The Owl Wood

My chuckle amid the bloody gunfire.

2012-01-29T12:31:00.000Z

General Brrrk von Flappalot, demonstrating the latest techniques in Pheasant camouflage.
If you are having difficulty seeing him try turning your head on one side and squeezing your earlobes tightly in a Vegan Nerve-Pinch.

This is huntin' shootin' fishin' territory. Most of us don't live in caves anymore but an awful lot of people still behave as though they do.

The only wood around here where animals aren't ritually slaughtered by gentlemen with large guns, stuffed wallets and tiny ... triggers ... is the Owl Wood.

Every other patch of woodland around here resounds daily to bullet, shot, bludgeon and occasionally what we have decided can only be an elephant gun. Speculation as to why anyone around here needs an elephant gun ranges from rogue Lincolnshire elephants to extreme trouser-contents insecurity. Bear in mind that we have had a wallaby bounce up the driveway though and that at the first sign of elephant poop on the verges I am quite prepared to believe that Colonel Hathi and family are on the run (and the best of luck to them).

Every Thursday a lot of big, brave, chaps gather together with caterin' and seatin' and scruffy oiks to do the complicated stuff like loadin' and re-loadin' for them. They employ fiscally ill-adapted peasants to drive the wildlife towards them for an apparently leg-wobblingly, knee-tremblingly exciting bloodbath. I believe that it is not unknown for a young lad to be employed and given a stick with which to gently ease a, shall we say, less than sparklingly bright shooter's gunbarrel into roughly the right direction. I don't think much of these big, brave, chaps, as you may have gathered. I'd be more inclined to be impressed if they ever hunted anything that had a cat in hell's chance of fighting back.

I have written to my Member of Parliament (surely a limp Membrum virilis labouring under the yoke of an extra "Hooray" gene if ever there was one), suggesting that support from the more cerebrally-developed, less Hooray-enabled public for hunting with dogs and shooting un-armed birds would skyrocket - if only he introduced legislation ensuring that the various Hunts and Shoots hunted and shot only each other.

You know the sort of thing - put the Seventeenth Louth & District Land-Owner's Fnarr Fnarr Lancers on one side of a convenient copse, bus in the Peterborough Pheasant Annihilation League of Tweeded Ladies to the other, and then blow a whistle. Let them blast away at each other until they're all ecstatically happy. Schedule in a few breaks for the St John's Ambulance people to go in with side-arms and deliver the coup de grace to any bloodsportspersons who may only have been winged, call in a variety of mobile salad bars for caterin' to the spectators and there you have it. What could be nicer?

Well, possibly the Grimsby Nunsthorpe Housing Estate Hunt, resplendent in their pinks, surrounded by their hounds and racing after the heady scent of the Brocklesby Hunt with a view to letting the hounds make a(nother) accidental "they're only vermin" success (possibly tragically, possibly, although not in my book, mistakenly, of the Earl of Yarborough) under the terms of the exemptions of the Hunting Act 2004. Who could argue that two Hunts huntin' each other would be double the spectacle, double the fun? Plus only those who enjoy bloodsports would thus be involved, the animals could sit it out without worrying that they are ruining anyone's day.

I have outlined plans for combining Hunts with Shoots in busy tourist areas. I intend to add on a sack or egg & spoon race for the local sitting Members of Parliament - first MP across no-man's land gets two un-audited non-receipt expense claims or something as a prize. Mr Tapsell MP seemed surprisingly lukewarm on the matter. I suspect that he remains unconvinced that sufficient of the public would be interested in seeing hobbled MPs racing each other for undue financial reward while under conditions of enthusiastic but amateur live gunfire and while surrounded by un-fed huntin' hounds safely directed and carefully controlled by an apoplectic caveman on 'orseback blowin' an infallible "hound-control" horn.

Personally, I think it would make splendid prime-time television viewing with the possibility of going global.

