Love at the Five and Dime

A story of music, love and diners.

When I was a child, I spent many holidays crammed into the front seat of a small red Renault Four as my mum and sister and I crawled through rural France. The Renault had some quirks, including the windows that always trapped my fingers as I slid them shut and the gear stick which had to be pulled out of the dashboard to change gear, resulting in a bruise that never quite disappeared on my leg. As we munched on poor man’s pain au chocolats - baguettes stuffed with a bar of chocolate - and watched the countryside drift by, our soundtrack was made up of two cassette tapes, played on repeat - Tracy Chapman and Nanci Griffith. My mum, a staunch feminist, was starting our musical and political education early.

Griffith, who passed away a few years ago, was a true stalwart of the country music scene in America with a voice that was one in a million. With a focus on tales of small town America, rural hardships and the eternal emotions of love and sadness, her songs are sung with a twang that stays just the right side of cliched. Some of her tracks like Late Night Grande Hotel and Anybody Can be Somebody’s Fool have the power to make me cry every single time I listen to them.

“And they’d sing, dance a little closer to me, dance a little closer now, dance a little closer tonight. Dance a little closer to me, hey it’s closing time and love’s on sale, tonight at this five and dime.”

There’s one particular track on the cassette we had, which was a live recording of a song made in 1988 called Love at the Five and Dime. The song is a classic country ballad about two school age sweethearts, Eddie and Rita, who meet when they’re young and stay together for a lifetime, dancing to the radio late every night. It’s a touching depiction of a relationship that endures a lot as it slow dances through the years. If you don’t know it, maybe stick it on now as you read the rest of this, preferably with a soda in hand.

The live version of the track has a three minute introduction given by Griffith in her thick Texan accent. She talks about her lifelong love of Woolworths’ stores, makes the sound of an elevator with her top guitar string and describes how, changing buses on her way back from school,  “I always had just enough time to run into the Woolworths’ store and get myself a vanilla coke, dig through the record bin, wink at the boys and get back on the bus.” My mum and I would always chime in at the point she says “hah school” and when she describes the noise of a popcorn machine that goes “pap pap pap”. It is the perfect introduction to a song filled with youth, age, love, hope and a timeless melancholy that defies generations and geography and somehow makes you feel nostalgic for a life you’ve never lived in a country you’ve never been to.

Griffith’s music helped give me a language and currency for that country, but that language was primarily taught to me by my Dad and his  lifelong love of the States. After a stint as a visiting student at Yale, he returned time and time again for conferences and personal visits, always coming back with an oversized t shirt for me emblazoned with place names like “Kennebunkport, Maine.”  I was never entirely sure what he loved most, the landscapes, the sense of possibility, the wide open roads, but certainly the thing he talked most about was the food. Dad was definitely a foodie, but one that was as happy eating fries in a sports bar as he was a Michelin starred restaurant. But his true love lay in diners, and he never could say the word burger without putting a New York twist on it -

There’s one particular track on the cassette we had, which was a live recording of a song made in 1988 called Love at the Five and Dime. The song is a classic country ballad about two school age sweethearts, Eddie and Rita, who meet when they’re young and stay together for a lifetime, dancing to the radio late every night. It’s a touching depiction of a relationship that endures a lot as it slow dances through the years. If you don’t know it, maybe stick it on now as you read the rest of this, preferably with a soda in hand.

The live version of the track has a three minute introduction given by Griffith in her thick Texan accent. She talks about her lifelong love of Woolworths’ stores, makes the sound of an elevator with her top guitar string and describes how, changing buses on her way back from school,  “I always had just enough time to run into the Woolworths’ store and get myself a vanilla coke, dig through the record bin, wink at the boys and get back on the bus.” My mum and I would always chime in at the point she says “hah school” and when she describes the noise of a popcorn machine that goes “pap pap pap”. It is the perfect introduction to a song filled with youth, age, love, hope and a timeless melancholy that defies generations and geography and somehow makes you feel nostalgic for a life you’ve never lived in a country you’ve never been to.

