Recommendations of note

Yesterday evening was the final part of my birthday celebrations, which involved going to see Shaun Usher promoting his new book "Lists of Note" in Waterstones on Deansgate in Manchester.

Unfortunately, perhaps due to the potential chaos of a United home game, not enough people signed up and the event was cancelled. So we had a slight change of plan and this leads me to be able to recommend three things in today's blog. I should point out that I have received no financial inducement to recommend them.

The first is where Gel, Caitlin, Andy and I ate last night. The Jitrada in Sale (http://www.jitradarestaurant.co.uk/). The food was scrumptious, the ambience in the restaurant serene, the staff attentive (but not overly so), and the bill for four of us - including a bottle of wine - was £66.

My second two recommendations are both books given to me for my birthday.

The first was given to me by Caitlin and Andy and is "Lists of Note" by Shaun Usher. I've followed Shaun on Twitter for ages now when I became aware of his first publication "Letters of Note".  It's a simple idea, but really cool. The letters and lists aren't dry and dull, but exciting, moving, funny, intriguing.

The second book was a present from Gel and is called “A Lifetime of Looking”. It is a collection of photographs by Jane Bown. Jane was a staff photographer for 50 years at the Observer newspaper. She worked predominantly in black and white, and engineered a move away from the colour magazine when she was “promoted”, so she could get back to her mono work. She almost exclusively used “available light” with her camera set to 1/60th of a second, f2.8, judging the light by looking at the way it fell on the back of her hand.

She used to work around her subject with a view that you find photographs rather than take them.

She was a small, quiet, calm and determined woman and that calmness comes through in her images. Many of the images are great because of the subjects, but nearly all of them are great because of the image.  As someone who has embraced black and white photography more and more, I take a great deal of pleasure and inspiration from her images. The trick is to learn from them and not simply ape them.

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A challenge awaits this afternoon as we have to herd the kittens to take them to visit the vet for the first time. I'll let you know how it went tomorrow.