The Gentle Giant

Essential TV viewing - Mark Lawson talks to... David Bailey: now on BBC I-player. Affable, candid and a bit sweary, David tells us that the best camera is the one on you at the time and that Photoshopping has been around since the Greeks...I briefly met the great man back God knows when at Cardiff's Ffotogallery and it was good to be back in his amiable company for a whole hour.

Weather dull and still down with lethargy and stubborn headaches - but I did meet:

My chief concern here is maintaining anonymity but feel it important to include some facts. Those who have got to know me through Blip will soon realise why and my reasons for Blipping ‘Julian’ * (not his real name).

I was on the same psychiatric ward as Julian for quite a while many years ago. We sort of got to know each other.

In an unidentified city in the southern part of the UK I came across Julian sitting on his own, this morning, outside a pub, enjoying a cream-laden, chocolate sprinkled mug of hot chocolate, his third, it turned out.

I hadn’t seen him for a good while. It was sort of good to see him. He was very pleased to see me.

He is just a bit older than me and has high level Asperger's Syndrome. And severe bi-polar as well as some other diagnoses. Decades of medication has made him unable to walk further than a few hundred yards, his voracious appetite acerbated by one or more of his med’s side effects being that his brain cannot receive signals from the stomach to say that he is full. He suffered from angina all those years ago – now, I think he has had a minor stroke too, by his appearance. He suffers a kind of palsy, or shake, again, a side effect from medication. He used to be 22-23 stone, I think he has actually lost some weight since.

Conversation is very much one-way – I know what humours him but long silences are frequent. He had been living with his mother, now in her late 80’s. I know that at times she had found him very difficult to care for – she told me that herself. He could not possibly live on his own. Yet, he is grammar school educated.

His mother is now in a nursing home. He says that he (apparently) threw a pan of boiling water over her after she attacked him with a carving knife. That he had to go to Court and had been back in the psychiatric unit for over a year. Now, he is under some sort of curfew and is resident at a kind of half-way house. Personally, I do believe that his mother finally couldn’t cope with him and that he did go into hospital, probably under a Section, but that the ‘violence’ is one of his (many) delusions. I have got to know him quite well – and of procedures too. I also know other ex-patients that resided where he is now – and it is not a prison, or any kind of correctional or secure facility.

I only had the 135mm f2 lens with me that wasn’t a wideangle. I didn’t want to go too far back from him to take this so as to break the intimacy needed. He quite happily pulled this pose but wouldn’t again, when I realised that I had focussed the heavy manual focus of the lens on his spec frames and not on his eyes. But in some ways, I prefer this – a detachment perhaps, more anonymity. I have only added some vignette to bring in the top light corners, a bit and a little sharpening. His food stained clothes have thus not been included.

Unbelievably, for a morning, a fight broke out between the female manager of the pub and a young rather loud young ‘lady’, who was refusing to leave, as she had just become ‘barred’. All the ‘victim’s’ mates – male and female – all cited unwarranted violence from the manager and of course, the Police were summoned. This all provided quite an interesting – and unusual – diversion for both my friend and I, to say the least!

Everybody was all too keen to provide statements in defence of the barred lady and when I asked Julian when he had to back at the House for lunch, he said that he was going to stay, to provide HIS witness statement. I persuaded him, quite easily, that this was perhaps not such a good idea - and so we left.

I left him at the bus shelter a few yards away. He said the bus ran every five minutes, but the electronic notification said almost an hour’s wait. I wished him well, that his mother was fine and that I’d see him next time. As something you say, an expression, not that I’d necessarily be going looking for him, but if I did....

I’m not trying to make statements or pose arguments. I hadn’t told him what I’d be doing with this pic or where it would go. I hadn’t asked even to take it, I had merely gestured. His first question when I sat down was something about me still taking the photographs and my always present camera. No words about this portrait at all. I know he is computer illiterate and doesn’t even have a mobile, let alone access to the internet. But this gentle giant – at least always to me and in my presence – is typical of many people we see every day, in every town and city. Decades ago, they probably would have been incarcerated in one of those awful Victorian asylums, never being seen or ever seeing the outside world.

Yet seeing him and talking to him today has thrown many thoughts and emotions at me and has caused some discomfort and perhaps a little pleasure too. I won’t go into them, some which I’m sure you can imagine, others not. I am not seeking approval or permission to have posted this content from fellow Blippers either, as it is my Journal – and he is my friend. But somehow, as fellow human beings we can all become slightly better human beings by appreciating our fellows, whatever their disability, or plight. Thank you for reading this far. Much appreciated. You have helped me too by doing so.