A write up of who, what, why, starts this week.
I am writing up a long but always spontaneous series of ramblings over the last five years. I have photographed and recorded what i like most: the incongruities. And in fact they are rarer than one may assume. Never specific to any individual location or even region.
There has always been a mission - to perhaps encounter like minds. Perhaps that has failed, certainly in any permanently meaningful way. But the journey perhaps was the prize.
My time on trying discover what rural really is, is a tribute to the man, twelve years feeding the worms (which would make him happy) who gave me for over a decade of my childhood and youth the only true gift there is - time. Endlessly nattering about the balance of nature and sometimes the obvious imbalance in the human natural histories of those around the land we both worked on together. He was not born in the countryside but in the near forty years since those days I have met only very very few people who understand functional peace and centredness in modest rural existence yet in fact endless curiosity in the world further afar, as that man. Ralph. I was lucky to have him as the one who took me under his huge gentle wing for nearly ten years. Shelter from the storm of the average middle class nonsense melodrama raging at times in my own particular family home in those years. It has been a longheld wish of mine to simply describe him to my own now adult child. This isn't about the past, it is about now. I have known no other greater person. I wish that any younger person growing up in the countryside may have their own Ralph..... amongst many things he taught me how to fix almost anything.
