I have a camera

Last week in Bournemouth was an unusual conference from a personal, photographic perspective: given the amount of extra social media work our team was doing, I wasn’t slated for any work snapping.

That, of course, had one massive advantage: it meant that my bags were lighter, as I decided to do without an DSLR for the trip.

But it still managed to be an interesting week photographically.

First, because it offered the first official uses of a couple of pictures I’d taken properly: one was a portrait of Neville Lawrence (see below), which was ripped off in 10 seconds at best, with a crush forming around.


I like to think I captured a sense of the quiet dignity of the man.

The second was of Eleanor Smith, the UNISON president for the last year, whose term ended at the close of conference.

For that, I’d had far more time than I’m used to getting, and was fairly chuffed with the result.


When I'd originally processed it on my super duper screen at work, one colleague, walking past, had glanced and assumed that it was Michelle Obama, demanding to know how come I'd got a picture of her!


I'm very happy with the glamour of the shot – but it's not 'weak' glamour, so to speak. Eleanor is a woman who makes everything she wears look like Chanel (yet she's a grandmother, for goodness sake!) but it combines glamour and strength. There's nothing passive or submissive about this shot.


I'm really proud of it.

But away from any such ‘official’ photography I was left, for the week, with my iPhone.

As usual, I was photographing my food – I posted one result earlier this week). But there are always other things that are worth snapping too, especially when you’re away.

As I mentioned not long ago, I’ve noticed that I’ve become rather fond of photographing flowers, although it never started out as a deliberate thing – and indeed, it’s not any sort of a ‘project’ even now.

Using the iPhone with an eye on something more than a snapshot for memory’s sake is an interesting challenge.

On the one hand, the most obvious advantage is its very size and portability. I was never without it, so I was never without a camera.

On the other hand, while the inbuilt camera is remarkably good (I’m still on the third generation, having refused to upgrade because the camera is decent) there is no adjustable zoom or lighting or anything else.

If you have good light, then it can produce remarkably good pictures.

Picture framing can be a tad awkward – certainly if you’re pointing it in a direction where you’re not actually looking into the screen – meaning that ‘straight on’ doesn’t always work as you want it to.


But all in all, it’s not impossible to get interesting results with a phone camera.

There are really big questions that phone cameras raise. Indeed, I'd go further than that and say that modern communications technology as a whole has massive ramifications for society as a whole – see Leveson, for a start.


The British media, as a whole, is trying to work out what it can provide/sell to the consumer – that's us. Increasingly, it's sensation and gossip.

And local stories that, in all honesty, would not have got even near a national daily only a few years ago.


But that's the world we live in. And 'citizen journalism' is an offshoot. With real journalists either dumped or made to turn a few tweets into a story, we might come to regret that. But that's the way it is, at present, in the UK at least.


But setting that aside, there are things that you can do with a mobile phone – and they don't always have to be  snapshots for the sake of memory.


They're not works of art, but I include a couple of last week's examples for your delectation and delight. As a slight technical note – the flower photographs (taken on my phone) have had very little done with them).

Good food in Bournemouth after all these years?

It was in June 2006 that I first visited Bournemouth. It’s not difficult to remember the date because it was also the first year in which, thanks to the Catalan Dragons, I had visited France.


In fact, that trip to Perpignan (and Barcelona) had been just a few weeks before. And after experiencing the wonderful food out there, one of the things I’d been enormously looking forward to had been trying food in a seaside resort in England.
 
Expecting much, I was severely disappointed. Not only was nothing we ate even close to being in the same class as what’d we’d eaten on that holiday, it was pricier.
 
In the interests of strict accuracy, I should say that I had actually been to Bournemouth before. But that was on a family holiday – and I have no memories of food at all, apart from that we were self catering, which in my mother’s case, meant an awful lot of an awful lot of mornings were spent dragging the rest of us around supermarkets to buy food.
 
The only thing I really remember about that holiday was meeting Tom O’Connor in a TV shop.
 
But subsequent trips to Bournemouth since 2006 have seen gradual improvements in the fodder I’ve been able to get my gnashers into.
 