Anyway, the ruddy point! While out walking I was listening to the rapid - almost rabidly rapid - sounds of gunfire echoing from every copse I passed (with my head carefully down) and it got me to chuckling. Not your usual reaction to gunfire, I grant you, but I shall explain. I do a lot of chuckling while I'm walking. It discourages folk from the village who may offer me a lift and it prevents strangers from asking directions (they tend to just move on, especially if I do that thing with my eyes, looking in two different directions at the same time). So. Chuckling. Why?

Well, what if the gunfire I could hear were not a one-sided slaughter of frostbitten fowl and rheumy-eyed rabbits being blasted out of their wicker bathchairs, but the sound of a more balanced and fair military skirmish?

Have I spent these years supporting the wrong kind of action? Might we huggy-wuggy animal-loving wusses not take a leaf out of the foreign policies and strategies of the United States of America and of that horrible accidental political construct; the United Kingdom? Instead of thanklessly trying to persuade the great white big brave hunters not to hunt - why not just do what the UK and USA have always done internationally and arm the locals? Supply weapons and training to the Pheasant Freedom Fighters, help the Rabbit Taliban hone their hand-grenade delivery skills, drop gas masks into badger strongholds by airlift? Level the "playing" field a little, so to speak?

I spent the rest of my walk imagining the fierce guerilla battles going on in the wooded undergrowth and felt some slight optimism at the notion that at least every other gunshot boom or ricochet whine that split the hedgerows beside me had originated from something with claws or paws, fur or feathers and a "Rambo" bandana, fighting for its life. Abandoning a rabbit warren here to gain some tactical advantage, brave escapades to save Pheasant Ryan, hunters crawling through the bracken only to come nose to nose with the knees of some heavily-armed ~~Colonel Hathi~~ fox ...

In international politics yesterday's terrorist group becomes today's freedom fighter and before they know it tomorrow's cause for surreptitious regime change. Mayhap we can make yesterday's roast dinner into today's popular cause célèbre and tomorrow's independent fellow living creature?

I have to get my brain off its soggy gluteus maximus and finish January's edition of the Owl Wood Publications - so that I can move on to the Gunfight at the Aby Corral, featuring the Magnificent Seven, or something. The day the pheasants and the rabbits cried enough, tied shemaghs across to hide their faces, held their Kalashnikovs overhead and ululated ...

Vermin control my Arsenal Villa are doing awfully well this year, don't you think?

I just walked through a rainbow (and a hail shower)

2012-01-28T16:30:00.001Z

And I just took an abysmal photograph of them both! With the widest wide angle I could get on my pocket camera I still needed three images nailed together manually, and it doesn't do it any justice. This is how my walk began:

A gateway into a field with gentle sun backlighting traces of misty vapour rising from the soil

My breath was steaming, all was cold enough to make me thankful for the extra fleece under my topcoat. Only the excessive but proudly-worn nostril hair of the rural middle-aged man insulated my face enough to prevent it cracking like a poorly-maintained glacier. Only the rampant hobbit-hair growing unchecked in my ears prevented my jaw hinges from freezing solid while I tried to blow vapour-rings. Only insulating eyebrows the size of poisonous Amazonian furry elephant-caterpillars prevented my eyes from sticking in the "crossed" position, focussed on the end of my nose, looking for "smoke" rings that were never going to work. Still, I was wearing layers so all was well ...

Have a look at that formation and tell me how to dress for my walk...

There then of course immediately ensued lots of bright and sunny spells when layers had to be unzipped and removed and a chap's hat began to feel like an over-thick tea-cosy on an over-full teapot. It was as well to keep an itchy trigger finger on the zip-toggles though, because it seemed that those clouds may - or may not - perform at any moment. I twitched one way and the weather twitched the other. It's always a game of bluff in Blighty.

The first of the "test" rainbows before the big show.

Weather in England is supplied by Her Majesty's The Met Office. This morning the The Met Office threw up a few half-hearted test rainbows, presumably just to make sure that the system was working properly on all legally-required colours and that the bend-o-meter was calibrated to "steady curve shape".

