Writing the London Marathon

I’ve never run a marathon, but I’ve written one and my piece about the finish line of the London Marathon went live at 26 Miles today.

As the crow flies, Greenwich to The Mall is only a few miles. Back in the 17^th century Pepys used to walk it often to do deals in the royal shipyards (and stash a little more cash in his personal coffers). On Sunday, though, thousands of runners will take an all-round-the-houses-pubs-docks-and-offices 26 miles and 385 yards to get from A to B.

Rather them than me. I had way more fun writing the marathon than I would have running it.

As part of the 26 Miles project I’m the last of 27 writers who’ve each examined a mile of the route and, with a collaborator, created something about what they found – a poem, a story, a film, a documentary.

I worked with photographer Mark Cocksedge. We wanted our piece to reflect the constant flow of people, like blood through veins, through and around St James’s Park. Why were they there, in a place with no homes, offices, shops or warehouses? When we didn’t get permission to take photos in the park (though thousands of tourists were snapping away around us), nor to interview people, we knew what we had to do.

Mark created a really great slide show - it's at the end of my piece - so we hope you'll take a look and celebrate the  people we met and the strange place they were passing through.

If you'd like a bit of background history, here's a neat potted version by a London cabbie, and a longer one from British History Online. Poor old lepers, thrown out to make room for Henry VIII’s deer.

Photographers but no photos

I'm definitely an amateur photographer, and not a very good one at that. I use a point and click camera, and can never remember the important things like depth of focus, so my photos are pretty much the result of luck.

Because I sometimes get to work with photographers, I know that a good photo is almost never down to luck. Though being in the right place at the right time helps, you also need to have a great eye, amazing reflexes if things are on the move, and lots of technical knowledge. Good knees are handy too - they all seem to spend a lot of time crawling about on the ground.

It's not about the camera - a decent photographer will take a fabulous shot with my camera phone and I'll take an utterly unmemorable one with the very best equipment.

I tremble whenever an ill-advised editor hands me a camera and asks me to take the photos myself - last time that happened was at a conference, and I was expected to take photos of people chatting over coffee, but the only lens they gave me on the huge and complicated camera was a vast telephoto so I spent the coffee breaks pinned against the back wall of the hotel trying to get far enough away from my targets.

Anyway, I thought I'd share the websites of four photographers I've worked with and whose work I really like. Mike Pinches and I have done lots of work for Sense (the deafblind charity) together, and have just finished a feature which I'll be shouting about here in a few weeks, I hope. He's quiet and calm, perfect attributes in a photographer, I'd say. Just take a look at his portraits.

Mike's assistant on our photo-feature was Mark Cocksedge. He's also just assisted at the The Blue Oblique shoot of David Hockney for the RA - and his own work's great too. I love his Sunday league football refs especially.

Steffi Pusch is a quite different kind of photographer. Where Mike and Mark's work is clean and bright, Steffi likes to muddy the waters. Her shots are moody, full of hidden elements, emotional. She often works with a pinhole camera, making complex images. She and I have been collaborating on an illustrated version of my story The Swimmer which The Old Stile Press is bringing out this year. I love her portraits, but perhaps the photos of hers I love most are her series, Soul Flowers.

Roelof Bakker came to me via The Swimmer too, which he read and liked, so he asked me to write a story to go with one of his photos - a great treat. He has some fabulous photos of Dennis Severs House on his site, which reminds me that I want to go there this year.

It seems a bit strange, talking about photographers, but showing none of their pictures.But there's a reason for that - their photos are their work, and they're all copyright and I wouldn't dream of infringing it. So you'll just have to go to their websites, I'm afraid. Sorry.