Change

Made the mistake of taking all my gear out with me today - camera, flash, spare lenses, tripod - and leaving the memory card in my PC. Normally I'm organised enough to have a spare in the bag but that was in my other bag from when I was doing a commission earlier in the week. Stupid. So this is taken on my smartphone.

Aged P. enjoyed her trip out, our first in a while for reasons I can't explain here. We went for breakfast in Giraffe which (if you've never been there) is a quasi mexican breakfast haunt for (mainly) young couples and yummy mummies with their husbands and assorted sprogs in tow. it's all very messy, stripy babygrow territory and you never know if the baked beans and huevos are going to end up in the little ones mouths, on the floor, or flying through the air. The noise is often deafening because of the sheer mass of toddler and child crammed into highchairs or poised precariously on a bored daddy's knee.

Aged P. loved it, after a week of being trapped indoors she is ready for a bit of human life in all its Dantesque glory. Excelled herself today by telling someone at a neighbouring table that she has two daughters and one son (she has two sons and a daughter) calling me by at least three different names and asking me if "granpop" (my father's father) was still alive.

"No mum" I said "he died fifteen years ago".
"He wasn't very old".
"He was ninety six".
"That isn't old".

I think she must be rooted in that bit of the old testament when people routinely lived to be two hundred.

Anyway it was very windy and her knees hurt from her exertions, particularly getting from front door to car, which she found very difficult. So I couldn't persuade her to let me push her 'round Greenwich Park in a wheelchair. We just looked at the view over the city and talked. I felt a bit sad when I got home a couple of hours later. She was happy enough but the world has changed, at least for me. Oh well. Change as they say is the only constant. But constant change can sometimes be a bit hard work.

2012 may not have been the year the world ended but I think it will be one when my life certainly took a very different direction...