Deloitte Cayman 2006 - Christmas Gala Pics

'Freakshow' - Cayman photography club members

Be afraid
Be very afraid...

Anthropological characteristics:

Notice the strangely elongated facial features of these fine specimens. These are characteristic of this particular specie: 'Homo Horriballis Photographie'. You can catch a glimpse of these mutants every fortnight at 'The Camera Store', Grand Cayman at 7:30pm. Scary things have been captured by photographers in the past, but these are particularly gruesome exhibits.

Disclaimer: I take no responsibility for any psychological damage that may (and will) be caused by these images.

Brits abroad - a guide to where Britons live around the world

While immigration into the UK has received intense academic, media and political attention in recent years, the other side of the migration equation– namely emigration – has received relatively little consideration:

An estimated 5.5m British people live permanently abroad – almost one in 10 of the UK population. The emigration of British people has happened in cycles over 200 years. The trend is now rising again: some 2,000 British citizens moved permanently away from the UK every week in 2005.

BRITS ABROAD: THE TOP COUNTRIES

1) Australia 1,300,000
2) Spain 761,000
3) United States 678,000
4) Canada 603,000
5) Ireland 291,000
6) New Zealand 215,000
7) South Africa 212,000
8) France 200,000

My beautiful brain Vs The world

Many social philosophers and spectators enjoy making love to the idea of human progress. They rhapsodize and wax lyrical about ‘Man’s continual ascent to higher civilized values and the raising of human consciousness to peaks not yet traversed’.
Mmm…well bollocks to that I say! – And here’s why:

Ladies and gentlemen; I introduce you to the city of Bogotá in Columbia. If the mere mention of Bogotá, doesn’t cause your rectal muscles to dilate or your arterial pressure to jack up by a few notches then consider yourself thick skinned. Bogotá has formerly received the rather dubious accolade of ‘murder capital of the world’ – for this is the place where the worst excesses of man are laid bare for all to witness in blood curdling gory and splendour. Calling Bogotá a city with a ‘civil’ administration to ‘run things’ is flattering in the least, rich in the medium and a gross violation of human intelligence at the worst. Civility is not widely practiced here and the idea of someone ‘running things’ is well, a misstatement of dinosaur shit proportions.

Formerly Columbia was better known as a coffee bean growing country. Nowadays, its chief export is drugs and criminal racketeering gangs that have no qualms about ‘unburdening’ you of your life. Life has a value in Bogotá. That value is the mean sum of exactly zero. As the holder of a degree in biological sciences from a prestigious London institution, I find that hard to swallow and rather appalling. Because we humans are amazing products of evolution. Beautifully crafted with a brain that is arguably the most elegant and complex structure in the known universe. From day one we pop wide-eyed into the dazzling big wide world, soaking it all in like a sponge; colours, sounds, languages, dodgy smells, yummylicious flavours, and not so yummylicious flavours too. The world gets in through our eyes and ears. Seeps in through our skin and tongue; helping us to build a useful picture of our surroundings. All thanks to our brain. Yet, there are mindless scum in Bogotá, who would not bat an eyelid before putting a hole, the size of a golf ball, through that elegant brain of yours; depriving you of any further use for it. The damage is usually done by means of a device that discharges high speed lead projectiles. Yes a gun. And all for what? For a cigarette. Yes a single measly cigarette. Where's the sense in that?

You were carried in your mother’s womb for 9 months. She suffered to get you into the world. She suffered when you cried all night as a baby and suffered even more when your hormones went awry and you started sprouting zits and having crushes on the music teacher.
And now…now you have a hole in your brain; all because someone with an insatiable nicotine addiction, and no desire of satisfying it legally; decides to pump your head with lead and extinguish you from existence. Where’s the sense in that?

I see a problem here. And it’s pandemic. The ‘Shifta’ gangs in Somalia for example, that roam the lawless Sudanese border areas to the south, will kill you for your Nike’s. In Haiti, it’s your grocery shopping their after. In Papa New Guinea, just having life seems a good enough reason to deprive you of it. In Iraq, 500,000 people dead since the war began. Eh? How many? Let me say that again: 500,000. Nobody even flinches. Nobody cares. Nobody gives a shit. Where’s the sense in that?

