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| 23 March 2025 |
I constantly tell people, “I am a product of the 20th century.”
When I was 8 or younger in Buenos Aires our milk and ice were brought daily by a man on a horse-drawn cart which in an Argentine peculiarity had car tires.
1. A man came to our home once a month to clean and clear our sewage system.
2. In 1951(I was 9) we had the first refrigerator in our block. My mother had obtained it from a friend from the American Embassy who was leaving town. It was then than I had my first taste of lime flavoured Jell-O.
3. It was around that time that my mother (in my presence) told our live-in housekeeper to buy something called “catsup” at the corner store.
4. We did not have a telephone or TV until we moved to Mexico City in 1953.
I have always admired the writers Paul Theroux and Graham Greene. Theroux wrote an essay on Greene called “An Edwardian on the Concorde”. I am certainly not an Edwardian but I have been on just about every airplane since the DC-3 to the Comet 4-C, the rare Convair 880 and even a Douglas A-4 Skyhawk when I was told to translate into Spanish the operating and maintenance manual when I was in the Argentine Navy. I have flown in a De Havilland Beaver many times.
What all the above means is that I am happily adopting many of the improvements to our life from this 21st century. I shoot film but also digital. I use a scanner and the latest Epson V700 inkjet printer.
I cannot explain exactly why but of late I have been getting these intense dreams. Because I am 82 I have to get up at least three times to attempt to do something that is quite difficult. While waiting for action I think about those dreams before they disappear into some ethos. Last night’s dream was that I was going to write a blog about one of the most significant inventions of this century (even the end of the last one perhaps?) which is the heated toilet seat. It is a fabulous invention.
