Pictures

1. Pictures from Mexico

Me and lovely Yair outside the funky church in San Juan Chamula near San Cristobal. We met in  the back of a pick-up truck near Palenque and ended up travelling together for about two weeks, as well as meeting up again in Mexico City and his native Israel. A really splendid guy.

These were some chaps Yair and I met in Arriaga. They were from El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, places like that. All en route to America. One of the guys had been shot through the ankle recently and most of them had had run ins with bandits. Arriaga is a major stop off on the immigrant trail: it's where hundreds of people every week board a freight train that'll take them further into Mexico. Because they're illegal there, you see, they're afraid to board buses. Yair and I had arrived in Arriaga thinking we could hop the train too, not knowing about all the immigrants we'd meet there. The train, it turns out, is known as 'The Train of Death' because bandits board it and rob people and push them off. Many horror stories abound. We waited a couple of days and then we gave up, thinking it not quite the sensible option. The guys above were really friendly and sweet and we spent several happy hours playing football with them in the town square. I wonder where they are now?

Me and Yair looking 'pretty friendly' on the beach at Puerto Escondido. We had raced each other there hitching in trucks and cars and he won by travelling through the night while I stopped off and slept in a half-built house. By the time I got there he'd already found us an awesome hotel room: two pound fifty a night with a pool right by the beach! This picture was actually taken by a girl he was sleeping with, so you can get that idea out of your head.

Me and Yair and a nice Mexican guy called Salvador looking really joyful after catching a ride on the back of a big massive rock truck in San Cristobal de las Casas.

This is like one of the best pictures ever - but only if you know the story. The girl is Maya, my friend Dalia's daughter, and the car is an Aston Martin we came across while having a wander in Mexico City. She posed for a picture by it and then lost her balance and dropped her bike on it. I clicked this about half a second later. Great face.

This is me and a Spanish girl riding on the back of a pick-up truck near Palenque. The only way to travel.

Ditto. And that pack, by the way, was all I carried with me for six months in Mexico, Guatemala, and Canada. And still there were things I didn't use!

This is the hot springs canyon I'm always going on about. Look at that mountain! Look at that river! Truly the greatest place on Earth!

And this is me when I was first there, in January 1999. I picked all that fruit myself. I camped there six weeks and that's mostly what I lived on. That place totally changed my life.

This is me right back in the exact same spot eleven years later. The tree the oranges were hanging from has gone - but it was pretty much the same. I camped again another two weeks and it was just as wonderful as before.

Another picture from the hot springs in '99, a little further up stream. That's Sierra, Shane, me, and Kristen. Lovely people, magical time. Probably the time of my life, in fact.

This picture was really spooky and powerful for me. What you're seeing here is a fire I made on my hot springs beach the day I left, after six weeks of life-changing experiences. I burned my friend Shawn's chair that he had made - it was falling to bits - and I burned this Santa hat I'd been carrying ever since San Diego and a party at Gus and Kim's. When I'd taken it it was very much a case of point and shoot, because the flames were much too strong to actually look at what I was photoing, and so I only saw the photo something like four months later. When I did, I was like "wow". It spoke to me. It was saying, Rory, you burned your old self up back there. And like the phoenix, you rose again.

2. Pictures from England

Meditating by a big rock in Avebury, 2001.

The band I was in when I was 16-18. We were called The Electric Russells, I think, though we later became The Weekenders. This was probably the highlight of our careers, supporting Salad at The Duchess. Nirvana played there! We're even making a youth shake his hair! Man, we must have rocked.
From left to right: Tim, Ady, Brent, and me. Dig that hair!

Same night. Mood lighting.

Brent rocks while I look poncy with my tucked-in shirt and headless bass. My hair is mad and I think I bought those jeans off the market for a tenner, new. I had no idea about anything back then.

Juggling devil sticks in Leeds, 2007. That's how I used to pay my rent when I first started university. Luckily for me my rent was only a fiver.

This is me and Diego and Elliott sitting on our roof terrace in East Dulwich. Did I not mention that we had a roof terrace? But we did! In fact we had two. We had two roof terraces: there was one, and then another one, and in total we had two. What more could a person want from life than that? Except, weirdly enough, plenty? 

