LFW earring

http://www.timothyfoster.co.uk

Fingers feet

My first thoughts on entering 7 dials alternative dance group was:

1. Wheres the bar?
2. Why is there a girl crying on the floor?
3. No, really, why is there a girl crying on the floor?

Also, I quickly realize no one is wearing shoes, plus everyone looks more like they're all having epileptic fits than they're dancing to the beat, and to top it all everyones looking at my shoes.

It felt like the day when we realized the amplifier in the studio was picking up a faint radio signal from a Pentecostal radio station.  Not only should the amp be unable able to pick up a radio signal but there were times when this almost silence would pervade your subconscious to make you feel like you might be dead but that you just couldn't be sure.

I watched the dancers from afar for a while while my friend Pete, who brought me here, is looking at me with a smile creeping into the corner of his mouth while slowly and silently removing his shoes.  He lowers onto his socks but rips these off slowly like this is part of his dance before he even gets onto the dance floor.

I watch him scan the room with sniper like eyes targeting the pretty girls, even the crying girl!!!  Socks off and he's away, immediately bumping and grinding into the middle of the pack like the big South African loon he is.  Yeah 'Ice cream and arse cream' I blow through the teeth of my pained smile.

The dated beatbox distorts a disjointed beat and no one is looking now perhaps as I'm bare foot.  I sort of begin to saunter out as though I'm holding a pint in my hand and edge into the peripheral of the dance floor because the centre looks like an event horizon.

Something pops into my head, Christ, what if anyone sees I've got fingers for feet?  When I was at art school we would debate the shapes of our feet, Pete had Hobbit feet, Dan had Pasty feet and I had fingers feet, the hours would fly by.  Now here on this cold Parkay flooring I realize I don't think I've danced in daylight since, well, ever.  At a festival maybe, not that I remember?  Daylight is always assigned for recovery and night time, well night time is reserved for the ever grinding pelvis of Pete.

I mooch about, hands close to my chest smelling people and watching what everyone else is doing.  Yeah, yeah, this isn't too bad.  I can do this, no problem, 30 minutes of this will be just like Wigan Pier used to be on... then bam, a girl enters front and centre, and clearly wants to dance with me.  'By the sweat of my teeth'!  She grabs my left arm and swings me around, back and gently holds up my arm and leaving in the air disappears into the throng.  My arm still upright I catch a glimpse of Pete looking at me laughing.

The music changes with a clunk and a scratch whilst the tempo rises and a thought washes over me immediately which is: why not?

Like shouting, "Bollocks!" very loudly at Reading festival.  At first you think, this isn't allowed, someone will arrest me, but then dimly across hundreds of tents, someone else shouts bollocks back, and then another and another, until the whole field is a chorus of bollocks.  Yeah bollocks, come on Tim, shake your money maker!

So I let fly, I think to myself I'm gonna have the best damn Epileptic fit you guys have ever seen.  Past the crying girl I fit, past the old guy with BO, past the couple who look like they're making out, even past the old lady dressed all in purple and even past Pete dancing with his hands on the ass of some eastern european girl wearing a spay-on.  I move slowly into the centre past the event horizon, there is no going back now and where I expect to find all mass becomes energy but all I see, are my fingers feet.

Claudia Kruse

Claudia Kruse was really funny quick witted and easy to photograph, and when I later read her CV I was supprised she gave me time she did to make the photographs.

Head of Corporate Governance, APG InvestmentHead of Corporate Governance, APG Investments

Occupy London Stock Exchange - OLSE

I went to the Occupy London Stock Exchange with a heavy heart expecting Wizards preaching the end of the world by frogs drinking coffee through their eyes...

Whereas in fact, I quite enjoyed myself, and I saw no frogs with severe caffeine habits.  

What happened was that I sat in a tents talked, debated and even sang Beetles songs with a man playing a guitar.  I chatted with a broad range of people, all enthusiastic to talk about what they each individually stood for. 

I saw businessmen passing through looking with smiles on their faces like everyone was high on something here.  We were all buzzing, but from what cause we didn't know, only that something was going on and that seemed to be enough.

I was impressed by the churches original stance and that they had actually stood up for the people, it felt old and respectful rather than modern day and exploitative, but as I write this today I read the tents have had a bailiff notice issued.

It seems to signify everything the protesters had set out to try and 'change'.

When I got back home the next day a friend visited for lunch and a chinwag and we talked about the occupation.  His stance was that the protesters/occupying people had used Starbucks for the toilet and to buy coffee, so their argument against capitalism was invalid.  

