Grapes.

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The Creative Itch

Creativity is a thing I’ve found I can’t force. If I do it comes out fake, especially when I’m trying to do it for an audience. I found this particularly during a stint of creating my short form Friday series on YouTube. It started with the best of intentions, but I wound up writing it for YouTube, which wasn’t faithful to what I intended, so I stopped.

After a taking a while to regroup, life got busy again and I found my writing took a bit of a nosedive, I picked up my camera and started looking for inspiration there. In my impatience, it felt like a slow drip, but whilst photographing the disparity in the wealthy areas of Paris, I felt a stirring to write about the baked-in injustice of our current world culture. It welled up like a scream, pages and pages of words have followed and I’m on the verge of publishing it as a zine – the working title is “Subtle Art”.

This collection is part righteous angry rant, part reflection and a chunk of holding up the mirror. It’s also a bit more ‘sweary’ than my previous work, but I’m a believer using it deliberately and sparingly to drive home a point. I’ll be looking at options for producing physical copies, but in the meantime, here’s a snippet: My poem, tentatively titled “Rebel?”, an exploration of societal expectation against the lens of biblical expectation of how we react to injustice.

Rebel?

exuding the subtle art of not giving a fuck
viscerally caring too much
I want to rebel
to turn over tables
to call out hypocrisy

But what of my own?

A plank for a speck
not an eye-for-an-eye
not a tooth-for-a-tooth

what could be more punk than loving the one holding the hilt
as the steel twists between my ribs,
as the cavity of my chest fills with my own fluid,
the capacity to breathe squeezed out of me,
whilst I pray for their salvation
for their situation
let that be my action in this moment
the only thing over which I have any control
and hope that I see them again when I’m raised

new body, same soul.

by Grapes. October 30, 2026October 30, 2026

Out of Chaos Comes…This

I’m currently spending some time looking back over some of my writing ideas and whilst my writing time itself (albeit sporadic) is reasonably well structured however, how the ideas arrive is chaos! I have notebooks and exercise books in several places about the house, in my backpack, in my other backpack, in my camera bag and so on. When I, for some unfathomable reason, have an idea when I don’t have one to hand, I have voice notes on my phone (useful for songs) and Ulysses. Leave it 6 months to a year and I now have to work out what I’m actually looking at and listening to, is it metaphor, simile, allegory or total rubbish? I call them poem seeds and where digitised, organise them as such which is helpful. I rarely delete them because they might mean something to me later than they do now, I figure even a half-scribbled Haiku can turn into an epic with the right inspiration.

One thing I do find to be true, is that I find it easier to put pen to paper than type in the initial stages. There’s something about that locomotion, that muscle memory, that helps ideas flow. It’s like converting streams of my consciousness and subconsciousness into something physical, something I can query & probe, a thought or moment held captive on my page. Of course it can be complete nonsense, but it can also be a great way of teasing out a feeling, or the beauty/horror of a snatched moment in infinity and quite often, even if I turn it sideways I still can’t work out what I was banging on about. But herein lies the challenge – what can I make if I can’t connect my original thoughts with what I’ve written? Is it now a prompt rather than something to be incorporated or is it something to throw away?

I’ll leave you with this one, pulled from my typed Ulysses poem seeds:
“When cats panic”

by Grapes. October 22, 2026

Street Photography: Paris

I found myself with the opportunity to spend a few days in Paris this summer. It’s an incredibly well known and well photographed place, so I took the approach of photographing the interesting rather than just the touristy bits. The banks of the Seine are pretty rich pickings in this respect with a good mix of culture, street art and the, shall we say ‘less pretty’, but different angles of well known monuments are always worth trying. One of these was from an evening boat tour just as the weather began to turn stormy, so some dramatic skies ensued, but also some opportunities that I might have missed on the banks themselves.

I spent the time playing with shadows, frames and some slow shutter-speeds. As it was bright, over head sunshine the whole time, so I used a K&N variable ND filter to help maintain shallower depth of field and/or slower shutter speeds.

All shots taken with my trusty (and discreet) Canon EOS M3 and my Canon 22mm f/2 or Sigma 56mm f/1.4, edited in Lightroom Classic.