from an old diary, circa 2003

I arrived at the bus-stop and took a seat on the bench beside an elderly gent. He was immaculately dressed in an old-fashioned suit, blue-striped shirt and a gold satin paisley cravat. He turned to me with what I believe was an amiable grin, but it was hard to tell: his teeth were brown and broken, his face cracked, scabbed and warty, and the underlying muscle structure seemed to have collapsed lopsidedly. When he spoke, his tone was cultured, but he said everything at least twice.

“Dog’s colour was buff, so what did they call her? Buffy!” Some of his speech was incomprehensible, but I played along, being friendly. He chuckled wetly, or maybe it was a cough.

“Dog raisers, they were. Dog was buff, so they called her Buffy!” I touched his shoulder.

“Is that your bus?”

Jaqi by Terry Biggenden

FERNS 1 by Terry Biggenden

Originally uploaded by Illuminata

I’m just faffing around on the pooter, and one thing I was overdue to do (I think I’m overdue to do pretty much everything I do by the time I actually do it; it’s some kind of galactic time conspiracy; Douglas Adams would understand) was to update my blog address in my Flickr account details. I haven’t blogged a picture from my Flickr photo site since I moved to WordPress, and that’s far too long. So here’s a pic from my latest photo shoot.

An accomplished fine art photographer, Terry saw images of me by Peter Crowfoot on another photo-sharing site, and asked Peter to put us in touch. Terry was looking for someone to make a day trip with him to the abandoned maltworks at Mittagong, a couple of hours out of Sydney. I was up for it. We got some beautiful images that day – several different spots around the site, and enough unexplored to make another trip not out of the question. If you want to see more, the link to Flickr is in the left column, down low.

There’s a colour version of this shot too, which some viewers (howdy, James) prefer, though I like the restrained classicism of the sepia. The sunlight on the ferns does glow rather gloriously in the colour version, I have to admit. There are more images still to come from this very successful shoot, as Terry processes them. But I’ll try and ornament my blog with pictures that aren’t always of me without my clothes, if only to save my father’s feelings :)