I was on my way to work this morning, and an old man stopped me. He looked perfectly ordinary. He had a neatly trimmed grey beard, and he was dressed in a plain brown winter coat. I figured he just wanted to know what time it was, or that he wanted directions to someplace. I was completely unprepared for what he did say to me.

�I spent half a century photographing water rats.

I was really too surprised to say anything more than �oh?�.

�Fucking water rats.�

At that point I felt justified in just walking away. Crazy old men, what would we do without them?

Now, when you leave the house to go to work in the morning, and that�s the first thing anybody says to you, it kind of sets the tone for the whole day. The fact that this was not the strangest thing anybody said to me all day should worry me, but it doesn�t. Mostly I just feel a strange resignation to my fate as world-class weirdo magnet.