I’ve been looking for this shot for weeks – it’s meant to symbolise the bittersweet-ness of life – ha ha but of course I’m no artist, just someone trying desperately to be me…… So, you know, this is supposed to be a fragile, brittle bit of life caught on an unyielding, sharp highly dangerous object yet retaining its fragile beauty (no folks, it’s no attempt at an analogy for my own life – I can’t possibly claim any sense of my own fragile beauty…..fragile yes, beautiful, no!) it is, of course, totally contrived in as much as a leaf would never get impaled on a bit of barbed wire, it’d float down past it in reality.

Sometimes I get images for photos burned into my mind so hard they won’t go away. Whenever I can, I like to push on those boundaries and try to make strange things come out of my camera...

Many, many of them are swilling round and round in my head at the moment because basically we’re more-or-less unable to do any studio type shooting at the moment what with all the boxes that we’ve got to climb over just to make a meal, get into bed or have a shower. Couple that with the fact that for half the week, I’m generally either in an hotel room with no ‘props’ or on trains until all hours of the night and you don’t have a very fertile environment for creativity.....I think I've done pretty well in the circs - there are only a couple of total duffers in the period since the beginning of September!

Today, I’ve had the luxury of a day working at home (it’s my only one this week, for the remainder of the week, I’m going to be away) and, although I’ve not been able to see the sunshine, because of all of the boxes piled up in our conservatory and blocking the light from our sitting room window, I actually got a bit of fresh air at lunchtime. Woo hoo. I can’t remember the last time I had a lunch break – sure, I have once or twice eaten lunch at the pub, while discussing business with my colleagues, so today I rebelled.

There is a little glimmer of rebellion in my heart now that I can more-or-less breathe again at work. I have watched my friend and colleague spend this weekend up to her ears in work and seen her drawn face while she’s been trying to work despite obvious exhaustion and I’ve decided that I’m going to try to stop all this madness and make sure I get a lunch break every now and again so today, with its glorious weather, I took my beautiful babies out onto the moor for a walk at lunchtime – I was away an hour and boy did I feel good when I got back. It’s so worth it. So, for once, I got to realise one of my imagined pics.

I have a few dozen more sloshing around and sometime over the coming months, I will find a way to let out a few more of them and all I can say is ‘you’d better be ready’ because they’re going to be dynamite – nearly literally!!!

Do you sense that lunch break has done me some good? You betcha!!!

I'm on my way to catching my own fall - and I'm determined it won't be as painful as this one!

Two years ago, we were off to London meet up with Mat and Mand - and sparking a distinctly unpleasant chain of events (not related to them) - they had a baby daughter last week - good luck with little Maddy to you both. Last year, we had no idea that a single year later we'd be living our dream and we were trying to combat dust with a long walk on the moor - Patti will recognise the scene of this photo because we took her to the very spot this weekend.