The Vole Returns!

You have all signally failed to improve this benighted country in my absence. Though you did get rid of Baroness Warsi and a government minister who insisted that he just couldn't live on his £125,000 salary + expenses. Good work, all! To be fair, I have a little respect for Warsi now: she was elevated as a kind of Judas Goat to persuade ethnic minority voters that Tories aren't racists any more, but she turned out to have opinions too, clearly not what the hierarchy wanted from a Northern Muslim woman. Anyway, having slightly damaged her party, let's hope she carries on doing that but otherwise withdraws from public life.

What did I do on my holidays, I hear you ask? I read a lot of newspapers and books, including Williams's sleeper hit Stoner, about a failed academic. It's a wonderful book but desolatingly sad. Academics reading it are committing a form of self-harm, I couldn't help feeling. I also read a book on Foucault and TJ Bass's The Godwhale, which was rather good. I also took a lot of photographs. See the whole lot via that link or click on these to enlarge them.

Otherwise, I went swimming in the Atlantic near Killorglin in Co. Kerry, Ireland:

where my lithe body attracted a crowd of salivating photographers:

Though they may have been wearing beer goggles rather than swimming ones:

I was stung by jellyfish at Rossbeigh, so moved to another wonderful beach, Dooks for the rest of the holiday. The weather was wonderful: here's the sun setting over Killorglin town

The main event of the year is Puck Fair: a wild goat goes up on a stand to preside over 3 days of carousing, merry-making, horse-trading (literally), music and dancing. I love it, especially wandering around with a camera in-between daytime scoops. I particularly love the dodgems:

and the mini-car ride which I enjoyed very much:

and fairground neon

but after a day or two I was looking slightly haggard, though still dapper:

Though after a stroll through the horse-fair I got back on my horse and felt a new man:

before shopping around for some stupid pocket-size dogs:

I even found the time to get myself some new togs:

and a feed of buns:

before setting off purposefully to the Mr Puck competition

Though the crowd of people chanting 'get 'em off' at me was slightly disconcerting

and not everyone was impressed by my rendition of Voulez-vous…

Ingrates. King Puck was a magnificent specimen this year. 

So much so that he even inspired some lookalikes:

And then came the rain. Being County Kerry, I was never without (and sometimes simultaneously using) a waterproof and sunglasses:

And the band (Fanfare Piston, a French engineering students' brass outfit) played on:

and in-between the showers there was dancing:

Although there was a sinister side to the festivities:

One of the lovely things about Puck is that all buskers are invited to play - no permits, auditions or (as you can see) minimum ages or height tests: I made a fortune.

The sweet strains of the melodeon made a pleasant accompaniment to the gentle shower of small change and vomit from the funfair:

While outside the bustling metropolis that is Killorglin, bucolia awaited:

Until it was time for me to fly* sadly home, fatter but not necessarily wiser.

*Metaphorically. I actually got the train and ferry. 

How was your summer?

Say cheese…

Rather shockingly, I've won this month's Guardian travel photography competition, on the theme of solitude. Shocking because lots of the other shortlisted entries are stunning, and because I almost never travel, and certainly nowhere 'exotic'. I go to Ireland several times a year, and to Stoke-on-Trent most weeks.

(Click to enlarge the photos)

I can only see the shot's flaws now, but I'm still pleased with it. The girl's hair matches the paintwork, and the different lighting emphasises her isolation. I never use flash or tricky post-production nonsense: this was taken with a 50mm f/1.8 at 1/200, 1600 ISO on my Nikon D7000.

I took it at 1 a.m. at the famous Puck Fair in Killorglin, Ireland. Out of shot, 10,000 drunks are marauding round the streets singing, drinking and celebrating, while a wild goat presides over the festivities from the safety of a tower. I was interested in the aftermath - you can see from my set that the place is trashed, though by 6 a.m. the streets are pristine once more and ready for the child-friendly daytime activities. I've a taste for garish fun sometimes - a couple of years ago I took my old camera to Birds' Funfair at Puck and was pleased with the results despite having very limited technical resources.

The lad demanded I take his picture, then his sister arrived to tell him that I 'might be a paedo' and promised me a beating if I was. She still wanted her picture taking though. 

Live footage of people up on some horrific ride. It reminded me of something from David Lynch. 

The next competition's theme is 'beach'. I don't go to many beaches, but I was thinking of submitting one of these. 

The beach at Formby/Crosbie near Liverpool has these Anthony Gormley statues all over it, at different depths of water or in the sand. People do funny things to them, like paint on swimming trunks, dress them up as James Bond and so on: high art becomes folk art (see them here). They're also ageing beautifully, covered in rust and algae. But they're so familiar now (one was entered for the competition I won) that it's hard to photograph them in a new way. So I was pleased to find this family camped around a rusty naked gentleman even though the beach was almost deserted. The sun was blazing, so I decided that I could emphasise both the heat and their isolation by opening up the aperture to its maximum, flooding the image with light and losing all the background detail.

