Lockdown: day one

A lazy day. I didn't get up until after 7:30, watched a hockey game recorded the night before - the Leafs beat Winnipeg in a shoot-out - then lounged around for another hour. 

I finally got out for my government-sanctioned exercise at 11 or so, accompanied, as always, by Fred Douglass. 

It's the late 1840s. He's struggling to keep his newspaper, The Northern Star, alive, while continuing to lecture - he needs the fees to support the paper. He's also suffering bouts of illness, both physical - throat complaints related to the oratory and some kind of rheumatism - but also psychological. He is anxious and depressed about the tenuous situation of the paper and his family finances.

Help arrives in the form of financial support from Gerrit Smith, a rich political abolitionist - i.e. one who believes in using the political system to achieve the abolition of slavery, as opposed to the American Anti-Slavery Society which holds rigid beliefs about adhering to a non-violent, "moral suasionist" strategy. 

He is also joined at the paper, and in his home, by a friend from England, Julia Griffiths. Julia becomes business manager and assistant editor of The Northern Star, and she and her sister board with the Douglasses in the house they've now purchased in Rochester. Frederick's appearances in public with the two white women, sometimes arm in arm, incite outrage and on one occasion assault by racist whites. 

His illnesses, sometimes debilitating, continue. Julia  worries about his psychological state. Her presence appears to be causing issues in his marriage, though Douglass never admits to this in his own writing. Rumours are afoot of a sexual relationship with Julia, probably spread by his pro-slavery enemies. Blight thinks it unlikely but doesn't completely rule out the possibility.

The break with the AASS has finally come, which is where I left off. 

*

I did go out for an afternoon walk, but it ended up being only over to the Bulk Barn and Dollarama. By the time I came out, it was spitting rain, so I headed home without clicking the shutter once. 

I had aspirations to do some more experimentation with in-camera double exposures and composite photography back at the ranch, but my enthusiasm petered out pretty quickly and I ended up heading back down memory lane to Spain 2016.

We went from Granada to Cádiz on the south coast. On our last day in the city, wandering around the old centre, I got intrigued by the entranceways to low-rise apartment buildings. They all seemed to conform to a similar design: a dark corridor from the street, leading to a door of decorative grillwork, usually latched, giving on to a courtyard open to the sky (or possibly with a skylight), often with stairs visible beyond. Yet each one was also different. 

The other pictures I monkeyed around with are the kind that I take and then look at when I get home and think, why did I take that? But then sometimes, much later, I look at them again and think, oh, yeah, that's what I meant. But in these two cases, I'm guessing that 99 out of 100 viewers would look at them and think, why did he take that? Don't know if I've got much of an answer.