Old age has also brought with it, she complains, misspellings and an over-reliance on exclamation marks. And tray dropping could serve as a metaphor for the frustration of old age. You might justifiably dismiss this as inconsequential, only that it is random thoughts that make up the texture of a life. One morning, staring at her breakfast tray, she imagines what it would be like were she to smash it on the ground. Nowadays, she has a marmalade for every day of the week, each from a different part of Wales (if it is Monday, it must be marmalade from Tŷ Newydd … that sort of thing). The marmalade fixation is not a new thing – she went up Everest with a pot of Cooper’s. Yet I find more compelling her relationship to her books, her attitude towards sheep (unenthusiastic), her passion for marmalade. her autobiography, Conundrum (1974) described the transition Her verdict on Trump is of passing interest – she deplores his bigotry, his appearance and coarse speech, but reluctantly recognises the reach of his apolitical style. It is remarkable to be writing a book at 91, yet what grips is not so much her thoughts about the world (towards which she turns and turns away) but her sense of the rhythms of domestic life. Old age is not for sissies and Morris is a trouper, keeping faith with the writing life. It reveals so much about how to soldier on in your 90s. Today, Morris’s horizons are limited to what she remembers and what she sees at home in north-west Wales.īut it is its limitations that makes this book valuable and rare. Morris has written 40 books ( Spain is one of the most vivid evocations of cities I’ve ever read). In due course, she and her wife, Elizabeth, with whom she had four children, divorced but were reunited in a civil partnership ceremony and are still together in old age. Her autobiography, Conundrum (1974), described the transition. She changed sex in 1972 (she went to Morocco to have reassignment surgery, as this was forbidden in the UK if you were still married). What happened next in her own life was, in its own way, at the time, as radical as swapping planets. She admits now with chagrin (taking herself to task for unthinking presumption) that she had hoped she might be invited as a reporter to accompany astronauts on the first trip to the moon. For this is a woman who started life as a man, who made her name as a journalist, James Morris, reporting for the Times on the first ascent of Everest in 1953. They are mentally equivalent to the walk she takes daily: 1,000 paces up and down the lane, singing different songs as she marches – she learned to march at Sandhurst. ![]() These are short outings, limberings up she does not overdo it. For 188 days, Jan Morris, now 91, has written a page or more of whatever comes into her head. ![]() ![]() This is much simpler to work with than the old darkroom, especially since I only did B&W.T his book is a writer’s constitutional. Of course there is the digital darkroom, where you can adjust color balance, brightness, and other parameters. With digital, you can look at them on the monitor at home. This was nasty if you could not easily go back to get more pictures. With film you had to wait until it was processed to find out. I really like the ability to view the results of capturing an image to see if it turned out the way I wanted it to, so I can fix it if need be. When I finally got rid of my darkroom equipment years ago, it felt like I was burying an old friend.ĭigital prints still don't seem to have the finesse of film, however, there are so many things that can be done with digital. I also really enjoyed developing and printing my own black and white film. The Ftb and AE-1, along with my Yashica MAT-124, are on display in the curio cabinet. Now I use a Canon EOS Rebel T1i and a Sony H1. I bought a Canon EX-Auto, then few years later, an Ftb, and then an AE-1. The cameras then only had three things you had to worry about, focus, shutter speed, and aperture. I developed (no pun intended) an appreciation when I borrowed a friend's 35mm camera about 1972. The lake was low, so many of the rocks were visible. This image was taken in October of 2013 at the Jordan Pond House in Acadia, Maine.
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