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'Quiet'
Different tone of voice for this update, as this one's about me as apposed to Liam's training. If you'd like to know more about this project from my point of view, and what it's been like thus far in the process, keep reading! If not, then this is gonna get a bit introspective and soppy, so be warned!
I took today for myself. It was necessary for the benefit of my mental stimulation, motivation for this project and my ability to conduct myself in a manner fitting to the reason for me being here.
We're almost at the crest of two weeks shooting now, and this'll be officially the longest I've ever spent on a single project in one stint. It's without a doubt the most one-on-one time I've spent with a subject. It's intense, to say the least. The nature of this project is one that has thrown up, not obstacles, but learning experiences I need to quickly understand and adapt to in order to keep the momentum going.
For instance, I am not an alpha male. It's simply not who I am. I'm an introverted, artistic, gentle giant of a man-boy. Shy and considered with my words, scared of upsetting anyone. The people I'm hanging out with? Mega-alpha males. Professional fighters. Literal world champions. Men who epitomise the idea of 'being a man'. Large in both build and personality, confident in actions and conversation. As polite and welcoming as anyone I've ever known, and yet they put me on a strange back foot with my social skills. I feel it akin to hanging out with the cool kids back in secondary school, (who were often the more 'developed' guys in the year group). For some reason, despite being 23 I feel like I'm 16 next to these men. I'm naturally quiet around people I don't know because I like to get a sense of what that person is like before I open up. I'm not a fan of meaningless conversation, so when I speak up it's usually with a point behind it. I'd love to be good at small talk, but damn I'm awkward. Not even Huge Grant 'charmingly befuddled' awkward. Maybe it's because of the fast-pace lifestyle this city demands, but my natural rhythm of life seems too slow to keep up at times. Being around these men, most of which I find fascinating, I understand everything they talk about, but I find myself unable to contribute, and when I get to that point I feel like I'm a deadweight. So I pick up the camera, to remind myself that I'm here to do a job, not be popular. But it's a tight-rope situation. Being a successful freelance anything often rests on an ability to connect with people around you. It's not what you know, it's who you know, as many will be quick to remind a shy person.
Yesterday was such that I didn't feel like myself at all, and it bothered me. Quiet beyond a given reason, I could feel there was a slight tension between myself and Liam. To be honest, this was somewhat expected given the aforementioned one-on-one time between us, really it was more of a 'when' not an 'if', not that it's destructive in anyway, but you'd get testy with anyone you spend 11 consecutive days with, especially when one of them is mentally preparing for a world title fight, you know? I don't speak a lot, but when I was making a noise my voice felt quiet and timid, without a confidence I know I can possess. Yesterday I was much more acutely aware of my personal silence, and the direct effect it was having on those around me. After a full day of shooting, taking some images I was immensely happy with no less, I felt like I was at a point where I needed to figure out where my head was at to keep going strong. Maybe it was just that I was at a point of being burned out; shooting very similar things, long days, a routine of such. Whatever it was I felt like I was missing my groove, that inner-bounce that makes me excited to do what I do.
I may be quiet and introverted, but one thing I will say is that when I'm faced with a problem I make it my business to overcome it as quickly as possible. I hate dealing with a nagging issue, and especially given the time constraints of this project I felt it necessary to be drastic with getting my head back to where I know it needs to be. So I took today for myself.
I became most aware of it recently when I was writing my 3rd year dissertation, that sometimes I just need to allow time for myself in order to return to a positive state of mind. When I was getting stressed out about researching and writing that piece of work I allowed time to get away from it and focus on something completely unrelated, and not let myself feel guilty about it. Sometimes it's not that you can't concentrate anymore, but it's that you can't concentrate on something specific anymore. You still have that concentration and drive, but it's exhausted on one subject and needs a chance to change direction and a chance to explore, then eventually that motivation returns in a positive manner to the original work, often with fresh perspective and ideas.
Such was the case for me today. I needed time to myself to be able to think, consider, plan and muse on this project in the way I do with all of my projects, but I also needed an out from it for a moment so I could enjoy doing something different. I didn't see the New York skyline when I was here last time in March, so I decided to go to the top of the Rockerfeller centre and get 'that shot'. I spent a lot of time walking around the city today, exploring places I'd not seen before, and simply enjoying the sights and spectacle that is New York city.