And in many ways, this year’s food was, in general, possibly the simplest as well as the best.
 
When you’re at the seaside, you really have to have fish and chips. At least once. We did it twice – on our first night and on third.
 
In both cases, it was at the hotel – once in the restaurant and once in the bar.
 
On both occasions, the fish was excellent and the batter top notch – crispy and light as a feather; an utter joy to eat.
 
 On the first, the chips were a hand-cut tower (apparently they like them like this in the House of Commons too) and there was a very minty streak of pea purée, plus a generous dollop of good tartare sauce.
 
As a bar dish (slightly cheaper) the chips were not so obviously hand cut – although they were served in one of those miniature frying baskets that are so popular these days and are rather fun. It came with the same minted pea purée.
 
Supposed fish ‘n’ chip specialist Harry Ramsden’s, which is just on the other side of the pier, could learn a thing or two. On the basis of my visit there, the last time that I was in town, two years ago, the hotel was not only far better quality, but also a fairer price too.
 
The Highcliffe is one of the very few hotels I’ve stayed in where the food is worth eating – and breakfast is not excluded from that equation. Okay, there might not have quite been the egg station of Brighton’s Metropole, but there was a cook on duty making fresh fried eggs.
 
And unlike some places I could mention, nothing that you served yourself from under the heaters was crozzled to death from having sat there for hours before service even started.
 
Efforts to have 'Healthy' lunches were mostly dashed by eating on the go – and the best lunch of the week came a rather a surprise.
 
It could hardly have been more simple: with only minutes to spare before going back into the conference hall to report, after my jaunt to see the Oceanarium’s otters, I grabbed a Cornish pasty from one of the conference centre snack outlets.
 
Now, I don’t know if it really was Cornish – and therefore fulfilled the EU rules on protected origin status – but my expectations were low. In the event, instead of taking just the few bites I had imagined simply to sustain me, I scoffed the lot – and was disappointed the following day to find they’d all gone before I got there.
 
But as for dinners, the treat of the week came on Monday night.
 
Slumped in the hotel lounge (that’s a posh word for a bar) after a long day, we mused on where to eat.
 
A couple of similarly working trips to Bournemouth in the past, I’d lunched at an eatery on the sea front. I couldn’t remember its name, but I did remember that I’d had plaice and that it had been very, very good.
 
Indeed, it was probably my first decent culinary experience in the town.
 
The internet had, for once, provided me with nothing that I was sure was what I remembered, but in the hope that whatever it was was still there, I suggested we wander down.
 
In the event, it was there. WestBeach is its name.
 
We secured a table without a reservation – and given the number of people who came in while we dined, that was lucky.
 
WestBeach is a slightly unconventional cross between a restaurant and a bar. For instance, some people were only coming in to sit at a booked table for a drink, and there were TVs showing that night’s football (sound off, though).
 
The décor is all blond woods and rushes, giving it a hint of the sea-washed, which is very relaxing.
 
The food is excellent.
 
 I started with rollmops: according to the menu, an appetiser, but my pair of rollmops were two fillets from a pretty substantial herring. It was delicious – and, at £3, damned good value for money.


And then came my culinary treat of the week: a whole – well, cracked – Lymington crab.


It arrived in a beautiful display; on a bed of ice, with a lime mayo that complimented the sweetness of the flaky meat quite gloriously.


There was a vast – ridiculously so – bowl of fries and another of salad.


Even after being pre-cracked, it still took some, err, cracking. But it was so, so worth the effort. Super taste and texture.


And to finish, I enjoyed three balls of Purbeck ice cream – this is, after all, the Purbeck coast.


Vanilla, chocolate and raspberry – all very, very good. But the raspberry was to die for. I wish I'd just order that.


Now, take the fries and salad out of the equation, and you have perhaps the closest I've come to a meal that is comparable in size and construction to what I so loved in Barcelona.


I am, indeed, specifically thinking of the wonderful Els Barrils, a Galcian fish restaurant, not far from Gaudí's crazy Sagrada Família, where I ate my first lobster, sandwiched between a course of padron peppers and one of sublime orange and chocolate ice cream.


