Can anyone else smell that?

“So how’s it going folks?!”

It appears I’ve stumbled into the ever-present world of blogging. As guided by my college lecturer I am here trying to think of something innovative or interesting to talk or ‘blog’ about. My view on blogging in its purist, non-Facebook, form was as Elliott Gould   (M*A*S*H) summed it up, “Blogging is Graffiti with punctuation”. Now perhaps this gentleman’s archaic view on this new medium of self expression, promotion and publication is as dated as an Elvis fan’s view on emerging Punk in the early 80’s. However, as new and strange as it is to me that someone actually gave a notion as to what my daily thoughts and observations for the day were, this is something I’ll have to embrace and tackle head-on as well as a Ayrshire Lad can. I come from an area where you would wake up to the sound of kids breaking into cars and the smell of dairy cow-shit  from the adjacent fields.

I live in Ireland, and have done on and off, for around ten years. I first stayed in a small tourist town in the West of Ireland and because of tourism seasonality ie, everyone left after summer and I was bored to tears, I’m now living in Dublin in the East. By weaving in and out of various Catering/ Hospitality roles, travelling the seven seas on the QE2 and even working in a vineyard in South Africa I’ve realised that there was only one common factor to my nostalgia when I look back. The very medium which has triggered the ‘going back to college education’ and therefore the very reason why I’m writing this blog now. Photography.

Curiosity has always driven me to explore new areas whether its Geographical or Coffee Shop Sociological. I travelled extensively throughout South East Asia on motorbikes, Hiked through Scotland and Ireland on boot and drank my way through most of the Western Cape’s vineyards on bicycle. Nothing entertains me more than sitting in a coffee shop sending tourists the wrong way up temple bar and watching as the rest of the world walks by. I love trying to hazard a guess as to what everyone is up to, perhaps conceiving world domination plans or how they spoke Espressonese before Starbucks made it cool ( or mandatory, as one College Professor found out the hard way).

By watching the world and its people I’ve developed a need to record or capture everything around me and my camera is the best tool I have to do this. I’m terrified that one day I’ll forget all these characters as I get older, incidently the reason my Grandmother keeps a box of photos beside the bed, and as such I’ve the compulsion to record everything for fear of memory loss.

Anyway I’ll knuckle down and hopefully nail this blogging medium, first to keep up to speed with the rest of the blogging world and secondly, to pass the blogging class.