Although I spend most of my time trying to understand and highlight other people’s lives, like many writers, I also spend a lot of time inside my own head. I happened to be rummaging around in there recently—initially trying to release a song that had been stuck in the doorway for several days—when I came across an old memory hidden behind years of dust. It was a photograph of my mother, taken by the recently deceased photographer Martin Parr—one of his iconic seaside images from a commission for work to be displayed in Dorset County Hospital. My mother never knew about it. She was asleep on Weymouth beach when the photograph was taken and passed away in the same hospital long before any of us knew it existed. The same image had been used on an album cover by a band called the Saw Doctors. Although his work might have elicited a Marmite effect, Martin Parr has left an extraordinary legacy. In the documentary I Am Martin Parr, Grayson Perry described him as having ‘inveigled his way into our visual unconscious’. Martin said he simply photographed ‘the yin and yang of British society’ as he found it. In this month’s issue on page 36, we highlight some of the images made by visitors to the Harmony Centre in Bridport, where local photographers showed how time with a camera could help ease some of the challenges felt by those visiting the centre. The results were fascinating and uplifting. One of the participants in the workshops commented that ‘just a little validation or encouragement can work wonders with someone’s self-esteem and confidence.’ It reminded me of a slightly mildewed saying that my mother enjoyed—‘Why not encourage someone today?’ Trite, banal, cliched, call it what you will, but the sentiment is well worth adding to 2026 New Year resolutions.
