Daily Photos No. 36: A Beard

My friend Neal grew a beard for a while. It rather suited him. These shots proved rather popular on Flickr amongst gentlemen who prefer a hirsute gentleman.

The aesthetic is a mix of Flashman, regimental boxer, or archaeologist about to desecrate another culture's holy places. The straw hat is much missed, the book is a gorgeous 1930s translation of Dafydd ap Gwilym, the poster in the background is a Soviet one marking ten years since Gagarin's first flight (purchased from the wonderful Left on the Shelf) and the glasses are the model's own. In what may be disappointing news to some of you, he is married.

Daily Photos No. 35: At the European Championships

I can't honestly remember what I was doing at the Euros in Sheffield, 2011. Definitely something: I have the polyester tracksuit to prove it, but whether it was refereeing, team management or welfare I have no clue. I blame the armourers' very competitive travelling whiskey society for the blanks in my recall. I certainly didn't win any medals, that's for sure.

Anyway, there I was and I must have had plenty of time to wander around with my camera. A couple of things come to mind. I very much enjoyed watching a distant cousin on the Irish team destroy the highly-fancied (by themselves) British senior foilists, and I got up close to top-level wheelchair fencing for the first time. It's brutal. The chairs are fixed in a frame locked to the floor so the athletes are in hitting distance at all times. In ambulant fencing you can step out of the way to take a breather and regroup: in wheelchair fencing there's no escape at all. You can rock back and forth a bit, but otherwise you're exposed at all times. The bladework is ridiculously fast. I've tried wheelchair fencing a few times since and it's not for me: I'm just not good enough.

The rather sickening side of photographing the wheelchair competition was subsequently noticing that those shots were viewed by thousands more people than the rest. Delving into the usernames and their histories, it became clear that there's a thriving population of fetishists who get off on amputation. Ugh.

Anyway - this was me playing with higher-speed shots and looking for character and reaction. I got better.

Fencing has had VAR for quite some time. There's nothing worse as a ref than hearing the audience groan when they see a replay you haven't and you know you've got it wrong. 

Self-reproach

Self-congratulation

Laurence Halsted - very much one of the good guys

Halsted lands one

Halsted celebrates

Rigine attacks

Unorthodox

A fléche, parried

An aerial attack

Victory and defeat

Cassara v Avola, men's foil final

Cassara attacks into Avola's preparation (don't @ me, new-style referees)

Avola wins

Daily Photos no. 34: In the Cathedral Close

As a child, holidays meant being locked outside the house in the rain from sunrise to sunset, varied by the occasional trip to stand in the Irish rain. Occasionally we would be allowed inside, as long as the chosen building was a church. Preferably Catholic but, if not, then one built by Catholics and subsequently half-inched by the forces of evil our Protestant friends. I have vivid memories of standing on a bleak airport runway to see the Pope's plane touch down a mere mile away, while my sisters whiled away eight happy hours in full Parisian summer sun to see the Popemobile drive past. My boss similarly recalls a family holiday touring every single Catholic shrine between New York and the Canadian border (his mother also told him that she'd rather visit a ruined Catholic establishment than one in current use by the kind of people who keep their toasters in cupboards). More shrines than anyone would guess, apparently.

Driving that the apple doesn't fall from the tree, all my holidays as an independent adult are to Ireland and I still enjoy visiting cathedrals – I like the architecture and the music, though I find the imperial history very hard to take. I've read too much Betjeman and Trollope not to enjoy visiting them despite their deeply problematic cultural positions. St. Patrick's in Dublin is particularly weird: all the union jacks and memorials to men dying in the service of enslaving the globe that you'd expect in England, with no hint at all that Ireland's been (mostly) independent for a century.

Anyway, I dropped into Lichfield Cathedral one afternoon in 2011. It's an interesting town - an old cathedral built on the site of a much older ecclesiastical and national headquarters in Anglo-Saxon times, and one which was battered in the Reformation and civil war, then quietly faded from history since Johnson left. There's an excellent cheese shop, and Erasmus Darwin's house and herbal garden are rather wonderful. Since that visit I've been back a few times and through the good offices of the university's chaplain, have started thinking about ways my English department can work with the Cathedral. And not just to get my hands on its ancient library of unique manuscripts. Not at all. One of the greatest artistic experiences of my life was there: sitting at the back of the cathedral behind a screen as darkness fell, while Philip Glass himself performed at the festival - he played well beyond his allotted time, then hung around afterwards talking to anyone who stayed on.

Samuel Johnson is watching you

Erasmus Darwin

I told you I like patterns

A biblical wall-painting subsequently white-washed in the Reformation

Welcome to Historic Lichfield

Daily Photos no 33: Stoke-on-Trent (part 1)

Stoke's an endlessly interesting city, as nobody ever says. It was at the forefront of the industrial revolution, thanks the presence of coal and clay (steel production came and went later), while the ceaseless efforts of the ceramic kings like Wedgwood meant it was – for the first and last time - super-connected to the transport infrastructure of the day: canals. Drawing in workers from the surrounding countryside, the city became a place of unremittingly grim labour producing work of astonishing beauty - a largely Methodist population laboured down the mines or under the kilns, breathing in a toxic, choking fog and yet their work graced the tables of the aristocracy and the humble throughout the world. Many of native Arnold Bennett's fascinating novels reflect the proletarian and lower-middle class Potters' struggles, while George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier and JB Priestley's English Journey reflect their sympathetic horror at the gap between everyday life and the beauty that emerged from the Six Towns (Bennett forgot Fenton: in return, the city's original  memorial got his dates wrong).

