FebulousFebruary 2026: The Old Photograph

Shopping for essentials

Essential: completely necessary: extremely important…

Like Art, the Joy of creating, the Passion for life, and the excitement of exploring ideas and worlds inside your head and out there, where birds sing and polar bears roam shrinking glaciers. Like smelling the wind off the snow, and feeling the spray off the waterfall and understanding their songs.
These are not available in Lidl.

Like a meaning to your life, that makes you want to get up in the morning for the joy the day might bring. Like enthusiasm for getting it done, whatever it is. Like understanding how that it fits into your purpose. Like challenges and meeting them head-on… with a fellow human to share the hilarity of your failures and the recognition of your success. Challenges more interesting and varied than surviving day after almost identical day of social media, Netflix and bananabread, and smiling grimly at the observation that we are lucky to be safe. Like a vision of the future, to hope for and work towards, that we are not afraid to seek.
These are not available by click-and-collect.

Like You, my friend, whom I cannot see or touch, and cannot visit, except by the slippery and deceitful glass screen of videochat. Except in my memories, and my hopes for the future. But you are essential to me.
And you are not available via Amazon.
Even though you are one.

Fin McMorran (age 64 and 3 quarters) Eighton Banks, Tynesid

I scream at the sea. 

The sea hears me, but no reply. 

She goes on, being, being the sea. 

Swelling and heaving,

Crashing and sighing, 

Yielding.  

To rhythm.

In peace. 

I stare into the waves, 

The waves gaze back, but still, no reply. 

She goes on, being the sea. 

Swelling and heaving, 

Crashing and sighing, 

Yielding. 

To rhythm. 

In peace. 

I yearn for the sea,

The sea draws me, draws me in. 

I am swelling and heaving, crashing and sighing, yielding. 

To the rhythm. 

To the peace. 

Within me.

Jayne Hazelden (age 50) Brighton

Four seasons in Lockdown

Spring

Washed our hands and stayed inside

Appreciated spring blossom

Learnt the songs of garden birds

ditched bras and wore trackie bottoms

Our screens became gods and we drank martinis at Corona o’clock

Summer

In May and June we took the knee to show that Black Lives Matter

We recognised our privilege and 

lives that police had shattered

July and August brought the sun

And pub gardens welcomed us outside

Eating out didn’t help us out as we soon again had to hide

Autumn 

Lockdown pounds started taking their toil

I ran and nurtured the body 

I watched the leaves change colours 

and took photos of the sky

pink, orange and purple sunsets

Starling murmurations passing by

Winter

Darkness came and shit got real

No parties or big gatherings

We mostly saw our mates on screen

And missed our seasonal happenings

More people getting sick and dying

We all stay home and drink

await the weekly van from ASDA and the call to vaccinate

Kerry Mitchell (age 50’ish) Brighton

Haiku for Lockdown

Was twelve months last Jan

Chemo in a pandemic

Survived it I did

Jacqui Soo (age 59) and a proud Scouser

Watching each wrenching episode of ‘It’s a sin’ led me to consider the impact of the AIDS pandemic on the future of our LGBT community and even on society as a whole. Certainly being gay in most countries other than the USA and most of Europe continued to be fraught with prejudice and physical danger but change was taking place and it was often thrilling.

I remember standing in the middle of the Castro in San Francisco in the mid 90s and with hundreds and hundreds of other LGBT people celebrating, and sending off to Washington, the first out member of President Clinton’s administration. And here and there, and more frequently, there followed regular examples of prominent people now publicly acknowledging their sexuality.

Gay Prides sprung up all over the place and the authorities gradually accepted that such events could take place in the centres of cities rather than in the backstreets where they could be ignored. Those marches in London particularly produced a sea of thousands of us claiming Piccadilly and the West End and we were inspired and encouraged by being there together. I remember hearing a gay man saying to his more nervous partner “I told you, you would like it”, or the straight woman being amazed at the thousands marching and being told “now you know what it’s like being a minority”.

The police, whose shameful record of harassment of gay man over the decades and which had destroyed the futures of so many men, now began to soften in their approach. You could see the change as each Pride followed another and hostility gave way to acceptance – even eventually,may I suggest, joyful acceptance. In the late 90’s I remember a somewhat camp young thing approaching an officer and asking “can I have my photo taken with you?”, to which he replied “OK, but don’t kiss me, OK?”

