I need to get out more

I'm a photographer, right? And photographers take photos…which is surprisingly difficult when you're spending most of your time stuck indoors and mostly stuck in one room as I have been recently. I don't do flowers, I don't do cats, I don't do self-portraits of myself gazing from a window with the caption 'trapped'. To be brutally honest, I can't abide those ME photo groups that are over-populated by photos of bloody cats and rose bushes!

DISCLAIMER: I have cats. I even take photos of them.

Today was my first proper day out. We went out for a fry up followed by apple pie and custard and a big mug of builders tea. I took my camera and made a kind of photo essay of my day, complete with an out-of-focus photo of a Jack Russell (do those dogs ever keep still?) and discarded fag ends in the gutter. As Julia Cameron would say, you've got to turn up at the page. Click, click.

I've always wanted to do a sort of a documentary series on shops and shopping but I've never actually done anything about it. So, I found myself in Boots and figured, well, I've got to keep turning up at the whatever it is that photographers turn up at…the shutter button, the memory card, the lens? So I clicked.

Speaking of Julia Cameron and the Artist's Way and all that stuff, the one positive aspect of my recent relapse - and in the middle of my photography course - is that I've come to all sorts of conclusions about creativity and 'Important Work' in relation to that whole personal growth/fake spirituality industry. And how many people become anaesthetised by the relentless addiction to all this fake personal growth to the extent that their raison d'etre is to devour more and more of the stuff instead of actually…well…getting a life, whether that's picking up a camera, a guitar, a pencil, a paintbrush, or whatever it is.

I'll save that for another time as my relapse has also coincided with the fizzling out of a friendship who was very long on the amateur psychology rap but very short on creativity. It all sort of makes sense.