I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ve been too hard on myself in recent weeks. I’ve been having a crisis of confidence, brought on by extreme tiredness and stress. You know how it is – the harder I’ve pushed myself, the more I’ve felt like I’m failing at everything I try to do. I’d got to the point where David was pressing me to keep a really important promise to him and I felt I simply couldn’t because that meant I would have to break one to someone else. I was between a rock and a hard place as they say.

So, I’ve decided to (well, with more than a bit of encouragement from DM who is sick to the back teeth of my punishing work schedule and Christine who has been a complete angel of mercy in my life of recent times) push back a bit. I’m not going to carry on soaking up work like a sponge….that’s what I came here to try to escape from.

Tomorrow I have a sixteen-hour working day and another on Friday. I promised myself when I unceremoniously fainted in a cubicle in the ladies loo at Heathrow Airport recently on my way home from a similarly punishing day that I would NEVER put myself in that situation again. I need to start keeping promises to myself and to DM so that’s that – after this week, no more of that sort of stuff.

For now though, I’ve been concentrating on a positive promise to myself – I was really devastated when I was looking through my 2005 diary and found so many snatched shots from train windows and cack shots in hotel rooms with nothing to say ‘hey, I’m not a bad photographer’ about them. In fact, there are many shots that I was downright embarrassed to have taken. I was almost going to give this up because I’d totally lost my confidence to do a decent shot.

Then I started getting praise from my colleagues at work about the artwork in the meeting rooms and several enquiries about sales. I suppose this gee-ed me up a bit and then I’ve had a reasonable start to 2006 too with some shots I’m quite proud of.

So, where this is going is that I’ve decided to concentrate on getting good photos to go with my diary instead of thinking of that bit of the equation as the less important bit.

Of course, we are helped here by having some wonderful ‘props’ and this boot scraper is one such. It’s outside our new front door along with the pulley that I photographed last week. Although I think the shot would be technically better if I’d had another studio light to the left of my subject but slightly behind it to burn out the background properly, there wasn’t enough space for another light in the cramped conditions in which I was working so I took the view that this was as good as it was going to get today. At least today’s compromise was based on a good start point rather than a crap one.

The subject is the boot really – caked in the mud of our new veggie patch which has seen another hour of digging today and I’ve now got a bit that’s big enough to start planting. In fact, I aim to go online after posting this and order my seeds (having failed spectacularly again to do so last week) so I can get in the garlic, broad beans and onions, all of which like a long growing season.

I am going to find a way through my own personal maze to happiness and I am going to find my way there soon. There have been too many blind alleys of late and I find myself clutching at straws too often.

Last year, Archie was my subject and I was bracing myself for yet another trip away.