Purrdita
Friday. A much better start to the day. The migraine has finally buggered off, and I slept like a narcoleptic log outside on the patio sofa where it was cool. Another lovely clear sunny morning, and while I’m not complaining about the great weather, it is giving me substantially less to write about in my daily posts. Just like that — we’re down to the metatextual asides already, clearly hitting the bottom of the barrel.
Very little of note happened here today, largely by design. Milo had work as usual, and the Fab Four are enjoying their holiday in Venice. Raff, Dash, Gabriel and I made the most of the peace. Monty’s travelling somewhere in Japan, and Ken’s working in Arizona at the moment — but they’re planning to meet up in South Korea to celebrate their first wedding anniversary in November.
Today’s photo needs a bit of explanation. While rummaging through an old box of keepsakes — memories I’d ironically long forgotten putting away — I found a set of very old prints. They were carefully attached to sheets of white paper with corner mounts, and stowed in A4 plastic sleeves. My younger self had even typed captions on small adhesive labels and stuck one next to each print: essentially a 1980s photoblog. The prints were, in themselves, the opposite of spectacular; small, round-cornered, slightly yellowed, and mostly poorly focused pictures of a cat in the desert. They are also among the first photographs I ever took.
I would have been ten or eleven at the time, using my mum’s old Halina Paulette 35mm camera on whatever cheap colour print film was at hand. Back then, we were living in Jebel Ali Village, about 20 miles from Dubai city, where my dad was working as an electrical engineer on the construction of the nearby port — hence the desert background. The photography bug had bitten me straight away, and I took photos of everything I could: the garden, the scrubby semi-desert landscape outside, passing camels, dead cars, and the occasional stray dog sleeping in the shade. But most of all, I took hundreds of mediocre pictures of our monochrome cat Purrdita. I chose this one today, not because it was the oldest or more significant than the others, but because it at least has something resembling a composition, and you can see the oil refineries at Mina Jebel Ali port in the background.
To make the digital version you’re looking at, I re-shot the print on my iPhone and used some careful massaging in Lightroom, Photoshop and DXO FilmPack 7 to restore it. The original composition is unaltered, with no additions or removals, but the software helped me remove a colour cast and some staining from the old print, and return the image to roughly how it would have looked when it came back from the lab in 1980.
