Two steps forward, one-and-a-half back …

As some of you already know from an email I sent in December, last June (2023) I suffered a major setback with my ME/CFS, where my energy levels plummeted so badly I became housebound and, on some days, fully bedbound. I still don’t really know what happened; I have a sneaking suspicion I may have gone down with long covid on top of the ME, but I don’t know for sure.

Unfortunately, my energy has continued to be really low for more than a year now, and I’m still largely housebound. The only way, really, to deal with this is has been to completely strip back what I do with the initial aim of not getting worse (rather than aiming to get better), and stabilising my current levels and keeping them that way for a while (months, rather than days or weeks) before I can even start to think about improvement and an increase in activity.

So most of my non-working hours over the past year have been spent resting. I mostly only leave the house to do the school run, go to medical appointments and a few short trips to the local beach where I can sit in the car on the beachfront. Such is the reality of living with energy-limiting chronic illnesses.

Something’s working though. I’m starting to have days where I’ve begun to see some gentle improvement in my energy, and I recently took my girls for a week in Bath to see their granny and grandpa and have a few days away, which was an interesting test to see how I coped with a longer drive and a bit more activity (I coped … OK … much better than I would have this time last year, but I still needed a lot of rest and pacing).

It’s early days, and it’s still really easy to crash my energy, but things seem to be headed in the right direction. If I continue in this way, I may even be able to consider a brief trip to the Garstang later this year or early next year to see how I would cope with maybe an hour or so with my camera. (There is a statuette of two baboons I photographed in 2022 when I was employed as a photographer for a couple of months, that I would love to spend more time on, that would make an excellent reintroduction to my artefact photography.)

What’s the plan for my photography in the immediate future?

I know that most of you here are signed up because you enjoy my photography (thank you!). I still love it, of course – it’s my passion and one of my favourite ways to spend my time – but I haven’t been able to create new work of artefacts for over a year now because of my health.

My job with The EES

I have my job as Publications Manager at the Egypt Exploration Society, which is really important to me.

Over the last few months, my job has been keeping me busy. We published a major two-volume academic book focussed on royal statuary at the city of Amarna (300,000 words and 1,500 images to typeset!) and a gazetteer of archaeological sites in the Nile Delta, and we’re now working on more exciting titles, such as Ancient Egypt in 50 Discoveries, edited by Drs Campbell Price and Stephanie Boonstra.

I believe strongly in the work the Society is doing supporting and promoting Egyptian cultural heritage, as well as its efforts to widen access to Egyptology to people from all walks of life.

The job is part-time, which is best for me right now (I’ve been able to adjust my working pattern so that instead of working three days a week, I work four days a week for three weeks then have the fourth week off to rest) and I work entirely from home. It’s also provided me with some much-needed financial stability at a time when I would otherwise be unable to work.

However, I have no desire to leave the photography behind because I love it, it’s a great way for me to keep my Egyptology knowledge fresh when reading is too tiring for me, and I know it brings joy to other people.

So my plan for my photography for the time being is this:

Artefact photography

I have a huge backlog of artefact photography, just sitting there waiting to be edited and shared with you. Yes, it turns out that I was photographing objects faster than I could edit them and I have literally hundreds of images that need editing.

So as far as the artefact photography’s concerned, I’m going to work on editing what I already have, and sharing it with you here in the my new series of articles, Artefacts in Focus, which are short object photography stories (I published the first one, about an amulet of Thoth, recently). Rather than trying to do a lot of academic writing about objects, because it’s too energy intensive, I’ll share the story of how I went about photographing them – what was difficult, interesting, fun, etc – with just a sprinkling of info about the object itself for context and give you some pretty pictures to look at. Most will need to be fairly brief posts, so I don’t expend too much energy.

Exploring heritage

I also want to spend some time enjoying and sharing the other side of my photographic pursuits: exploring heritage. Ever since I got my first digital camera in 2013, I’ve loved making photos at museums and heritage sites, just as a visitor. I’ve long found photography a mindful activity that helps me make sense of the world and – for me, at least – is great for my mental health.

