Trimmings

THIS MONTH'S LUCKY DIP into the box of film trimmings is a streetscape, but it's certainly not anywhere in Canada or the United States. If you're from the UK, however, you'll recognize it as a classic middle class Victorian terraced street.

It's Elgin Crescent in Notting Hill, where I stayed over the Christmas of 1997 with an old friend and his pregnant girlfriend (now wife.) It was my first time in the UK - my first time overseas, in fact - and I spent the first few days on the ground suffering from something I'd never encountered before: Jet lag.

I remember staying up late at night staring out over the rooftops, sleepless and fascinated by urban features like the gasometers I could glimpse in the distance, confounded at how they would be different heights whenever I looked at them. London was terribly expensive - more than I anticipated, and even though my friend paid for my meals, the £200 I managed to scrape together for the trip evaporated from my wallet just buying a pint or a newspaper or a magazine.

It's also a frame from the last film I would ever shoot with my Pentax SV, taken along in the interest of being as portable as possible. It was fun to use a camera with a single prime lens and no meter - a challenge to my skills at a point in my life when I would have described myself as a photographer and nothing else.