That's It Folks!

 

The gate is now shut. With no one around, it's time to turn off the lights and leave. It's been fun and maybe one day someone will discover this personal trove of nonsense. That is, as long as the big companies that host all this stuff stick around. They do have a tendency to vanish when the economics demand it and erase all signs of a previous life. Digital is very pervasive yet at the same time, incredibly tenuous. 

Hopefully it'll stick around. My grandkids might get curious and read something of me here. Maybe they will look at a few of the quaint pictures I've taken over the years and wonder at the creaky old technology used. I'm not afraid anymore of dying, but I AM afraid of FOMA. The Fear Of Missing Out. 

I really, really want to see the grandkids grow up, see who they choose as partners and what they do with their life. I've not done half the things I wanted to do in life, but the half I have done has been wild. I watched, live, as the first humans walked on the Moon. Now they are going back once again, but I don't think I'll see it happen, never mind them walking on another planet, on Mars. Damn, but I want to be able to watch THAT when it happens. I'm sure it will happen. It has to. 

Back when I watched the Moon landings, I expected by the year 2000 we would all be enjoying a hotel holiday on the Moon. The politics that enabled the space race back then is once again enabling another push to space. So it will happen. But maybe not as peacefully as I would hope. 

Conflict has been the overriding theme through my lifetime. The threat of nuclear war when I was at school gave me and everyone else the feeling we might as well live for today as we expected no tomorrow. That was liberating in a way. The swinging sixties was the result. Which is ironic as I have personally lived through the most peaceful and prosperous time in human history despite all the regional wars that went on and are still ongoing. I also managed to be there as the Iron Curtain fell and joined in with the celebrations in Berlin at the Brandenburg Gate. That promised so much, yet the West screwed up and didn't bring Russia into the fold, and once again, a new version of Stalin has arisen in Russia. 

I fear for the kids future in what is now a far more dangerous world than it ever was in my own time. Much more dangerous now than it has ever been. The rise of Christian Nationalism in the USA alongside all the other fundamental religious dogmas around the world is frankly horrible and to my mind, incomprehensible. We have the entire human history and knowledge at our disposal in our hands, and yet many choose to believe what they believe in a closed bubble and actively ignore any opposite view that does not agree with them or even what history can tell them. 

Artificial Intelligence is dumb enough to regurgitate any nonsense as fact and in doing so, validate it. Truth inevitably becomes the victim and then the tool of corrupt. Politics has always been this way. George Orwell wrote 1984 and was correct, if a little early, in his predictions. I fear for the future but hope that sanity will eventually survive. It's up to the kids now. My hope is that the love we give them now strengthens their moral compass for any future trials they might face and do the right thing whenever they can. 

This all sounds terribly gloomy and it is. But it all sounded terribly gloomy when I was a kid too. Back then we were told to expect another ice age. That we would all be blown up within three minutes any second now. Nothing much changes much does it? Yet here we are. Life goes on. Wonderful things DO happen and they happen all the time. And damn, but I want to see those wonderful things but of course, I never will. The changes will be immense, perhaps more so than during my lifetime.  

But I have seen wonderful things in these brief years on earth, and read about all the other wonderful things that have gone before I was around, and that's, well, wonderful isn't a strong enough word. We are conscious for such a brief moment in the huge depths of time, so we must make the most of it. Enjoy and celebrate that simple, yet astonishing fact. I'm not religious, but isn't it a true miracle that we even exist at all...?

The above picture is a self portrait. Kind of. You see, every human alive at the time this picture was taken, on July 21st 1969, is in this one photo. (I was seventeen at the time on that pale blue dot in the background, wide-eyed with wonder staring at the grainy black and white images being beamed back live to Earth on the TV). Every human being apart from the one taking the shot is there. That person is the photographer, astronaut Michael Collins sitting in the command module as the lunar landing vehicle returns. And as a photographer, I know that feeling of not being in the picture! This image and the next, was downloaded from the NASA the scans taken off the original film and then I digitally re-mastered them both, to show them at their best, here. 

Two other historically interesting events I'm proud to have witnessed (and this time photograph), is the fall of the Berlin Wall and Concorde. Only one image from Berlin survived the film processing lab boiling and ruining my films during processing, which is why the quality is so gritty. But it works as an image I think. 

I watched Concorde fly as a prototype well before she came into active service. I also saw one of the last flights she made from the USA to Heathrow in London, and took this image on the 8th of June 2003. And damn it, I never flew her. 

Apart from taking pictures, I've also dabbled in writing a few stories. These are all hosted at this website link ABCTales. Again, no idea how long that will exist. But for now at least, it does... Two other sites that host some random photos of mine are One X and Flickr.

 

If I'm still around this time next year, I'll update this. But for now, so long and good luck.

Peter 23/01/23