I spy

Dresses at V. Lotus

Manic Mannequins at Doug Up On Bourke

Rings from I Ran the Wrong Way

Breakfast at Little Marionette

When I first moved to Sydney, I had some time off before going back to work and so I started the blog A Place A Day. It's quite labour-intensive: I identify a place that is of interest, take around 40 photographs there, distill them down to 20 or so, and write a short paragraph about what I found interesting. Often I would end up covering the place where I had lunch. I put pressure on myself to do it almost every day; and now I'm back at work it's impossible to keep up, so it's more of a place a week (or less) and the title has proved to be fraudulent.

What I learned in doing this was that one of my favourite aspects of the process, apart from photographing and then eating food, was talking to the people who owned the place. Inspired by my friend Davey's Shot by Shooter blog (hands down the best, and most interesting, street fashion blog in operation), I decided to take my camera to work with me and shoot people who catch my eye in the street for Sydney Spy.

Sometimes people say no (older women are often very reluctant, and I lost a beautiful girl in a jewel-coloured gown who said she felt she looked terrible today); sometimes they say yes, then affect an attitude (the only photographs I haven't used so far are of someone who posed petulantly then said "are you done yet?" – why not just say no?). I'm drawn, not to obviously dressed-up or self-important people, but to people who are just quietly going about their day with their own style, and by definition this often means that they're camera-shy.

Someone said to me they'd be too shy to go up to people in the street, but I enjoy the interaction, particularly the pleasure on their faces when I tell them how good I think they look, and I like the idea that they go away feeling good about themselves.

Stefanie

What I've also discovered is that fashion bloggers are very different from food bloggers: for one thing they are almost all women, many of whom photograph themselves and not others: obsessively cataloguing their outfits every day. I'm far happier behind a camera than in front of it.

The reader

When I was 18, just after moving to Glasgow to go to university, I bought a copy of Lanark by Alasdair Gray and was completely bewitched by it. I had dreams afterwards about growing scales on my skin. I related the dystopian landscape of the book with what I saw in Glasgow at the end of the twentieth century, just beginning its economic recovery and rehabilitation with events like the Glasgow Garden Festival (a visit here was the last time I saw my granny before she died; the cheerful newness of the showhouses and a cheap showcase of "modern" design are what I remember) and the accolade of European City of Culture (1990).

I had my precious, battered and well-read copy of Lanark until 1993. It was borrowed by my then-flatmate G to take across the Atlantic, on a boat-delivery mission from Cyprus to the British Virgin Islands. He got sick and had to get off the boat in Minorca, leaving my book behind; on its continued journey, it was seized upon by the captain's girlfriend, who decided it would be a fine wheeze to tear out each page upon reading it and cast it into the sea. On arrival in the BVI, she threw the carcass away.

Favourite books are a special possession in a way that few other things are. I can happily leave a thriller on a plane or in a hotel room for someone else to read, but I sometimes lie awake at night worrying about the safety of books left in the attic of a house in North London. This callous behaviour with someone else's book, by someone who later went to clown school, has always struck me as being an unforgiveable act of vandalism.

True to type

For some reason I have been quite taken lately with trying to remember all the obscure indie bands I liked in the 80s. How quickly we forget - until I looked them up I'd almost forgotten they existed: The BMX Bandits; Close Lobsters; The Orchids ("I'm drinking Irn Bru and I'm thinking of you" - clearly a classic of its time); The Bodines. In some circles it was a point of honour to be able to name bands no one else had heard of.

Before CDs, before the internet, before digital technology of any kind, you could write off for a fanzine (one I remember particularly was an Edinburgh "'zine" called Alternatives to Valium, which I thought was very cool at the time) which would consist of four sheets of photocopied A4 paper stapled together, with a seventh-generation band photo on the front and written entirely in Courier because that was the only typeface on the old typewriters - the kind where you had to hit the key quite hard and a skinny length of metal shaped a bit like a grasshopper’s leg, with the letter on the end, would spring out of its bed and whack a length of ink-soaked cloth to create an imprint on the paper.

I think in some ways the fanzines were a reaction to the looming onslaught of technology and the shock of the new, the slickness of the 80s; they were home made and low-tech, and often came with a flexidisc of some quasi-plastic material hardly more durable than rice paper, which when played on your turntable emitted the tinny, scratchy sounds of effete guitar bands with whimsical names. CDs were regarded as the enemy; as heralding the Death of Music; and as somehow not being as real as vinyl.

When I first started in legal publishing, which was in the mid-90s and not that long ago, all the terms used actually meant something: “leading” was the divider between the lines of type holding them in place, which was made out lead; and “typesetting” was literally setting type, each letter individually placed in a row next to the others to make up a page.

We outsourced typesetting to a company in Roslin, near Penicuik, which was full of old men who had been working there for years; they all seemed to have beards and pot bellies and stood around with their sleeves rolled up, with the ease borne of long experience, smokin’ a fag with half an eye on the machines, presumably wondering what things had come to with these wee lassies telling them what to do. They were already using newer technology but still regarded the old methods as the real thing, and one of them showed me the rapidly-obsolescing equipment with real pride, hefting the heavy letters in his hands.