereby helping me avoiding limping around the shop tonight. Our local shop, where Joel use to have a paper round have been doing informally organised drop offs, and turned up with some staple stuff, as well as cider and chocolate.
Joel helped unpack and disinfect the packages.
In an exciting turn of events this afternoon I managed to rest a book on my ‘good’ knee, that’s also a bit knackered. Like my back.
Staying at home has enabled me to get out some photography books and having being inspired by Milton Rogovin’s work yesterday, I spent some of today looking through the work of Bruce Davidson, a Magnum Photos Cooperative member, who works in a similar vein to Rogovin, but is much better known. Davidson’s work in Harlem, his civil rights photos and his work on the New York subway has a clarity of vision and empathy with his subjects that reflects his desire to be a ‘humanitarian’ photographer. But it’s his work in Britain that holds a particular interest for me, Rogovin’s connection to mining communities is echoed in Davidson’s work in Welsh pit villages, and some of his images convey stories and affects in ways that often elude description, other than perhaps in poetry.
Mostly, however, today was about cake and other comforts.
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