Griffith’s music helped give me a language and currency for that country, but that language was primarily taught to me by my Dad and his  lifelong love of the States. After a stint as a visiting student at Yale, he returned time and time again for conferences and personal visits, always coming back with an oversized t shirt for me emblazoned with place names like “Kennebunkport, Maine.”  I was never entirely sure what he loved most, the landscapes, the sense of possibility, the wide open roads, but certainly the thing he talked most about was the food. Dad was definitely a foodie, but one that was as happy eating fries in a sports bar as he was a Michelin starred restaurant. But his true love lay in diners, and he never could say the word burger without putting a New York twist on it -

boiger

One of his last trips to the States before he passed away in 2019 was a conference in Las Vegas. I don’t remember much about this conference, I imagine it was something to do with cultural studies, his area of expertise, but I do remember two things about the trip. I remember him telling me about the enormous car the hire place gave him, and his feeling like Mr Toad as he set the car into cruise control and hit the highway.

But most of all, I remember him telling me about Peggy Sue’s, a diner in a place called Yermo. A lifelong diner connoisseur, he said it was the stuff of dreams. Not particularly because of the food, but of the authenticity, the smell, the sense of history, the feeling that not that much had changed since the 50s. He loved it so much, a photograph of him nonchalantly leaning against his Mr Toad car outside the diner was set soon after his return as his Facebook profile picture. I have a copy of that photograph pinned to the noticeboard in my office. I glance up at it often throughout the day, sometimes while I’m looking at my wall planner for gaps in my schedule. Sometimes in moments when his loss hits me like a freight train, out of nowhere, the air sucked out of my lungs, before it passes and quiet normality resumes.

It was in a more absentminded moment when, thinking about my upcoming first visit to the States back in January, I glanced up at the photo. Although I knew Dad visited the diner on his Las Vegas trip, I could have sworn the diner was on the East Coast, as that’s where he’d spent more of his time Stateside. A quick Google, however,  told me it was an hour or two out of LA, where, in happy coincidence, we’d be flying out of on our way home. A frantic joyful message to my girlfriend, and we had it firmly in the trip planner.

Fast forward to the end of February and we’re wrapping up a month escaping the British sog amongst the cacti of Mexico, New Mexico and Arizona. After our last night camping in the spectacular Joshua Tree National Park, watching the sun go down amongst the rocks and spiky trees that give the Park its name, we hopped in the car for the last time. A slow meandering Dodge Journey, it had a terrifying knack of not changing gears in time sending the car revving in panic but was luckily big enough for me and my girlfriend to sleep in when the Arizona nights dipped towards freezing.

After a pit stop at a car wash where we hoovered a month’s worth of crumbs and deposited guilt filled McDonald’s coffee cups into the recycling, we made one final stop. We pulled into the parking lot at Peggy Sue’s, and there, five years on from when Dad died and probably seven or eight since he visited, the sign I have seen every day in my study was suddenly in front of me. We parked up the Dodge, and Charlotte took of a photo of me, nonchalantly leaning against our own Mr Toad machine, copying Dad’s photo to a t. A brief cry and hug, and we headed inside.

Peggy Sue’s Diner and Five and Dime store sits next to the I-50 freeway, near the intriguingly named Ghost Town Road exit. The current owners have been its caretakers since the 1980s, but the original diner, with nine counter stools and three booths has existed since 1954. As you walk in through the entrance that faintly resembles a jukebox, you are greeted with what feels like a ticket booth to a cinema, and a choice to go left into the Five and Dime or right into the diner.

We headed left, and are instantly hit with an array of vintage memorabilia, trinkets, road signs galore and a large ice cream counter. After spending a while looking through the various aisles our mothers would both love, we headed back towards the diner. All three original booths in the first room are occupied. One thing you need to know about me is

I love a booth.

There’s something about the cosiness and the quintessentially American feel to them that I have always loved, and even in the UK where you more often get a banquette on only one side of the table, I will fight my dining companion for it every time. I could bore you with knowledge from my environmental psychology training that gives evolutionary reasons why we might like booths, but I’ll leave it by saying if we ever go out for dinner, I get the booth. We went round the corner and the diner opened up into several more rooms, one, joyfully with some empty booths in faded pink and turquoise leather. We hopped into one, drinking in all the details as we slid in.

There were doily straw covers, film memorabilia that covered almost every inch of the walls, a genuine Wurlitzer, a cabinet full of pies, and a mixture of tourists like ourselves and local customers. Arriving sometime between brunch and lunch time, we ordered a grilled sandwich and a slice of pie, along with two mugs of refillable filter coffee. The food was classic diner fare, but I don’t think that’s why you come to Peggy Sue’s. You come to sit in a booth, escape the stresses and strains of the modern day and imagine you are back in the 50s, with the Wurlitzer playing rock and roll in the background as you sip your Vanilla Coke and dig through the record bin, winking at the boys all the while. As I wandered around with my camera after our second cup of coffee, through the rooms of faded brown wood paneling, booths of faded brown leather and faded photographs that matched the brown decor, I was transported to the world of Eddie and Rita, the characters from Griffith’s song where we started this journey. I could almost smell the polish on Rita’s counter, and hear the squeak of Eddie’s shoes as he danced in the aisles.