I feel reinvigorated with myself and this project heading into Day 13.
9 Days to go.
Labradorite and peridot. Why is labradorite so enchanting? I really feel so introspective when I look at it.
Ogni giorno, ogni minuto, mi osservo, mi ascolto, cerco di cambiare.
Tu sei però cieco dei miei piccoli bisogni.
Ti abbraccio.
Music of the moment: Spleen: Peter Pan
© All my images are copyrighted.
Please, if you want to use any of my pictures, for any usage, you must contact me before you use. Thank you ©
Everything feels deep and introspective in a rainy cold day. Every one of us in our own bubble, under the umbrella, surrounded by a wet wall...
He seemed very introspective as he looked out at the recreation of the tide. Who knows what's going on in that curly haired little head of his?
I like this second, closer up shot more. Better expression.
So I was feeling moody and introspective today.
I want to buy a portable backdrop and take pictures of everyday Omaha folk a la Richard Avedon in the early 80s.
I want some serious lighting gear.
I want to find the time to sit down and learn lighting techniques. I want to take more photography classes.
I want, I want, I want.
89/366 (EEM)
You can find a large number of full-resolution photos under a Creative Commons license on my official website: nenadstojkovicart.com/albums
My friend Ibnu reminded me it is Chinese New Year Monday.......I was born in the year of the snake......what is your sign???
The Snake is the intuitive, introspective, refined and collected of the Animal Signs. They are attractive people who take cries with ease and do not become flustered easily. They are graceful people, exciting and dark at the same time.
Contemplative and private, the Snake is not outwardly emotional. He can appear cunning and reticent and works very modestly in the business environment. The Snake will plot and scheme to make certain things turn out exactly as they want them to. They are not great communicators and can become quite possessive when they set their minds on achieving the interest of a partner.
THE WOOD SNAKE 1905 AND 1965
The element of Wood, like in most Animal Signs, gives the Snake a bit of solidity and foundation. Wood Snakes are not as self-preserving as the rest of them, as vanity is not really his style. These Snakes have a stable group of friends and family to hang out with and love each of these people quite deeply. However, it is rare that the Snake utilize his group of loved ones for advice or listening, often opting to go at it alone. Kindness and genuity are two of this Snake’s greatest characteristics.
GEMINI SNAKE
These Snakes can talk their way out of anything, so a confrontation with them is a lost cause. They are well-educated and a bit amenable, making them quite intriguing.
''I feel most at home in the water. I disappear. That's where I belong.''
â–½
Life
Motion
Renewal
Blessing
Intuition
Reflection
Subconscious
Purification
Transformation.
A new very personal project I really care about. Moved by my current introspective phase and love for the water, nature, elements and symbols.
Introspective - the reflection is how we see ourselves, sometimes a little clouded - the reality is often clearly better than we imagine.
Living in Transit: The Thinkers of a World in Turmoil
War looms over Europe, uncertainty seeps into everyday life, and the weight of history presses upon the present. The world is burning, and yet—there are those who seek understanding, those who bury themselves in the quiet refuge of books, the dim glow of libraries, the solitude of knowledge.
This series captures the introspective minds of young academic women—readers, thinkers, seekers. They wander through old university halls, their fingers tracing the spines of forgotten books, pulling out volumes of poetry, philosophy, and psychology. They drink coffee, they drink tea, they stay up late with ink-stained fingers, trying to decipher the world through words.
They turn to Simone Weil for moral clarity, Hannah Arendt for political insight, Rilke for existential wisdom. They read Baudrillard to untangle the illusions of modernity, Byung-Chul Han to understand society’s exhaustion, Camus to grasp the absurdity of it all. They devour Celan’s poetry, searching for beauty in catastrophe.
But they do not just read—they reflect, they question, they write. Their world is one of quiet resistance, an intellectual sanctuary amidst the chaos. In their solitude, they are not alone. Across time, across history, across the pages they turn, they are in conversation with those who, too, have sought meaning in troubled times.
This is a series about thought in transit—about seeking, reading, questioning, about the relentless pursuit of knowledge when the world feels on the brink.
