Wandering around town

I saw the morning light one day last week and thought I would go for a walk with my camera before breakfast.

This might seem unremarkable to all you healthy people out there but to me, that morning, it was a breakthrough.

I had been feeling down – miserable, depressed, ill, however you want to describe it.

There was something about the morning light that took me out of myself and there is something about a camera that lets you forget that you are anything more than an eye and a brain.

The other thing about a camera is that it encourages you to leap around, dodge the traffic, crouch down, climb on things, anything to get a better shot.



Well, you may not think they are up to much, but I got truly carried away.

I have, as you most likely know already, been recovering from a major brain haemorrhage which has left me feeling generally unwell, disorientated, giddy and, I guess vulnerable, for nearly five months now.

Going out on my own has been something I have done with some trepidation and more of my share of cautious warning from friends and family.

That sunny morning, I picked up my camera, threw caution to the wind and just headed out looking at the town where I live.



This is the county town of East Sussex in England and in my totally prejudiced opinion it is the best town in Britain if not in the World.

We, can I say we in that patriotic, good citizen way please because I mostly do behave myself here and I like it very much,we were founded over one thousand years ago and bits and pieces of that history can still be found everywhere you look.

The Norman Castle, a ruined priory, the medieval Barbican gate, some 16th and 17th. century shops and houses including one built for Anne of Cleves, the unattractive and quickly ditched 4th. wife of Henry VIII and plenty of buildings from the 18th. and 19th. Century including the house that was the home for a time of Thomas Paine and another one where that iconic but gloomy writer Virginia Woolf lived before moving further into the Sussex countryside.




I was not thinking about any of this that morning though.

It was more a question of how photo-friendly our buildings are and how everywhere I wandered,there was something to see, even though I had no plan or pattern.

Virginia Woolf, Anne of Cleves, Thomas Paine and others must wait for some other time,well they were all pretty miserable folk and today is one for simple pleasures. I just want to throw random pictures together to give you a taste of what it must be like to be me, one of those lucky guys who happens to live in the middle of that best town in the World.


For once, I didn’t look where I was going, I wasn’t careful about people bumping into me and I didn’t think about brain haemorrhages and the possibility of sudden death or the chances of me falling to the ground and giving a dramatic and embarrassing display of what it is lilke to have a brain seizure.

No, all I thought about was the sunlight and the buildings and, someone was watching over me for sure because I wasn’t run over once even though a few cars did blow their horns at me.


It was only hunger pangs for that missed breakfast that drew me home.

Throwing down the keys, placing my camera carefully back in its case and boiling the kettle for that now essential pot of coffee, I suddenly realized that I didn’t feel ill.

I wasn’t giddy, frail or over-cautious in my movements, no, I felt almost the way I had done in those days when I was “normal.”

It wasn’t a miraculous recovery by any means – all those symptoms return with frustrating regularity but the sunshine, the camera lens and a very pretty town took me out of myself for a time and reminded me that life can be a light, easy-going experience if you could only leave yourself behind for a while.

Maybe you should do the same, go for a wander around this town as it looked that sunny morning, don’t worry about what the buildings are or who lived there, just imagine that you are as lucky as me who can take this walk every day.

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