But the love that I felt that day in Yermo wasn’t a romantic love. It was a love of a place, a culture, and language that I learned from Mum and Dad through the Nanci Griffith tapes and the endless anecdotes of empty roads, baseball games and where you could get the best boiger in town. A love of people, here today and lost years ago, who have shaped the very essence of who I am. A love that, much like Griffith’s songs, will defy time and space to keep on dancing long after closing time.

So come on, dance a little closer to me, it’s closing time and love’s on sale, tonight at this five and dime.”

On developing and enlarging

Brighton Pier during lockdown, Brighton, 2021.

5 minute read

As a photographer who, as readers of my last article will know, learnt my skills in the good old days of a pre-digital world, developing and enlarging are what happens in the darkroom.

For those of you who have not had the treat of being in a darkroom, let me enlighten you. A darkroom is a place of magic. As you leave your worries and your phone at the door, as you shut out the real world, you enter a liminal space where time stands still. The tangy smell of the chemicals mixes with the soft red light as you watch blank pages become alive before your eyes.

It is a place of transformation.

You start with a film, a little canister that holds all the hope, inspiration, creativity and expression of you as a photographer all locked away. When you develop it, the images are small and in a negative form. Everything is back to front and unclear. You have to use a magnifier and lightbox to pick which image you think might be worth exploring, which one has the potential to become great. 

The next step is to take that raw back to front little piece of film and, using an enlarger, blow it up into a larger image which is then cast onto your photographic paper in a beam of focussed white light. 

Brighton beach during lockdown, Brighton, 2021.

At this point the paper gives no hint as to the transformation that’s just happened. It looks just the same as when you took it from the packet. It is bare, naked.

But underneath its surface, a quiet change has taken place, nascent, waiting to be seen. 

Now is the time for the final transformation, which happens gradually in stages. First off, the paper is put into a tray of developer fluid. Within seconds the faintest trace of lines and shadows begin to appear; 30 seconds or so longer and the full image has emerged. At this point the paper is plucked unceremoniously from the tray and quickly doused in a chemical called ‘stop’, that, well, stops the development. The final stage is when the paper is laid in a tray of ‘fix’, which finalises the image on the paper as it is, with no further change taking place that isn’t at the hands of time or a photographer who wants to add colour and other embellishments back in the studio. For all intents and purposes, the transformation is now complete.

But it’s not really fixed. For once you have developed the image for the first time, there may well be further adjustments you want to make. So you go back and repeat the process, this time maybe dodging, burning or masking at the point of exposure, to bring out and emphasise certain areas that may be a little reticent and to make other more dominant areas blend into the image as a whole. It takes a while to get the image to how you truly want it. And even then, photographers often revisit images many years later to make further tweaks and improvements, using the techniques and perspectives they have learnt in the intervening years to recast the image in a new light. 

It strikes me that this entire process of transformation, from the negative to the positive, could just as easily describe the development of the self.

Brighton beach during lockdown, Brighton, 2021.

We are not static beings, fixed at an arbitrary age when we become a "grown up”. We too are at the hands of time. We continue to evolve, reacting to things that happen to us, around us, we change and we grow. We take the bits we do like about ourselves and our lives, and try and make the most of them. The bits we don’t like, perhaps that we don’t let many people see, we work to blend them into the background, to give them less of a presence. We add colour and embellishment and although some things do become solid and anchored within us, we repeat this process of evolution for the rest of our lives.

We don’t really ever fix.

One way to grow and change is to get bigger. This is the concept of enlargement, that’s how it works in the darkroom, in mathematics, in physical augmentation of the body. And it can be applied to the self too.

By far and away one of the most powerful things I have read in recent times was Oliver Burkeman’s last advice column in the Guardian. He proposes, in the context of making big life choices, a refocus from happiness to enlargement. Happiness is a blurry concept at best, especially when it comes to the future, where we make decisions based on emotions, context, money, status. Burkeman proposes that if we reframe the question of “will this make me happy?” into “will this choice enlarge or diminish me?” we will get a different response. He feels that, intuitively,

“you tend to just know whether, say, leaving or remaining in a relationship or a job, though it might bring short-term comfort, would mean cheating yourself of growth.”