Again, I have a back catalogue to be working on and, at the moment, making new images this way is more accessible for me than the artefact photography.

I live in Liverpool, whose heritage and history was built on its coast and docks (including, unfortunately, wealth built from the slave trade). I’m close to the beach in north Liverpool, which has the Anthony Gormley Another Place public art installation featuring 100 iron statues of Gormley’s naked body, and there’s a section of the beach that has a car park right on the beach front, so I can park up just a few metres from the sand and spend a few minutes out with my camera.

Because this part of the beach is so accessible to me – as well as it being a place I find relaxing and enjoyable to be – it’s an easy win. I can’t actually walk much to get up close to the statues, but I can get a different perspective using different lenses to capture not just the iron men, but also the container ships coming in and out of the docks, people visiting the beach, the most northern part of The Wirral and, on clear days, the Welsh hills across the estuary.

The statues have become an important part of the local heritage landscape and the beach provides a wealth of photographic opportunities, with the statues, the ever-changing weather and tides, and the people and wildlife that spend time there.

It is a beautiful, soothing place to be.

Whilst my artefact photography allows me to open a gateway for others to see objects in a new way, or to actually see objects that are otherwise living in museum stores, my Exploring Heritage photography is the opposite: it’s something we can share together, which again is something I’ll be working on as-and-when I’m able.

Social media

These days, it seems expected that anyone with any kind of online presence as a creator or business must spread themselves wide and be everywhere. We should be on Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, TikTok, and now Threads and Mastodon, as well as keeping up a website and a mailing list.

For people like me, however, who are neither gregarious, bursting with energy/time nor earning enough to employ a social media manager, it’s a seriously big drain. I’m not a natural look at me person, so trying to put myself out there on multiple social media sites, trying to constantly feed algorithms is exhausting.

So for now, I’m going to focus more of my attention here on Substack, whilst I work on my photos and give my own website some much needed attention.

One of the reasons I decided to move to Substack is that it’s so much more than just an email delivery system. Here, I get an entire website where you can easily see all my previous posts (aka the emails I send out) as well as my Notes, which are Substack’s version of social media posts.

And the beauty of it is that it lets you decide. If you’re an email-only person, you’ll receive all my articles, in full, in your inbox and I’ll include links to my Notes section so you can pop in and have a look. Unlike some other social media sites, you can see it all without needing to sign into an account.

Alternatively, you can create your own profile here, add the app to your phone or tablet (or continue to just use the website) and you’ll get all my Notes and articles (and those of anyone else you follow and/or subscribe to) there.

I’m not leaving the other places; I’m just … resting a while …

What’s happening to the Tiny Egypt Society?

As with everything else over the last year-and-a-bit, my ability to keep communications flowing has been somewhat dented, so for those of you who have continued to support me please know that I love you very much for continuing to be there for me.

Because of the wildly expensive cost of the software I have to run on the Tiny Egypt website to facilitate membership payments and logins I shall soon be shutting the site down, moving some of the photos and content to my main website and adding the rest to my archive of posts here.

Because here’s another great thing about Substack: it has a subscription and membership facility like Patreon, Ko.fi and Buy Me a Coffee, so I can restart there.

At first I will move my posts across and keep everything open. When I improve healthwise and have more energy to put into it, I’ll think anew about member benefits. I’ll switch on paid subscriptions soon and you can choose to offer me your patronage as a show of support for all my independent photography (not just Tiny Egypt). Until then you can pledge to become a patron of my photography (please note that pledging isn’t tying you in; it just allows you to let me know you’ll consider it when available, and you’ll get a notification when I switch it on). I don’t really like gatekeeping too much knowledge because some people – like I have been – can find themselves in difficult financial positions through no fault of their own and then find themselves excluded from things that would really bring them some joy, so that’s something else I need to devote some thinking time to.

For now, however, it’s baby steps. I need to move cautiously, make sure I continue to have plenty of resting time and try to make sure I keep focussed on health and recovery until I see some reliable, stable improvement in my energy levels. I must continue to concentrate on my health and take care to not push myself into overdoing things again. If I can continue to do this, hopefully you’ll start to see me in the museum storerooms once again!