Ever felt mildly embarrassed when you met someone but weren't sure why...?

It happened to me a few weeks ago. I met someone in a job centre whom I saw going red quite easily...I don't know if I should state this but I think it wasn't our first meeting. I seemed to have some recovered memory as I quite frequently do of an incident which occurred on the canal towpath that I must have been cycling along on my way to work one morning when I worked at Teleperformance.

There are reasons why the real causes of mental illness are kept out of the public gaze - it's highly illegal nationally and must also break international human rights laws for governments to allow to happen what does. One of the mechanisms seems to be how the human mind is considered to have malfunctioned if an individual has some recollection of a benefits advisor taking a shit on a canal towpath, the advisor realising that they've done this in a public place and then this being classed as a reason for why they were going quite so red. It is embedded within popular culture that this type of explanation can only be connected to the malfunctioning human mind owing to a high degree of overwork, poor work-life balance, poor inter-personal relationships or some other explanation which is largely bio-psycho-social in nature: that we're prone to mental illness when we don't take adequate care of ourselves and someone merely needs to adopt a different approach to life in order to recover from a bout of mental illness, take a course of medication or have extended time out.

These types of 'sensible' bio-psycho-social models do appeal and may make a large degree of sense in a great many instances, however, in my experience there does seem to be a great deal bubbling under - and there are distinct problems associated with dismissing someone as a conspiracy theorist who doubts the credibility of these models. I continue to try and influence the authorities to believe that this is a distinct possibility, however, the means that are used to shape the society we live in and to extend life, whilst being illegal, are probably the most effective manner of increasing life expectancy - we assume there to be very genuine reasons why life expectancy has increased - McKeown's work being a prime example of this. This is a correlational approach which examines the increases in life expectancy with industrialisation and concludes that increases in life expectancy have occurred largely through environmental improvements and legislation to reduce the frequency of accidental death. There is no doubt that correlational studies are generally only going to indicate a little about causes and in no way be conclusive - there could be a great deal more that needs to be uncovered regarding the reasons behind these changes.

I think about the one blushing fellow I met and the impact that his facilitated negative emotional state may have had upon how comfortable I felt in that situation and I don't think that there could be much in the way of reason for it - there was something that had taken place and perhaps one day I'll find out who did what and why?

Goodbye to Leslie John Willis.....

Dear All,
Friday was the funeral of an uncle of mine and later in the day I went along to the Rush Hour Blues in the foyer of Symphony Hall. Uncle Les was a very charismatic type of person to me and my brothers - in some ways he seemed much larger than life. My parents had interests, but they didn't seem quite so colourful or expressive as the things that Les seemed to get up to. He had quite a noticable sense of humour and watching him crack jokes at his wifes' expense (my dads' sister) did seem to be a bit of a family event, some form of pressure-valve for all of us.

I was thinking about Les when I was taking the shots of the band playing away. He took some nice shots of me and my brothers when we were kids that are in a different class to those that my mother took with her kodak. There was an element of wanting to have a blast, photographically at least, for Les. In what I class as quite difficult circumstances to photograph the bands, with no extra light on them, it can be quite a difficult space to photograph and do a subject justice. I have dedicated the slide show that's on my flickr page to Les and I hope some of the other relatives get a chance to check this type of thing out.

Les has made some impact upon me as a photographer, and while I don't think I'll become a popular mainstream photographer, nor necessarily progress that far technically, I do get quite a lot out of the experience and I do feel pleased with what I can do. For that alone, I'm kind of grateful to Les. I did mention to his son, a shot that Les had inspired me to take of the summer palace in Beijing, Chinas' capital. Similar to the historic forbidden city, it is a major landmark and of cultural importance as an indicator of past dynasties. I was there on quite a dreary day unfortunately, perhaps unlikely to bring the best of the scene but still worth being there. I tried to use the willows to continue the curve of the building, something that Les has discussed with me as a child when we looked through some of his most prized photographs - how important the shapes of figures and objects sometimes in the background are to the composition of a shot. I guess there was an element of that in the way I was taking shots of the boys on Friday afternoon - difficult circumstances: far from ideal, activity and events that I couldn't control and a scene in front of us all (the band) that looked generally the same to everyone present but somehow would look different - in a million different ways to a million different people. Though this may seem a little sermon-like, as I sit writing about it on a Sunday morning, there is an element of what life's been like in the Woodward family about it - circumstance doesn't tend to go our way and there's a need to try and make awkward circumstances work in our direction - as I tried to do with the reflective background of the mirror-like plate glass in the shot above that's in the slideshow of the ben markland quintet. Somehow, despite confronting circumstance, things just don't seem to work but there's some pleasure in trying. Friday was to me, a goodbye to Les first and foremost - I wonder if there's much influence in the shots.....

Steve Yenga & Crossroad Collision

More duff photographs from the Symphony Hall Foyer Commuter Jazz event which was held on Friday 6th January. Steve Yenga & Crossroad Collision did a couple of good sets which went down really well. I was surprised so many frozen pensioners who seem only to live for jazz on a Friday made so much noise....maybe they weren't put off by the snow because they all come out of a freezer on a Friday morning only to be put back in on a Friday night.

The week of nothing much.....

It's been a week now since I paid up the funds for the tribunal through tribunal action. I don't feel particularly confident at present, they didn't seem to know what they were doing.

Watched a bit of Folk America on BBC4 this week - it was good to see Graham Nash and David Crosby - teach your childrenteach your children is a bit of a classic.

Nothing much has happened this week. Can I do a thing about this lack of inspiration....