Enlargement of the self thus becomes about moving away from a narrow range of focus on happiness and actively seeking wider horizons. Choose things that will give you new perspectives, opportunities and experiences which you can learn from, that will help you recast yourself in a new light.

Skateboarder, Brighton, 2021.

Darkrooms were built to facilitate developing and enlarging, that is their raison d’être. But transformations of the self are not limited to the cosiness of a blacked out room suffused with red light, they can take place anywhere at any time.

And in the same way a tattoo artist will often describes a body as a canvas, see your self as a piece of photographic paper, waiting in the dark for the process of enlargement, development, stop, fix and embellishment to begin, again. 

All photographs are from the first roll of film (Ilford HP5) shot in a decade and taken on my late father’s Leica iiia camera.

On identity and belonging

Skeppsmaln, Sweden, 2020.

I’ve been thinking a lot about identity and belonging recently.

Identity has always been important in societies. It’s long been a crucial way for individuals to understand each other, to read each other as “them" or “us”, friend or foe. A way of taking chaos, the unknown, the dangerous and turning the world into a legible, ordered and safe place, where you know where and with whom you belong.

Many of us now are pretty lucky to lead varied lives, with careers, interests, hobbies and loves that change over our lifetimes. And many of us are no longer defined by the job we do, or the community in which we live. 

But are we really free to present this variety?

Because at the same time as we’re experiencing this range of experiences, as we diversify, we also live in a world where, especially with social media, we are asked to define, to distil who we are and present a version of ourselves that fits into neat little boxes of identity. 

Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation, Marseilles, France, 2009 or 2010.

Instagram’s 150 character limit on our biographies is such a case in point. In a short space we are asked to explain who we are. If, like me, you are lucky enough to be an ambassador for an organisation, that role title alone fills most of the space, leaving very little space left to explain what else you might be about. 

So are we at risk of reducing ourselves to fit in these boxes?

Or, are we merely choosing which self to present? The sociologist Erving Goffman proposed a theory where individuals present themselves differently depending on who they think will be responding to them, something known as “impression management”. Can you think of a better modern example of impression management than social media? We curate. We choose what goes out there and how it looks, but we are not immune to feedback, to the insidious creep of comparison. It’s hard not to start to change what we put out there, to tailor who we present ourselves as being in order to be accepted by the groups we wish to belong to, those we want to be liked by, rather than put out a true expression of who we are. (I am making generalisations here. I do, of course know of some very wholly authentic profiles out there and for those I am grateful.) 

I am no stranger to this.

Scroll back to my early Instagram photos and you will see hazy photos of my cat on a blanket, or solo meals I had prepared. Fast forward a few years and it becomes all about the camping, the mountains, the adventures, all “shot on an iPhone”. More recently, as I’ve rediscovered my love of photography, the images of landscapes and nature have become more artistic, carefully chosen rather than uploaded at 11pm after a glass of wine. They’re accompanied by posts I have written and rewritten, trying painfully to tread the fine line between honesty and truth, and overshare and being “too much”.

These are not necessarily bad things. I have been working on my photographic craft for a while, learning, growing, and I’m proud of the journey, my evolution, and of the images themselves. And to have a specialism is also no bad thing, in fact it’s often what we spend our careers trying to achieve, and perhaps it’s only natural that the more I specialise and the more I share that specialism, the more narrow my profile becomes.

Bullet holes in a wall, Mostar, Bosnia, 2016.

But as I go further down my photographic path, as it weaves in and out of the outdoors world, and especially in the context of my next steps, I find myself questioning

What self am I presenting to the world?

A large part of why I started this website was to be able to showcase a broader range of my images than perhaps fit with the current direction of my Instagram profile. But if most people encounter my images via social media, and if that is my main public and social platform, am I not still reducing and distilling myself into a neat package, even if it’s one of my own choosing and curating?

I also find myself asking what communities do I feel I belong to, and how does what I’m putting out there relate to those communities? We all seek belonging. The safety and comfort of a group who gets us, who understands what we’re about is immensely powerful. It’s perhaps no surprise that the place I feel most at home is in the outdoors community. There was a line in the Kendal Mountain Festival’s 2019 trailer asking why everyone at the festival is wearing the same kind of coat. In every showing of that trailer, that line always elicited a laugh. But it was a safe laugh, knowing that we all got the joke, we all had the coat, we all belonged. It was an in joke for the outdoors community. And I was definitely part of that crowd laughing. But, in the same way I’m questioning what identity am I presenting to the world, I wonder if I’m restricting my communication with and participation in other communities if the self I present is too focussed on one activity, on one identity.

