‘What do you mean, funny? Funny peculiar or funny ha-ha?'

Ian Hay, The Housemaster, 1936



This is a collection of pictures made over a period of twelve years. I took up my camera again in 1998 after a gap of over three decades while I was busy at work and with family. Since then, I have hardly gone anywhere without a camera in my pocket or bag. I like nothing better than to mooch around keeping my eyes open (‘like a lizard looking for bugs’ hissed a man to me in Washington Square, Greenwich Village, NYC) watching out for the oddities of life that pass by unnoticed as we drift along in our daily life.



Most of these pictures were little more than the scratchings in my photo sketch book. They were never meant to be more than ‘studies’. I did not set out to prepare a chronicle, only to exercise my camera ‘eye’.



As time went on, I started to see a few themes and connexions which I set out here. If you give a million typewriters to a million monkeys for a million years they will eventually type out the Encyclopedia Britannica. This is my contribution . . .