There needs to be a fundamental shift in thinking. Some kind of ‘raising of consciousness’ – we can call it the ‘people are precious campaign’. Because every single life that bubbles into existence is precious. Your life is precious. My life is precious. Each and every one of us is a miracle of embryology; bundles of neurones bursting to the brim with quirkiness, weirdness and bizarreness all packaged in a waterproof skin and ready to take on the world! So take on the world! Change it. Shape it. Mould it. Awake it from its slumber. I believe it’s the value that society places on life that determines the civility of civilization. And by that yardstick we’ve still got a long way to go…

Las Tortugas - The Cayman Islands

"Here is the deepest secret nobody knows (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows higher than soul can hope or mind can hide) and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart" - ee Cummings

'Buttered Bun' - Tasties from the Vulgar Tongue

Costa Rican memory byte #2

(Eyes open)
...You hack your way through dense impenetrable rainforest; a milieu of tangles and twists where the air hangs thick, unmoving, not interested. Not a breeze stirs and your pores leak sweat and you taste it on your lips. Green moss infatuates itself to everything. Nothing escapes; tree barks, rocks, dead spiders hanging from their webs and even the lens is covered in a layer of green fluff. You grab a hand full of moss and squeeze; it is soaked thorough with water like a sponge; perhaps why in these parts it is widely used as a dressing for wounds.

You make your way up the torturous incline, slipping on rocks, crawling on all fours, and gouging out fist sized chunks of dirt that lodge into your finger nails; laced with all sorts of critters. At the summit, sunlight greets you and also pesky nasties that buzz around your head like miniature Apache helicopters on attack sorties, poking your skin like searing hot needles. The forest is teeming with life of unimaginable diversity, yet you hear not a peep. There is the faint rumbling echo of the river down below and occasionally the silence is shattered by distant howling monkeys; deep growls that disturb the slumber. It is dark down here. Not much light reaches the forest floor, as it is intercepted by thick foliage high above that soaks up every last remnant of precious sunlight.

This place feels old. You can smell the age of the forest in the damp air and see it in the mahogany tree; tall, beautiful, proud and ancient. It rises supremely above the canopy; surveying all. This tree is older then the Costa Rican Constitution itself and has lived through World Wars and borne witness to early Spanish attempts to tame this country...
(Eyes close)


(Eyes open)
...You find yourself on a metal platform that rises vertically 200 metres above the rainforest. The view is panoramic like looking through a fisheye lens. The claustrophobia of the forest is replaced by the sprawling vistas that melt into the horizon. Mountains surround the valley but there is an opening from where you can spy the path to the Pacific Coast. Little gangs of clouds loiter above the tree line on the mountains and the vultures; Ahh! The vultures; they encircle the trees scanning for death of which there is plenty. This is not the place to be if you suffer from vertigo or for that matter if you fear death.

You attach the harness that is wrapped around your waist to the pulley. The pulley is then hoisted onto the line. The line stretches into the distance to a similar platform 750 metres away. Below, 150 metres separate you from the jungle canopy and certain death. Are you ready?
1…2…3 Push! - There is a jerk and you are propelled off the edge; suddenly you find yourself zipping along the wire at break neck speed; soaring above the rainforest, wind whistling past, below you a green blur, your face contorted and your screams trailing behind like exhaust fumes...

“Ride the wild wind
Push the envelope don’t sit on the fence
Ride the wild wind
Live life on the razors edge
Gonna ride the whirl wind
It ain’t dangerous
enough for me

Get your head down baby
we're gonna ride tonight
Your angel eyes
are shining bright
I wanna take your hand
lead you from this place
Gonna leave it all behind
Check out of this rat race

Ride the wild wind (hey hey hey)
Ride the wild wind (hey hey hey)
Gonna ride the wild wind
It ain't dangerous
enough for me!"

(Eyes close)

Costa Rica

Costa Rican memory byte #1

…and then you are dropped off at San Jose’s ‘Coca Cola’ bus station, or as it is more politely known as ‘pickpocketer's heaven’. This is truly the most evil place you are likely to encounter on Planet Earth. The scum and thievery that abounds here is enough to satisfy the most demanding of masochistic misanthropes. There is nothing like a great introduction to Costa Rica then the feeling of terror and hopelessness that overcome you when you step off the bus, take one look around the bus station and hear yourself say: “I’m fucked”

For you are truly fucked indeed. There are different degrees of being fucked. There’s fucked as in the traditional sense of “well it’s not too bad, but I’ll just say fuck to get some attention fucked”, there’s also “Ahh this should be interesting fucked” and finally there’s the fucked that I was feeling that day in San Jose; “I’m never going to see my mum again fucked” – for it is true what they say; that when faced with a potentially lethal situation your mum does come to mind. Well my mum was staring at me that day. A huge billboard mum, looking at me, shaking her head and wagging her fingers with a ‘I told you so’ look on her face.

Why the fit of fear you may wonder? Could it be something to do with the rough looking unsavoury characters staring at you, eyeing you up from the corner of their eyes as if you're going to to be their next meal ticket? Or perhaps the blindingly obvious fact that you are the only 'Non-Tico' within a radius of 3 miles? Or maybe even the fact that with your camera equipment, you look like a one man BBC documentary crew hell bent on some serious hardcore voyeurism in the name of artistic license. Voyeurism is good. But this. This is foolishness. This is just plain nuts...

Imagine all the children...(girl clutching a wooden 'doll')