Towards the end of every year since 2010 I have produced a small number of copies of a simple, spiral-bound A4 calendar featuring my own artwork, for distribution as a Christmas / New Year gift for close friends and family. Inevitably, the numbers in those two categories are declining, these days, so the costs involved in this largesse are manageable. The standard of art reproduction I choose is quite high (I use and recommend Vistaprint) so each calendar constitutes a little portfolio of some of the better work I have produced in the preceding year for its recipients to contemplate or ignore as they go about planning their daily lives. If nothing else, it's a nice way to be present in the domestic environment of some people I never get to see often enough.

It occurred to me that – calendars being essentially ephemeral objects – it might be worth putting together a book to record a few of them. It also seemed an interesting idea to pair the calendar image for each month (on the right) with a photograph taken by me during that particular month of that actual year (on the left). A calendar picture is a kind of speculative gamble: you pick an image for, say, June in the coming year, without any idea at all of what those few weeks in the future will be like in the various lives and situations of those who (you hope) will be looking at and living with that picture for the duration of that month. So, perhaps this book may give some hint of how each month in each of five consecutive years did turn out for me, if only as captured in one photograph. I thought it would at least be curious to see how often there might or might not be a connection to be made between the two images, one as prophesy and the other as actuality.