When I was seventeen I started work for the grand salary of thirteen pounds a month. Feeble recompense, even in those days; but somehow I managed to save some cash and eventually bought my first camera, a Russian-made Zenit-E for the sum of seventeen pounds. It was an agricultural monster of an SLR, with a mirror that would make the room (and the photo) shake every time you pressed the shutter. But it was mine and I had paid for it and many rolls of film passed through its sprockets until it died and was melted down to make a tractor.

After that, I had Canon SLRs for most of my adult life. Come the digital revolution I bought a Canon 300D and then a move to a 30D when I retired. Then everything got a little out of hand.

I used to enjoy shooting sports, and soon people started offering me money to shoot sports in various locations. As the money came in I started to upgrade my gear, and by 2009 I was up to a Canon 1D and a load of lenses. A trip to shoot a round of the Indian Rally Championship found me checking in for my flight with fifteen kilos of camera and (some of my) lenses in a rucksack. Fortunately, nobody bothered to check the weight of my carry-on baggage, they just assumed that I always walked as if I had a sack of coal on my back. Holiday trips with she who must be obeyed found me hauling similar weights around the place; just ridiculous.

Then, in December 2009, I bought this:

One of the questions I am asked most often is “How do you amuse yourself whilst sitting on the toilet?” The other frequently asked question is “Why do you invent questions that nobody has ever asked you?”.

The answer to the first question used to be “Angry Birds”; but now it is W.E.L.D.E.R.; to be known in future as Welder because it is a bugger to type all those full stops in the right place.

As we all don’t know, W.E.L.D.E.R. (damn, I had to do it again) stands for Word Examination Laboratory for Dynamic Extraction and Reassessment. Which means nothing. But it’s an excuse for the game to make machinery type noises which you soon turn off as you spend your time forming (sorry, welding) words.

But if you forget the stupid title and the sounds, Welder is a time-consuming slice of genius.

You start with a Scrabble style board and move letters around to form words. The first few levels are easier enough, but the word count required gets higher and the moves available become shorter, and new types of tile are introduced. Red tiles can’t be moved by you, but will fall if you clear words underneath them. Brown, broken tiles (also known as “complete bastard tiles” by aficionados) cannot be moved at all, and words formed beneath them result in useless spaces, like this:

She who must be obeyed was in a quizzical mood this morning.

What do you hope for in the new year?

To be alive by the end of it. And to spend the year with you of course (excellent additional answer I thought). Oh, and to get this evening over with.

It’s a long time since I drank a crate of Newcastle Brown Ale and regurgitated the lot over my parent’s favourite sofa. It’s almost as long since I got drunk (Newcastle Brown again) and told my mother’s best friend I was in love with her before throwing up over her hair. Happy days.

Somewhat weary after three days of photographing horses and now faced with a couple of thousand images to process. But then I find shots like this and it’s all worthwhile.

Spacefruit is an excellent chap. This much is evident from the fact that he commissioned two books of photographs from me; for which I am very grateful.

His tastes in fine things extend from photographs to chocolate, and he recently returned from the UK with a large box of Flakes. When he complained that he was ballooning due to excess Flake consumption, I did the decent thing and offered to take some off his hands; “some” being about twenty flakes. Now I am growing.

However, I really must request that next time he comes back to Thailand with a catering size box, the carton he supplied was a bit of a squeeze for the cats.

There is a very nice lady I know who has recently had a baby. My personal opinion of all babies is that they should be locked away in a cupboard until they are old enough to control their bowels and maintain a civilised conversation; but I appear to be in the minority. Most people like to take their babies everywhere, so that all may share the endless drooling and frequent howling; and this requires a substantial support system including a pram, nappies, food, post-poo change of clothes for baby, post-vomit change of clothes for mummy, towels, headache pills and goodness knows what else.

Oh, and a camera. It is important that every moment of baby’s life is captured, especially the embarrassing bits, so that the photos can be used to amuse future boy/girlfriends.

And my friend had a problem. In fact she had two problems but she only expressed the first one; “how can I take photos of my baby and have the background out of focus?”

It’s good that she asked me this question because one along the lines of “when do you think he will start teething?” would not have elicited a response. But throwing a background out of focus is something I know a little about.

I explained that she needed a lens with a wide aperture, around F2, so that she could have a narrow depth of field and therefore a blurry background (don’t understand? Go here). And then we looked at her camera. She has a chunky black DSLR with an even chunkier monster telephoto lens stuck on the front. The aperture was F5.6 and worse, which is why her backgrounds were more sharp than she would like. But one had to wonder what the point was of carrying round this substantial piece of kit just to photograph her child, when her arms were already full with baby and the attendant life support system. And that was her second problem; she was stuck with a heavy sports camera when all she needed was something light to take baby photos.

I had the answer. “You need a portrait lens with an F stop of F2 or better.” “I do?” “And the lens you need is the Olympus 45mm F1.8. Small, light and perfect for portraits” “Sounds great, I’ll get that!” “Just one problem.” “What?” “You will need a new camera to stick the lens on.” “Oh.”

Still, her interest was piqued, her husband was listening, and he took me to one side and gave me a pile of cash to go shopping. I made my choice and she got this for Xmas:

Apparently it’s Christmas, a day I have managed to mainly disregard for many years. Lunch was my usual plate of noodles and I was planning something equally festive for this evening. However, fate intervened when I received this from the creator of PattayaDaze:

Taking a photo of a cat wearing a hat is no easy undertaking. Especially with our cats.

Cat 1: Tiki - Feisty, inquisitive, involved, behaves more like a dog and does not take shit from anyone, especially someone wanting to put something on her head. Attempts to introduce her to a floppy Xmas hat were rejected with extreme prejudice.

Yesterday I had to get up early and drag myself to Bangkok. Felt like death driving there, and after a frustrating six hour condo management committee meeting, and then driving back; I felt even more like death and retired to bed in a state of complete exhaustion with added coughing.

This morning I awoke at 0800 feeling substantially refreshed and, for the first time in a week, in the mood to actually do something. Luckily, my return to life coincided with a day off work for she who must be obeyed; so when she suggested we go and photograph some dried squid, I happily said “yes”, rather than coming out with a more obvious “why?”.

This dry squid outing has been on the cards for a while and I know not why; but off we went and eventually found a place with tonnes of squid and a few kilos of fish laid out in the sun to dry.