Why Yes, I Am Insane

Yesterday was my last day of summer break. Today it's back to work.

And how did I spend my last day of freedom, you may ask? I took a train to Croydon! South of Croydon, actually, to a community called Kenley.

Remember those slides by Joan Tubbs I recently bought at Camden Market and have written about endlessly? I already mentioned my suspicion that I'd only bought a fraction of her output. I also mentioned that I found a video on social media focusing on her mother's diaries.

It turns out there are multiple videos about those diaries, posted by the company that helped clear Tubbs' house after she died. I had a hunch they might have more slides, so I hopped the train to investigate. I soon found myself in an antique shop talking to two women about my curious quest, and lo and behold, they did indeed have a lot more of Tubbs' photography. (The diaries, by the way, have apparently gone to a museum, along with some of Tubbs' family photos. So that's good to know.)

I paged through the slides quickly -- many are mounted in binders -- and called Dave, asking him if I was crazy to buy the entire lot. He said yes, I am crazy, but told me to go ahead if I wanted them. So I rather rashly did so, even though a lot of them didn't look like quite what I was hoping for. There was a whole kerfuffle with my bank card which I won't bore you with but we eventually completed the transaction. I brought the slides home on the train and sat yesterday afternoon giving them a preliminary look.

The vast majority of them seem to be photos of flowers, mushrooms, lichen and seaweed. Apparently Tubbs was a botany enthusiast (and also liked fungi, sea life and insects and invertebrates). She and her friend Phyl Taylor, who is shown in some of her photos, were members of the Botanical Society of the British Isles. In fact, they are mentioned on page 15 of this 1981 issue of the society newsletter offering traveling photographic courses on natural history to such places as Dartmoor and the Isles of Scilly. Most of these photos appear to come from those trips, with those interests in mind.

She's a good flower photographer, don't get me wrong. But from the standpoint of preserving worthwhile photos, flowers don't interest me much, unless the photos are very unusual or taken in a way that show a photographer's unique perspective. I could go out today and take a picture of the same types of flowers that Tubbs shot forty years ago, you know?

But there are some good slides of people and places mixed in with all the flowers, so my trip wasn't a bust. And the slides that I bought in Camden ran from the early 1960s to the early 1980s, while these begin in the late '70s and continue through the '90s. So this appears to be more of her later output. I will have maybe a few dozen more pictures to scan and add to her eventual Flickr gallery.

I didn't find any more pictures from her trips to Namibia or the Shetlands, and as I said, nothing in this new haul is older than 1977 or so. So I still don't have much of what I suspect I'm missing. Maybe some of her friends already went through her slides and took their favorites, or maybe many were already sold to others. Who knows?

On my way home, this guy was sitting across from me on the tube. At first glance I thought he was holding a real pigeon -- but no, it's a bag shaped like a pigeon. To be precise, it appears to be a J.W. Anderson pigeon clutch bag (price £650), unless it is a cheap knockoff (£26). Given that he's also wearing a Vivienne Westwood "Extra Virgin" t-shirt (originally £180), I'm thinking the bag is the real deal.

I love it when there are interesting people on the train.

(Top photo: A sculpture outside London Bridge station, on my way home.)