I’m starting to believe that summer might happen again…

Today we take a look at life below stairs in Muir Hall. While I swan around the drawing room punishing the brandy and making sharp observations, Ryoko Uyama is downstairs polishing the brass and blackening the boots. She might not exactly be the engine of Muir Hall, but she’s one of the big pistons. She is my assistant - my driver, my bodyguard, my technical expert, my external short-term memory. She is Cato to my Clouseau.

Some interesting things about Ryoko:

- Her name in Japanese means Cool Child Space Mountain.

- She is a morris dancer.

- When I first heard her say the word ‘polaroid’ I thought she was having a stroke. I have since painstakingly trained her to pronounce it correctly, along with other problem words like ‘umbrella’ and ‘squirrel’. The difficulty in pronunciation has got something to do with the sound of ‘l’ and ‘r’ in the Japanese language. She explained it to me once but I wasn’t really listening.

- She is a very resourceful napper:

- We have never touched each other. I don’t just mean inappropriate touching, I mean appropriate touching too, like shaking hands. We don’t shake hands or hug or do media kisses. We greet each other with a curt nod. I like this. All the double-kissing and hugging you have to do can be exhausting. Ryoko is strictly business.

- She’s pretty good at standing in for people:

Chris Eubank:

Takashi Murakami:

Sir Benjamin Slade:

Stephen Hawking:

I was once doing a location shoot with Ryoko when we ran out of supplies. I sent her off to get some more thinking she would only be five minutes, but she still hadn’t returned after half an hour so I went looking for her. As I was walking down a path she jumped out from behind a tree and shouted “SUPPLIES!”

Anyway let’s hear from Ryoko:

 

- What was your first impression of me?

We met up at a cafe in Hackney.

I said look for a Japanese, and he said look for a Ginger afro.

 

- What have been some highlights of working for me?

Becoming a friend with his lovely girl friend.

I get fed lots of Bacon rolls!

Charity shop surfing after the shoot.

 

- And some lowlights?

Asking me to bring my light meter which is more expensive than my day rate.

Verbal abuse.

 

- What am I good at as a photographer?

The amount of crap comes out from his mouth, to anyone, for hours and hours.

The confidence he has in his jokes and his photography.

Open-mindness; His mental age is about 5 years old I reckon, which is great as a photographer and also fun to go on a long road trip with.

 

- What am I bad at?

Being nice to me.

 

- Any tough moments?

When I have to listen to him when he goes on how good he looks.

 

- Any funny moments?

His Mum, Dad and son came to the shoot together in a small car.

 

- What have you learned?

How to swear.

 

Ryoko is a really good assistant; she’s smart, and is always thinking of how she can help. She’s great fun to hang out with and talk shit with but when the client or subject turns up she goes into PhotoBot 2.0 mode, silently and efficiently doing useful things while I’m talking crap and taking photos. But that’s faint praise, she’s also a really good photographer. Which is why she’s resigning her post here to shoot full time. She’s leaving me to carry my own bags and I will be lost without her. For a couple of days anyway, until I find someone else to carry my bags.

If you want more Ryoko you can go here: www.ryokouyama.com

A Valentine’s Day photo for all you romantics.

A few days ago I was slumped in front of the TV in a Christmas coma watching the credits roll on Any Which Way You Can when a name caught my eye: Boone Narr is credited as the animal trainer. He’s the guy that taught Clyde how to turn right.

I recognised the name because I’ve had a photo of him on the wall of my office for about 10 years - this photo:

I didn’t take the photo, although I would have been proud if I had, as I suspect, would Martin Parr. I found it when working as a cruise ship photographer in 1998, developing and printing passenger’s films.

Being a cruise ship photographer is like being a prisoner of war, but you have to wear a name badge and pretend to be happy. It is, of course, grindingly depressing. For example, once a week we would go to Margarita, a Venezuelan island in the Caribbean, where I was forced to get up at a ridiculous time in the morning with a crippling hangover and dress like a Mexican so I could delay and irritate the passengers by posing with them for a photo as they left the ship.

As you might imagine, it was soul destroying. The Margaritan dock workers would come up to me and ask me why I was dressed like a Mexican when we were in Venezuela. I had no idea.

I keep these photos on the wall of my office too, partly out of a sense of proletarian pride, but mostly as an incentive, a reminder that if it all went wrong for me I might have to fight down my bile, don the poncho, and plaster a shit-eating grin on my face again…

Another weekly low point was the captain’s cocktail party. All the passengers would be herded past the captain for a handshake while I took a ‘grip-and-grin’ photo of the momentous occasion. It was during one of these shoots that I took the first ever photo that I really liked. I was interested in photography but had bluffed my way into the job with no experience (not that this was a problem as Boone Narr could have trained Clyde to do the job in a day or two). I can’t remember how, but I had offended a cantankerous American passenger earlier in the cruise so when he came in for his free cocktail and handshake with the captain he gave me this moment of photo-gold:

A ‘grip-and-flip’. Thank you old man for being a lone island of right in a sea of wrong…

If I was a bit more organised this is the photo I would have posted at Christmas time:

Renata Jacobs is many things: a director of Jacobs Holding AG, good dancer, carnivore, billionaire, philanthropist and MILF. Not a bad CV…

I was in Buenos Aries with her to photograph her charity work with the cartaneros, the people who make a living from sorting through rubbish for recyclables.  