And, most to the point, that is a restaurant where I have never felt overwhelmed by the amount of food served to me; where I could roundly polish off all three courses; a restaurant where the quality of the oh-so-simple food was such that I still dream about it.


Is that enough of a compliment to pay to WestBeach? Well, I do mean it.


The Other Half, having paid perhaps a greater amount of attention to Raymond Blanc's Very Hungry Frenchman series than I had, spotted a wine he'd recommended on the menu; a 2010 pinot gris reserve by Joseph Cattin of Alsace. And that was delightful too.


Nothing for the rest of the week came close.


But my faith in Bournemouth food – and in south coast English seaside food – was revived.


If you're in that town any time – try it. No. it isn't the cheapest, but when I compare it to my other culinary experiences in Bournemouth, it's no more expensive (that whole crab was under £20) and it was so, so much better.

Who's idea was muzak with the Cornflakes?

There is nothing quite like hotel living. Or at least, not when you’re staying in a hotel for work.

At home, for instance, you don’t have to face muzak with your bacon and egg. Shown to the furthest corner of the dining area first thing on Thursday morning, The Other Half was growling instantly: “Who thought I needed cheerful music with my breakfast?”

Perhaps it was a deliberate technique for getting guests in and out as quickly as possible, because after bolting his fodder with more than usual alacrity, he bolted outside for a fag, muttering grimly that, if he didn’t escape quickly, he was going “to murder someone”.

But we were in sometimes-sunny Bournemouth for a full week, so there was no escape. And although I am well over the original strangeness of it, there is something rather odd about meeting colleagues, bosses (clients) and members at breakfast for an entire week.

Odd – and not perhaps conducive to relaxation.

My own responsibilities involved penning reports on this year's UNISON conference.

That is, in effect, the union's parliament, and the debates are as impassioned and varied as one might expect.

Of course, as a member of the team staffing the conference - albeit a freelance member - obviously I cannot contribute to the debates. But like anyone else in that position, I suspect, there are times when I desperately want to say something.

So I have to make do with little notes to myself in the margins of my spiral-bound reporters' notebook.

At other times, I simply long for one of those rolly-eyed emoticons, when hearing something that i Personally find risable.

But there are always, of course, highlights. TUC president Paul Kenny turned up and delivered an entertaining speech while making me wonder if he was Ray Winstone's long lost twin. I kept expecting him to turn to Dave Pentis at any moment and say: "You're the daddy".

Neville Lawrence addressed conference on Friday and reduced much of the hall to tears with a quiet and dignified retelling of how he heard about his son's murder and the struggle for justice that has followed.

And he went on to say that privatisation of the police would be a dreadful step, with profit coming before solving crime.

When you look at the case of his own son or that of murdered private detective Daniel Morgan - let alone many miscarriages of justice - that's a salutary reminder of just how negative a step such a sell-off would be.

Carmen Mayusa, a nurse and trade union lead from Colombia, where they murder and 'disappear' trade unionists as regularly as most of us take a shower, made everyone realise that things could be a lot worse, while four of the wives of the Miami Five highlighted the injustice of the continuing imprisonment of their husbands by the US.

Our own little team was based in a bunker - sorry, room - surrounded by tons of cable and the usual piles of conference documentation, trying to keep the tech running while filing a mass of reporting from the conference hall.

Away from the serious stuff, there were chances to enjoy the banter - I know who the Manchester United fans are and had great fun joining delegates to watch the England v Ukraine Euro 2012 match.

I admit to having been one of three England fans (the others, a father and son, are pictured here) running through a remarkably wide repertoire of about four songs, while several Scottish (Ukrainian for the night) members drowned their sorrows as the co-hosts failed to score.

A very rapid lunchtime trip to the Bournemouth Oceanarium, after reading that it had introduced a pair of otters last year, proved thoroughly enjoyable.

Stan and Roxy are Oriental small-clawed otters aged two, who have been at the Oceanarium since last November.