You come across monstrous clay chasms hundreds of feet across and almost as deep, with little rusty tubs creeping on chain railways up one side, and on the other, workmen clinging like samphire-gatherers and cutting into the face of the cliff with their picks. I passed that way in snowy weather and even the snow was black. The best thing one can say for the pottery towns is that they are fairly small and stop abruptly. (The Road To Wigan Pier)

Priestley was even more scathing, and yet he had some empathy for the inhabitants.

This is no region to idle in… not a place designed to comfort and compensate… I do not know what Nature originally made of it, because nearly all signs of her handiwork have been obliterated. But man, who has been very thorough here, has not made of it anything that remotely resembles and inland resort. For a man of the Potteries, it must be either work or misery… as a district to do anything but work in, it has nothing to recommend it.

…it is extremely ugly… I have seen few regions from which Nature has been banished more ruthlessly, and banished only in favour of a sort of troglodyte mankind. Civilised man, except in his capacity as a working potter, has not arrived here yet… Their excellent services of buses… simply take you from one absence of civic dignity to another… these differences are minute when compared with the awful gap between the whole lot of them and any civilised urban region. 

… the general impression is of an exceptionally mean, dingy provinciality, of Victorian industrialism in its dirtiest and most cynical aspect. 

In short, the Potteries are not worthy of the Potter… if you are not working there, if the depression in America or the triumphant competition of the cut-price countries has thrown you out, then God help you, for nothing that you will see or hear or smell in these six towns will raise your spirits. 

And he has the grace to acknowledge that the proles aren't mere passive recipients of patronising concern:

I smoked a pipe with one of their Trade Union officials, a good solid chap ('Oh, we often read you round here', he declared, 'and sometimes we'd like to give you one on the nose'). English Journey. 

Priestley mentions something that all Stoke inhabitants do wherever they are – if you see someone doing this anywhere in the world, be sure to shout ' 'Iya duck' or 'Ey, youth'.

When I dine out, I often turn the plates over and see who has made them.

I took these pictures in 2001 at a canal fair, one of those events that melds nostalgia for a better past with a kind of desperate optimism: that doing anything is better than doing nothing.

Stoke's been abandoned by capitalism and the state in any meaningful way. Coal, steel and mass manufacture pottery have long since gone and the political class of all persuasions has given absolutely no thought to what to do with a population that can't live on selling lattes to each other. There are a few large potteries left but they're on the way out, and only the Wedgwood line that starts at £500 for a saucer is made in the suburbs, but skilled mass employment and the traditions that went with them such as trades unionism, civic pride, socialism (briefly replaced by the BNP and now obsessed with Getting Brexit Done) and hope are things of the past. The respiratory problems have gone too, but poverty and its associated evils have taken their place, alongside low wage service jobs and of course Bet365, which employs thousands, owns Stoke City and paid its owner £323 million this year – in one of the poorest places in Western Europe. I don't think the Methodist city fathers would have been keen on that.

There's a lot to like about Stoke, which is why I'm back there frequently, often with my camera. The people are friendly, the dialect is rich, the oatcakes and pikelets are delicious, there are great musicians (Havergal Brian, Slash, Lemmy and, er, Robbie Williams) and few other places have specialist burglars who know their Clarice Cliff from their Doulton.

Daily photos no. 32: Lines and lines and lines and sheep?

These are from a spring walk in Cheshire with my friend Hannah. The railway lines are there because I like geometric shapes amidst the variation of nature - I suspect it's why I like the most repetitive minimalist music too.



But there is a softer side to me, hence the bluebells and sheep. The cat decided to take on the entire flock, and pretty much immediately regretted that decision but tried to style it out anyway.

While I'm here: some book talk. Lisa McInerney's The Blood Miracles was a bloody, darkly funny, tale of Corkonian low-life which also managed to be rather moving. Naoise Dolan's Exciting Times was a shorter, sharper tale of a young Irish woman finding herself, largely in opposition to the English toff with whom she has a spiky sort of undefined affair, and the woman she eventually plucks up the courage to be with. It's all done in first-person narrative which I often find hugely irritating, but it's beautifully done here: Ava gradually becomes more honest with herself and with us. There are also a lot of jokes at the expense of unchecked upper-class English privilege abroad, and about the differences between English English and Hiberno-English. I wolfed down a collection of PG Wodehouse short stories, Young Men in Spats - formulaic but very funny, and there was a sharp interesting one parodying the idealistic young toffs who discover proletarian socialism that may find a way into a journal article one day. For now though, I'm on Mike Davis and Jon Wiener's enormous history of Los Angeles' protest movements Set The Night On Fire and it's inspiring. I'd never heard of Sister Corita before, and now I want her paintings on my walls.