Where the Thinkers Go
They gather where the dust has settled,
where books whisper in the hush of halls.
Pages thin as breath, torn at the edges,
cradling centuries of questions.
They drink coffee like it’s ink,
trace words like constellations,
follow Rilke into the dusk,
where solitude hums softly in the dark.
Outside, the world is fraying—
war threading through the seams of cities,
the weight of history pressing forward.
Inside, they turn pages, searching
for answers, for solace, for fire.
And somewhere between the lines,
between time-stained margins and fading ink,
they find the ghosts of others who
once sought, once wondered, once read—
and they do not feel alone.
Three Haikus
Night falls on paper,
books stacked like silent towers,
thoughts burn in the dark.
Tea cools in the cup,
a poem lingers on lips,
war rumbles beyond.
Footsteps in silence,
the scent of old ink and dust,
pages turn like ghosts.
ooOOOoo
Reading as Resistance
These young women do not read passively. They underline, they take notes, they write in the margins. They challenge the texts and themselves. They read because the world demands it of them—because, in a time of conflict and uncertainty, thought itself is an act of resistance.
Their books are worn, their pages stained with coffee, their minds alive with the urgency of understanding.
1. Political Thought, Society & Liberation
Essays, theory and critique on democracy, power and resistance.
Chantal Mouffe – For a Left Populism (rethinking democracy through radical left-wing populism)
Nancy Fraser – Cannibal Capitalism (an urgent critique of capitalism’s role in the destruction of democracy, the planet, and social justice)
Étienne Balibar – Citizenship (rethinking the idea of citizenship in an era of migration and inequality)
Silvia Federici – Caliban and the Witch (a feminist Marxist analysis of capitalism and gender oppression)
Didier Eribon – Returning to Reims (a deeply personal sociological reflection on class and identity in contemporary Europe)
Antonio Negri & Michael Hardt – Empire (rethinking global capitalism and resistance from a leftist perspective)
Thomas Piketty – Capital and Ideology (a profound analysis of wealth distribution, inequality, and the future of economic justice)
Mark Fisher – Capitalist Realism (on why it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism)
2. Feminist & Queer Theory, Gender & Body Politics
Texts that redefine identity, gender, and liberation in the 21st century.
Paul B. Preciado – Testo Junkie (an autobiographical, philosophical essay on gender, hormones, and biopolitics)
Judith Butler – The Force of Nonviolence (rethinking ethics and resistance beyond violence)
Virginie Despentes – King Kong Theory (a raw and radical take on sex, power, and feminism)
Amia Srinivasan – The Right to Sex (rethinking sex, power, and feminism for a new generation)
Laurent de Sutter – Narcocapitalism (on how capitalism exploits our bodies, desires, and emotions)
Sara Ahmed – Living a Feminist Life (a deeply personal and political exploration of what it means to be feminist today)
3. Literature & Poetry of Resistance, Liberation & Exile
European novels, poetry and literature that embrace freedom, revolution, and identity.
Annie Ernaux – The Years (a groundbreaking memoir that blends personal and collective history, feminism, and social change)
Olga Tokarczuk – The Books of Jacob (an epic novel about alternative histories, belief systems, and European identity)
Édouard Louis – Who Killed My Father (a deeply political and personal exploration of class struggle and masculinity)
Bernardine Evaristo – Girl, Woman, Other (a polyphonic novel on race, gender, and identity in contemporary Europe)
Maggie Nelson (though American, widely read in European academia) – On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint (a poetic, intellectual meditation on freedom and constraint)
BenjamÃn Labatut – When We Cease to Understand the World (a deeply philosophical novel on science, war, and moral responsibility)
Michel Houellebecq – Submission (controversial but widely read as a dystopian critique of political passivity in Europe)
4. Ecology, Anti-Capitalism & Posthumanism
Texts that explore the intersections of nature, economics, and radical change.
Bruno Latour – Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (rethinking ecology and politics in a world of climate crisis)
Andreas Malm – How to Blow Up a Pipeline (on the ethics of radical environmental resistance)
Emanuele Coccia – The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture (rethinking human and non-human coexistence)
Isabelle Stengers – Another Science is Possible (rethinking knowledge and resistance in an era of corporate science)
Kate Raworth – Doughnut Economics (rethinking economic models for social and ecological justice)
Donna Haraway – Staying with the Trouble (rethinking coexistence and posthumanist futures)
The Future of Thought
These are not just books; they are weapons, tools, compasses. These women read not for escapism, but for resistance. In a time of political upheaval, climate catastrophe, and rising authoritarianism, they seek alternative visions, radical possibilities, and new ways of imagining the world.