The public belief in the sinfulness of gay sex, with its accompanying abhorrence, also took an unexpected turn. Whereas the government’s pronouncements on the subject more than inferred that we shouldn’t do ‘it’ ever, a saner approach now took its place and no gay pub, club, sauna, or disco (and there were now many of them) was complete without condoms, lube and dental dams being freely and liberally available, and the word now was ‘always use them’.

Nevertheless there were still examples, many of them, where being gay might be tolerated, but would be a bar to promotion, employment or social acceptance. There were for example very few ‘out’ teachers who achieved promotion and the same was true for a number of professions. I remember one of our senior teachers publicly saying that he could never agree to homosexuals being promoted to high positions, and, of course, Section 28 still loomed large over the whole teaching profession.

We also learned the necessity and the freedom of publicly expressing our grief for our ‘fallen’ buddies and to honour them too. It was to be later that official memorials would be set up in cities in many western countries but the creation of the AIDS Memorial Quilt both here and in the USA was a uniquely moving example of how much our dead meant to us. I have no idea where the British one is now kept, but it should surely be displayed regularly to remind us all of those dark days.

At a London Pride in the 90’s one of my ex students held a champagne breakfast at his home before the parade and I was invited. Following the breakfast I stood on the underground platform, to make my way to the start of the march and saw a couple standing close by holding what was clearly a banner. I approached and asked “Are you going to the same place as me?” They replied “Are you going to Pride? It’s our first time. Our son came out to us last week and can’t come today so we decided to come in his place.” They were wearing t shirts which proclaimed ‘We are proud of our gay son’
And I cried!

Roger Newman ( almost 80) Margate

Lockdown shockdown stunned

Locktail cocktails, who zooms who?

Sweet pea seeds in pots

A flurry of snow

Swirling and birling so free

Awwwwwww  grandkids with sledge

Fiona Thomson, (age 60) Westgate

Memorial Day


Caustic hollow,
Man’s inhumanity to man.
I didn’t drop the ball,
I wasn’t even born.
Excuse enough to turn away? And then get on through,
My own dark, locked down day.
Another decade, another, pointless carnage.
No blame, but still the political shame
Of those born to the means,
Choosing a lack of care Disguised as innocent unaware.

Janet Jones (age 56) Brighton

LOCKDOWN.

The gearbox shouldn’t have been visible through where the radiator grill was supposed to be.

In fact, even with the grill removed, it should at the very least been the radiator to rest my eyes upon.

But this venerable workhorse of adventure and toil; a lady probably of the desert or the savana, both radiators and engine had been ripped from her, leaving an unpowered, driveless gearbox with four forward gears, one reverse, and a choice of two or four wheel drive, impotent, stationary; a piece of carrion at the mercy of vultures and scavengers.

Dishevelled as she was, the venerable carcass was still beautiful, almost as exquisite at ‘The Iimes,’ a 1930’s double fronted Art Deco house and home, hiding behind a two meter high wall, only a hundred meters up the road.

Lockdown precipitated these discoveries with its hour of exercise. An hour’s exercise is a walk of three miles, five miles if you jog, maybe ten if you cycle.

My shoes pound the pavement; burning off calories, seeking to satiate that longed for hope of human interaction; ‘Hello, lovely day isn’t it,’ ‘What a lovely dog.’ Barely a philosophical discourse, but contact with another human being.

On foot, I almost stumble on a small bunch of snowdrops; springs coming.

On foot, a stream embolden to riverhood alerts me to its presence by a watery roar. It’s not a place to swim, it’s foaming breast fed by incessant rains is angry. Yet even here, a mother with four ducklings, webbed feet paddling for their lives, instantly think a source of bread crusts has arrived to feed them.

What surprises me the most? Ducklings so early in the season? Or that in thirty years of traversing this road, I’d never realised a water course of such volume awaited discovery.

On foot you see so much more. 

Without lockdown, I’d probably never have taken this walk.

Peter c-Hill, (60’ish) Whitstable

The lines left dug into the tired and flushed face are real. 

The usually clear and beautiful skin looks spotty and worn.  Exhaustion and anxiety from another under-staffed, full-bedded unit. 

No respite from the head to toe coverings. There was no offer of finishing early for Christmas because they ‘need a rest’. No, they will all have worked over Christmas at some point or may have had to stay away from home to keep their loved ones safe.  That’s what they do.  Annual leave is cancelled. 

No more clapping, no pay rise. 

Thank you – it won’t pay your bills but it comes from the heart. 

You know who you are, x

Anne Stevens, (age 53) Thanet