Katherine Furman

Well hello there faithful readers,

So, the photo challenge I did a few months ago was a huge hit. My readership sky-rocketed and people who are usually too cool to give me the time of day started to befriend me on facebook (teenage insecurity overcome!). I have made vague attempts at keeping the photography alive back in the Eastern Cape, but I just can’t seem to get my mojo together on this one. The photo challenge is dead until I move to a new city and get excited about my surroundings again. Continue reading →

Richard, my partner, always complains about blogs that have no central organising theme. We all know the ones. The blogger who will post about her new yoga regime on Monday, pen her views on the meaning of life midweek and then round off Friday with a weekend recipe selection. The really famous blogs do one thing and do it well. Hyperbole and a Half  tells amusing stories via pictures, the blog that inspired Julie and Julia  worked its way through a cookbook, and Belle de Jour’s Secret Diary of a London Call Girl  was, unsurprisingly, about being a call girl in London. This blog risks falling into the ‘messy messy no theme’ camp, but considering that I do this mostly to amuse my friends (and because Richard is currently too far away to stop me) I don’t care Continue reading →

It is difficult to write on a topic like inspiration without sounding like a cheap self-help book. The topic tends toward the trite and without even realising it a perfectly sensible person can start writing about ‘reaching for the stars’ and other such nonsense. That said, being inspired (or rather, not being very inspired at all) has been weighing on my mind and so I am going to ramble on about that for a bit. Here goes Continue reading →

This has been a crazy week. I made the trip from South Africa to Milan for an interview. The journey took roughly 24 hours from door to door, excluding the time it took to drive to and from Johannesburg (add about another 24 hours to the total). In the end I only had one full day in Milan, which was the day of my interview. After surviving my encounter with the selection panel, I hopped onto the metro and went to the city center to see the Duomo (see photo). It is the fourth largest cathedral in the world and it took almost six centuries to complete. The most striking aspect of the cathedral is that the Italians clearly have a more frightening god than the English-speaking world – one of the outer panels graphically features David decapitating Goliath (Yikes!).

This is a pretty poorly composed photo. I blame this on the fact that I was running around with Richard’s journalistic grade camera shouting ‘I can haz camera’ and trying to remember which button is auto-focus. I am posting it, despite its obvious failings as a photo, because I thought that my London friends might enjoy the image of an aloe. I may be wrong about that, but I am posting it anyway.

Ever since Meryl Streep put on her pith helmet and declared ‘I had a farm in Africa’, African whities have been writing about their own farm-related experiences. In fact, you may very well need a safari suit and compass to navigate your way through the memoirs of white Africans (now living abroad), all rambling on about aloes and rolling hills and dust. I have been back in ‘Afriiiiiiiiiiicaaaaa’ for almost two weeks now and sure enough, I wound up in a farm house. A farm house situated in the midst of rolling hills and aloes and dust. This is a photo of one of the dogs that dwells in that house. I feel that he adds a certain Jock of the Bushveld feel to the image.

Just before I began the photo challenge, I wrote a post about how much I hate the tourist photographers in London. One of the sites I complained about was St Paul’s, where everyone and their iPhone feel the need to take a photograph. Keeping this in mind, it felt fitting to end the photo challenge with St Paul’s.

And so my guided tour of London’s libraries continues. Today featuring a creepy stalker photograph for your viewing pleasure. Unsuspecting library users sit below as I dangle over the railing and photograph them from above. Behind them is the utterly impressive ‘Kings Collection’, housed in an enormous glass chamber and dominating the center of the building.

I found this peculiar wall on my walk home today. It is just off Regent’s Square and looks like layers of painted advertising- perhaps. That said, its in an entirely residential area (so not painted onto a shop or anything like that). Any ideas?