1325Ladies and gentlemen, may I present to you the third SOTM ever taken, which was captured in Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent, UK with a Praktica MTL-3 which is about 30 years old. This was taken long before the actual site existed, or before people had started submitting their own pictures from around the world, or before I'd been to Bangor, India, LA, New York and Paris to take pictures of volunteers there.

I loved the background (a fairground ride in full swing,) and the warmth that the film captured - but made the mistake of not placing our subject, a gentle Welshman, too far away. I was stood in the middle of the road to take this, and that's actually where he should have been instead.

I actually learned lots from this one photograph, and composed future SOTMs with this one in mind, forever making sure the signs were legible from then on. So this image is an important one in the evolution of SOTM, even though I finally posted it three-and-a-half years into the site's existence.

Anyway, this is the result of my effort on that grey day. I've always held back from using it, because the sign is almost illegible - but today I decided to use it after all. The SOTM - a wasted life is bitter spent - is a line from a Richard Ashcroft song.

I asked our subject to change it to something he'd been told in person, but he firmly refused, thereby demonstrating how much these words meant to him. If you're reading this Harri - sorry it took so long!