The New Year Message

The New Year message on this weblog column is directed to photographers who may not have. I urge you to. If you leave it until the end of 2016 the chance will be gone and you will always regret it. Of course you will regret trying the shrimp cocktail in a service station in Arkansas but for an entirely different reason…

You must either go out and buy it or not, because it will or won’t make all the difference. Whichever course of action you adopt, make sure that you get the papers and read them.

You will be advised by a number of publications that cost $ 14.95 to pursue your dreams. This is in spite of the fact that you cannot remember your dreams five minutes after you get out of bed and are standing in the shower. That is not the point – the publishers of Australian Photo Wannabee magazine pursued theirs – they dreamed that you would give them $ 14.95 –  and you did.

A publisher of free advice, such as the writer of this weblog column, will also achieve his ambitions if you read the thing. You needn’t do as he says, but the fact that you have clicked on it does register somewhere in the WordPress statistics mill and provides a warm glow of pride. And the thought that somewhere out there someone is sharpening a dagger or poisoning a pudding because of it.

There will be more. There always is more, except in the case of the English cleric who angered the sovereign and was murdered for his temerity. Then he was no More.

One final point – the Fussbook account to which this blog is automatically linked is a sometimes affair – sometimes it lets my comments on other people’s troubles go through and sometimes it doesn’t. I think they read my stuff and press a “reject” button and I am excluded from the conversation. One of the perils of Fussbook. But I’m happy to say that it does not seem to provide them with the same facility when it comes to the weblog posts. These all go through – if not to the keeper, at least to the trash can.