Their books are annotated, their margins filled with questions, their reading lists always expanding. Knowledge is not just power—it is revolution.
Charles Leplae, (Leuven, 1903 - Uccle, 1961), was a Belgian sculptor and draftsman. Experimented initially in an expressionist style, but evolved towards a more traditional view. He often sculpted female nudes, which he regularly imparted a reserved, thoughtful, introspective attitude. He was also a known medalist. Hoping to restore the true meaning and character of the art of medal making, he went back to ancient techniques by engraving the patterns directly into the metal of the matrix with a chisel.
Title of the work: Two pregnant woman
This work of art can be admired at the Middelheim open air museum at Antwerp: www.middelheimmuseum.be/en
Charles Leplae, (Leuven, 1903 - Ukkel , 1961), was een Belgische beeldhouwer en tekenaar. Experimenteerde aanvankelijk in een expressionistische stijl, maar evolueerde naar een meer traditionele opvatting. Hij beeldhouwde vaak vrouwelijke naakten, die hij regelmatig een gereserveerde, peinzende, introspectieve attitude toedeelde. Hij was ook een gekend medailleur. In de hoop de ware betekenis en het karakter te herstellen van de kunst van het maken van medailles, ging hij terug naar oude technieken door de patronen rechtstreeks met een beitel in het metaal van de matrix te graveren.
Meer over dit werk: search.middelheimmuseum.be/details/collect/148140
Dit werk kan bewonderd worden in het openlucht museum Middelheim in Antwerpen: www.middelheimmuseum.be/nl
Charles Leplae, (Louvain, 1903 - Uccle, 1961), était un sculpteur et dessinateur belge. Initialement il expérimentait dans un style expressionniste, mais plus tard évoluait vers une vision plus traditionnelle. Il sculptait souvent des nus féminins auxquels il assignait régulièrement une attitude réservée, réfléchie et introspective. Il était également un médailleur connu. Dans l'espoir de restaurer le vrai sens et le caractère de l'art de la médaille, il est revenu aux techniques anciennes en gravant les motifs directement dans le métal de la matrice avec un ciseau.
Titre de l'Å“uvre: Deux femmes enceintes
Cette œuvre peut être admirée au musée en plein air Middelheim à Anvers: www.middelheimmuseum.be/fr
Self portraits of me are generally few and far between. They may exist, and other photos of me in general, in quite an abundance, but public display is another thing. Frankly, unless there's a good reason, all you assembled viewers of Flickr and other mediums would much rather be looking at some handsome chap with a six pack or a lady blessed with ample curves. Be honest.
The thing is about self portraits, as many of you Flickr viewers will know, is I've really quite taken to following the work of many of you who do self portraits regularly. I've become quite taken by numerous 365 projects, Brent (stateofthenation) and his flash portraits (strobist is a phrase born of the American desire to call everything a different name surely?) and Miss Aniela's delightful self examinations springing to mind. Aniela's work has also, through a certain level of snooping opened up a whole raft of people here on Flickr practising 365 self portraiture who's work I'm really enjoying following and feeling quite inspired by.
Yet this manipula sudonym and username, and ultimately the images I take are not of the same ilk as these self portraiture artists, and I think, despite kinda having a longing inside to join the bandwagon, it sits at odds with what I've spent about ten years of my life becoming.
And it's this looking at others work, those years, and the general soaking up of internet photography culture that's resulted in this. I am really hacked off, and completely disillusioned with photography currently.
I see these female self portrait artists on here, and as a guy looking at a picture of a girl, I instantly feel the need to have to justify it. The fact remains that Flickr is obviously a domain in which perverted, predatory males lurk in order to get their rocks off over pictures of girls. I was looking at some images earlier of two lesbian lovers, and I'll be quite honest, I thought they were fantastic, but was afraid to click that 'comment' button because I knew I would be seen as yet another predatory man looking at girls. And you know what it's not true. Not all guys out there are looking at these images trying to get their rocks off, in the same way not all of these female artists aren't shooting their images as a way of attracting attention to themselves to fuel their egos.
