Patience.org

What happens when a 2 (going on 3) year-old grabs the camera and takes pictures from his or her point of view? Any of you with kids and digital cameras will know that this happens quite often. And we’ve seen the results before from him, though when he was 4. Macro-capable lenses in even the cheapest and lightest of cameras have made quite a difference in recent years.

But she grabbed the camera recently and wandered around the apartment picking out items of interest to her and these are the results. As usual, we need to know who you are before you can see them, but here’s a taster with the feet as a signature theme:

They don’t all involve feet, as you’ll see here.

I know I’m guilty of encouraging my son in watching and playing sports. It started with watching and it has extended into playing – he hasn’t yet seen a sport involving a ball that he doesn’t want to play, perhaps apart from golf, but it’s early still. Football is the mainstay, by which I mean soccer. We’ve tried the American variety, though that’s a bit dangerous for Dad to be playing in the apartment. A lot of potential for head, neck and knee injuries, I’ve found in just two or three brief, ahem, experiments.

Anyway, a few weeks ago there was a little party at his school, whereby the parents come into to read the latest stories written by their kids (and read those of the other kids and comment on them too).

Our boy chose as his subject the first professional football game he attended, that of Fulham v Middlesbrough.

I have to wonder how many of the parents thought, “that’s nice, but what is this M’brogh?”. He gets that from the abbreviation M’Boro they use on the telly when showing the score.

Anyway last week we went for his twice yearly assessment with his teacher and without going into details, story-telling came up and she said – and I’m paraphrasing here – ‘he needs to diversify the subject matter for his stories, they tend to be about one thing.’ And we know what that is, don’t we?

I went to see Badly Drawn Boy last night at Webster Hall – it’s great to be able to walk to such gigs, even it is below freezing (someone else took some pictures, here). He is something of a contradiction, an anti-show man show man. After the first song, his second was an instrumental and he played a bunch of new things, all the time apologizing for playing new things, even though he’s got a new album out. Then he played a bunch of solo acoustic things, mostly old, which were fantastic, including The Shining.

A bit later, with the band back he played a couple of songs then walked off the stage and left the band to do some awkward jamming. He returned saying, “I hope you didn’t expect a costume change – I was having a cigarette in the cupboard.”

Then the penultimate song of his set was a quasi-Vegas style number called (I think) ‘To you from me,’ where he took the mike out of its stand and walked around the front of the stage shaking his hands and thanking the audience, which he appeared to do without being tongue in cheek about it, but he still made an unlikely crooner in his beanie hat and combat jacket.

January’s pictures had a sporting theme, as quite frankly, does every day of the week these days, as the lad has boundless energy, an interest in more or less every sport – at least all those that involve a ball – and subsequently, winters in New York City can be a bit of a challenge.

Thankfully Chelsea Piers had an open day and he was able to scratch his itches for football and basketball at least, while she also got in on the act