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Dreadful Nonsense

"I've read your blog. it's really funny. you should write a column." - Jon Ronson

Little Sister Edel has been over visiting, and with her she brought one of those fancy pants new-assed cubes what carry music around in a tiny box and make other people who don't have one dribble with delight - you know, one of those ipod things that everyone else in the world but me has now, it seems. This morning on the train into work, a middle-aged, overweight, hair-parted-to-the-side-and-dragged-across-bald-spot was sitting tapping his foot in delight along to his ipod while I was forced to drag about with me the ton and a half weight that is the ridiculousness of my stone age cd walkman.

"Imagine!", Little Sister Edel was heard to chortle to a random passerby, "listening to the same CD over and over again!" The random passerby joined Little Sister Edel in her mocking behaviour, and I thought the chanting and the dances were a bit overboard, but I get their point.

This weekend, we were doing lots of tourist based activities, seeing as how Little Sister Edel and my good friend (and yours) Hutch were being tourists, and I decided to go all native and drag out with me my photographing camera, with which to take images to seal the occasion forever. Only, I had no film, and try as I might I couldn't find a place that sold it. "Camera film?" one of the shop owners near St Pauls responded to my request, "what is this old fashioned nonsense you speak? What are you, a cave dweller? Where's your digital spirit, you fool? Fool! Fool!" And so the other people around the tube station joined in with his chanting and his pointing (as again did Little Sister Edel) and I was made to walk away in shame, with my normal sized camera in hand.

I took some photographs later in the day, and some people began to crowd around behind me in order to view instantly what image I had caught in my magical box. I had to, of course, explain that my camera holds surprise and disappointment, not sharply focussed imagines immediately available for downloading or deletion depending on how fat the lady in the picture decides she looks. My camera instead is like the earlier hours of Christmas morning - anything could be produced, the potential for delight is limitless, and yet when everything is revealed you're left with a sense of disappointment that can never be shaken off.

And so it is that I've decided once again to try to update the stone tablets I've been using to sketch my memories and invest instead in something new fangled and highly priced, confusing and small-buttoned, frighteningly technical and easily breakable. My choices came down to either an ipod or a digital camera, and I almost immediately remembered that ipods are expensive and digital cameras aren't quite as bad, and that if I ask nicely enough I might get an ipod as a joint birthday/Christmas present, and so I'm getting a digital camera with which to make this site pretty once again, and probably discover my true calling as an astonishing photographer of stray dogs in parks and will win fame and fortune world wide.

Or at least, when I finally get it done, I can show you pictures of my bloodied feet, fresh from the tattooing.

Results of camera will be on line as soon as sick laptop returns from the hospital for sick laptops (which should be any day soon).

This entry was posted on 17 October 2005 at 2:57 pm. 0 comments

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