The white rabbit can now be revealed. Thanks to all those who looked, some successfully, others not.

There are hundreds of articles on the internet and in print about how to look at photographs. I think this one is difficult because it is not obvious what the white rabbit will really look like, and some people assume that maybe the white rabbit is part of some superstructure in the image, like the Young Girl – Old Woman illusion. Other people have the ability to spot it immediately.

Half the people that commented on the posting struggled to find the white rabbit. This got me onto thinking about how photographers, and I assume that photobloggers count as photographers, derive pleasure from photographs when a good number of us clearly don’t see everything in a photograph. (Now before we go much further, I must remind you that I didn’t even realise that there was a white rabbit to look for, even though I understood the question posed in the graffiti, and I know that if I had looked before my wife pointed it out, I too would be one of the strugglers.) So I thought about the photographs I derive pleasure from looking at, and the type of photographs that I enjoy taking, and have come to the self-realisation that it is people that do it for me. Show me a picture of a person that shows their emotions or character, or a group of people interacting in some way (or not) and that is really what clicks my shutter. I can also enjoy shots of nature whether it is close-up flower details or expansive landscapes but most architectural and still life images leave me cold. I know too that I respond to colour and curves rather than black and white, and straight lines.

Perhaps if there is something that you tend to respond strongly too, then it doesn’t really matter that you don’t see everything in an image.

I only took this photo because I liked what I saw, I didn’t think too deeply about it at the time. When my wife looked at the picture, she said “Oh, there it is”.

“There what is?” I said.

“The white rabbit. There it is”, she pointed.

Later on I asked a friend to find the white rabbit. He gave up after five minutes.

Can you find the white rabbit?

In the good old days when life was lived in black and white, women didn’t have careers and there was no such thing as social mobility. People knew their place and were content with their lot, but the times they were a changin’ and people wanted to see the world in glorious technicolour. In the Sixties people turned on, tuned in, and dropped out of conventional society to explore new ways to live.

At the beginning of the Seventies all seemed hunky dory, but before long we were working a three day week and attempts to give HRH’s subjects something to cheer about were rudely disrupted by the explosion of punk. Labour plainly wasn’t working.

The class system was smashed down in the Eighties, often literally. Council houses were sold off, financial strait-jackets were cast aside and money trickled down from the rich to the poor (that’s the theory, at least). What we had we stone-clad. What we aspired to were Filofaxes, Porsches, penthouses on Canary Wharf and Phil Collins on the Walkman. We were no longer a nation of shopkeepers, but a nation of house owners.

But then Blue Monday turned into Black Wednesday. In the Nineties we nervously watched our mortgage interest rates soar whilst our pension funds jumped overboard and drowned. The lucky ones compared notes at dinner parties on how well they were doing on the property ladder; the canny ones seeked alternative sources of retirement income as buy-to-let landlords. For a while we channelled our efforts into improving our living spaces, for an Englishman’s castle is his home. Friends mucked in to landscape gardens and impose their own personalities on neighbours’ living rooms, all in the name of light entertainment.

In the high-definition Noughties luxury apartment blocks rise from the ground whilst loopholes are exploited to avoid providing affordable housing. When I were a lad these were all brownfield sites. The fallout from the break up of the Nuclear Family resulted in high levels of single occupancy dwellings. Plasma no longer courses through our veins but is wall-mounted. We obsess about location, location, paying off our mortgage in two years and chance our luck at property development as a way to make a fast buck.

The people in the picture are heading out of town.

My wife always tells me to stand to the right on empty escalators. If there were more people like her, then this wouldn’t happen.

As it happens, I’ve been re-acquainting myself with Beck’s Mellow Gold. Top Album.