I’ve been at work today for the first time in nine days and have missed DM. It’s not that work isn’t stimulating (although today has been something of a yawn if truth be told, I’ve had to spend a good deal of it stopping my in-box on outlook from falling over, the vagaries of IT rules in our company mean that we can’t store more than 55 somethings of emails) - don’t know what the ‘somethings’ are but I’d got 79 of them in my box which meant I couldn’t send or receive messages so I had a painful morning of admin waiting for me while I sorted and filed. It was as boring as hell I can tell you.

Yesterday evening, while sitting on the sofa eating supper I had a flash of inspiration for a ‘capturing songs’ gallery photo to depict the Cure’s ‘Why Can’t I Be You’ and this photo is it. I’d already posted for yesterday so I saved the idea for a quiet day but today was that day……damn, I always like to have an idea or two up my sleeve and now this one is used up.

I’ve spent most of the day while I was doing my mundane stuff at the office thinking about how I could set up the camera and lighting to get DM reflected in the mirror that I am looking into. It’s not a new idea from me but this one was harder to set up because I needed to leave me out and the last time I did a similar shot I wanted to get me in rather than out. Both the previous shots were easier – the first, I just climbed on the table and hid behind him and the second I didn’t have to worry about filling the frame.

My props today are DM – who is as crotchety as Tony about having a camera pointed at him and started to say he would start applying the two shot rule too if I didn’t get on with it. After I got the shot, he was quick to dismantle my ‘set’ before I could get upstairs, look at my pic and decide to re-shoot….which I would have done had I noticed the door in the background causing a displeasing distraction in the thumbnail on the camera! The other prop is a very old mirror that was given to me by Claire, my pal in Melton Mowbray, owned by Pop, her granddad who sadly passed away about fifteen years ago.

His passing was celebrated by his family (I’m sure they won’t mind me mentioning this) because when he was found at around 83 years old I seem to recall, he was sitting cross-legged on the floor, half-way through a game of patience and with a half-drunk whisky in a glass next to him. What a way to go! I can’t imagine anything nicer.

So, who is my fairest of them all? DM of course. It’s always a shock to the system to go back to work after a break and adjust to not having him challenge and stimulate me.