Holidaze

It’s been a week now since I got back from my holiday in Rhodes, what a lovely place. I’m glad I went there early in the season though, first week in fact. To me it was just the right side of really hot, and it was only 30 degrees or so at the most. I say only, it was averaging 7 degrees or something back home.

It was quite hard for me to switch off the first couple of days I was there, knowing I had photos to send from Laura and David’s most excellent wedding party (sorry I watched Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure the other day and it still hasn’t worn off) and other photos from gigs and loads of other stuff to sort out, plus the fact I hadn’t been paid for my part time job which took me four hours to sort out. Then there was that flipping ash cloud… but we got there and once I got used to it I loved it. The thing I’d been most looking forward to was taking photos and while I was there I was quite disappointed with how things were going, but on reflection, I really like what I came back with. I didn’t want to take the usual tourist photos, that was what my parents were there for, and I didn’t want to take family photos- I have enough of them, but what I didn’t expect to be taking photos of was cats.

Tonnes of them.

It’s a fairly well known fact I’ve never particularly liked them. I think that’s because the cats I generally see are overfed and lazy, and we were more of a dog family if anything. But these cats had something to them that I found interesting, I think it was the fact that they were far more ‘street’ than cats over here. People feed strays over here, then they go to another place, they get fed again and they move on to the next place. These cats were gnarly. They had some attitude.

Even at the top of the Acropolis in Lindos, there was one there lazing in the shade. I could forgive it having a lie down given how far up it had to walk to get there.

Anyway, I kind of became obsessed with taking photos of cats and had to snap out of it, after all there are many other things to take photos of.  Like the sky.

and the insects, at 6am on my very early morning stroll…

But the thing I took most photos of while I was there was my two year old neice. As if I didn’t have enough of them. I don’t really want to go putting photos of my family on the internet, especially without their permission, and I kind of feel like family photos are just that. People look at photos from parties, gigs, weddings… whatever… but as soon as family photos come out it’s quite often welcome to Yawnsville, population 1.  I guess this is because they are so formulaic, normally a parent or someone telling the subject to “smile for the camera” in a situation where they are forced to do something they don’t want to do. A mundane sense of “here we go again” through gritted teeth. Somebody being forced to look at a photo of someone being forced to have their photo taken. Nobody wins.

So I’m just going to post my favourite. No recognisable faces, just a father and daughter having fun. If you don’t want to look, you don’t have to…

And if anyone sees my brother tomorrow, wish him a happy birthday.