On the boringness of my immediate neighbourhood

I am aware that, of late, I have been failing to post recently photoed photos here. There’s been stuff from five years ago. from ten years ago, and even from seventeen years ago. I hope it’s been interesting and diverting. But, and especially given how “historic” right now surely is, there’s been a lack of photos photoed only a matter of an hour or two ago.

Well, here’s a photo I photoed yesterday, when out shopping. We’re in Vauxhall Bridge Road, look south-east, towards Vauxhall Bridge and the River. Just this side of the bridge is this tower, which often gets hit by the evening sun, making it look like this:

Part of the problem is that getting out has proved very irksome of late. It was getting slightly more irksome by the year before all this Lockdown nonsense, but now it has got much more irksome, because of Lockdown. Trivial things like taking a ride on the tube, or dropping into a cafe for a coffee and a sitdown and a book-read, have suddenly become fraught with uncertainty, confusion and potential stress. Food shopping is okay. I have to do it, and everyone I meet knows I have to do it. But I don’t have to stop for a sit-down anywhere in particular, so the danger is that some bossy stranger will ask me about this. Home, by comparison, filled as it is, the way most homes are these days, with untold diversions and entertainments and fascinations, is a place of calm and certainty.

Which means that right now, I tend only to photo very familiar objects and very familiar effects, which I have photoed many times before. And have become – let me be frank – rather bored by. I suspect that this is a universal problem, for many, many people. Because you see the places very near to you again and again, they seem mundane, and therefore not worth telling other people about.

One of the reasons my immediately neighbourhood happens to bore me is that not a single one of my close friends lives near to be, and I know none of my neighbours well. My neighbourhood is just a place, and one I am very familiar with, which I have to walk through every time I want to go anywhere more interesting. So, it bores me.

So, I suffer from neighbourhood envy. The grass is always greener, the neon lights always brighter, blah blah. Sometimes a novelty hoves into view (perhaps because it is being constructed) and I manage to photo it. Then, I’m not bored. But most of my photos of my immediate neighbourhood look very boring to me, so why would I inflict one such upon you lot now? It doesn’t seem very polite.

What I’m hoping is that the above photo will amuse you more than it now amuses me. I can’t tell you how many times I have trudged down Vauxhall Bridge Road lugging too much shopping with me, with that tower in the distance, often illuminated as it was late yesterday afternoon. But since many of you have not seen this exact effect ever before, let along about once a week for the last two decades, I’m hoping that you won’t be bored.

I’m thinking of how beautiful I found photos like the one above, when I first started photoing them, quite a lot more than ten years ago. Maybe that is what you, some of you at least, will see now. I hope so. If not, I hope that you at least found the attached musings amusing.