Heroic. Need I say more? Yes, I need: I need to say "I scored a hat-trick in this game! We won 6-3 even though we were 3-1 down and one of my goals was from the half-way line and another was with my bum! I need to say that!"

This is a nice picture of me and some friends on a boat trip down the Thames. Not that this was our boat...

Diego rejoices after 'Rory's Heroes' win the seven-a-side league (okay, division) in the last match of the season.

Yes, we really were called 'Rory's Heroes'. But the name wasn't my idea, I swear!
From left to right: Diego, Tom, me, Jim, Rob, Jesse, Frank, Bod, Fred

Another football team, this time St Lukes Church in London. We had an all day tournament in Regent's Park. We could've won something, I think, but certain of us missed penalties in the semi-final shootout. (Yup, one of them was me.)

3. Pictures of me being weird

This is what I made for Christmas Dinner in 2010. It's fried eggs, fried cabbage, Stilton, humous, and Yorkshire Puddings with mashed potatoes and veggie sausages in them.

This is me in my Rocky Horror get up, for a show in Sheffield in 2007. Was the second time I'd seen it and I think the last. Much prefer the movie. You just can't beat Tim Curry.

Being naked and red with my guitar in the garden in Oxford, 2008. 

Sitting in a box in the snow in Guelph, Ontario, winter '04/05.

We've all done this: sat up a tree on a little pink car.

This is the time I kissed a deer and its entire body fell off! How weird is that?

Me and Eric full of glee because Canadians make homo milk.

It's one of the joys, of course, of having something of a beard: being able to do silly things with it when you trim it.

I think this one might have been taken first.

A necklace and a banana and not much else. Self-explanatory really.

Do you remember when I used to write about my face swelling up for no apparent reason? I bet you didn't believe me. But here's the evidence. Turns out I was allergic to certain forms of work/types of people. Only cure was to become a layabout and avoid mankind. So far so good!

4. Pictures of things balancing

This is me showing off in Guadalest in Spain. Don't worry, it's only about five hundred feet down.

This is perhaps my favourite rock balancing picture, from Robin Hood's Bay in 2005.

This is another groovy rock I balanced in India in 2008.

This is an awesome Jenga tower I built, which went from floor to ceiling and required an on-shoulders girl to finish it off. Despite its height, it was rock solid, the last bricks being squeezed into the ceiling in a cunning and, at the time, unique design. Now everyone's doing it.

5. Pictures of cars

This is my 1986 Chevy Cavalier, which I drove from New York to Arizona in 1996. This is actually where it died, somewhere on US-93 just south of the Hoover Dam. The front-end damage was caused by running into a deer - or at least that's what I used to tell the cops. It overheated like crazy, and only had one working headlight, plus most of the cylinders were gone. Also, I drove it off the road in a blizzard in New Mexico. But it did over 5000 miles, which was a personal best for me at the time. 

The 1972 Ford LTD. I still dream of this car. I weep (pretend weep) when I think of it and the mess we made. She was perfect when I bought her. But I had a compulsion to crashing. The front-end was a testament to that.

This is the first car I owned in America, a 1984 Mazda 626. She was a pretty sweet little motor, really: California plates and everything. Such a shame I did this to her after only six days together.

This is the Mazda MX-5 I bought with my Brainteaser winnings. Skidded it off the road in Wales going a little too fast round that corner in the rain. Amazingly enough, she suffered barely a scratch and we were able to drive away from there with a little help from a passing rope-wielding farmer.

6. Pictures of other things

This is me when I had long hair, in 2002.

This is me when I was a cowboy's shadow in Spain, 2008.

