The things I saw #8

‘Saturday 26th September – We’re parked outside the Premier Inn on Dover seafront. We’re due to get the 1am ferry to Dunkirk on Monday morning, but we raced down from Norfolk to see if we could get a last-minute deal on the tunnel… no such luck. The cheapest they can do is £178, one way… the man at the ticket office obviously misunderstood and thought I wanted to buy the actual tunnel. So we’ve decided to hang around and get an earlier ferry instead.

We had an eventful day… after waking up in our ‘adults only touring park’ we drove to Dereham, about 20 miles west of Norwich to meet-up with photojournalist, and great friend, Jim Mortram. Jim brought along his partner, Laura, a very talented artist (and French, which I have to admit I didn’t know until we met…) and his father, Dave – I can see where Jim gets his charisma and sense of humour from now. We spent a couple of hours with Jim, Laura and Dave – Jim and I talked about photography, mostly. I remarked to Jim about the difficulty we had finding Dereham, that even our GPS got so confused I thought she’d give-up and tell us we were on our own. Jim told us that his home town is notoriously difficult to find and that even ambulances get lost on their way to emergencies. I didn’t even bother plugging the GPS in as we left town.

So, tonight we’ll sleep in the camper at the side of the road. In the United States they call it ‘boondocking’ – the art of covert motorhome living in streets, car parks or away from designated camp grounds… but it just sounds a bit too much like ‘space docking’ to me…’

All images made using an Olympus MjuII 35mm compact and Kodak Portra 160 film. Developed and scanned at UK Film Lab

DO NOT Google ‘Space Docking’ if you’re reading this at work…