Brian - The Ubiquitous Anti-Chameleon

There is nothing in the least exotic about Brian so the word protean feels a trifle excessive; however, he is something of a shape-shifter and he comes in various guises. His age varies from mid thirties to late sixties; however, he is generally middle-aged and always male. He can be found in various habitats from the Far East to Torquay Pier; however, whatever the environment, his physical malleability seems designed not so much to make him fit in but rather the reverse. Wherever he is found, Brian can be expected to stand out like a sore thumb. I strongly suspect he is the president of the Swindon Photographic Society or just possibly of the Crawley Camera Club.

My first encounter with Brian was in the rather glamorous surrounds of the five star Hyatt Regency Hotel in Hua Hin, Thailand. The year was 1986. We had escaped from Bangkok for a short break and were relaxing in the really quite magnificent air conditioned lobby. The waiter had just brought us cocktails when there was a sudden thrashing from an adjacent floral display and a rather alarming albeit diminutive figure emerged from the lush decorative foliage. Clutching a huge Nikon and looking like a stand-in for the photojournalist in Apocalypse Now, the bedraggled khaki-clad figure hurled himself to the ground and with an extraordinary look of grim determination started clicking. At first I though he might be a member of the paparazzi and glanced around to see if any celebrities were present. But then I realised he was taking photographs of the foliage. In a flash of intuition I realised that the short, dishevelled would-be photographer could be none other than Brian.

After that first encounter, I was always spotting Brian. Whether perched on a portable step-ladder (the ‘photographer’s friend’) and dressed in Gulf War camouflage at the Chelsea Flower Show or emerging from the shadows of the Coliseum dressed in his more usual khaki shorts, matching waistcoat and heavy boots, the only constants were the huge camera, ‘kit bag’ and the complete and utter incongruity with his surroundings. He also wears an air of what might be described as the inverse of studied nonchalance. It is a look of painfully self-conscious yet somehow wilful gaucherie.

My second close encounter was at Stourhead Gardens one early morning in the spring of last year. I was there to try out a very costly tripod that I needed for a photographic job the next day. I hasten to add that I am not a professional photographer and am most definitely not a member of Brian’s camera club. However, I didn’t want to look too incompetent when I turned up my client’s offices and the tripod required some mastering, being both heavy and extremely cumbersome. Realising I needed help, I happened to look up and there dramatically materialising from the swirling early morning mist who should I see but Brian.

Despite the affected professionalism, Brian turned out to be quite hopeless. After fumbling for a while he gave up and expressed his frustration in a glare of absolutely blistering contempt directed at my digital camera. It would seem that he is a purist, a ‘film man’. In a charitable attempt to defuse the situation and to mask any embarrassment he might be feeling, I asked what he thought of the hideously expensive tripod. His eyes took on the gimlet look of a high court judge and he considered for a moment. “A most acceptable bit of kit … for a first tripod” he opined with nauseating condescension before striding back into the mist. Had I been of a more violent disposition or had faster reactions, I would have hurled the thing at his head.

Last Friday I spotted Brian again. He was on Park Walk in Shaftesbury, a place much favoured by young mothers with pushchairs and elderly couples taking their afternoon constitutionals. As is always the case, it would have been virtually impossible to miss him. Not only was he clutching the longest telephoto lens I have ever seen, but he appeared to have transmogrified into a clone of Robert Capa and was busy striking extremely dynamic poses more suited to a particularly hellish war zone than to a genteel and rather sedate Wessex market town. I tried to capture his picture using my own pocket camera, but my wife thought I was being cruel and dragged me away. As I turned to go, I saw what would have been the perfect photo opportunity. Wearing an air that combined professionalism and menace, and with finger on the trigger of his camera’s motor drive, and with gleaming, perfectly calibrated telephoto lens, Brian was advancing towards a bed of pansies.

Fruit of the Loins

A solitary, unwholesome pleasure bringing a momentary illusion of connectedness, of being one with another – lover or stranger, it is just enough to sustain the brief fantasy that there is this shadowy ‘other’. An urgent, not-to-be-ignored quivering next to the thigh; a furtive personal pleasure that must be satisfied even if it entails a withdrawal to some squalid semi-private place, or – if too insistent – a discrete albeit public unholstering and frantic manipulation with fumbling or shamefully expert fingers. Indeed, satisfying such an intensely private act under disapproving public eyes adds a certain frisson to the thing. The spasm passes, the throbbing ends and a brief instant of gratification, la petite mort: yes, oh yes, your BlackBerry® has brought you mail.

We were always told that such ‘filthy’ activities brought with them the risk of blindness, although our Victorian forebears were probably not thinking of eyestrain due to staring at BBMilbank text on a minuscule screen. We were warned that it was a habit that if carried to excess broke up families.

A puerile joke about attending to throbbing tools in public? Well, Research in Motion asked – or just possibly begged – for it . Why on earth name the thing after that most engorged, must turgid of fruits?