Tourist Photographs

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to visit England for 10 days—a trip partly to attend a convention related to my part-time job as a writer/editor of horror stories, but also serving as a long-overdue tourist-style vacation.

During our first day in London, my traveling companion and I decided to take an expensive double-decker tourist bus. This would be a good way to orient ourselves to the city. Plus, it was the coldest and rainiest day of our vacation, so it was nice to let the city roll past us.
The bus ride included a tour guide who gave us historical background and directed our gaze throughout the trip. Several times he pointed to a Starbucks, and said that was America’s revenge for the Tea Tax (apparently that joke never gets old). At one point, he alerted us that a “perfect picture opportunity” was just around the corner: the iconic Big Ben, framed inside the giant London Eye ferris wheel. I aimed my digital camera and dutifully took a picture. It’s a pretty cool shot, even for such a cold, rainy day. No doubt 60 other people on the bus took exactly the same picture:

So, that’s a pretty decent tourist photo. But here’s one of my favorite photographs from the trip. It’s from the convention I attended, which took place in Brighton—a seaside resort kind of like our Ocean City, with its own boardwalk/pier of carnival attractions. The hotel, The Royal Albion, was built in 1826. Its public areas were lovely, but the rooms weren’t necessarily in the best or most luxurious shape. Our room included one of the ugliest chairs I have ever seen:

I really love this chair. The shape. The color. Have you ever seen anything like it? Oh, and can you imagine: it’s actually a rocking chair—one of those coiled-spring rocking chairs that never seems to wobble the right way. Every time you sit down, the back of the chair bangs into the wall!
I doubt a tour guide would ever demand a bus load of people should point all their cameras at this chair (“Coming up, around the corner, one of the strangest ugliest chairs you’ll ever see!”), but I’m really glad to have the photo. I set the picture to my computer wallpaper, and laugh every time the screen boots up. For me, this is the best kind of tourist photography.
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My other bit of news from the trip: One evening of the convention I attended was devoted to a banquet/ceremony that announced that year’s winners of Bram Stoker Award in different categories of writing (novel, first novel, long fiction, short fiction, anthology, collection, non-fiction, poetry). This is a peer-nominated award, voted on by members of the Horror Writers Association. My story “In the Porches of My Ears” was nominated in the short fiction category, and I was surprised to learn that night (after a dinner of fish and chips and “mushy peas”) that I won the award. Here’s a picture of me and the other winners, all of us holding a little haunted house trophy. If you open the little front door, there’s a plaque with the category and title and author name. This was an incredible honor for me—and I’m glad that someone took a photo to commemorate the evening!

Winners from left to right:  Norman Prentiss, Michael Knost, Brian Lumley, Tanith Lee,

Hank Schwaeble, Lisa Morton, Ray Russell, and James Herbert.

~Dr. Norman Prentiss
English Department Chair