Neil Hopcroft

If you ever wondered why I was called smooth Neil, meet Spiky. More importantly I’m actually Neil number 4 – Number 1 might turn up at some point but two and three are consigned to history now.

A perfectly fitting 5×5 Hula Hoop and Kraft Cheese sandwich. The breakfast of kings.

This is one of the flats I lived in in London, the nicer of them, it was in Finchley, a few minutes walk from the Tube station. I didn’t really like living in London much, there’s a lot of angry people and it kinda makes you angry too. There are some things I miss, like […]

Our friend Matti is not one for doing things by halves – this is Daymo trying to control one of his kites.

I learned to skim stones on a lake in the Canadian Rockies. We went with some friends of my parents and their family, including their children and Gramps, their grandfather. It took hours but with the endless supply of skimming stones and patience I can only dream of, I got there in the end. And […]

The Laxey Wheel is the biggest waterwheel in the world and one of the iconic images of the Isle of Man. We visited and went down the mine associated with it.

We went on a mountain tour on quad bikes while we were on the Isle of Man. I didn’t really get the hang of driving – and drove into poor Mikey when I applied the accelerator instead of the brake. No major damage done. And, fortunately, the picture was taken beforehand, so we were all […]

Three of us went to visit one of our number who moved to the Isle of Man. This was a far cry from the urban life I was leading at the time, and my first (and thus far my only) experience of flying from London City airport. We were met at the airport after we […]

Understanding how light works is a very important part of photography – a flash can bring out colours that would otherwise fade into the dusk, or freeze a nearby object while capturing movement in the background. These days I hardly use the flash, I see it as kind-of vulgar, it makes the photography intrusive. “Look […]

At last, I have now gone through all of the unpublished comments that have built up on this blog over the last few years and marked most of them as spam. The automatic filters got a lot of them but they left me with quite a collection of verbose comments to sift through – these […]