Hi folks. Last week I logged on to Flickr for the first time in months and discovered that a couple of you had kindly tried to contact me, so I thought I'd stop by here to say sorry for not replying.
Over the last six months or so of last year I was in the grip of a fairly catastrophic episode of the mental health condition that comes along and clobbers me now and then, so I'm afraid I really wasn't in any condition to be chatting to anyone online. It's no big deal in comparison with the horrors that so many people have suffered from Covid, but it was enough to cause quite a lot of self-inflicted damage in my own life. And it meant that I rudely ignored a couple of you from here, and I want to apologise for that.
I've now realised that there's something intrinsically destabilising about social media for me personally, so I've shut down everything apart from Facebook with a handful of close family and real world friends. That includes shutting down my Flickr account. Of course you can't officially close down a PF account, and that's fine because I think I probably would have wanted to keep this one open anyway for old time's sake. I've lurked here now and then and it's been good to see that the K10D Club is still going strong with some talented new members, and I've loved what I've seen in the CCD cult thread. But I won't be coming back here as a regular contributor, because, like I say, I've come to accept that social media isn't particularly healthy for me personally.
I've actually taken a couple of photos again over the past few weeks, which is hopefully a sign that things are on the mend now. Although it seems that, somewhere during the months of chaos, I gave away all my lovely Takumars to charity -- which is just the sort of thing that tends to happen in those sort of times. I've still got the GX-10 and 18-55mm though, and what else more than that do you really need anyway?
Here's a couple of snaps from the start of this year (assuming I've remembered how to do it and they're actually visible).