• An older person sitting on a concrete bench in the shade, looking at his mobile phone, being watched by a second person. Copyright Urban Camera 2024
    Commentary,  Life

    Dinosaur: Your Time Has Long Gone

    I’ve never considered myself to be old, at least, not until the doctors starting telling me I really needed to lie down on the operating table and have a few things done to keep the old pump beating. And, to a certain extent, I still do not consider myself to be old despite what others might claim: I have been referred to as Grandpa, and the Old Man by various people, although I have tried to appear as if they couldn’t have been referring to me, and simply gone on my way. When it comes to technology, though, and the advances in computers and telecommunications, well, let me tell you…

  • A homeless musician playing a self-made guitar - strings strung across the length of a common shovel - in Bremen. Copyright Urban Camera 2024
    City Life,  Commentary

    It’s Not Always What You Can See

    I took the header photograph to this post back in June 2024, at a time when I was more active with my camera, travelling to many cities across the country, and making great plans for the future. Not, I hasten to add, my first great plans for the future, merely the latest ones. In the past I have written books, short stories, magazine articles and other papers for publication. I have acted on the theatre stage, and been in one or two minor films over which it is best to be quiet. I have invested in real estate, in art, in literature, in antique photography. The next great plan for…

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  • A possibly homeless person sleeping across his rucksack on a bench. Copyright Urban Camera 2024
    Life

    A Place For Everything

    I am fairly sure that most people, perhaps more likely the older, but younger may have been subjected to this too, know the phrase: ” A Place for Everything, and Everything in its Place.” I heard it constantly uttered as a child, but always from my grandparents, never anyone else. Perhaps it is a thing which springs over a generation now and then, as those on the receiving end vow never to repeat what they have experienced in their youth, and bring their children up differently, or perhaps it is just me. Regardless of which, as I get inevitably older, it is a sentence I have begun using to myself…

  • Two young women sitting underneath the Roland in Bremen. Copyright Urban Camera 2024
    Commentary,  Life

    Fielding the Three Big Questions

    There is a certain attraction to traditions, especially when visiting foreign lands, which draws tourists and others into a spiral of mixed feelings. On the one hand, it is good to see that the old ways are being respected and upheld. On the other the question of why people cannot simply let go, especially when it comes to traditions filled with outdated pomp and circumstance, costing the taxpayer a fortune without bringing them any benefits. Just as not everything which is new is good and worth pursuing, so it is with the old; there comes a time when traditions need to be consigned to the history books, taught in classes,…

  • A view of train lines ad platforms with a local express train at Bremen main railway station. Copyright Urban Camera 2025.
    Travel

    The Utopian Golden Age of Steam

    Transport, especially trains, has a bad name. Some might say it is well earned, others that the comments and accusations, when taken in context of the whole picture, are overblown and unnecessarily damaging. The fact remains, things are not what they used to be, and many hark back to the days of steam, when trains were punctual and clean, as if they had lived those days themselves. Here, in a country where the punctuality of trains is always talked about as being perfect by those from other countries, things are as they have always been, and as they are in most other western nations. The trains and buses run, that…

error: Copyright Urban Camera.