Empty empathy ….. in My things ……

Not quite like yesterday today, it isn’t raining but there are those cool pinprick feeling on my skin, a soft Cornish day and looking up and down the valley it’s like a photograph from an early camera; as slight soft view of reality.

I have a few old cameras, those that fold near flat and slip in to a jacket pocket, the one I’m thinking of make a six by nine centimetre negative, just eight exposures on a roll of film. It was made in Germany in the late 1920’s, a simple camera just five shutter speeds; and it still works.

The lens is slightly soft, I used it in Manchester and the images it made took the city back to the era when the camera was made. The other two or three I have were made in the 1930’s, in those few years lens had moved on, to a sharpness near to we expect now.

I haven’t used them since moving to Cornwall, when I left Manchester I also left behind the darkrooms; my own darkroom is a wish packed away in several boxes. One day I shall unpack …..

Here in the UK our Churches are speaking out on the new welfare reforms, these come in on the first of March, these reforms combine six means-tested benefits into one, the one fits all approach that seems better as seen by those who rest on the security great wealth.

The Archbishop of Canterbury the Most Reverend Justin Welby used his first Christmas Day sermon to highlight "injustices" facing Britain's poor. Reverend Justin Welby a former oil company executive - who this year launched a campaign against payday lending firms - referred to "injustices at home; even in a recovering economy".

"Christians, the servants of a vulnerable and poor saviour, need to act to serve and love the poor, they need also to challenge the causes of poverty." He added,

Now the leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols described the changes as a "disgrace" last weekend. The welfare state was growing increasingly punitive amid the biggest shake-up of the system for decades "My concern is to echo the voices that come to me of the circumstances today in which people are left without any support for weeks on end, are hungry, are destitute," he said.

And the Prime Minister’s reply: ‘For me the moral case for welfare reform is every bit as important as making the numbers add up’