Re-photographing from the computer screen a small detail of a badly scanned version of WG Sebald’s photocopied image of a photograph of herring fishermen in Lowestoft. I had to dash out for a meeting. It was raining heavily, the first time for a good while. I grabbed someone else’s raincoat. Curiously, when I got back I couldn’t find my camera. No-one had been there. Had I taken it with me? Had it slipped out of the flimsy pockets of the jacket? I didn’t think so. Three days of looking high and low, the workshop was in a shambles. Still no camera. Grrr.
I bite the bullet, trudge over to the Police Station. In the queue ahead of me, a man was attempting to get his passport photograph signed. Kafkaesque logic meant that he couldn’t get his plane back to his home without someone validating the picture. Just as I was to be called to the counter a young mother marched in demanding that the police arrest her daughter, who she had locked in her car outside. This took fifteen minutes whilst everyone signed the relevant paper work and looked for keys to the cells, and then her car. Another person rushed in, couldn’t stop, with a completely different set of keys, found in the next street. More paperwork. More confusion.
My turn. Had anyone brought in my black, shoot and snap digital camera? The receptionist laughed cheerily, tapped the few details I had given. “yes, sir, we have it here, someone will bring it up for you.” Unbelievable. “Fantastic. Thank-you”. When I left ten minutes later I floated through the mother/child/police dispute that was flaring outside. The sun was shining, a lovely spring day was bursting forth.
