Halway through reading Bleak House and feeling somewhat awash with the unending stream of odd-bod characters writ large that Dickens so enjoys creating. Comic, strange, tragic, curious all. Some a doodle and others a bombardment. How very peculiar, preposterous that he would invent them and on such a scale.
And then on the way to Tesco after work last night, cycling along an unlit path in the gloom, I discerned ahead of me an odd assemblage of a person pushing a shopping trolley towards the store, shuffling along in a bobbling, pausing manner. Getting closer, even from the barest glimmer of lights t'was a small, impossibly elderly, unwell woman and an emaciated young boy walking on tip toes, who were seemingly attached by their clothes being stitched together they were so close.
In the store I saw them again, in their own oblivous to all, attached to one another condition, pondering things very precisely but not really buying anything much. The boy, with ill fitting overly-large black glasses, a blue beanie pulled down to the top of the frames, crumpled dark clothes, and still tentatively moving about on tip toes, huddled up close to his grandmother (?). The signs of impoverishment and lack were heavy upon them and yet with no apparent hint of disaffection at that.
I now think Dickens invented nothing, no imagination was required, just observation, all his people were drawn from real life.
As a person who photographs my interest in them was clanging a bell, that they should be photographed, but the bell was muffled by an alarmed hand dampening it, my own, from self-doubt and anxiousness, that I don't do that, but that 'someone should', but perhaps also that they should not.
Once after seeing a Jeff Wall exhibition I was in a heightened state of Jeff Wall-ness for a few days. His staged photographs were fastidiously recreated tableaux of situations he had glimpsed while going about his own life, when his imagination had been fired by something he saw, someone, and the relations of things.
The old lady and the young boy exist as tiny moving images flickering in my head. Something about bleakness, and the value of having someone close beside you when you have little or nothing.