The Muglins Issued

It’s a bit late for January but the production issues have been overcome and we mailed out the first issue of the photozine today. The free subscription list of thirty-nine is full but that doesn’t mean a request for a free copy will be ignored in these first few issues.

Thirty nine might be a number of steps in novels and movies but to me it’s the number of fractions that made up a radiotherapy treatment that started this time six years ago. That’s when I thought I’d do a photozine. I’d created a tagging system that would have made it easy to group photos by themes suitable for a monthly ‘zine.

Some readers may recall that I crashed my car during the radiation treatment. I suppose I can say the safety systems did their job. Things crumpled and fortunately, the airbags did not deploy. The car was written off by the insurance company which was very sad for me.

Earlier that same week, a month into my treatments, I walked into a wall at home. I knocked the most valuable picture to the floor with my shoulder. Perhaps we’ll explain the accident to the artist and it will be repaired one day but for now it bears scars.

The previous weekend, I made a plan to back-up my photos to a more reliable system but somehow reformatted the primary disk while doing it. That wouldn’t have been so bad if I hadn’t then dropped the new disk that then held the only organised copy of my photos. It broke and it took close to five years to rebuild my databases from the many disks that clutter our drawers and shelves.

Thirty nine photozines reminds me that I had a tolerant employer who allowed me recuse myself from work for a few months. I called from the crashed car while waiting on the tow truck to say that my executive functions had become compromised by my treatments. I knew then as I know now that this was true. The radiotherapy was simply an added stressor to the treatments for a biopsy sepsis that nearly killed me and hormone treatments that changed my personality.

If you golf, you know what I mean when I say there was a flight of us going through radiotherapy together. One was retired. Another was working hard to hold onto a very fluid job. Another was also retired but very active in various organisations and support roles. The radiotherapy staff noticed our little groups and kindly helped us schedule our treatment times to coincide despite being under different consultants for different cancers. None of us were sad to have finished treatment but we have met for coffee and chats a few times a year ever since.

And so thirty nine means something to me and the photozine is a manifestation of whatever catharsis I need to purge. There you have it, all thirty nine of you. I hope you enjoy The Muglins and the eleven that will follow each month of 2021.

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