I said that I thought their argument wasn't about the abolishment of capitalism only the belief to make it fairer by talking and more importantly, 'doing' something about it.

Perhaps they have achieved something of this but under our present Conservative led government I fear a two-tier system will form in the UK, and faith alone will not cure it.

Father & Son

One late September morning I travelled with my Dad back to Portsmouth from France in his Morris Minor and recorded the journey.


As a child I thought the car was alive.

I'd recount its registration number over and over incase I became lost.  I thought if i'd say its name it would come to rescue me, TKB 917G, TKB 917G, TKB 917G, TKB... and then, in the distance its distinctive exhaust noise would be heard.  

I think of the car and my Dad as the same, one in fact.  The Morris is fallible, something I only discovered in my father after a long abstinence and that this realization was okay, perfect in its imperfection.

My Dad would check the oil before setting out, but I think he's generally just a bit nosey.

I remember my Dads hands always.  Huge like spades and rugged with evidence of labour, they always scared me as a child but now I see them as an just daft.

Time.  There's something about the speed of the car never going above 55mph.   The trucks would bully the car as they passed, but it didn't matter, were on a different journey.

My Dads boiled eggs are synonymous like the sound of the cars exhaust.

Always talking to people I wait aside until the car in front has stopped talking to him about the good old days of Ford plants, and how there is little graffiti in France.

It's hard to get him to pose or repeat a moment, he feels silly.

I took a picture of his shoes once and captioned them, "dads shoes" as they look like shoes that a dad would wear.  Since then he's bought new ones and says he's cool now.  He eats his packed lunch whilst looking into the sea and chunnering about what's on his to-do list.

The Morris struggles up the pier onto the ferry.  I think it must have seen this a 100 times in the 39 years I've known it.

We dance around trying to find the way to the deck.

When we get to the deck we drink French beer and eat crisps.  As he walked to the seats a girl thanked him as though he'd bought them for her, he's such a flirt.

The big man can eat, and has no fear in asking for what he wants.

I come out of the cabins toilet and catch him gazing out of the window.

Like serving mashed potato, he whacks his socks to unravel them from their form after being rolled off his foot.

I'm the only one in the family through the generations that doesn't have bad eyesight, he takes the watch off holds it at focal distance and goes through his to-do list.

Then sleep.  He catches me taking the photograph opening just one eye like a pirates parrot, always aware.  I ask him to close his eye and he smiles. click.

The ferry is slow, slower than the Morris in-fact, and after a game of cards we watch the shore come in and the boats go out.  The air is fresh and tainted with diesel and we breath, it, in, deeply, withit'sinevitability.

Terror.  The Morris doesn't like the night.  The indicator light flashes green illuminating its passengers like two animals caught in the headlights of its own doing.  The trucks push us around, it's late, I talk shit, and dad panics at the directions of my iPhone.  The old and the new.

I'm the ghost, the photographer, I realize I want to put down the camera and just remember, as the journey is coming to an end and I'm sad.  I love being with my Dad, I'll miss his irritations, his smell, his sense of direction by just asking people and driving there rather than asking the phone.

Saying goodbye is always hard but he and the car are a part of me, and as much as I document him, I document myself, it's more of a hello to love than a goodbye.



The End.

http://www.mmoc.org.uk/

Rhubarb!

It's been amazing having a garden in central London. It's been so amazing in fact that I even got next door to agree to let me dig up their garden and plant veg in it.  Planting and then eating it has been a bit of a thing I never expected when becoming a homeowner. I thought buying a home was all about the equity, but I'd forgotten I could simply enjoy just living in it.

Living, I suppose is the optimum word here, as I've been watching the Rhubarb grow. Not quite like watching paint dry, as the seed forms and you beat off the snails, then leaves form and you knock out the snails, until finally it grows into an adult plant and you do a Mexican dance on the heads of the snails. I've no problem with this dance of the snails physically or ethically.  I was once a vegetarian as my ex-girlfriend was one, but when we split up I thought, 'Hang on, small fish are eaten by bigger fish and bigger fish are eaten by even bigger fish', Woody Allen said, "It's like the whole worlds a huge restaurant"! So, I figured I'm part of the food chain, and the snails just get in the way of the rhubarb.

However, at the bottom of the garden was a Victorian pond. I removed the pond with hammer and sweat only to discover at the end of the destruction; a frog looking at me, and it made me feel guilty. So I put the frog in a bucket and on the passenger seat of my Citroen and drove it two miles down the road to the local stream. When I got back my housemate said in her Italian accent, "Where is the frog"? When I explained what happened to it she said, "What, why didn't we eat it, you dance on the snails but the frog doesn't become lunch"? Good point, being the last in the food chain on most of the planets surface I have the power of choice to end the living, and the Rhubarb is witness to that.

