My last entry was in 2020. The year of the pandemic, and an interesting time for me - at the beginning of March that year I'd travelled back to India for a mixture of a months worth of work and pleasure and two weeks in, lockdown and the international travel ban came into effect. I ended up being stranded there for six months, though in fairly comfortable circumstances as I was staying in my chum Simon's house, whilst he in turn was stranded in Sandwich in Sussex having travelled back to visit his mother. When lockdown eased and we could venture out without fear of having the shit beaten out of us by police with lahtes I started walking on the beach with Charlotte - Simon's sister, co owner of Vivenda dos Palhacos and my next door neighbour. Naturally I took a camera as often as possible.
This is what I wrote when I eventually got back to the UK that September and the accompanying photos:
The international travel ban and swift nationwide lockdown left me stranded in India from March to mid August. Heavy policing - beatings and fines, made the streets unsafe except for in an emergency, so for exercise I started walking on the beach either at first light or just before dusk. The first thing I noticed was how much the beach dogs had suffered - they rely on tourists, beach shacks and fishermen for food and affection, and all had disappeared overnight. I started taking a box of biscuits everyday for the dogs. Initially suspicious of something that wasn't either rice or fish, they soon came to understand biscuits were also food. This made me quite a lot of new friends who would accompany me on my walks, usually in the hope that there was a forgotten biscuit in my camera bag. These images are a small part of a photographic journal I kept during the six months I was marooned.
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