And then we get to internet forums. I'd wager anyone who's on Flickr will have experience with a forum of some form. I'm a member of several photography forums and I am finding that the medium that makes photography so accessable is killing it slowly and woe betide you if you dare to say anything of the sort. Digital photography and posting it to the internet so some dude who you'll never meet can slap you on the back and give you a metaphoric rub of the groin and massage of the ego is not the reason we should be shooting images.
And making photography accessible shouldn't result in one mindless sheep after another jumping on whatever bandwagon is the latest craze. Witness psychadelic HDR photography, panoramics of absolutely nothing, selective colouring, the 'fake' tilt shift movement, ring flashes and off camera flash (though I conceed to liking these two it's getting a bit overdone), fisheye lenses for extreme sport, motorsport photographers who can't shoot anything that hasn't been seen aproximately ten zillion times before.
Models are another one. I've been privileged to have worked with some truly wonderful models, women (and men) who I'd quite happily hang around with away from a camera. In some cases this has proven to be the point. But picking up a camera to shoot a model for whatever reason it may be seems to be attracting more and more legal implications, more and more pre-madonnas with high and mighty attitudes, and greater and greater assumptions to claims on the images you shoot. Frankly I shoot people and models because I love showing people to the world in a way other people can access and feel a part of. I don't do it as a way of engaging myself into mind games and angst. It's enough to make you want to not bother...
So, photography, the internet and the sh*tty assed associations that come with it, I'm taking a break from. If I am looking at your photo of your perfectly formed ass, then my work should speak enough for itself to show I'm not there for the thrills. If your work is follow the leader fashion, and no substance, I reserve the right to say so without getting my ass handed to me on a plate by a moderator.
Photography is about you, and appreciation of others, and it should be as without boundaries as our own imagination.
Rant over.
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Living in Transit: The Thinkers of a World in Turmoil
War looms over Europe, uncertainty seeps into everyday life, and the weight of history presses upon the present. The world is burning, and yet—there are those who seek understanding, those who bury themselves in the quiet refuge of books, the dim glow of libraries, the solitude of knowledge.
This series captures the introspective minds of young academic women—readers, thinkers, seekers. They wander through old university halls, their fingers tracing the spines of forgotten books, pulling out volumes of poetry, philosophy, and psychology. They drink coffee, they drink tea, they stay up late with ink-stained fingers, trying to decipher the world through words.
They turn to Simone Weil for moral clarity, Hannah Arendt for political insight, Rilke for existential wisdom. They read Baudrillard to untangle the illusions of modernity, Byung-Chul Han to understand society’s exhaustion, Camus to grasp the absurdity of it all. They devour Celan’s poetry, searching for beauty in catastrophe.
But they do not just read—they reflect, they question, they write. Their world is one of quiet resistance, an intellectual sanctuary amidst the chaos. In their solitude, they are not alone. Across time, across history, across the pages they turn, they are in conversation with those who, too, have sought meaning in troubled times.
This is a series about thought in transit—about seeking, reading, questioning, about the relentless pursuit of knowledge when the world feels on the brink.
Where the Thinkers Go
They gather where the dust has settled,
where books whisper in the hush of halls.
Pages thin as breath, torn at the edges,
cradling centuries of questions.
They drink coffee like it’s ink,
trace words like constellations,
follow Rilke into the dusk,
where solitude hums softly in the dark.
Outside, the world is fraying—
war threading through the seams of cities,
the weight of history pressing forward.
Inside, they turn pages, searching
for answers, for solace, for fire.
And somewhere between the lines,
between time-stained margins and fading ink,
they find the ghosts of others who
once sought, once wondered, once read—
and they do not feel alone.
Three Haikus
Night falls on paper,
books stacked like silent towers,
thoughts burn in the dark.
Tea cools in the cup,
a poem lingers on lips,
war rumbles beyond.
Footsteps in silence,
the scent of old ink and dust,
pages turn like ghosts.
ooOOOoo
Reading as Resistance
These young women do not read passively. They underline, they take notes, they write in the margins. They challenge the texts and themselves. They read because the world demands it of them—because, in a time of conflict and uncertainty, thought itself is an act of resistance.