Well, it was at about this point in the stroll - having been frozen, rained on and then given a token winter sun-tan that there appears to have been some sort of civil unrest or other incident in this very the The Met Office Control Room. Possibly a small weatherman went "postal" or was about to retire, maybe terrorists tried to take charge and there were fisticuffs. Anyway, someone, somehow, some why cranked up the sonic oscillators to maximum, pushed all of the little rainbow hue sliders past the safety limit and then rang through to the Power Station to ask for Emergency Volts and Wartime Amps.

Possibly the worst rainbow photo you'll see this decade. Good thing I'm not a professional. Oh, hang on though ... oops!

What you have there is a hail shower off to the left, a hedgerow to the right basking in truly warm sunshine, thunderous grey clouds like an invading army forward and overhead with a semi-circular technicolour treat spanning the lane. It looks ho-hum here, to me it looked magical.

In fact, if not in this photograph, an amazing rainbow buzzed like a neon sign straddling the lane that I was walking on (at my customary three or four steamship knots and the occasional skip, hop, stumble). Who could possibly resist walking on through the archway of a rainbow? I couldn't - I walked until the angles all changed and it faded overhead. I had crossed over to the other side of a rainbow!

Night descends, during the day.

Well, surprise, surprise, surprise - as soon as I got "through" the sun went out. It didn't just hide behind deep cloud, it coughed and spluttered and the birds stopped singing while they waited to see if it would come back on again. I got the impression that I had broken the weather or something. We had a minor monsoon that stretched maybe twenty yards in front of me and twenty behind (oh very personal, thank you very much indeed, yes and lovely). Aware of my responsibility to the community at large, I decided to take the hint, hang a U-turn and head for home back through the archway and see if that would make amends.

Just after I'd performed my u-turn and was heading back home.

Bzzzzt, cue the blinding glare and cue the Aviator shades! At that moment the emergency must have been cancelled, the weather-terrorists subdued or something equally heartwarming. Back to "normal" (rain, sleet, wind, stillness, sunshine, warmth, cold, all in any old order).

You have to chuckle at a The Meteorological Office where they obviously have very little idea what they are doing and almost no control over anything meteorological.

Welcome to England!

Mind the gap, dress in layers, always have a waterproof, sun-screen, sunglasses and an extra fleece with you. Be certain that the dog's lead is securely fitted for you will surely be flying him like a kite at some point during the day and at others be using him as an anchor for yourself. Be prepared to be roasted, frozen, blown over like a penguin in the wake of a jet engine, treated to eerie silences and stillness, accept that half of your weather will be in pure monochrome and get ready to jump up and down when in the middle of all that someone plonks a neon rainbow right over your head. Bobble hats, umbrellas, wellington boots and exothermic underwear optional (at your own risk). And, if you should walk through the archway of a rainbow, be careful and take a torch...

Am I too young to have just had a "senior" moment?

2012-01-26T15:47:00.001Z

If you were to put me on one side of a set of scales and put half a century on the other then I would slowly sink. I am half a century plus that extra couple of powdery-coated lemon bonbons that they used to pop into the paper bag just to make sure that you knew you weren't being cheated. I am thirteen years old with an awful lot of experience.

I should quickly mention that this "senior moment" did not involve incontinence in any way and nor did it involve a paper bag of bonbons.

Nope. There I was, ambling down my favourite lane (shown above), contemplating the plot of "The Attenborough Alternative" and wondering if I could really get away with substituting a fluffed-up white-faced sheep in four Ugg boots for a Polar Bear in the "birth" scene, when two confusing things happened.

