The letter: October

Second one of these. I said once a month, and here it is roughly on time, which by my standards counts for something.

I had October down as a quiet month. November was circled and everything before it was marked as run-up. October had other ideas.

October

My father-in-law died in his sleep on the night of 5 October, in a nursing home in Brittany. Jean Paul Jacob. I met him in 1993, moved into his house in 1994 as the English boyfriend of his eldest daughter, and spent the thirty years after that being argued with, mostly on purpose. I have written about him below and I am not going to do it twice here. All ten of his grandchildren were at the funeral. I keep coming back to that.

The rest of the month was mostly a camera. I have a Praktica MTL3 again — same model, same lens as the one I was given in 1987, which finally died of old age around 2009. Fifteen euros from a collector in Montbert. The only part of the original still in service is the strap. My hands knew where everything was before I did, which was a strange few seconds.

Not all of it went well. Two frames on the first roll came back half black, which smells like the shutter at the quick end, so that wants testing before the HP5+ goes in. The camera can take a knock — I came off a bike with the first one outside Lyon in 1987 and it carried on without complaint — but half a frame is still half a frame.

And then a friend in America asked me what was going on in France, and I lost a day to answering it properly. I live here, so a feeling was not good enough. I went through what is actually known and what is only being claimed, and it came out as two posts rather than one, because the long version turned out to need a short version.

What went up this month

The first letter (2 October). The one before this one, put on the blog so anybody could read one before deciding whether they wanted them.

This One Is Mine: Shooting a Praktica MTL3 Again (9 October). The camera I learnt on, bought back for fifteen euros. Also a day that took in a knife-forging course, a florist, a missed confession and an incident in a pub I would rather have skipped.

Jean Paul Jacob, 1946 – 2026 (21 October). I had written this one a thousand times in my head before any of it went on the page. He taught me French by arguing with me, and I would rather have had more of it.

France, October 2026: what is going on (24 October). The long answer. How it started in a school, three popular explanations tested against the evidence, and a dated list of what to watch next.

What is happening in France is a French story (24 October). The same thing at a tenth of the length, for anyone who wants the facts without the footnotes, and one request at the end of it.

In the shop

Nothing has changed in there since I last wrote, and after September — new paper on everything, the prices rebuilt twice in one day — that is quite restful. Prints still start at €99.99 on Ilford matte with Baryta above it, and the downloads are €39.99 if you would sooner pick your own paper and your own framer.

The shop is here, if you want a look.

Next

The remembrance piece goes up on Friday 6 November, and that is the one all the Normandy work has been walking toward.

Same again in a month.

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If you'd rather have one of these on a wall than a screen — prints from €99.99, Ilford or Baryta paper, made by WhiteWall in Berlin. The shop →