A (belated) last photograph from Astley Green, maybe slightly influenced by the street photographer Saul Leiter. OK, very influenced – my influences are many and diverse, although there’s no evidence of Leiter ever taking a photograph of a coal mine!

This was very much a chance photograph – I’d finished looking round and had retired to the refreshments tent for a brew and a KitKat with my friend Mark, as the rain had started coming down. I noticed after a while that the plastic tent windows framed the headgear perfectly, but rather than opt for that composition, I instead went closer and excluded the window ‘frame’ and focussed on the raindrops on the window. This rendered the headgear pleasingly out of focus for a more impressionistic image with a ‘northern’ feel!