Their books are worn, their pages stained with coffee, their minds alive with the urgency of understanding.
1. Political Thought, Society & Liberation
Essays, theory and critique on democracy, power and resistance.
Chantal Mouffe – For a Left Populism (rethinking democracy through radical left-wing populism)
Nancy Fraser – Cannibal Capitalism (an urgent critique of capitalism’s role in the destruction of democracy, the planet, and social justice)
Étienne Balibar – Citizenship (rethinking the idea of citizenship in an era of migration and inequality)
Silvia Federici – Caliban and the Witch (a feminist Marxist analysis of capitalism and gender oppression)
Didier Eribon – Returning to Reims (a deeply personal sociological reflection on class and identity in contemporary Europe)
Antonio Negri & Michael Hardt – Empire (rethinking global capitalism and resistance from a leftist perspective)
Thomas Piketty – Capital and Ideology (a profound analysis of wealth distribution, inequality, and the future of economic justice)
Mark Fisher – Capitalist Realism (on why it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism)
2. Feminist & Queer Theory, Gender & Body Politics
Texts that redefine identity, gender, and liberation in the 21st century.
Paul B. Preciado – Testo Junkie (an autobiographical, philosophical essay on gender, hormones, and biopolitics)
Judith Butler – The Force of Nonviolence (rethinking ethics and resistance beyond violence)
Virginie Despentes – King Kong Theory (a raw and radical take on sex, power, and feminism)
Amia Srinivasan – The Right to Sex (rethinking sex, power, and feminism for a new generation)
Laurent de Sutter – Narcocapitalism (on how capitalism exploits our bodies, desires, and emotions)
Sara Ahmed – Living a Feminist Life (a deeply personal and political exploration of what it means to be feminist today)
3. Literature & Poetry of Resistance, Liberation & Exile
European novels, poetry and literature that embrace freedom, revolution, and identity.
Annie Ernaux – The Years (a groundbreaking memoir that blends personal and collective history, feminism, and social change)
Olga Tokarczuk – The Books of Jacob (an epic novel about alternative histories, belief systems, and European identity)
Édouard Louis – Who Killed My Father (a deeply political and personal exploration of class struggle and masculinity)
Bernardine Evaristo – Girl, Woman, Other (a polyphonic novel on race, gender, and identity in contemporary Europe)
Maggie Nelson (though American, widely read in European academia) – On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint (a poetic, intellectual meditation on freedom and constraint)
BenjamÃn Labatut – When We Cease to Understand the World (a deeply philosophical novel on science, war, and moral responsibility)
Michel Houellebecq – Submission (controversial but widely read as a dystopian critique of political passivity in Europe)
4. Ecology, Anti-Capitalism & Posthumanism
Texts that explore the intersections of nature, economics, and radical change.
Bruno Latour – Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (rethinking ecology and politics in a world of climate crisis)
Andreas Malm – How to Blow Up a Pipeline (on the ethics of radical environmental resistance)
Emanuele Coccia – The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture (rethinking human and non-human coexistence)
Isabelle Stengers – Another Science is Possible (rethinking knowledge and resistance in an era of corporate science)
Kate Raworth – Doughnut Economics (rethinking economic models for social and ecological justice)
Donna Haraway – Staying with the Trouble (rethinking coexistence and posthumanist futures)
The Future of Thought
These are not just books; they are weapons, tools, compasses. These women read not for escapism, but for resistance. In a time of political upheaval, climate catastrophe, and rising authoritarianism, they seek alternative visions, radical possibilities, and new ways of imagining the world.
Their books are annotated, their margins filled with questions, their reading lists always expanding. Knowledge is not just power—it is revolution.
All Saints, Alburgh, Norfolk
It was one of those intensely hot days at the start of August 2018, and the cool shade of the over-bowering trees along the narrow lanes was a blessing. You don't have to get far from the Waveney and the busy A137 taking the traffic through to Lowestoft and Great Yarmouth to find peace. Here in the folding ridges to the north are secret villages linked by lonely, jinking roads. I had just come from Denton, its church hidden in the trees in a dip and reached only by a bridge and a track through the grounds of the Hall. And now it was a short distance from there to the larger village of Alburgh, and I caught my first sight of the curiously narrow top of Alburgh church tower appearing above the trees and the barley-stubbled rises. Soon, I came down into civilisation, and there was the church, its tower towards the road.
