Its difficult when you fall behind. There is so much in the world. So much that seems trivial but may very well take on greater import later on. I remember being sat down by my mother when I was 9 or so, to write a letter to a friend my age. He and his family had moved to Zambia for a few years and this was to be my first letter to him. I wrote that I was chewing gum at the time, that the chair I was sitting in was hard and other mundane sorts of things. My mum was not very approving of this (sorry mum!) and I had to re-write the letter and say other things. I forget what those other things were, but probably had to do with what school was like, my teachers and friends – how my sisters were. That sort of thing. But it remains my memory of that event that I was truer to myself and my friend when I wrote about the things that seemed important to me right at that moment. This is how it should have been recorded, too.

It is the minutiae of daily life in archeological excavation that often proves so interesting. I once held a recently-uncovered clay oil-lamp, made in the second Iron Age, and on turning it over felt my thumb slide into place on the bottom – directly into the thumb-spot the maker had pressed when the clay was soft. I could even feel his millenia-old thumbprint-ridges. It sent shivers down my spine and I loved the smallness and bigness of that experience. If the maker had smoothed over the bottom I would not have had the experience so many thousand years later (Iron Age 2: 6thC BC to the 3rdC AD). In a similar vein, I sort of hope that Owen or Finn will unearth all the thousands of images either Carrie or I took before we met each other and during their own upbringing. My father gave me (a number of years ago now) all the BW negatives he had from before he emigrated to Canada and then some of when he and my mother first met. What a treat they are to pour over! What interested him enough to take picture? How did he see the world – in portrait or landscape fashion? Did he take several pictures of the same thing from different angles?

Here are a few images from recent days: