At the moment i am exerting my middle class upbringing by sanding the floorboards in my house in Walthamstow. The work is agonizing especially with edger as I'm using it like an anglegrider balancing it with my elbows on my thighs. All day i hear myself breathing and the sander raging, my eyes sting with the cloud of dust and were it not with the help of my friends this would be crap.
I realize how lucky I am when i notice how my hands have gone from soft photographer hands to wrinkly hard callus ridden things. I notice how much food im eating and a craving for chicken and beer at the end of the day, it seems that no matter how much food I eat I'm still hungry at the end of the meal. Im reminded of George Orwell's, 'Road to Wigan pier' when he discussed the food of the working classes and how hot stodgy food worked perfectly when working in manual labour and how the middle and upper classes did not understand this.
I have also been without a fridge for 3 weeks and my milk sits in a bucket in the garden with last nights curry, which is sort of hilarious as i realize, you can do this, that I'm a spoilt, white western male sold on the 3rd economic miracle of consumerism.
I remember on a daily basis the incident when walking down a rail track in Madagascar and 3 children at the end saw me, screamed and ran away. I couldn't work it out until my fixer told me they had probably never seen a white person before let alone a camera.
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