on home soil...

I'm on home soil today. Sussex.

Doesn't that sky look as though it was taken in August?

We've had chips in paper on the seafront.

It's been t-shirt weather.

It's always strange bringing the children back to the places I knew as a child.

They are not always impressed.

They did like this lift though.

The views from up there are fantastic.

A lot of houses in Sussex are clad in this way - half cladding; horizontal timber, painted white. As soon as we spot the first cottage clad this way I feel as though I'm 'home'. Yet when I grew up here I barely gave them a second thought. Oast houses are another familiar sight.

When I was 15 or 16 I used to photograph the fishing boats using black and white film in my SLR camera, then go home, develop the film and make prints in my bedroom with the window blacked out. It was an exciting process seeing the image come alive in the developing tray and experimenting with the exposure and various grades of paper for different effects.

These days it seems to attract quite a few photographers - we spotted some serious kit being carted about whilst we snapped here and there with our ipods. I'm quite happy to create an image just to record the memory. It doesn't have to be art.

So we have quite a few silly snaps of *E* and *J* balancing on the huge anchor you can see just to the left in the boat picture. With free wi-fi at a nearby fish restaurant *E* had shared this silly moment with friends over 200 miles away within a few minutes.

Not to mention a picture of Mr H's bowl of mussels with the caption 'YUK! Dad's eating something dredged up from the bottom of the sea!'