Not a spectacular church at all, but it has a special connection for me as someone I was very fond of came from here. I was back after twelve years away, but that visit was still clear in my mind, not least because of what I had felt about it then. When I'd got home, I had written: 'Coming down Norfolk by a different road, I came out into a landscape that I knew. It was early spring, and five years before I had explored the Suffolk side of the Waveney valley at the same time of year. Here in Norfolk were the same rolling, secretive meadows, the copses that seeped and spread between the fields, the quiet, scattered parishes with mere hints of village centres. Introspective hamlets, not talking to each other, the narrow lanes that connected them veering and dipping as if trying to shake them off.
At a crossroads, an old Methodist chapel sulked under the indignity of conversion. And there were wide pig farms and ancient silage heaps and faded bottle banks outside the village hall. No commuters here, no holiday cottages or weekend homes. Everyone except me was here because they had to be. This was where they lived, where they worked. They were the modern equivalents of the blacksmith, the carter, the wheelwright. The Waveney valley is the heart of rural East Anglia, perhaps the last truly insular place in the south-east of England. I was glad to be here.
Alburgh is not a place I have ever thought of often. But now, in the crisp air, I stood in the graveyard and looked across the country at the scattered village and its setting. Beyond the houses was the ancient field pattern, the beech trees on the ridge and the rooks wheeling above them. I thought of a song of the early eighties, Pete Wylie's Story of the Blues, and his declaiming, towards the end, the words of Kerouac's Sal Paradise: the city intellectuals of the world are divorced from the folk-body blood of the land, and are just rootless fools. I had been born in a place like this, tiny and remote in the Cambridgeshire fens, a world away from now in the 1960s. But we moved to Cambridge when I was two, and I had lived in urban areas ever since. I was a city intellectual, and I stood now and looked around at the land, a rootless fool.
I first heard of Alburgh more than twenty years ago. I was living unhappily in Brighton at the time, learning to teach, finding out how little I actually knew about anything. I would cycle out to the University through the stinking traffic on the Lewes road, and often arrive cold, wet and battered by the wind from the downs. At first, I knew nobody, and I spent most evenings in my attic room listening to music and feeling sorry for myself. In the bitter-sweet autumn sunshine of the weekends I would cycle around the downs, searching for old churches, repopulating the hamlets and lanes of East Sussex with characters from Hardy and Trollope.
I hardly went into town at all. Everybody seems to love Brighton, and they can't understand it when I say that I don't, but perhaps I was too often miserable there. In my memory I still associate Brighton with debt, and with the transience of being a student. And then, extraordinarily, a brief, doomed relationship, a love affair, became the one vivid thing, a brief, sweet memory of my year in that brash town.
She came from Alburgh, and at first I thought she meant Aldeburgh in Suffolk, and she said it again, Ar-brer, and showed me on a map. How narrow was the single bed we shared, how intense those brief few weeks. And she loved me more than I could possibly have loved her, for I had already met the woman who would become my wife. And so it was messy, and then it ended. But Alburgh still existed, of course, and so coming here I remembered.
If that had been all there was, then I wouldn't have thought it worth mentioning, but there was also the Kerouac quote, and I had recently gone back to the village where I was born. It was a tiny hamlet, off of the Cambridge to Ely road. My mother had been born there, my parents married in the Church there. I was baptised there, and so were my brothers.
At one time there had been three farms, a shop, a railway halt, a pub, a school, a church and a chapel. I'm not looking this up in some mid-19th century White's Directory, I remember them from the 1960s and 1970s. Now, they were nearly all gone. The farms had been built over, the pub, shop and chapel converted to houses. To stand beside the railway line, you'd need a vivid imagination to guess that the halt had even existed, as the expresses screamed through at over a hundred miles an hour.
