A morning with Anja.

Just before we left Glasgow, Natalie and Steven invited me to their stunning home (seriously, I was stunned. It was proper magazine-beautiful)  to photograph their tiny baby girl, Anja. 

Anja's grandparents had travelled from New Jersey to meet their first grandchild and we all spent a quiet morning together, just revelling in how beautiful and sleepy babies are and what a privilege it is to have three generations together for the first time. 

(I'm still working away on a website for this new photography business of mine. I spent two weeks building a blog site only to decide that I don't like it and I had better start again. We do however have a name, which is a start. I'm no longer available in Glasgow for shoots as we live in the Highlands now (surprise!) but in three months we'll be in London, and I hope I'll be launching Cara Shoots Littles (not the official name) properly then.)

Life without the internet.

Jake Davis, 19, was arrested a year ago for being part of an internet hacking thing I don't entirely understand but which I admit, I found rather amusing. One of the conditions of his bail is No More Internet. I'm probably not the only person who finds myself envying him this, just a little bit. (I'm not so much envying the potential extradition to America, where they don't like people who make them look silly.) I found the whole article about Anonymous fascinating but Davis' piece about his forced exile from the internet was unexpectedly moving.

'Things are calmer, slower and at times, I'll admit, more dull. I do very much miss the instant companionship of online life, the innocent chatroom palaver, and the ease with which circles with similar interests can be found. Of course, there are no search terms in real life – one actually has to search. However, there is something oddly endearing about being disconnected from the digital horde. 

It is not so much the sudden simplicity of daily life – as you can imagine, trivial tasks have been made much more difficult – but the feeling of being able to close my eyes without being bombarded with flashing shapes or constant buzzing sounds, which had occurred frequently since my early teens and could only be attributed to perpetual computer marathons. Sleep is now tranquil and uninterrupted and books seem far more interesting. The paranoia has certainly vanished. I can only describe this sensation as the long-awaited renewal of a previously diminished attention span.  

 For it is our attention spans that have suffered the most. Our lives are compressed into short, advertisement-like bursts or "tweets". The constant stream of drivel fills page after page, eating away at our creativity. If hashtags were rice grains, do you know how many starving families we could feed? Neither do I – I can't Google it.'

*Jake Davis, in last week's Observer  

Image by Emilie Bjork, via East Side Bride.  

Flower Floret Farm

Do you know Flower Floret Farm? If not, you probably need them in your life (or their blog, at least). They're an organic flower farm north of Seattle and their life makes my heart ache for a world of sunsets and dahlias and wheelbarrows of soil and baby chickens at my feet and fairies in the foxgloves (because I'm sure that's exactly what running a flower farm is like. All of the time.)  While the chances of me running away to start a flower farm are slim, I am all kinds of excited about the beautiful things we will grow in our garden, if we ever find it.

images by Erin Benzakein of Floret Flower Farms

To Macca's Shirt

To Macca's Shirt (On exhibition at the Museum of Liverpool, alongside Macca's trousers)
By Roger McGough 

You arrived washed, ironed and lightly starched.Stars and stripes on the label, 'Broadway and Sunset Strip'Assumed he'd brought you back from his first American trip. 

But you weren't my style. Too flash for a teacherI left you in the laundry bag and squirrelled you away.Forty years on I re-read the label: Esquire regd. Glasgow. 

May 1960, the Silver Beatles on tour with Johnny Gentle.Two weeks in Scotland, bread on the night, and the lureof the Sanforized shrunk imports in the Esquire shop. 

Though never quite living up to the promise of your name,at least you appeared on stage and realized your dreams.Felt a sense of history coursing through your seams. 

The alternative? Shoplifted by a teddy boy from Alloafor the dance at the Town Hall. Lipstick on your collar,sweat on your oxters and blood on your cuffs. 

To end up here, the carapace of a silver beetle,pinned down under glass, would have been unthinkable.A shroud, ghostly, Sanforized and unshrinkable. 

• From As Far As I Know, published by Viking. via The Guardian .photo of The Beatles in Scotland, from Sound and Vision, via photosfan

mama.

They call me 'mama'. 

Sometimes I feel lost and then they point at my heart and they call me mama and I know who I am again. 

It's like floating off and just as you're losing sight of the ground, feeling the gentle tug of a string and knowing that you're tethered somewhere, even if you can't quite remember where. 

*photos by Nye.