Portraits

I have thousands of photos stored in 'the cloud', accumulated since 2008 when I purchased my first digital camera, yet few are of me. I'm very happy with this situation as I don't consider myself to be in any way photogenic, not can I imagine that there is anyone out there, not even my nearest and dearest, who would want a mass of pictures of me.

So such pictures of me as I have kept are very largely for my use in recalling particular moments in my life, in helping me to remember how I felt at the moment each was captured - and this picture, taken on the long desert coast of Namibia, is one such.

All night the onshore breeze has carried a dense, chilling mist in from the sea, a mist formed as the warm, damp South Atlantic airmass crossed the cold Benguela current - but the sun is almost hot enough to burn away the last of the mist leaving us to broil in its direct heat.

I remember that short walk on my own. I remember the immense heat, the burn of the sun on my skin, the rhythmic bump of the waves, the otherwise immense silence, for this beach backs on to the emptiness of hundreds of miles of desert. I would have been quite happy to spend the rest of the day in that lonely place, where air meets sand and sea, but we were on a tourist trip and had to return to the Land Rover so we could hurry on to see the flamingoes.