Renata at cartanero HQ:

She had give then a conveyer belt which must make a pretty shitty job a bit less shitty…

Chic cartanero chica:

I’ve just had a couple of very good, thirst-quenching days in Paris and am now back to face the looming Christmas season… Its only the 4th of Dec and I already feel like this:

For reasons that needn’t concern you I recently visited New York and California with Eliza and Elliot. Getting there was not half the fun.

I think this is dating New York style:

Some people still know how to have a good time though…

Steve Pyke still knows how to have a good time. Here’s a crap portrait of one of the greatest portrait photographers.

I wish I could retell the story he told me of his first ever night in NY as a fresh-faced young man. Maybe after a couple of statute of limitations have passed… 

This wig, below, was being sold in a fancy dress store…

Then it was off to California…

Even though we were living out of motels Eliza still managed, with a combination of technology and ingenuity, to cook up some noodles.

Sometimes I think that she and Elliot might be an Al Qaeda sleeper cell…

I was brought up in a country without sun or teeth, so Joshua Tree was a little out of my comfort zone. 

I can’t remember these people’s names but we met in the Joshua Tree Saloon one night and I almost left Eliza and Elliot to live with them in a trailer. Good people…

I think I’ve mentioned here before that I’m part of the New World Order…

The other night I had a quick drink with two of my dear friends and NWO colleagues Richard Branson and David Milliband. It was OK, although we mostly talked about the economy and didn’t have time to discuss my campaign against people on public transport talking too loudly on their phones. I’ll make sure that we deal with those braying imbeciles next time though… 

Branson had just flown in from France where he’d been kite-surfing to go straight into a dinner with The Elders: Desmond Tutu, Kofi Annan, Jimmy Carter etc… He left that to come to our NWO drinks thing and then went back to his plane to fly to Cancun to go swimming with whale sharks. I went home to watch Alice Cooper videos on youtube…

I met Robert Sandall in 2005 working together for the Sunday Times Magazine. We became, I’m proud to say, good friends and remained so right up until the point that he died about two years ago.

A semi-aquatic Robert with his daughter Grace on her birthday.

He was unimprovable as a friend, funny, smart, easy, always ready to laugh, he knew seemingly everything about music and literature and interesting things that I knew nothing about. He once called me on a beautiful summer morning and invited me to watch Serena Williams at  Wimbledon with him. I’m not too bothered about tennis, but I am a fan of the way Serena makes the big panties look like little panties (credit: De La Soul) so I toddled along. As we took our seats he rummaged around in his bag and produced a whole roast chicken and a chilled bottle of champagne with two glass flutes. We sat there in the sun giggling, gnawing our way through the chicken, clinking glasses and quaffing champers, pinkies aloft - a really happy memory…

Robert was most well known for broadcasting and writing about music but he also wrote a wine column for GQ, so was often being wined, and sometimes even dined, by the wine industry. He was invited to the Feria de Jerez in Spain which is a massive horse / flamenco / sherry festival, and being unimprovable as a friend, he made sure that I got to tag along to take photos. We spent a great weekend getting wankered on Fino sherry while staggering around trying to avoid piles of horse shit (sorry, I’m not as good a wine-writer as Robert was…).

This Tio Pepe lady was my fantasy girlfriend for the weekend…

We were taken on a great tour around the Tio Pepe bodega. Here’s Robert:

If you’re going to have someone famous sign your sherry barrel I suppose Margaret Thatcher is about as good as it gets. Although Picasso is pretty good too…

We also visited a very progressive church where was saw a statue of Jesus and an angel enjoying the love that dare not speak its name…

Robert died of cancer in May 2010. My last communication with him was marred by an idiotic misunderstanding on my part. I was so used to him being ill, and so ostrich-like in my attitude to the inevitable outcome, that when he sent me a text asking me to call him, saying he was ‘bed-bound finally’ - I was  in a summerhouse in Sweden with Eliza, lying around, stupefied by indolence - I thought he meant ‘finally’ as in ‘at last’ rather than ‘conclusively’, so replied that I would call him in a couple of days when I was back home. He died the next day. I’ve made a few hugely stupid mistakes in my life but none that I regret more than that. I often wonder what we would have said to each other…