Sim Carter: Past Tense Imperfect

That's me & my old man. My dad, daddy, dada. My father knows best. He would have been about forty when this picture was taken. I'm probably two, maybe two and a 'foff'. I had a little lisp so that's how I would have said it, not two and a half but two and a foff. So my mum used to tell me. We are standing, if I've got my familial history straight, in the back garden of my grandmother's house on Mansfield Drive in Hayes, Middlesex, about twenty miles outside London proper.  I wish I had just one photo of my father holding my own son in his arms like this, the way my sister does of our dad and her daughters. She has plenty of snaps of him playing grandpa: our dad standing in my parents' kitchen, holding one of the twins with both arms under her pink diapered bottom, one fat little baby arm thrown around his neck, her head on his shoulder, her other hand clutching at his sleeve. The look on his face; the pleasure he takes that he's been abl...

I’ve been working on a novel for the past year and a half, a process which has made doing any kind of creative writing here in this space more and more difficult. I’ve kept up with my book-to-movie blog at Chapter1-Take1.com  but that’s a very different kind of writing. When giving out factual information, I don’t require inspiration.  Now I’ve finished the book and I’ve begun reaching out, searching for an agent. An easy sentence to write, a horrifying, intimidating, paralyzing process to undertake. The first chapter, one I was happy with before, now strikes me as sophomoric, tedious, garbage and any number of cliche criticisms. Is it? Or is that my fear talking? I don’t know. I’m in a place where I can’t imagine my novel is worth the paper it’s written on—about 1/3 of your typical paper-suitable tree. Which is why I still can’t find the energy to get back to memoir pieces. My writing brain needs a break.  So in lieu of a writerly post, I’m posting...

What’s the most time you can spend on vacation before you have to do any laundry? A week? Ten days? A little longer if you can do your ‘fine washables’ in the hotel room sink? Or perhaps you’re well-heeled enough that you can leave your clothing with the cleaning staff to take care of ala Tom Ripley pretending to be Dickie in The Talented Mr. Ripley? When the hubs Mark, and I went to Europe for a month this past spring we found we needed to do a load about every 10 days. We did laundry three times, in Paris where we were lucky to find a laverie just a block from our hotel on the Rue de Seine where in  early May, the temperature still a fairly brisk 55º and we wore multiple layers and our raincoats everywhere to keep off the chill.  We did a load in the beach resort town of Rimini in Italy where someone had left a box of detergent in the lavanderia.  The temperature had risen to a balmy mid 70's by then and we left our raincoats in the back of the rental car....

I was scrolling through our vacation pictures from this past spring when this shot of a cafe caught my eye. I wasn't sure what pulled me in. It's certainly not that it's a perfectly composed photo. It's a bit busy, the light fixture at the top left intrusive, the yellow building with the shutters and charming grey and white striped awnings cut off too soon. But I love it. Why, I wondered. Because it takes me back to such a happy period? Of course that's part of it. On the left side, out of range of the photograph is the small market where my husband and I would buy bananas, yogurt and pain du chocolat in the morning. Learning how to use the machine at the grocery store to weigh the bananas, figuring out how to make ourselves understood to the clerks at the checkout line, part of the fun of being adrift in a city where you don't speak the language. When your Ou est? and Combien? are not quite enough. The view of this cafe across the street from our hot...

My beautiful nieces. They're 30 now. And still beautiful. I got my first camera when I was ten. A Kodak Instamatic. I didn’t ask for it, not that I recall. It’s not like I was begging for a Brownie, dreaming of taking pictures like a mini Ansel Adams, not that I had any clue who Adams was. Nonetheless I was thrilled when I unwrapped the camera. A birthday gift from my father even though he was out of town on one of his frequent business trips. It felt like a bit of magic, his present being there while he was absent, thousands of miles away. I lacked the imagination to realize it was my mother who went to the store, my mother who bought the gift, my mother who wrapped it. My mother doing the work, my father getting the credit. I was devastated he wasn’t there on my big day until his call came in.  While I was listening to my father’s voice on the other end of the line telling me how much he loved me, how sorry he was that he had to be away, how much he hoped I’d enjoy t...

A policeman directs buses  in the intersection of Trafalgar Square , London. IMAGE: CLIFTON R. ADAMS/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE/CORBIS My brother sent me this series of photos of England, circa 1928, by Clifton R. Adams for National Geographic. The images are so amazing that for this week's British Isles Friday post I'm bailing on my weekly London walk to share these photos with you. I was stunned at how vibrant and bright the the clothing colors are. I've lifted the article directly via Retronaut , a very cool site that specializes in historical images. Their twitter profile says simply "time travel without the time machine."  The only change I've made to the piece is adding the "u" to Colour. This is British Isles Friday, after all. 1928 England in Color The King's Country, caught in Autochrome by Amanda Uren In the late 1920s and early 1930s  National Geographic  sent photographer Clifton R. Adams to Englan...