Wanders at Warkworth

So driving up to Warkworth over the weekend, I had to shoot a wedding. I know I don’t necessarily talk about weddings on here these days, but I do if friends or family or people I know do come to me with wedding requests, I’m more than happy to shoot weddings. I used to shoot around 20-25 weddings a year. These days, it’s more like five or six. And that’s really good because for life and for family things, it’s great for me to have my weekends back, to be able to spend time with my little one.


But one of the things that kind of driving up made me go, ‘Ah yeah…’ It’s kind of one of them legacy past history things that kind of is in the back of your head and you don’t realise it. There’s a significant number of geese on the fields on the way up the A1. And most people won’t have spotted it, most people won’t realise they’re there or know what they are – they don’t realise how migratory geese are as a species.

And it takes me back. The only reason that I know is that, as a kid, my Dad was an active birdwatcher and he still is now. So it was inevitable whenever we were out and about anywhere, that things would be pointed out to me, ‘Oh look, there’s a such and such, oh look, there’s a such and such.’ And that kind of view and the eyes of always trying to see the little things in your peripheral vision, I can’t help it now and my wife and child both get confused as to how I can be driving down a road and I could spot a buzzard stood on top of a lamppost five- or six-hundred yards away and they wouldn’t even see anything wrong with it just being a post but I’ll spot the buzzard straight away. Or we’re driving through the Derwent Valley and there are some red kites up in the sky. I’ll be the first one out of a crowd of people to spot them. Again, just because every weekend as a kid, there was something pointed out to me, or we did go and do a bit of like formal twitching. And that skill’s never kind of left me.


And I’m not sure if it’s a thing with my peripheral vision. I think I do seem to be able to pick things up a lot more peripheral than most. I mean, maybe it’s an ADHD thing, I don’t know. But, seeing these birds and seeing some grey likes and white and pink-fronted geese come in – the noise and everything. So it could be the noise, it could be the sounds, it could be the visual of seeing them? That really makes me smile because it takes me back to my childhood and it’s another one of those skills that I just assume everybody spots things and sees the world in the way that I do. And it’s blatantly clear that that’s not the case! We’re all so different and nobody can even contemplate what’s going through somebody else’s head in a lot of situations.

So, how many of those little sub-conscious things that you do, that if somebody was to say something, you’d be surprised, ‘Oh well, is not everything like that?’

Or is it just me??