Hello people just talk!

 I am nearly always the one who strikes up a conversation, maybe I just like the sound of my own voice. But with lockdown it’s difficult. I haven’t seen anyone and it’s gotten so as I don’t know 🤷‍♂️ if I actually want to see anyone. For me to be like that anyone who normally is a bit shy must be really anti people. I know I can pick up the phone but really the only people who I have called since lockdown have been my family and because lockdown has taken away things to talk about. Now in normal times I don’t need anything to talk about, I once struck up a conversation with three strangers explaining that I will talk to myself lamp posts and stray dogs! The strangers all women of a certain age asked which category did they fall into then one came to the conclusion of ‘stray dogs’ which caused much hilarity. The spoken word can  be such a lift, I used to read poetry aloud to Heather my wife and have only done so once in these lockdown conditions ☹️ I must try harder.

Depression is a thief it steels your sense of fun in life, now that might not sound much life ain’t meant to be fun but if you don’t enjoy life you become miserable. I am sure life was never designed for you to feel miserable! When life is fun you actually smile 😆 Everything becomes a reason to laugh you smile and those around you smile, smiling is infectious. You might smile to a lady weeding her garden and finding her task tedious that brief smile could lift her spirit and her tedious task becomes a joy. The trouble with COVID is we are all wearing a mask 😷 so we are being robbed of simple joys. My personal pleasure is music, l love early rock n roll and music from my youth and the 60’s and 70’s to me music stopped in the 1980s  and restarted when Adele released 19 in 2008 I enjoy all of her albums. Ed Sheeran has become another of my favourites. 

My mainstay of enjoying life in recent years is photography. With the advent of digital photography and then the camera 📷 in phones photography has be one of the easiest of hobbies to get involved with. I do have a phone but mainly use a camera 📸 as this gives me far greater control over the creativity of an image. I am not an artist but sometimes I do venture away from the cameras auto settings to capture something a little bit different. Then after shooting the pictures I have some more fun transferring said pictures onto my laptop 👨‍💻 or more recently my iPad. Transferring images by WiFi is new to me and as with any learning experience fun and frustrating in equal measure. Twenty years ago I tried using photoshop and was bewildered by the complexities of post production of photo’s I didn’t enjoy the process and on one forum I frequent I use “life’s to short to learn photoshop “  as my tag on each post😃

Each of these stages is an escape from reality! When I am engrossed in taking photos or transferring them and cropping and enhancing the images I become detached from my everyday problems. I use photography as a means of escape. I will write ✍️ more about my escapism from depression in future posts.