My pocket began to vibrate in that curious, strangely distant, should-I-worry-about-that sort of way - and my brain decided to just accept that sometimes the pockets of green waxed jackets just do vibrate for no reason. The voice of reason even whispered to me that the pocket was probably just registering sympathy with easements in the Mindanao Trench or possibly a large lorry passing on the A16 a couple of miles away. Whatever it was, it was nothing to do with me and it would be polite to just let it continue without undue fuss. I waited a few moments for an elbow or a buttock to join in the tembling vibrations, but no, so on I went, Brain and I.

Then I heard the most peculiar birdsong. It was sort of a brr-ding brr-ding ding-ding-brr. Brain stopped me walking for that one and I actually started looking around at the (sparse) trees, wondering what on earth might be making that sort of bird call. Was it perhaps an undiscovered Lesser-Buttocked Thrumpet Warbler or maybe even the legendary Bald Gargling Sparrow, not seen since the Middle Ages? I even turned around to check trees behind me in case the rare feathered wee beastie was shouting abuse from a branch I had already passed. I shielded my eyes from the low Winter sun and checked the sky for the undercarriage of a circling Robinson's Kneecap-Eagle or flock of hunting Pterodactochickens, to no avail.

It took a hell of a long time for it to dawn on me that it was my mobile phone ringing...

Thank goodness I was on my own and don't have to confess to that in public!

It reminded me of that occasion when I closed the front door of my house, got in my car, clipped on my seatbelt, stuck the car in gear and squeezed the accelerator and then couldn't for the life of me figure out why it wouldn't move. It took a couple of minutes to discover then that it helps if you put the keys in the ignition and actually start the engine...

Is there some sort of Home for the Bewildered that I can check myself into?

Do you think I ought to begin carrying a note with my name and address on it? Maybe have my mittens on string fed up one sleeve and down the other?

At least today I could follow this home:

Pterodactochickens feeding on seagulls (the seagulls are the white dots)

I shall self-medicate with pure, uncut caffeine and see if that helps. Nanny? Please put the kettle on and fetch me my favourite hookah.

When swans argue.

2012-01-24T09:04:00.002Z

Claythorpe Water Mill

A forgotten anniversary perhaps?

Stayed out all night with the lads and didn't even ring home?

Called her mother an old water buffalo?

Told her that her bum looked big in all those feathers?

Something must have got these two at loggerheads. They were punting around Claythorpe Water Mill yesterday with some very odd body language indeed. It's anthropomorphic of me I know but they were just not happy with each other. The lead swan with the foot flailing was listing slightly to port on just one engine and the trailing "shunned" swan was just following as they meandered aimlessly. I watched them for about ten minutes, they are in a bird "sanctuary" with staff about (and I was peering over the public road-bridge for free) so I'm confident they weren't in any medical distress!

Unless of course showing a foot is swan-speak for "Hello Sailor"? Maybe I was intruding on some swanny mating ritual?

Ideas on a postcard please! I'm happy to be put in my place by someone with more Nature-savvy!

The High and the Mighty - starring John Wayne.

2012-01-22T17:32:00.001Z

Not John Wayne's DC-4. Not a DC-4. Photo of British European Airways does not imply any endorsement of British European Airways. Other commercial airlines are available. Photo by H C Hutson (my Daddy).

Just watched the 1954 film "The High and the Mighty". Starring John Wayne. It. Is. A. Classic.

Synopsis - Mr Wayne has to get off his horse and drink his milk as one of about four pilots aboard a DC-4 Turbo-prop flight from Honaluawaikiki or somewhere to San Ferisco in California, United States of America. The aeroplanium slowly loses an engine and then some fuel while the crew lose their ability to fly with only three engines or to navigate or use the radio. The motley dozen passengers (not the Dirty Dozen) variously reconcile themselves with spouses, play mouth organs and loosen their suit ties as they tie on their "Preservers".

There is a scene where Mr Wayne, co-pilot, slaps the dazed and shell-shocked pilot around and tells him to "pull yourself together you yella ... etc etc". They smoke, they drink, they tell their life stories. Mr Wayne goes back into the tail of the aircraft with a torch to check on the wires and pulley arrangements that control the flappy bits of the wings...

