The Interviewer

Did my little bit for European co-operation this morning. This is S, a journalism student from Ghent in Belgium. He and a group of classmates are here in Edinburgh for a week working at QMU. They are studying at the Arteveldehogeschool in Ghent and have a series of group and personal assignments to do during their stay, 'Over De Grenzen' ('Beyond The Borders'). He got in touch with me last week, having found my website, as he wanted a one-to-one interview with an Edinburgh photographer. So this morning I found myself talking about photography in the cafe at the National Portrait Gallery. It was quite interesting having to think back to my leaving a well-paid job in IT to pursue something creative. Hopefully he will have got enough material for his interview piece. He took a picture of me for the article, so I thought I'd respond with a quick portrait of him in the cafe. Yesterday they were conducting vox pops on the street about Mothers' Day and tomorrow they are doing a piece on the trams. An interview with Lesley Hinds has been arranged, as well as with an 'anti-tram' journalist so they should get some good stuff on a controversial subject!
That reminded me of my Geography Field Trip to Malta when I was at Durham Uni when we arranged interviews with all sorts of officials, up to the level of government ministers, for our group projects. My group did one about land reclamation/soil creation on the island that sounded very good in theory and on the maps we were shown in the government building in Valetta but in practise, out at the end of a dirt track beyond the last bus stop, seemed more like a municipal dump than a soil creation scheme. Nice to be able to reciprocate with a bit of assistance for another visiting foreign student. S said he had been pleasantly surprised how friendly people had been on the street when asked about what they were doing for Mothers' Day, certainly compared to his experience of asking similar questions in Belgium, so I clearly wasn't the only helpful person he had met during his visit. After he'd worked through his questions and the interview was over we talked some more about other things, like sport. He also follows football and cycling so we had quite a lot of common ground.