Photography

I cycled to Willesden junction. My god it was cold. That coldness that sucks all your breath out and grips your lungs with ice.

The sky was immense and completely clear, and the winter sun was shining but was farely muted, as if it had been turned down a setting or two.

I was in no rush, and I had my camera with me so had my hunting eyes, and a nice song by moondog was playing through my headphones as I reached an odd place. There was absolutely nothing out of the ordinary in this place, physically, but the old man who stood in the middle of a narrow pavement leaning his head on the shaft of his broom, seemed to me to be the guardian of a momentary zone.

I saw him in a glance, a beautiful image that still burns, his wan human face at the same time lost amongst the bricks, dust and traffic and at the same time shining in its difference. I doubled back with that familiar pathetic, guilty feeling to try and capture this image, but he had resigned himself to the dust and was making his way back inside. When he closed the door it seemed impossible to believe that there could have been anyone pass through it in the past thirty years.

Next door but one, two young girls sat on the front wall of their four foot square concrete garden. Their view of the road obscured by a parked van.

On the other side of the old man's house was a long wall with a small gate in the middle. The locked gate was a side entrance to a large cemetary crammed full with headstones which sided onto the tangle of railway lines that headed to the junction, and a solitary figure in a black jacket walked away from me along a path. The most beautiful, full coated Fox then appeared from amongst the tombstones, looking directly at me, halting the steam from my breath.

Instinctively again, I raised my camera, but the wind rushing through the gap made tears flow down my face, and I could not see to focus.

When I looked away from the dark frame, the fox had disappeared, as had the man in black, and I cycled on, over the railway bridge, and away from those moments.