H.M King Abdullah II of Jordan Portrait Sitting

Woke at four, which is not waking so much as giving up. Jet lag since Monday. Los Angeles is eight hours behind and my body has not been told.

The room above the pub. Beams, a sloping floor, a window that opens two inches. Below me the bar went on until midnight and I lay there listening to the particular sound of a Yorkshire pub refusing to close — laughter coming up through the floorboards in waves, the fruit machine, someone's dog. I could not resent it. It is the sound of a place that is exactly what it is.

Kit laid out on the bed at five. I always do this. Bodies, backs, the two lenses, the modifier, gaffer tape, the spares I will not need and would be ruined without. Checked the batteries twice. Checked them a third time.

Richmond in the morning. The castle sits above the Swale on a crag and you come up to it through the market place, and then there is the keep, and then there is nothing above you but a hundred feet of Norman stone. I have photographed in cathedrals and in palaces. There is something about a keep. It was not built to be beautiful. It was built so that men could hold it.

The parade in the afternoon. New guidon to the regiment, His Majesty presenting. The consecration. Speeches. The march past. I have watched a great many of these now and I still find the same moment gets me — not the ceremony itself but the faces in the ranks, the young ones especially, when they understand what is being handed to them. They stand differently afterwards.

The sitting. 11:16 by the camera clock. f/5.6, 125th, ISO 100, and I pulled the ambient down four and a fifth stops so the keep went black behind him and only the light I had made was left.

Nothing else in the frame. Dark suit, regimental tie, the shemagh over the shoulder in red and white.

He was still. That is the whole note, really. Some men come into a frame and immediately begin performing themselves at you, and the work becomes a negotiation. He simply stood there and let me look at him, and after a minute or so something settled behind the eyes and I got it.

Two dozen frames. I knew on the back of the camera which one it was.

The album. Presented it and he went through it properly, page by page, not the polite flick. Then — and I still cannot quite account for this — the conversation turned to Star Trek, because it turns out he is a serious devotee, and I found myself showing a Hashemite king my portraits of Patrick Stewart inside a twelfth-century keep in North Yorkshire while he told me about his own appearance in the thing. There is no filing that under any heading I possess.

Aides took my details. So did one of the Jordanian press. I have learnt to hold these things very loosely. But it happened.

Thinking about Dawe all evening. One artist, one sovereign, one room in the Winter Palace with three hundred and twenty-nine faces in it. He did not know at Aix-la-Chapelle what he was walking into. Nobody ever does.

Making history one portrait at a time. Upheld today, I think.