Failures

“I went down Mrs Groundhog’s hole just now and poked her in case she wanted to come out and look for her shadow but she told me to go away.”

“In a most offensive way!”

Here in the north-east we have brilliant sunshine so Punxsutawney saw his shadow which is supposed to mean 6 more weeks of winter but up here that is expected. Although it is very cold, in bright sun the air today feels refreshing, invigorating!

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Having passed up the previous offer of an excursion, I decided yesterday to accept it.

Two refusals in a row, unheard of.

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Glad tidings. The Lakota’s Farm horses are back.

You’ll have to take my word for it as they were out of sight by the time I lifted the camera.

Lakota Farm is also known as The Wedding Barn. We always wave to those horses but their barn had been obviously empty for some weeks.

We don’t like it when our friends disappear.

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Apart from a few flurries there has been no more snow lately, but with temperatures remaining frigid, the countryside will retain its pale complexion for the time being.

The hills and fields are pretty but roadsides in towns are a muddy mess with icy spots.

The latter, I will concede, is not desirable.

And neither is the heating bill.

But I still prefer Winter.

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Taking the cross-country route to Greenwich, we turned off to get away from a vehicle that dared to follow us which led to us doing another back-to-front sort of journey.

That is to say we took a road in the opposite direction than usual.

It didn’t half look different, especially under snow.

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Some might call it bleak. I find it beautiful.

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Despite being driven the wrong way round, I was able to re-orient myself and for once prepared to take a photograph that I somehow always forget until its too late, nothing very exciting, just a line of trees that pleases me.

So what happened? As the trees hove into sight, the camera jammed. Again.

Got called a rude name. Again.

Every time there is a picture I particularly wish to capture:

“Turn the camera off and on again”

This has happened so often now I can’t believe it is coincidence, so I can only assume that the Universe is trying to tell me – what?

Probably that I don’t deserve to own a camera, although the rotten thing functions perfectly most of the time.

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It isn’t just this camera that plays me up, however.

Forty years ago when in Tibet, one of the things I particularly wanted a picture of was a yak.

It never occurred to me that yaks would be hard to come by in Tibet, but we were on the road for days before we saw one and that was the only moment when my camera failed.

There was another infamous occasion when I took a whole roll of photos at the Red Fort in New Delhi, back before the blessing of digital photography.

After I had clicked the shutter what seemed like 3 dozen times, I got a sinking feeling in my stomach. At the end of a roll of film, you couldn’t wind it on anymore, yet the lever kept rotating all the way.

In that instance, the problem was entirely incompetence of the photographer. How I could have failed to re-load the camera, I’ve no idea.

There had been so many colourful and interesting images in my viewfinder.

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Many more years ago, when we lived in Asia, my mother owned a Minox camera, a tiny “spy camera” that she carried in her handbag. Each roll of film took 50 photographs, as I recall.

When we went home on leave, my parents liked to stop en-route, so Mum took a lot of pictures but one time when she got them developed they were almost all blacked out. A tiny piece of film had somehow got loose and stuck in the lens.

So perhaps that is another quirk I inherited!

Photographic failures are annoying but not worth fretting about.

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