Hello world!

My name is Wendy Skinery and this is my webpage. You find me sitting in my little bedroom, an odd, angular, mushroom-smelling nest, at the top of my newly inherited creaky, damp old farmhouse in ‘darkest Somerset.’ I am now 285 days pregnant. However, as yet there has not been a sign, or any communication from the occupant of my womb that he or she has any intention to quit the premises any time soon, I wait.

I inherited this house from Henry Skinery….well, everyone called him Harry. He was my grandfather and I loved him very much - although actually I didn’t know him very well and hadn’t seen him for some time when he died. After my grandmother passed away ten years ago, Harry inexplicably retreated to Sri Lanka, where he spent the remainder of his life in what I can only imagine was some kind of ‘seclusion’ from ‘something’. He communicated very little with my parents and I have found a single photograph of him from that time. So it came as a surprise to me that he stated in his will that I was to have this house. I was moved that he thought of me but I have to admit very reluctant and ungracious about taking up my inheritance. I didn’t want to leave the city you see because I thought I would be lonely out here in the country. The truth of it is that actually I was deeply lonely in the city. Then I fell pregnant, by chance I think. Although sometimes I wonder if somehow I did it deliberately even though consciously I would never have thought it. The father, well he was/is afraid as men can be about these things. He panicked and got confused poor thing; he ran away and I found that I didn’t mind at all. ‘And that’s all I have to say about that’ as Forest Gump would say.

I had somehow been aware that my grandfather still owned this house and that it had various tenants and little decoration over the years but I’d never expected it to become mine, to do with as I wish. I’ve actually done very little with it. It seems so long ago that I was so careless about this house and yet it was only a few weeks past. I mooched around here for a while and then got myself organised for food and fuel provisions and then…well I mooched around some more. I’ve enjoyed tramping around in the fields and taking photos and I’m so glad I didn’t leave my laptop behind as I wanted to at the time that I left town. I was so stressed I thought I never wanted to see a computer nor a camera again. But communication is a fine thing, you just have to appreciate it when it’s gone and treat it properly when it’s here. I’m not saying I’m not lonely but I like to stick to my decisions once I’ve made them. Besides I find it suits me here, I have a melancholy, romantic disposition.

I came up here to the attic this afternoon in the winter sunlight and have spent these last hours searching through Harry’s archive of our family photographs collected by him over the last fifty years. Photographs of him with my grandmother at the age I am now, pictures of my own parents as children. As something of an instinctive photographer myself, I’ve become fascinated in an inexplicable way by this collection of yellowing, dog-eared photos. I have found that coming up here is all I want to do as the birth date of my baby comes nearer (I can just squeeze my belly through the hole and pull myself up in a way that I’m sure my friends and mother would warn me was far too dangerous (if they knew I was here that is), what if ‘something happened’ who would come to rescue me? But here is the only place I want t be, I feel a compulsion to climb up into this dusty treasure trove of things, which have no value to anyone except me, and my grandfather at one time, since he put them all up here. Somehow it must be instinctive, like any she mammal circles and sniffs and makes her nest in a protected place, as she is about to give birth.

And so to today. These last few hours as I have sat up here curled up with my laptop (the wireless signal works up here), scanning these photographs into the digital realm, it has grown dark. As the sun went down, the walls became Escher like and then disappeared and as I become immersed in the photographs and all the thoughts and feelings they inspire, I find I am in a kind of limbo, like being in a sensory deprivation tank. No it’s more like a kind of crossroads in time that you find me. A place where thoughts of the future and memories meet. What will be and what has been hang here, undecided. Life itself dangles by an invisible thread.  I imagine myself as my baby in the womb. Floating in space, alone in the darkness, vulnerable and unaware of anything beyond, growing here alone I am vulnerable. In this dark space.

This brings me to my point. Immersed as I am in my family’s archive I wonder if I have lost the ability to look at the contents of these photos objectively. That along with my topsy turvey hormones which have lead me to expericne the world in a different way, like some sort of alternate Alice Through the Looking Glass universe (remind me to tell you the tale of my getting up in the night a few weeks ago and licking the bathroom tiles..) these things combined make me now search out an objective view of the thing I’ve discovered in the photos that has puzzled me.

So, Ok, I have discovered a collection of photographs, which my grandfather has put together. One thing I notice is a man in each of these photographs who I don’t recognise. He appears in all of the photos in this collection, which Harry has bundled together. I don’t recognise this man. As my other family members age he seems to remain the same. Who is he? As well as the family photographs, I am including these images I have taken these past few weeks, of the area here around my new house. Is that the same man in my family photographs? How can that be? Am I hallucinating or is there really something in this?
Why I am not sure and yet there is something in common with them all. On the surface they are the usual family snapshots but look here, a man who appears in all of them and yet doesn’t seem a part of any of them. Who is he? In contrast I show you my own recent photographs I’ve been compelled to make, of the bleak landscape I find around me in my new house. This house, which I have inherited from my grandfather although he has not been here for many years. My hidey-hole, I have hidden away here, circling, alone, my senses focussing on one thing, my coming baby. I wish to share with this strange occurrence. Look again, do you see the same man? Have my hormones finally sent me into a psychological nether world or are there outside forces at play? I need your help.

My Family.

Since I moved out here to the countryside to have my baby I’ve not really been able to get stuck in to a proper professional life as a photographer. I’ve ended up going through a load of old photos and cuttings which my grandfather had gathered together and left in this house.
My Mother keeps interfering and wanting to help me with the baby but she always takes over and I just want to do this my way. She calls me and starts going on and on and I’m thinking of getting rid of my phone completely….why am I putting this here for the world to see…this is the kind of thing that’s usually just in my diary…