Getting Old
Recently, as I was shooting an unkempt house 70 miles, and 90 minutes away from home - ridiculously close to the Cumbrian border - carefully traversing a garden which contained the bowel contents of five dogs, all for a net payment of about fifty quid maybe, I was feeling old. This job has physical demands which require a degree of fitness, and things start to take their toll as time marches relentlessly onwards.
The following day I was given an address to attend in Morpeth town centre - always a nightmare as no parking is allowed anywhere except the main car parks and certain outlying streets. I carry a remarkably weighty Peli case packed with gear (actually 17kg when I weighed it), a tripod and a light stand, and I set off on a half-mile journey to my destination. Halfway through, I realised that I’d forgotten to display the required parking disc in my car, so I had to return and sort that out before heading out again. I got to the house in a state of exhaustion, only to find that it wasn’t the house I needed. Urghh. It didn’t exist according to Google or Rightmove, so I rang the estate agent to clarify. No answer. I rang their mobile number. No answer. The only answer was to walk with my gear to the agent’s office back where I’d started. Halfway I had to take a break, and decided to do a bit of research at the side of the road. Eventually I found a potential match near the house I’d originally visited. The agent had omitted the suffix “Court” from the address. Off I trudged and found a disgruntled vendor waiting for me. Ironically, there was plenty of parking in this little cul de sac so my miles of walking had been pointless. My whole body was in considerable pain due to the exertion of carrying half my body weight around for 45 minutes. The job was a quick one, and I dragged myself back to the car before heading off to another job.
The following day, my frozen shoulder and tennis elbow conditions had returned with a vengeance. My upper back had some serious pain, and I suspect that I might have sustained a hernia injury in a very sensitive area (aka the bollocks).
There was no chance of rest or respite as the following day was just as busy, so I had to work through the injuries. In your 20’s, 30’s and 40’s you can generally laugh off the discomfort, but as you approach the big six-zero (in 9 months!), it takes significantly longer to recover. The profile picture at the top of the page was taken about 20 years ago, before we had nippers, and definitely before I had to endure 100-hour working weeks. I asked Adobe Firefly - the AI text-to-image technology - to create an image of an ageing, exhausted photographer using that profile shot as a reference. It created the monstrosity below:
If that’s what I’m going to look like in a few years, kill me now.