Otters are very sociable – but only within their own family groups. It's hoped that Stan and Roxy will breed – and so their group will get larger.

One of the staff was feeding them when I was there – and explained how they help to keep them active and alert. We've thankfully come a long way since animals were simply stuck in an enclosure without any thought to their mental state.

With just the iPhone for this trip, I managed a rather splendid shot of a spiny tailed lizard.

It's well worth a visit anyway, as I skimmed around some of the other exhibits: lobsters - impossible not to think, 'dinner!' There were sharks too and a little turtle (or similar) that spotted me at the window and turned to swim right up to me

The otters gave me a much-needed dose of cuteness, that sent me back into the conference hall with a glow about me.

But for sheer, much-needed serenity, there were moments of total calm in the early mornings, sitting outside watching the sea, with the sounds of the wind, the waves and the birds soothing. There was food - and there were some personal moments of note - but that'll have to wait for another day.

A hotel for kinky dwarves?

In the past few years, I have become adept at hotel stays. From a time when I might stop in a hotel once a year – if that – I'm now at a stage of clocking up a lot more hotel stays than that, with many of them coming as a result of work.

Last week was just such an occasion – in Bournemouth this time, where I was working at a major conference. Fortunately, given that I (and The Other Half) was away for a full six nights, it was a good hotel. Indeed, it was rather posh; perched high on the cliffs overlooking the sea, with glorious views of the bay, west to the Old Harry Rocks off Swanage on one side and east to the Isle of Wight on the other.

The hotel, indeed, was the Highcliff. Formerly part of the Hilton chain, it's now owned by Marriott International.

None of which obviously explained why not only was there the obligatory Gideon Bible in the room, but also a copy of the Book of Mormon.

For that, I had to resort to good old Google.

It seems that the chairman and CEO John Willard 'Bill' Marriott Junior (who's 78, so not all that 'junior' any more) is a member in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – the Mormons. Indeed, not just a member, but a member of Area Seventy, which might sound another part of the US that's the secret home to loads of little grey men from outer space, but is apparently a Mormon priesthood.

Which rather sent me away on a surreal musing about what book you could place in a room if you owned an hotel or even a chain of hotels. How about Colin Schindler's Manchester United Ruined My Life? Or a nice little collection of kinky porn stories? Or how about The Communist Manifesto?

Funny but true – any of those might be considered offensive and produce complaints, yet it seems that the one ethos that you can happily foist on others is religion.

But this was hardly the only thing that was weird about the hotel.

Now I've got used to the way in which the end of your loo roll in the bathroom is always folded every day. And I've got used to the current obsession with superfluous soft furnishings – cushions on beds, for instance; what are you supposed to do with them?

But the Highcliff Marriott had me stymied for other reasons, I admit.

Since we were both there for the duration, The Other Half and I had a double room. Except that it wasn't really. It was a large bed – but with six pillows instead of the rather more usual four. What is one to do with six pillows? Assuming one sleeps with two pillows, are the spare two to act as a barrier between bed partners? It's not actually easy to sleep across one and a half pillows, so should you just chuck them on the floor?

But then it dawned on me that there was another clue. In the bathroom, there were three bath towels, three hand towels and three facecloths.

Perhaps it wasn't a double room after all – perhaps it was a triple! They were expecting three in the bed (and bath)!

But here's where it all gets a bit X Files. How could they know in advance that both The Other Half and I might be described as being vertically challenged? (A former editor once christened our home 'Dwarf Towers' – oh, the joys of Scouse wit)

Was there another short-arse trotting around the place that we were being lined up with? Were they – whoever 'they' are – anticipating our bumping into a similarly sized person and inviting them back to our suitably prepared room?

And what of that 'them'? Male or female? I'm easily pleased, but The Other Half is not so flexible, as far as I know.

Those Mormons are – or were – into polygamy: perhaps it's all intended as a form of horizontal conversion, to go with the book that stayed in the drawer?

By the end of a week in which adrenalin seems to bring hysteria nearer and nearer to the surface, I was no more enlightened. I just wonder if I missed some sort of opportunity.