In one magnificent scene they decide that the aircraft needs to shed weight - so they yank up the hatch in the floor and start piling up the luggage. Mr Wayne sashays down the aisle and shouts, rather memorably, "I need a big strong man to hold me around my waist" ... but this turns out to not be a momentary loss of self-control or even an understandable plea for romantic empathy. It's so that he won't fall out of the opened cockpit door as he braces it against the headwind and the passengers toss out their own luggage. One passenger kisses her mink coat goodbye and chucks it into the Pacific.

The engines cough and shoot flame as they cross the Golden Gate Bridge, Wayne and his bitch-slapped Chief Pilot struggle manfully at the "Dan Dare-esque" controls and the navigator (in his haze of gin fumes) shouts that they are down to 180' - the Coastguard advice is then "Don't descend any further" to which Mr Wayne's reply is a "Roger that, we're trying not to..."

Well, it got me to a-reminiscing about some of my own non-dirigible aviation experiences. The sister over at Pear Tree Log is the member of the family detailed to handle the hijackings and such, I get the "pilot errors" and the maniac pilots.

Most memorable? Well, hard to say. A takeoff from Heathrow in a Jumbo that had only six passengers aboard was a good one - it seems that no-one had told the pilot that he had any passengers aboard at all and he wellied it like I've never seen before. Think "squashed back into your seat with small, squealing cabin stewards passing down the aisles like witches without broomsticks". Add to that a rate of climb that probably equated to the maximum G-Force permissible in the little Owner's Manual in the glovebox. The envelope was pushed. It was the best take-off ever but the miserable git refused to go around and do it again, even when I offered him a crisp ten shilling note. Apparently the aircraft was light with no luggage, very little fuel and they had indeed thought that they had no passengers to molly-coddle!

Had a flight in yonder far east once that experienced a little bit of turbulence [English understatement]. I was in one of the two back seats just in front of the flight staff area and every time they got up to serve some drinks (they seemed very determined to do so) they had to sit down again -so they tended to just smile and jam the bottle between my seat and my mate's seat. It was an eight hour flight. We'd hand them back another empty and they'd jam another fresh one in. I could see the wings flapping up and down in lashing rain and incredible lightning and there were people praying all over the place, some in the aisles, some with their head between their knees. My only concern was not spilling the drinks - and we had to time gulps so as not to poke ourselves in the face with the glasses when the 'plane dropped or bounced up or sideways. Great flight. P*ssed as a f*rt, yowling Tally Ruddy Ho and trying to get my lips to the edge of a wildly moving glass, that was my problem. Wouldn't have been so great if I'd been sober enough to know what was really going on and how serious it was! First flight ever where I saw the flight staff look worried. I'll never forget the way the Boeing's wings actually flapped like a bird's.

Minnesota loomed large once. Very large indeed. A nice, ordinary, regular flight and we got to the part of the landing where I guessed we were maybe five or ten feet above the concrete and I was waiting for the tortured-rubber squeal of the landing gear. Suddenly the plane twisted sideways and the nice pilot must have floored it because all of the engines began screaming fit to burst and we sailed away like an airborne crab over the terminus buildings. Just. Only just. The runway disappeared off one way and we flew another past all sorts of big solid things. Lots of people called on their various gods then too. Thank you to the designer who remembered to fit a castor on the tail-fin, just in case - it worked beautifully even though it made a hell of a scratch on the runway. I was sober for that one. I think they called it a "sudden cross-wind incident".

You won't be surprised to find that the two giggliest flights were in Australia, one in a tiny five-seater and one in a single rotor helicopter. We'll discount the commercial flight to Adelaide where the chap on the tannoy announced that we would be landing in Perth in ten minutes, doubted himself, then left his microphone on while he debated in the background about where the hell we were and finally announced "That would have been a surprise wouldn't it folks - no, I'm told we'll definitely be landing in Adelaide after all. No bloody idea why I was thinking of Perth. Thank you for flying Quantas Airlines".

