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| January 7th 1999 |
January 7th 2009 |
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Hotel Turner, Porta Pia, Rome
This is me in a hotel bedroom in Rome. I’m writing a diary that I’ve since lost. My boyfriend had to attend a conference in Rome and he took me with him, which felt incredibly decadent. I was very pleased at the time with how eventful 1999 was turning out to be – here I was, just seven days into the year, and enjoying my first mini-break to Europe. We must have raided the mini-bar because I seem to be drinking a mini-bottle of champagne – out of a plastic tooth mug. The watch by my bed is broken now. It was a piece of marketing for the film ‘Perfect Day’ starring Michelle Pfeiffer that I won in a writing competition run by the Odeon Cinema at Swiss Cottage. The Body Shop don’t make those lip balms anymore. |
Lamp at special sale price, Ryness, Old Compton Street
Every home should have one of these! And there's no excuse not to treat
yourself at prices like this.
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| January 6th 1999 |
January 6th 2009 |
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PH and VR, Finchley Road
PH and VR in the kitchen of our flat. PH made that place look great, those are her pictures on the wall behind them. She was a great car-booter. |
Christmas tree left on the pavement
This is the third one of these I've seen round our way today.
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| January 5th 1999 |
January 5th 2009 |
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Steven D. Wright and Rouven Comic Relief Jukebox, BBC
I haven’t really been sure if I should name all the players in my photos-of-the-day from 1999? What if they object to appearing on some woman’s website ten years after I snapped them? So I’m going to use initials for the people who appear more frequently and who were the people I saw on a regular basis, name the rest, and hope for the best.
This is Steven D. Wright (r) and Rouven (l). Steven was the producer of Comic Relief Jukebox. I worked with him again after this in 2005 on a disastrous pilot for Sky TV. He liked to wear tartan shirts, which are now actually in fashion. Rouven was the runner on Comic Relief Jukebox, I never saw him again after making that series. I haven’t seen Steven since the disastrous pilot. |
Brutalised tree
There’s a special word for the procedure that this tree has been subjected to, but I can’t remember what it is. I thought it was ‘polyped’ but I’m not sure now. Either way, it makes the tree look stunted and abused, especially on a dark January day like today, like a bunch of tight, grey fists.
Note - I'm told the word is pollarded.
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| January 4th 1999 |
January 4th 2009 |
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Die Young, Stay Pretty at the ICA, the Mall, SWI
This must have been in the evening after work. I was a member of the ICA for quite a few years and loved going to the bar there. So did RT, my boyfriend, who you can just see peeking around the corner behind the bored-looking invigilator. I have to say, I did find most of the exhibitions a bit difficult to understand, though this one had a very sexy title. I’ve no idea now what this artwork is or who made it. It looks like a skyray ice lolly crossed with a lamp.
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Christmas Cards
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| January 3rd 1999 |
January 3rd
2009 |
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MW working on Comic Relief Jukebox – On a Sunday!
This is me at work in the office at the BBC. I was totally alone in the place and I set the camera on its timer to take the picture. I remember posing to look at my screen so I would seem ‘natural’ and busy. I don’t really know why I thought it was necessary to go in and work on a Sunday but perhaps after the Christmas holidays there was a bit of a backlog of work to get through. It was certainly a much more peaceful time to get things done than trying to organise and clear clips when the office was full of people. Behind me the real Comic Relief production team worked to organise the TV events, but the programme I was making was a pre-Comic Relief series and really dull. It was presented by Zoe Ball and went out in the six weeks leading up to the main event. It was basically a clip show in which we showed the first par of several ‘classic’ comedy moments and then invited viewers to ring in and vote for the clips they wanted to see in their entirety. The money went to Comic Relief, and I seem to remember we didn’t cheat in those days – we actually showed the clips that got the most votes.
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Poster for JDate in West Hampstead
This billboard hits the eye as soon as you come out of West Hampstead tube station. In case you can’t read the caption on the poster it says “What's more, he’s Jewish”. It replaces a poster for the same Jewish dating website that featured a feisty looking blonde chick kick-boxing. Two of my best-friends are members of JDate. Ten years ago I didn’t have any close Jewish friends, now I have two.
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| January 2nd 1999 |
January 2nd 2009 |
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Rainbow at the Oxford Physic Garden
My boyfriend and I went for a daytrip to Oxford. It was cold - I remember that - but I thought the light in the gardens was very beautiful. I wanted to visit the physic gardens because a year of so earlier I had done an evening class on Garden History and got quite interested in places like this. I think the Oxford Physic Garden is the oldest one of its kind in the UK still in use.
There were about 20 people in that evening class, all of them women, I don’t really know now why I chose it, though I did like looking at some of the books we were supposed to study. We also looked at a lot of slides and I can still remember the somnolence of sitting there on a Thursday evening in the dusty dark and listening, with my eyes mostly shut to the slide and click and whirr of the machine. The course met in the art room of a Comprehensive school in Holland Park, where the toilets we had to use had no locks on the doors and no mirrors above the hand basins which were always bunged up with loo paper because there weren’t any plugs either – it must have been a rough school, or maybe I’d just forgotten what school was like.
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Curly and the Monster, West Hampstead
The ginger cat is Curly who belongs to us, the other cat is nick-named ‘monster’ and he comes from two houses away – he’s a bit of a brute.
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| January 1st 1999 |
January 1st 2009 |
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Millennium Dome – One Year Early
I remember being pretty pleased that I could kick off the photo-of-the-day project with a picture of the Millennium Dome. After all, in the turn of the year the whole country would be focussed on it when it became the epicentre of our New Labour-flavoured Millennium celebrations. On the 1st of January 1999 however it was an empty, dull-looking place – a bit like a deflated balloon or some kind of hovercraft.
Looking at the picture again now I’m also reminded that I felt pretty pleased with myself that I was out and about on New Years Day and not stuck at home with a hangover. In actual fact the day before I had helped my boyfriend move all his stuff into my room at the flat I shared with two other women. He was going to be staying with me for the next six weeks while he looked for a new flat-share of his own. We’d been too tired to go out after shifting all his belongings up from South London, and it had been nice to stay in, drink a bottle of champagne at midnight, and go to bed soon after. After all, we knew we’d be doing something much more exciting the following New Year’s Eve, so it didn’t seem to matter if we weren’t painting the town red that particular night.
Note: It seems strange to think of it now, but in the two or three years that led up to 2000 there was fairly widespread confusion as to how you spelt the word ‘millennium’. Did it have two ‘l’s and ‘two ‘n’s? Was the ‘M’ always a capital? Only the really big dictionaries contained the word and when I was working at the British Film Institute a rather large and expensive batch of catalogues about their millennium restoration project had to be re-printed when the word appeared without its full compliment of ‘l’s. |
Birdfood, West Hampstead
Left over bread sauce and peas from our New Year’s Eve dinner last night, mixed with blueberries past their best. It’s been cold recently so I put this out for the birds today, but no birds came and in the end a squirrel ate the bread bits.
Note - I was trying to remember if you could get blueberries back in 1999 but I can’t. |
