from Napa Valley to Nappy Valley

Don't worry, we didn't die, we just moved to England.

The last ten days have been such a blur it's impossible to summarise into a coherent piece, so I'll just offer little tidbits for you.

The couple of days before we left San Francisco we re-defined the meaning of the word 'panic', with Donna falling as sick as I've ever seen her, hacking and coughing in a ball on our bare floors, yet still managing to pack up the remainder of our belongings.

"This is your flight crew from the cockpit. Welcome aboard. We've got a plane and a full tank of gas. Lets rock and roll." I half expected the pilot to add "Do I make you horny baby? Do I?! Yeah!"

As the plane soared away from SFO, we were treated to a flyover of San Francisco Bay on a crisp clear day of the like I've never seen before. By contrast, the descent into Heathrow was through endless grey soup, the plane bucking and diving, buffeted by a rare wind storm to hit the British Isles. We emerged from the clouds, were within sight of the runway, a mere few hundred feet off the ground, suddenly the plane pulled up sharply, engines whining, going into a steep climb into the soupy grey again. Yes, I thought, back to California. We turned around and took another stab at landing in the wind storm, this time touching down roughly but definitively onto soggy English soil. "Ladies and gentlemen, this is the co-pilot, wanted to tell you that your captain did an excellent job of landing us today. We had an interesting view of the approach from up here, let me tell you." I took that as pilot code for we were shitting ourselves. As we drove away from the airport, a British Airways plane came in to land overhead, listing and wobbling, practically hitting the runway sideways.

Installed at my sister's house, Donna curled up on the sofa dosed up on medicine, I answered the phone.
"Who's this?" said the voice
"This is Blanca's brother", I replied sleepily
"What's your name?"
"Juan"
"What?"
"Juan"
"What?"
"Hooo-aaa-aaahhhn"
"I'm sorry I don't speak Spanish, I can't pronounce that"...

"Look", I said in WHSmith in Weybridge. "Even the book covers are nicer in England."
"I think it's because you grew up here," replied Donna.
"Just tell me they're better."
"Oh they're MUCH better", she said, smirking.

A couple days after we arrived, a large cargo chip beached off the UK coast, containers washing ashore and being looted, sorry, salvaged, by the locals. "Look," I said, "that one says 'from San Francisco, property of Juan and Donna'". I looked at Donna. She wasn't smiling.

A week ago we moved our stuff to the Covent Garden Travelodge in Central London, paid for by our new employer, while we found our feet. The building must have been an old hospital, the narrow corridors and old wooden doors with wire-reinforced round windows set in the middle. "Which floor are we on?" I asked. "Radiology, or Obstetrics and Gynaecology?". The door opened to a room not dissimilar to the offices in the film Brazil - I half expected us the bed to be shared between our room and the room next door.

We focused our search for a flat to rent around Clapham Common, near my other sister. The local estate agents took our details and we wandered in and out of flats feeling uninspired. To satisfy curiosity, we went to Notting Hill to see what they might have to offer there. "There's a place just around the corner actually," said the agent. "Would you like to see it now?". We walked around to a gorgeous mews, cobblestoned and charming. The door opened, and I squeezed through. The stairs upwards were so narrow I could not fit without having to turn myself sideways a little. The flat was charming, and tiny. I felt as if I was in a large doll's house. The bedroom had a row of sinks across the wall. That's odd, I thought. I walked to the closet, and opened it to find myself looking at a bathtub. In the closet. "This is £380. A week."

Back in Clapham Common, we intensified our search. Where my sister lives is known as Nappy Valley for the large number of young families flooding the trendy area. Just across the Common is Abbeville Road, a similarly pleasant mix of residential, decent shops, pubs and restaurants. I'd been clued into this corner when my friends Luke and Amy lived here and remembered their flat. We walked into a maisonette a few steps off Abbeville Road. It had the perfect combination of light, space, and that indefinable I think I can live here quality that had otherwise eluded us. All things going well (a few bits of paperwork and a lot of money still to change hands), we move in next Saturday.

Back in Central London, Donna wasted no time in checking out the largest running club in the city - The Serpentines. We joined them for the Wednesday evening run. I picked the shortest run, Two Parks (Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens). Donna joined a group of people running about 8 miles along the river. Before she knew it she had lost her initial crowd and was with a fast group of men set on doing at least 12, all the way to Tower Bridge and back. Oh well, she said. This morning (Sunday) we came out to Richmond Park for a long run with the club. Well, I'm sat in a coffee shop writing this while she's running, but I'm with her in spirit at least.

We've been soaking in the kul-cha as well - quick visits to the British Museum, National Portrait Gallery, a trip on the slides at the Tate Modern (after getting a little drunk in the member's room courtesy of my sister's membership). We also squeezed in a play - Frost/Nixon. It was excellent. Donna proclaims the Gielgud Theatre the best place to take a nap in London.

All this as well as numerous family visits, trying to get our head around the myriad transport systems and buses that don't go as far as they advertise (or don't stop when you ask them to), arbitrary Tube closures, pounding the pavement day after day. We both have the look of people having to absorb too much in too little time, and we haven't even started work yet.

That's tomorrow.