However, recently my aunt made her choice, and killed herself.

She was 56 years old and she took a substance were only just finding out was something she accessed off the Internet. Her death was quite a shock although something I'd thought might happen, but not in such a calculated way.

It made me think of the Rhubarb.

As I watched the Rhubarb getting bigger day by day even though the snails devoured parts of it, I reasoned, it wants to live, and it fucking goes for it like the sun will not rise the following day.

It made me realise that even with the dark days in my mind that happen from time to time, suicide is not painless. As I sat in the back of that shit church watching her body descend into fire I saw that to everyone around this end of the living, their is no glorious end; it's just a shotgun in the mouth like Cobain or a bottle in the hand like Winehouse, and those who loved that person can't see why they didn't want to grow like the sun will never rise again.

Once I've seen this sun rise it doesn’t make me self righteous as I understand those in the throws of death cant see a way out and the only way to end this pain is to seek any kind of peace, even if that peace means death.  One of my friends found peace in football and is now a devoted Arsenal fan, I say I'm happy for her but that she should have chosen a much better team like Wigan FC, even though the league doesn't reflect this. Aside from the team choice I see she wants to live, and like the Rhubarb she's fucking going for it.

 http://www.timothyfoster.co.uk

Plummet for Summat - Skydive

Today I jumped out of a plane at 6000ft.

Before, I wasn't scarred about this tandem skydive as I'd attempted it months ago and it had been cancelled because of cloud cover, but this time it was a clear blue March morning with zero wind and zero chance of bad weather being my escape route.

We, my friend Mischa and I, arrived with four monster sandwiches in the boot and in good spirits to find people already falling out of the sky. Suddenly it seemed that inevitability had folded in time to a moment where I was looking at my friend from the corner of my eye at the height of Mexico city, half smiles whilst strapped to my tandem instructor. The drone of the engines dimmed and we looked at the door where 6 others had left before us until we were the last alone in our fears. I shuffled on my ass towards this exit, which turned out to be an entrance, and quick handshake with friend before I found myself tucking my feet under the fuselage of an aircraft and my thoughts cut like a shard of glass to my brother.

On route to the airfield in the middle of a Peterborough farmland I thought I was unfazed about this charity jump until I found myself telling Mischa that I've been meaning to write a will, where my brother gets all the crap I own if something did go wrong. Ridiculous that you rationalize everything like this before you sign up for jumping out of a plane, you think: will the chute open, will the instructor not fasten us together, will they find me holding onto the tail of the plane, and finally if something did go wrong: did I do enough with my time?

Too late, no backing out now I thought as I craned my head back to the sky of this abyss, instructor shouting in my ear, "okay, you ready Tim"? and cruelly, without even a countdown to one, the horizon tumbled before me like a red sock within the whites of a washing machine.

Silence.

Absolutely nothing.

Only the sight of the World leveling out like a quart of opium after some bad hash, and then, spread out below me in all it's splendor, the World seemed to glow. Fields and trees and little puffs of cloud seemed to gently go about their business unaware that I was plummeting towards them at 120 miles an hour. As instructed I lifted my arms to my sides and seemed to feel very little wind only remembering that I said:

"Wow, it's all so beautiful".

As though if this was it, that if something was to go wrong, it didn't matter.   I wasn't screaming, I didn't have my eyes closed I was just so transfixed with the beauty of the Earth that nothing mattered for the 35 seconds of freefall. It was an overwhelming experience cut short with the yyyyyyank of parachute and a reconnection with sound and unfortunately the gravity inside my stomach.

The last 3000ft was awash with the sick feeling of regret. Not that I hadn't done enough with my life but that I wished we hadn't had that breakfast, that can of coke, as well as two of the brick sandwiches, that pack of refreshers and a cup of tea with a nice Danish pastry. Ooooh, I felt ill, and when we landed my arms deserted me with numbness whilst my abandoned my face.

Lying on the green grass bathed in the yellow sunlight the colour slowly returned to our cheeks while I reconnected with my love of solid ground by digging my nails into the soil whilst trying to comprehend the enormity what had actually happened. Yet, even after texting my brother to say we he wasn't about to inherit my material crap, the only thing to occur to me after such a profound moment was: there are two remaining sandwiches in the car, it would be a shame to let them goto waste.

http://www.timothyfoster.co.uk