This week, I bring with me good news: I have signed up to the Norfolk Network. For those of you who are unenlightened as to what I am blathering about, the Norfolk Network is a marvellously well-connected hub of businesses from around East Anglia and the Irish Sea (click here, zoom out on the map and all will become clear), all threaded neatly together by the tremendous Lucy Marks. This fact means nothing to you, but a great deal to me, as it gives me a far healthier chance of taking on commercial photography on a full-time basis in the coming months (and years). It was only a pleasure to hand over the old hard-earned; I genuinely would recommend a chat with Lucy to any budding creatives out there who might have stumbled on to this page. (Halloa!)

I know why you’re really here, though. Somewhere in the depths of your character lurks a decadent, sadistic and wholesome trait, oddly termed ‘schadenfreude’, which causes you to take pleasure in reading my blog when I’ve got something to moan about. Lord, are you in for a treat this week.

I wish to step into gender criticism, you see.

Reading Bill Bryson’s Notes From a Small Island yesterday afternoon, an undeniable truism struck me. You’ll indulge me a moment while I quote our hero, won’t you:

‘I hate thinking about cars and I hate talking about cars. I especially hate it when you get a new car and go in the pub because somebody will always start quizzing you about it, which I dread because I don’t even understand the questions.
‘What sort of mileage you get? How many litres? What’s the torque? Got twin overhead cams or double-barrelled alternator-cum-carburettor with a full pike and a double-twist dismount?’ I can’t for the life of me understand why anyone would want to know all this shit… I always want to say: ‘Hey, I hear you’ve got a new refrigerator. How many gallons of Freon does that baby hold? What’s its BTU rating?’

Now. A word, please. Before I continue, I wish you to know that photography gives me all kinds of pleasure. Other photographers will attest that in our profession (and hobby too), something so small as one good photograph from a gig can make your fortnight. Getting up at silly a.m. to catch a train to the Norfolk countryside on a sunny January morning is nothing short of a glorious experience, before the thought even occurs that you have a camera with you. Capturing a moody seascape just the way you wanted it, at the thirty-ninth attempt, can be almost as satisfying as anything else being alive has to offer. I love photography, and I love the thought of doing it for a living. Understood? Right.

I quoted Bill Bryson there because photography, unfortunately, is cursed in precisely the same way as other activities involving complex technology: there is always someone in the pub ready to chunter on about it – in this case, cameras. Not photography, you understand - just cameras. ‘I’m running two SLRs at the moment, got the old Nikon fifty-five thou’ two ton’ running with a new twelve mil’, auto-folk and everything (beg pardon, sir?) with a pretty snappy polariser, you know, but of course, the battery life’s getting quite poor now so I’ll have to replace that soon. In the meantime I’m running a…’

By this time, you’re reading the pub’s licensing details nailed on the wall and reconsidering whether you truly want that last dram. I have this conversation at least twice a month, and it is enough to make me want to declare that my ambitions really go no higher than the newsagent I work in. Though I have no wish to alienate these people – if it weren’t for them, and their practically-minded ilk, there would be no photography, I actually would be stuck in the newsagent for good, and would have been denied something to moan about in this blog – I do sometimes wish that I didn’t attract that kind of conversation so darned often. Photography, like any other art, is about life, and life exists perfectly plentifully outside of Jessops cabinets.

I bring gender into this whole shambles because I have noticed that this terrible blandness is almost entirely exclusive to men. I have never had the displeasure of talking about cameras I may never touch with a woman; they know that the secret of photography is in the photographer’s personality, in the same way that most creative industry professionals value individuality and character as much as the technicalities of the equipment. This is a point about which I become morbidly self-conscious sometimes. I actually recall apologising to a friend of mine, after buying a 300mm zoom lens a little over a year ago. Chuntering on about its features, I knew exactly the sort of pub bore I was becoming. Furthermore, at its full extension, the lens takes on an unfortunate phallic symbolism reflecting the male photographer. But here I go again. I really must stop talking about the size of my zoom lens. Very off-putting. As you were…