This is my awesome guitar. The body was bought by my dad from Don Audio for two quid and sprayed up by his mate Trevor, who also put the letters on it. I used to be embarrassed by that but now I just think it's kitsch and funny. It used to have a Fender neck on it that had been rescued from Phil Winfield's shop one of the many times he'd burnt it down. It was all charred up the sides and looked great. That was a fiver. I had it like that for years, with various scratchplates - mainly a blue paisley Fender one - but then I took it to bits, stuck the neck on another body, sold that one, and this blue body lay for years upstairs in my dad's shop gathering dust. Anyway, in 2007 I rediscovered it, stuck this left-handed Chinese Squier neck on it, and figuring that I only ever use a neck pick-up turned up to ten anyway and dug the look of it as it was, simply screwed one pick-up into the body, wired it to the socket, and left it at that. Once upon a time in my youth I owned several sixties Fenders - Strats, Jaguars, Jazzmasters - and Les Pauls and Epiphone Casinos and Telecasters and all that shit. But now I play a twenty quid classical my dad was gonna chuck away and this sits mostly unused in a bag in a corner. Funnily enough, my dad's gone the same way. Once upon a time he owned four or five pre-CBS left-handed Strats, but now he's quite happy with Squiers and Tokais. Just as good, I think - and in some cases, better.

My travels across America and Mexico, 1996-2000. Bit difficult to see what's going on, I guess - you can click on it to make it bigger - but I think it made sense to me at one time or another. Basically, the different colours represent different trips and different modes of transport. Probably none of it's important anyway. The best trip, though, was the purple one that starts in Charlottesville, Virginia, and heads on down to Arizona before veering northwards. That was all by thumb, except a couple of little pink strips that were walks - one 43 miles through the Superstition Wilderness and the other across the Grand Canyon - and includes my three months working on a ranch near Tombstone. The purple turns pink again near Billings, Montana: this is where I hopped on a freight train and rode whooping across the Rockies into Missoula. Then I hitched some more, and rode another freight train, and got arrested and deported from Seattle. The nice immigration people drove me all the way there and that's the green line. That was February to August '98. Another time of my life.

My passport photos, from 1998 and 2008. I think I actually look a bit younger on the right; the first one was when I was still troubled and mad. Dig how much more symmetrical my face has become over the years.

I think this is probably the best picture I ever drew. It was back around the time when there was all that furore about the Danish cartoons and people were threatening death. Then, a little after that, I heard that some police posters in Lancashire were going to have to be reprinted because they featured a picture of a puppy and apparently Muslims don't like dogs. That was the final biscuit! So I drew this and put it on eBay and then my roommates said, "are you crazy? People'll come here and burn our house down" and I acquiesced. Still, I do think it's got a certain something.

This is The Great Wall of China. Yeah, I been there.

In fact, I walked about ten miles of it when it was real hot even though I hadn't eaten or drunk water in over a day 'cos I was ill from eating crazy Chinese raw mushrooms. I was there with some young Americans but they had to turn back after two hundred metres because it was too much for their poor, unexercised legs. And only one of them was fat! Anyways, I'm superhuman, so there.

7. Pictures my mate Tim's wife Jess took

She's right good at taking pictures, she is. She has her own website and everything.

8. Pictures off the telly

Countdown, June 2007. There's a video of this on youtube also, which you can find on my videos page. I also wrote an account of it in my blog, which sort of explains why I was so bad. In a nutshell, I was tired.
Left to right: Barry Norman (he was really boring and mean); a flowerpot man; Mikey Lear (my opponent); Carol Vorderman (she was weird and mean); another man; another man; Des O'Connor (looking like he's made out of plastic, and perhaps about to melt); me; a blonde-haired man; Susie Dent (she was lovely and friendly and pregnant and nice)

This was me on Brainteaser. I'm pointing to my head 'cos I'd kept misspelling the word 'occasion' - beginning it with an 'a'! - and therefore indicating that I'd gone temporarily mad. It was the studio lights, you see: they melt your brain.

But what the hell: I still beat the competition and walked away with the three grand jackpot. Wahey! :-)

9. Pictures from my youth

I think I was fourteen here. People say I'm trying to pose but I remember this well and I know for a fact I was incredibly sleepy this day. Had probably been up till 3am playing on my CPC464 or trying to watch old horror movies on Tyne Tees.

Damn straight I could read when I was tiny.

I'm lying here: I'm not four. That's actually my brother's badge, I'd just borrowed it. So I guess I was five. He was much cuter than me back then.

This is me when I went to QEGS, probably aged 11. Awful what parents'll let you do to your hair. But it was the eighties, that kind of thing was in vogue.

And that's my life in pictures! If that ain't enough for you I don't know what we're going to do. 'Cos I stopped taking pictures like two years ago. No mas!