The church and the school survived, but only because this was now a commuter village. Every morning, hundreds and hundreds of white-collar workers left their identical modern houses and piled up the A10 to Cambridge and Ely. I knew nobody there any more - my grandmother was dead, and all my relatives had left, or were lying under the frozen turf of the little cemetery. It made me sad. I thought that perhaps this was what growing old was, seeing change and resenting it. And so I liked Alburgh because it appeased my sense of loss, as if something might survive after all.'
All this then, gentle reader, was in my mind as I returned to Alburgh after twelve years away. The tower I had seen from Denston churchyard, and which bobbed its head above the copses and the rolling fields as I approached it, stands tall and proud, four-square to the road, the aisleless nave and chancel disappearing into the narrowing churchyard beyond. An imposing sight, though not a huge tower, merely large in proportion. The bulk of it is probably 14th century, but the bell stage with its enormous bell windows is later, a late medieval addition. It looks awkward, because the new building technology no longer required that the buttresses should continue up the bell stage. But the effect is unfortunate, I think, like the unnaturally small head of a large man. The buttressed pinnacles on the four corners are a more recent confection, for the very top of the tower collapsed in 1895, and what we see at the top now dates from the dawn of the new century.
The west front must have been rather grand once, with large niches flanking the window, but the canopies of the niches have gone, either vandalised by protestants or more likely worn away by the passing of the centuries. In proportion with the nave, the south porch seems bigger than it is. A 1463 bequest for the porch by the Wright family is recorded, but it now looks all of its Victorian restoration.
And so, I am afraid, does the inside of the church, a big 19th century barn with a lot of the anonymity you'd expect of this date. And yet, there are neat, local, rustic touches, and the pride of the early 20th Century parish in the boys who went off to war and never came back is still evident, great lists of names rather haunting in their context. Surprisingly, the roof is old, and it spreads impressively across the wide nave. A beautiful gilded rood screen dado is almost defiant in the face of all the restoration. There are pretty little gilded gesso saints in niches on the buttresses along the front, but I think the colour is wholly modern.
Echoing it, perhaps inspired by it, insipid apostles flank the altar and its simple reredos, a William Morris-style hanging. Turning back, the tower arch lifts tall and dreamily, light from the west window flooding the reset font below, the space becoming an echo of the wide chancel arch at the other end of the great roof. There's a pleasing harmony to the whole piece, and perhaps the Victorians should not be blamed for too much.
And so, that was all, my return to Alburgh. Just another church, and yet, like all medieval parish churches, a place full of stories, and memories, hopes, fears, regrets, embarrassments, delights, hungers, desires, agonies, beginnings and endings. Here, I sensed around me a building that was a touchstone down the long generations, and a beacon across miles and oceans. Just another church, but always and everywhere and forever. Think of the millions of people who can trace atoms of their being back to this place! Think of the lives touched by people who stepped out from this parish! And that's true of anywhere of course.
I went back outside and pottered around the graveyard. The heat was stifling after the coolness inside the church. A large dragonfly buzzed around my head and then veered away on the currents rising from the long grass. I sat down on a bench facing towards the newer headstones, and placed on the arm of the bench I found to my surprise a painted flintstone.
It had a message painted and lacquered onto it. On one side was a pink heart, and the words 'I ♥ Norfolk'. On the other side, the artist had painstakingly lettered in tiny writing 'congratulations on finding a Norfolk Rock', and asked the finder to 'either take me or rehide me'. It was extraordinary.
I slipped it into my pocket, not sure if this counted as taking it or rehiding it, possibly both, and thinking to myself that it felt like the goal of a pilgrimage. I wandered over to take a look at the more recent graves, which included a number in the last twenty years with her surname on. It is a common one in this village, but I wondered if any of them could have been her parents, who I had not known. I thought that she had probably been married in this place, if she had ever married, and so I said a silent prayer for all the people I have ever known and lost touch with, wherever they may be in the world, whether or not they remember me, or think of me, or are even reading this now.
I stood for a while, thinking of the years, and then got back in the saddle, shaking off a maudlin veil which was beginning to settle over me. I kicked off into a rush of heat lifted by the sudden breeze of my movement. A long stretch lay ahead of me now through delicious rolling back lanes with melting tarmac, zigzagging down into Harleston.
The veil that attracts attention - but remains impenetrable to outsiders. Thoroughly recommended for the shy and introspective, like me!