This is not a story about the store in the picture, more a thought about consumerism in general. I watched over my son a moment ago as he tried to buy a special newly released trainer/sneaker online. Only 27k of these apparently were being made available and 0800 UK time was the moment you could press GO on the purchase button. I suspect 0800 translated to midnight LA time, where this sneaker release would have had a particular and understandably personal resonance. We’d done everything we needed to; joined the brand’s membership, entered address and card details. Seconds after the sale went live, we were prompted to enter the three-digit security code. Bang. Done. We were put in a holding pattern, told minutes after that there was a problem with our payment details. There were I suspect no problems with our inputed digits, I suspect we timed out or something similar. In binary terms, computer said nooooo. My son refreshed the page still with a hope in his heart, to find the only sizes left would suit someone aged three and under. They were all gone, in less than ten minutes. Gone. Within moments, sales went up elsewhere from bots that had been far more successful and the sneakers were being sold for twice, three and four times the RRP. Bots and Greed United 1 - Normal person on the street 0. A part of me, just a part mind (looking across to my son), felt content, that we hadn’t won this rather obscene marketeer’s vision to pray on the anxiety of those who have been told you can only enjoy the spoils of newness, if you are prepared to step over the soles of others.

The undercroft of London’s brutalist Southbank Centre is host to an unplanned, and some might say undesired skateboarding park. It’s been there since the early ‘80s, this area with unintended ledges, banks, seating and pillars, almost perfectly designed at a time when nobody had heard of a board with wheels as a piece of sports kit. The centre has been described as London’s ugliest building, yet the geometry, the shapes, the disregard for traditional rules, makes it perfect for boarders, and for sketchbooking.

I met a photographer in Oxford recently, Tony Lorenzo, who shared with me his collection of small passport photographs that he has collected from the top lips of photo booths, and more oddly the concrete floors around ATMs? Tony seems to be building a collection of unknown portraits which is fascinating for its variety of characters and expressive observations. Video didn’t kill the radio star, as much as DIY digital hasn’t removed the photo booth. In Brighton I came across a shop where analogue photo booths frequent a whole shop in a fashionable quarter, where visitors come from miles to enjoy the process of seeing a print of their poses appear before their eyes from a micro chemical tank. Vive la photographic révolution.

I wonder what she’s thinking? On my podcast, The Photowalk, I often ask photographers, the mainstay of conversational subjects, if they, when exhibiting, ever stand behind gallery visitors, to hear what they may say about the work before them, or if in silence they can gauge what someone may think or feel, by how long they stand looking at a picture hanging on a wall.

The orange giraffe graffiti tag has been a sight around Berkshire since 2011, and this one, under a railway bridge along the Kennet and Avon Canal near Newbury has been ‘overpainted’ a number of times in the last couple of years to retain its presence. The artist’s name is Rook and this figure is now known officially it seems, as the Newbury Giraffe.