Due to only having enough chemicals to cover 35mm film, not 120, I eventually had to send this to Peak Imaging for processing. The delay in popping this in the post meant that there’s been a strange hiatus between taking these photos and adding them here. In terms of writing about them this isn’t good. My mood has changed. I’ve been really busy making myself a website at last, and sorting out some Instagram snaps for an exhibition at Brewdog in Leicester – plus all the other delights things that having two jobs and two kids entails.
Anyway, anyone who’s seen my Instagram stream will know that I’m not that keen on where I live. A trail of photos entitled ‘Leicestershire: A Difficult Place to Love’ has most likely pissed off anyone who believes that Leicestershire is the bees knees.
Week 11 saw me heading to Watermead Park – basically wasteland, sandwiched between a few overgrown villages that reaches almost into the city itself. The reasons for not really liking this place go on and on – in the last year my visits have been marred by me being hassled, meeting quite a scared runner who’d warned me away from an area from which she’d just been harrassed, giant clouds of gnats, floods, the vast amount of litter that hangs from the trees and the river banks after the floods and a path being closed whilst a poor woman was fished out of a lake. Add that to my slight apprehension some years ago as a man with an entire spider web face tattoo appeared out of the mist one dawn and the traditional drowning of dog owners whenever the lakes ice over, then it’s a pretty grim place to hang out. It’s not the first time I’ve taken pics here – a previous lot included a dead fox, a loo seat and a sodden stuffed hippo. The weir quite often harbours a bizarre catch of ghee oil drums and coconuts. And on my last visit I nearly trod on a condom.
But it’s within walking distance and vaguely countrysidey. It isn’t countryside of course. It’s flooded gravel pits, but I’ll take it.
And sometimes – just sometimes – it can feel like an escape.
This blog was first published on 52rolls.net
