Edited: rendered obsolete by further posts.
Off topic: Rob, upon what "rock" are you currently exiled? You surely do not mean Her Majesty's Splendid Kingdom of Truth and Justice up there across the Channel...
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Mike
Mallorca, Mediterranean. Great if you want to decline with G&T in hand and without any further interests - well, golf and yachts might provide solace - but the raison d´étre of the first defeats my warped sense of logic and the second my wallet.
On the whole, though, the Mallorquin people are genuinely friendly if you open up to them without that dreaded British sense of some sort of superiority (usually unfounded, I have discovered) and you have the sense not to tell them that things are better done in your country of origin. More often than not, once you learn how things work, the systems in place do very well indeed.
Exile? Well, the feeling of such stems from the fact that I came to live here on the basis of stock photography and calendars. The idea was that with so much (then) empty shore and work, I wouldn´t have to waste a lot of time and money travelling to other parts of the world to get my shots. As mentioned before, later political correctness saw the business sink into pointlessness and stock became ever less of a positively loaded (in my favour) gamble. So I allowed myself to wander off and smell roses, go cruising with friends and generally waste a lot of time until I discovered my own mortality on the night of my first heart attack, a point which brought Helmut Newton´s own moment to mind, as well as his reaction, which was that from that point on he would only do with photography that which he chose. Me too.
Not much else to it, really.
Rob C