The flight in the light aircraft was fine, as those little things go - I'd just got to the point where I was deciding where being sick would do least damage when our pilot announced that we would be landing - and pointed to a red-dirt track next to a pile of 50 gallon fuel drums and a grotty old garden shed. It was like something out of a Keystone Cops film. I was sitting up front and, on our third 50' bounce I heard the pilot muttering "get down and stay down you barstad" and sure enough we did. I think he was talking to his aircraft. The plane swung around to a halt in a cloud of dust, the engine backfired, coughed and died and we all sat there for a few moments in total silence. Then the pilot said "Sorry about that folks, it was a bit of fun though wasn't it?"

Total Nut Airways. Boing. Boing, boing. Tie me Cessna down, sport, tie me ol' Cessna down...

First place or the "Flight of the Bumble Bee" prize goes to a helicopter pilot we'd hired to take us out into "the bush"... Takeoff was smooth and professional, we hovered for a few seconds... and then he dipped the rotors towards the ground and started gaining forward speed... I think he last flew in Vietnam. He probably sprayed crops in Vietnam. While ferrying casualties to and from MASH units.

We swooped up for trees and then back down again. Sometimes he looped around the trees, possibly just because he could, possibly just to slingshot and gain more speed. We gave startled kangaroos an eye-to-eyelevel race while the landing struts collected undergrowth, then we'd swoop back up for more trees and take the top-most branches with us. To this day I'm convinced that he wasn't really our pilot, just a "vet" joy-rider who happened to find a helicopter with the keys and the passengers left in it.

I know now why El Popo kisses the tarmac when he lands - John Wayne is still flying. I'll be surprised if the chap below still is though. My guess is that he's upside down in a gum tree with a knife between his teeth, interrogating the koala that he is convinced shot him down...Then he'll probably tow the wreckage of his helicopter back to base on one broken leg while quoting favourite dialogue from Apocalypse Now.

Our HELLicopter pilot. Once landed on the bar of a bar in downtown Hanoi just for some peanuts. Probably likes playing the Ride of the Valkyries, very loudly, while strafing beaches.

Dig out those flares for the weekend!

2012-01-21T10:09:00.000Z

Uh uh uh uh stayin' alive stayin' alive

Sunspot 1402 exploded at 1430 UTC 19/1/2012. UTC is what the world calls GMT because they don't like the English. UTC is very nearly almost within a second of GMT (See Greenwich, where time was invented). Basically, if you'll pardon the language for the sake of the imagery, just this once, our sun farted last Thursday, a couple of hours before tea time and Blue Peter.

It did so during a long-duration event and it did so directly towards our little blue planet.

This time it sort of almost missed. The resultant CME or "Coronal Mass Ejection" (a plasma cloud to you and me), with all of its attendant protons, photons, piglets and re-runs of Saturday Night Fever songs, will strike a glancing blow at the North Pole. If you live in England this will take place over Saturday night and Sunday, the 21st and 22nd of January 2012CE. CE is what we non-theists call AD: CE = AD and BCE = BC (Current Era and Before Current Era).

What does this mean? Well, for a start, Father Christmas is toast. By Monday morning there will be a charcoal outline of a jolly fat chap and six thousand elves on the snow. The North Pole Police don't use white tape to outline bodies, for obvious reasons (if the reasons aren't immediately obvious then I don't think that I can help you). Vases and small lap-dogs in the Home Counties may tremble. Pictures hung on walls by amateurs may slip to a jaunty angle. Your short-wave radio may suffer increased static. Ladies may experience a mild blue St. Emo's static-discharge glow around the the wires of their corsets (this is like a St Elmo's fire but more depressing).

Sat-navs will be ever so slightly less reliable than usual and may feature the occasional one where a zero ought to be, as the satellites adjust their parasols and rub in more Max Factor Maximum Factor. This probably translates to at least one non-BMW driver being directed over a cliff while he searches for Piddling on the Wold or some other quaint but obscure village. It will be lost in the statistics.

