Glad they have decreed to begin un-lockdowning.
Not going out was problematic, and hiding diabetic medicine inside bags of Jelly Babies in the amusing, if self destructive, game of glycaemic lucky dip did little to help ease the gloom.
Yet, as I emerge blinking into the sunshine, I am greeted by conspicuous fitness, the trend for exercise, that illness of good health with a self obsessed Nordic quest for bodily perfection. All those wobbly grimaces of sweating lycra clad humans. It's not natural. For heaven's sake, make it stop.
I will flaunt my excesive fat, bad teeth, grey hair, baldness and less than perfect skin. My body is a steadily failing structure whose sole purpose is supporting a brain and the two eyes that sprout from the holes in my pressure cooker skull, like the fruiting orbs of an indeterminate fungus they glow white amid the leaf litter and dog turds, and like any good turd, my body is fat in the middle and thinner at the ends for very good reason.
On my walk through the woods, laughing audibly at those joggers alternating between imminent collapse and the gratuitous fingering of smartphones, I basked in the glory of Spring as it takes hold of things, buds, sprouts of green softening bony fingertips and the carpet of wild Garlic whose evocative aroma excels at taking me to other places and happy memories. While the trees are still bare you can see arboreal relationships, trunks standing close, rubbing along in touching embraces and slow encounters.
Photography is about slowing down, stopping and seeing.
As my friend Tim put it; "We notice these little changes. That's care. That's being maximally human."
My images were shot using 35mm Ilford FP4+, a Minolta SRT and a Rokkor 135mm lens.