Travel | London | Frost Nixon | Clapham | San Francisco

It's a public affair

Our combined efforts are starting to show. The rooms are starting to echo. It's very liberating to pare everything down to the basics. Now, onto something entirely different...

I haven't written about every detail, but the project I left ILM to pursue - the long-mentioned photography project - has been a feature of my daily life for the last six months. I set out to exhibit my photographs by the end of the year, something I didn't actually manage to do. Like a lot of things, it sounded relatively straightforward, but actually doing it has meant facing all the things I don't know how to do, learning what I needed to, and moving forward.

As I was building a portfolio from all the pictures I've taken in the last ten years or so, there were photos of people both known, friends and relatives, and unknown, people in the street. I wasn't sure of the legalities of exhibiting photographs with people in them, much less going about selling them. I would cross those bridges as I came to them. One of the selected photos was of a friend from a few years back. Several months ago I sent her the image in an email, told her I was thinking of using it in my portfolio, perhaps in some exhibition, I wasn't sure. She knew me when I had the first stirrings of my ambition and had always been supportive. She send back an email, making positive noises.

I published the portfolio online, put up some pictures at a party, but otherwise have not yet publicised it because there are still a couple of pieces that need to fall into place, and the move has pushed them down the list.

Then, I received an email from my friend. She'd casually been checking out my pictures, and received the 'nasty surprise' of finding her photograph amongst them. Saying I had misled her and hidden my intention for the photograph from her, she said she and her family were distressed to find her image in public for all to see. My first reaction was the stomach flipping, 'what have I done?' feeling when you upset a friend, and want to make it right as quickly as possible. I deleted the photo completely, sent an instant email back, and soon received a reply thanking me and saying that the issue was settled.

I wish it were settled for me. My instincts to preserve my friendship were good, even if the way she told me was more strident than it needed to be, but it brought home the issue of - what are my obligations to myself as an artist, regardless of my responsibilities as a friend, and where does the law stand on it? I quickly did the research that I had neglected to do earlier. Ideally, you're above board both ethically (never taking or exhibiting a photograph without permission) and legally (having everyone in the photograph sign a release that you can use, exhibit and sell their image as you wish). There are some exceptions, for the case of journalism or news, and in my case, if I simply exhibit the photos as art (without selling them), I am under no legal obligation to obtain consent from the people represented in them.

What if this photo of my friend had been the centerpiece of my portfolio, or of an exhibition? I would have been under no obligation to inform her of what I was doing, but would I have been willing to give up the friendship for the sake of preserving the work? Clearly my first instinct was to choose the friendship over the work, but I wonder if that will always be so, and if that's really such a bad thing. What has remained with me since I deleted the photo was not that I had upset my friend, but that in removing the picture I compromised something small but significant about my work, and I didn't like the feeling. You don't have to be an arsehole to be an artist, but it seems to help!

The other question that it raised was the notion of privacy in today's online world. I put just about all my photos on flickr, I write this blog, you can piece together a lot of information about me based on what is out there. In terms of net traffic, I would get more people to see my photos if I opened the front door of my house and invited everyone who passed to come in and see them. I am not even a blip on the radar, and I am trying to reach more viewers, not hide away. I keep enough to myself that I do not feel that my entire life is public, or that I am compromising my privacy. And where my photography is concerned, the private is public. I don't want, however, to assume that what I am comfortable with is the same as anyone else.

I know people who have been turned down for jobs based on what they wrote on their personal blog. My friends are not comfortable publishing photographs of their children on publicly available websites. People's youthful indiscretions are available on YouTube, and there are services that trawl the net removing such material before it falls on the eyes of a Google-ing potential employer. In today's world, to assume that a photograph taken of you by a friend or stranger will NOT find its way onto the web somewhere is naive at best, although as I said I am not about to deny anyone their right to privacy.

I Googled my friend who was upset about the photograph, and obtained all manner of public information about her. Her employer, her work position and responsibilities, even documents showing likely sensitive private information. I wonder if she's aware that it's out there, and would she demand the same of them that she did of me?

Photo | Privacy | Flickr | Google | YouTube

Desert Island Discs

Today has been the first big house clean-out day. It was tiring, exhausting, a little dispiriting. Despite our collective effort to not horde and regularly clean out the cupboards, there is still so much .. stuff. Every single object in the house required me to make a decision about its status, and in so doing, evoked emotions about what we were doing. I laid back on the couch and stared at the half-empty shelves, at all the work still left to do, and wanted to call the whole thing off. I love this house, I love being here, it's become our home, and leaving it to strangers makes absolutely no sense.

In describing this move I've realised that a good model is the "going to University" one. We have a home, we're not leaving it, we're just going to London the way people go to University, for an experience away from home, to try new things, and travelling hopefully with the minimum of belongings.

I keep a 'to read' shelf, and I had planned to take its entire contents to London, but after I had filled a few small boxes with books, and kept adding more to it as I went along, I was forced to rethink. Now I'm thinking more along the lines of "Desert Island Discs" - a very small number of items to sustain me on our desert island, perhaps no more than I can fit in a certain box.

Back to the boxes.

Packing | Moving | San Francisco | Desert Island Discs