Five Six Seventy

I could never comfortably call myself a musician. I can at best clumisly string a few chords together into something that is just about recognisable, most successfully if I don’t even try and think about the lyrics, but this ebay listing recently caught my eye and I was quicky overcome by a desire to own this peculiar looking thing.

More years than I care to think about, at the height of the UK small press comics boom of the 1990s, I self published one issue of a fanzine called Algol. Back then I had plans for doing more, but for one reason or another it wasn’t to be and so the continuing adventures of the Galactic Liberation Squad never got off the ground. Fortunately I had the foresight of presenting the final episode as the first and so there is an element of closure at least.

Photography has been a big part of my life, especially after I got my hands on a half decent digital camera for the first time around twenty years ago. Before this I had an array of film cameras starting with an extremely basic 110 in the 70s, a seemingly flashy but appallingly bad disc camera in the early 80s and then my first SLR in the shape of a Praktica MTL50 in the mid 80s.

The second SPEAK protest against the building of Oxford University’s animal testing lab that I documented was on 28th January 2006.

A much smaller gathering of people assembled in Cornmarket Street to highlight their feelings that funding given to Oxford University by Vodaphone could help to fund the animal lab.

Walking into Oxford city centre in January 2006 I began to notice a heavy police presence, roads had been closed and traffic diverted. Unsure what was going on I continued into town and soon realised that there was a demonstration organised by the animal rights group SPEAK about to begin. Intrigued by the situation, I had my camera in my bag and so decided to press on and see what was happening.

Beacon Hill near Kimble, Buckinghamshire has long been a place of interest for me. On the edge of the Chequers estate, skirted by the ancient Ridgeway, it is surrounded by sites and monuments from the more recent past, as well as those that predate history.