or to put it another way…Day 1097.

I seem determined to commemorate three years finished and year four’s start with some fairly cack pictures, even though I didn’t set out to do so. In this case, a cack picture of a pretty nice object! I’m away from home with a slow lens and no tripod.

This is Nigel’s jukebox, bought by his wife and my friend Ginny for a Christmas pressie. I was well impressed to see it apparently has a selection of songs on it including one called ‘Linda’ – up to now, I had thought the sum total of songs with my name in the title was the pretty dire ‘Lady Linda’ by the Beach Boys, which is a record I do actually own, sadly!!!!

I dare say there are many more songs about Lindas but I’m just not aware of them. When I was googling ‘Lady Linda’ to remind myself of whose record it was (no, it wasn’t etched indelibly on my mind), the top three references are for an S&M site somewhere in the north of England!!!

So, this is it – day one of year four…..how much longer will it go on? Who knows! I’m sure I don’t.

There is a little bit of me (no, let me rephrase that, quite a big bit of me) that thinks my PAD gallery is something to celebrate – after all, I have NEVER missed a day. Not when I went into hospital for a little op, not when I was in bed with Salmonella poisoning for over a week. Never because of work, even though I have a gruelling schedule of 12 hour days frequently and never less than about ten hours in a day, a commute of 250 miles each way when I go to the office and last year particularly, months of my life away from home.

I know my pics are not always stunningly good photos. I know that often they are complete pants. I know that there are many photographers who shoot better pics than I do every day. BUT mine are almost always from the heart and often are highly imaginative. I really try to photograph things that I’ve not seen before. Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I fail.

I also know that I have pushed quite a lot of boundaries since I started this. Not just in terms of my own photos but also in terms of the way I write, what I share and how I go about it. Let’s face it, I have spoken of the breakdown of my marriage, being a ‘victim’ of physical brutality from someone who was and always will be a nasty piece of work. I have spoken of the pain of loss and the joy of finding love. No matter how dire a day I’ve had, I still write. I have shared my hopes and dreams for the future and the ghosts and successes of my past with whoever is looking at pbase. Most of all, I believe I have given an honest account of what it is like to be ‘me’.

Along the way, I have made some wonderful friends, some I have met and some I may never meet. (You know who you are.) I have also made a few enemies. That’s life! I actually do believe that the two worst things anyone can be are dishonest about themselves or too scared to say what you think in case you stand a chance of offending someone, not that I go out of my way to cause offence, it just sometimes happens that way. No hiding, no flinching and no compromise.

I know too that I have touched people in a way that a photo a day without commentary would never have done. There was even an occasion when a woman called Sue emailed Emily (Slug’s missus) to tell her that my diary had given her a new lease of life when she was ill – I still sometimes hear from her. I have many ‘cyber friends’ who tell me that what I say delivers them hope or simply a good laugh. I have also given someone else the courage (Joe) to leave the treadmill and strive for a better life in the way I have tried to do. I so hope he doesn’t hate me now – either because he now sees I’m finding it so hard or because he may be…..

Will I ever stop? I don’t know. Somehow I feel the need to write and this is my outlet. Yep that does mean that sometimes the quality of the pic comes second to the story that it is a ‘prop’ for. I have other galleries by the yard that are the galleries where I post most of my best photos. I have over three thousand pics on pbase and only (she says with a certain amount of fairly smug irony) 1,097 of them are photo a day photos.

One thing I do know though. I know that my photo a day is a real achievement. It is a real photo a day – no missed days or archive shots and it’s no less valid as a photo a day because I spend a lot of time writing commentary to go with it.

There were only three photo a day galleries on pbase before mine - David’s, Karen Nichols and Nikki Harman’s so I can also claim to be among the pbase pad pioneers. When I started it wasn’t a ‘club’ and there was no meta gallery, just the ‘recently updated galleries’ to identify that I (and the other three) was (were) posting every day. There were no challenges or themes. There was just me and three others using pad to improve technique and get into the discipline of using a camera regularly.

What’s my ‘most hit’ pic – well, of course it’s Jo the Naked Housekeeper – that says something deeply sad about the reason why many browse pbase and what makes that even more ludicrous is that she was fully clothed at the time. She’s been hit about 20,000 times. There are clearly loads of foot fetishists who surf pbase too – all of the pics of my feet get loads of hits even the really gross grapey one. I even got a guestbook message from one the other day and I left it there to give a clue to the strangeness of this forum. That’s probably why I only post feet when all else has failed or inspiration is completely missing from my psyche that day. The others that get hit a lot – well, who knows, I’m sure I don’t.

I often say 'nothing changes' and I am constantly surprised at how much truth there is in that. Last year, I was also apologising for starting a new year of pad with a cack photo.