My other options are more traditional landscape shots, taken from another spot near Liverpool: Hilbre Island off the Wirral peninsula. At low tide, the sea becomes a mud flat, sometimes even a beach, and you can walk out to the islands. The weather changes every few minutes and the light is wonderful.

What could be more English than this? 'Trudging slowly over wet sand' in the rain towards a coastal town they forgot to close down, whose most prominent building is a Morrison's supermarket?

Which one do you think I should enter?

Get Pucked…

Hi Everyone. I'd like to say it's an enormous pleasure to be back… but that would be a big fat lie. To some extent, anyway. I was back in the office on Friday but spent the whole day reading 600 emails, one of which accused me of failing a student for 'being Chinese' which obviously made my day. Given that the marking was anonymous and the dissertation plagiarised, I think my defence is fairly solid.

Anyway, before I get back into my standard rant/work/politics paradigm, I thought I'd share some of my favourite photos of the holiday with you. I know this is no better than physically demanding that any visitors to the office sit there and view every snap of What I Did On My Holidays, but you might like some of them. And if you don't, you can go here, though you may never leave.

My Irish holiday fell naturally into a few core activities. After a stop-off in Dublin to pay homage to the Messiah (i.e. my sister's newborn son) it was off to Co. Kerry in the far South-West. I read a lot: the luxury of three quality newspapers – on paper – every day (the Irish Times, the Irish Examiner and the Guardian) and a pile of books. I can thoroughly recommend Nick Barlay's downbeat urban morality tale Hooky Gear, which convinced me to read all his others; Ian Samson's amusing and informed but resolutely unstylish The Norfolk Mystery; Martin Green's amazing cultural history of the interwar period Children of the Sun even though it also infuriated me: thoroughly fixated on an aristocratic coterie and completely incapable of differentiating between 'England' and 'Britain'; Cory Doctorow's Pirate Cinema which was difficult to read. I agreed with everything it has to say about technology, new media, copyright and so on, but the plot's full of holes and it's little more than agit-prop. Endless pages of expository dialogue ('So Parliament works like this, right…'). You can download it for free here, though I read it on dead trees. Gordon's huge account of Emily Dickinson's family feuds, Lives Like Loaded Guns, was astonishing and addictive, even though her writing tends towards the Mills and Boon. I distrust any biographer who deploys ! all over the place. The scholarship is superb though, and I can honestly say that I was surprised at the amount of polysexual orgies going on in 1880s New England. I'll be going back to Dickinson with wider eyes, I can tell you. I thought I might run out of reading material so I slowed down for the last few days and came back with Patrick Hamilton's grimy Hangover Square unread. Once I've finished Robert McCrum's Jubilee, I'll get on with that one.

When I wasn't reading and eating enormous amounts of Proper Irish Dinners, I wandered around the countryside, swam in what 2000AD readers will know as The Black Atlantic (some wimps were wearing wetsuits!), took part in the revels of Puck Fair, which celebrated its 400+ anniversary (it's probably much older than that but documents only go back as far – predictably – as the British arrival and takeover. This year featured a gymkhana, a horse fair, a huge parade, the Crowning of a goat as King Puck, a funfair and of course several days of mass inebriation. In short, a photographer's dream. The only shots I chose not to take were of the Traveller community. They're a superb group of people: culturally independent, proud and confident. They dress, especially the women, really distinctively, without any concern for anybody else's attitudes. I'd loved to have photographed them, but they're so harassed and despised by settled communities that it would be very easy to upset them, or just seem incrediby patronising and I didn't want to objectify them. Or get beaten up by stealing sneaky shots. Thankfully, Puck has no shortage of other great faces and photogenic events.

After Puck, the main event was a trip to the remote, dangerous and atmospheric Skellig Islands. I'll post night shots of Puck and the Skelligs in the next entry. Meanwhile, here are some pictures of Puck Fair. Click on them to enlarge and see the whole lot here.

One of the delights of the horse fair is seeing loads of really young kids riding around on their prides and joy, like city kids in BMWs.

The main Kerry to Cork road

Is this a Dragonfly or something else?

See the insect at the bottom of this bramble

I haven't touched the colour: its eye is naturally the same as the plastic sacks

Little did this busker know she'd be 'assisted' by the oul' fella.

The identical stances are what caught my eye.

I like donkeys. 

'I've got a horse outside'. 

I also have a horse outside

For three days a year, Chilled Cans is a fully functioning pub, despite being derelict inside

The girl on the left really makes this shot

King Puck on the way to being Crowned

The King surveys his temporary realm. After 3 days, he's released back into the wild.

I can imagine this man swilling port and beating the peasantry in about 1810