So, let’s draw the lens back a bit, widen the view.

I am a photographer, yes. But I have many other identities and my photography actually reflects much more about me than I suspect everyone knows.  

Amanda Levete’s Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT), Lisbon, Portugal, 2018.

Did you know, for example, that I have spent most of my professional and academic career obsessed with space? No, not the NASA kind, the architectural kind. I’ve probably watched every episode of Grand Designs there is. I know exactly what my own self build would look like. I’ve been known to cry at beautiful buildings when I’ve been in them. I’ve worked with architects and planners, am a trained Environmental Psychologist and had my own consultancy. I’ve spent my career trying to understand, encourage and build beautiful spaces that work well. Architects feature just as much on my roll call of inspiration as those summiting new peaks.

The built environment is just as important to me as the natural one.

I think this lifelong passion for space informs my photographer’s eye all the time. I’ve been told my images often show patterns or repeating lines and motifs. But one of the first things I do is to look for structure and form in my images, creating an architectural framework from whatever is in view. It could be using a tree to provide strong vertical movement or frosty wooden boards on a dock to segment the image into classical horizontal thirds. Architecture is always around, even in the natural environment, you just have to look for it.

I’m also quite old school.

While I do love a good hipster coffee shop and currently drink Oatly Barista in my coffee, I don’t think you could call me trendy. I listen to jazz, folk and classical music, anything with a banjo or mandolin lights me right up. My favourite books are early 20th century American classics. I knit, play board games and try and make things out of wood every now and then. 

Man on a boat, Arcachon, France 2015.

This also impacts on my photography. Despite currently shooting on a mirrorless Four Thirds Olympus camera, I’m predominantly drawn to older technology. While my A-Level classmates were fighting with each other to use the one license of Adobe Photoshop our college had, I was happily messing around with my 1930s medium format twin lens reflex Rolleiflex camera. I’ve recently inherited my late father’s Leica from the 1940s, and I’m currently waiting to see the results of my first roll of film for a decade. The benefits of digital photography are huge, and I am not about to hang up my Olympus, but

the analogue world will always have more depth, more draw and more soul for me.

This old-school approach probably affects my gaze more than the medium. Learning photography as I did in a mostly pre-digital way, I was practising the same skills as some of the classical greats of the photography world. The black and white photographs of Eugène Atget, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Bernd and Hilla Becher and my favourite Walker Evans are far more of an influence today than some of the contemporary photographers I also admire. The composition, the tones, the contrasts in my shots are all born from a love of images taken at a time when you couldn’t rely on colour to bring a third dimension, where the bare bones of the image were what made it sing or not. 

Most people when asked what country they would most associate with me would say in an instant Sweden. It’s no secret that I’ve totally fallen in love with the Scandi country, its mountains, the Swedes’ love of the nature and of course cinnamon buns.

But actually, the country I’ve had the longest and deepest relationship with is France.

My mother and father were teachers and professors of French, it was spoken around the house with an ease and frequency that has made me somewhat proficient in it although generally not used now beyond ordering croissants and beers. But French culture, of which my father was a professor and an expert, floods through my life and in my blood. The music, the food, the literature but above all else the photographers and artists who come from France are without a doubt those that I have the closest knowledge of and admiration for. I see their influences in my work as frequently as I speak to my cat in French (to clarify, this is often).

French doorways and ghost signs, somewhere in France, probably shot in 2014.

I’m also pretty humorous, in the sense that I see the humour in things rather than people find me funny (well, there’s probably some of that too). I’m a pretty strong and determined person, and as a lot of my photographs are often taken in the wet, the cold and usually whilst also carrying a lot of kit, they’re also representative of this strength. I think I’m not someone to shy away from difficult things, and although no-one likes criticism, even the act of sharing my photography in a world where criticism is quickly and easily thrown around is pretty brave. 

Walker Evans said that “the secret to photography is the camera takes on the character and personality of the handler”.

While I know how my whole personality is reflected in my photographs, I think that in a desire to fit in with certain communities and in a concerted effort to demonstrate a specialism, I’ve been choosing too carefully what I present to the world, especially on social media. So I’m going to make an effort from now to widen the view, present more of my different identities in photographs of a wider range of subjects,

because I am many things, interested, informed and inspired by many things and people and places, and I do and can belong to many.