Sheep may form up in patterns like iron filings and all face North. While disconcerting this is not life-threatening.

[My Aged Aunt's electric armchair may also malfunction and take her crashing through her front door and over the roof of the community centre, all the while folding and refolding and raising and lowering her be-slippered legs. This has nothing to do with the solar flare, it's just that I've had an idea and the parts have arrived in the post this morning from Radio Shack.]

This lovely Tzar-Trekky style website here has lots of detail and photographs. This is an extremely minor solar event, only involving thousands of millions of tonnes of nuclear matter and our nice magnetic field will (I hope!) protect us as usual. Try to forget that the Earth's magnetic field is due to disappear for a while soon while it flips (due any time around now, plus or minus 100,000 years, disappearance likely to be only for a momentary 1,000 years while it turns over).

We're safe, we're OK, this time, again. Electronics might just blip slightly more than usual, it's minor.

Am I alone in being frightened by the Sun? Not the newspaper, that scares everyone, I mean "our" star, the big bright thing in the sky? I am solar powered - depressed as hell when it hides behind clouds for too long but like a scared rabbit when it shines so brightly that it feels hot on my skin. I keep thinking that even at 150,000,000 kilometres distant it is making me uncomfortable - and I have nowhere to run. If I waddled as far and as fast as I possibly could then at most I could move the sun to 150,012,750 kilometres, hardly worth the change! I love the shade! Seriously, a hot blazing sun scares me. It makes me feel like a flea on an ant in comparison, and that's being generous to myself.

We are truly, truly peculiar creatures. We're two metres tall, scurrying about on a ball of mud in a soup of gas maybe twenty thousand metres deep, we have a temperature range with a comfort zone of maybe twenty degrees CelsiHeits with much more or much less being fatal (and making it difficult for the strawberries). We need watering every few days and feeding every few weeks, absolute minimum. The ball of mud and rock that we're clinging to is spinning us at up to 24,000 miles a day as it itself spins around a ball of nuclear fire while the whole arrangement spins in a galaxy that is itself moving at incredible speeds through space and time that we don't understand. We do this while our little star has gastric problems and shoots plasma at us. And yet we get awfully upset when the Digibox fails to record the last three minutes of an episode of Sherlock or Top of the Pops... or when arguing over how many words the Eskimos have for snow.

NASA Image

It's all a question of priorities I suppose and whether you enjoy being flailed by whips of plasma.

Send three and fourpence, we're going to a dance ...

2012-01-19T19:29:00.000Z

If you have a security peephole in your door, make sure that the dogs can't reach it ...

Meetings. Mankind has held meetings ever since Mammoth PLC first made a hostile take-over bid for Barratt Caves Ltd and they were all called to account before the Dinosaur Marketing Board.

At first we held them face to face to face to knuckle to knee to A&E.

Then someone invented the telephone and we all conference called ourselves into a frenzy of dialling tones. In offices the world over important people (usually by their own admission and account) yacked on for hour after hour and only when they paused for their applause did they realise that all the other teleconference participants had long since hung up or been disconnected. Satellites became involved and before you it knew delay lag time involved Atlantic mixed crackle confusion pause. Then some silly twerp improved satellites and international phone calls and that took all of the fun out of that.

Then someone invented the Interrossiter or "Video Conference" machinings please to not touch ze buttons. We liked those. They brought all of the nonsense back into a chap's working life, for a while...

The first "it's expensive rocket science" system used at one place I worked involved a couple of colour televisions and a karaoke microphone - and a load of wiring. Sophisticated it wasn't. There were boxes of electronics for this and bags of spare parts for that and someone had to spend ten minutes hooking up the connections at the start and, crucially, ten minutes unhooking the connections at the end of each meeting ...

Our first meeting using the new-fangled rocket science was a difficult one. It would have been difficult face to face. We compromised on time zones and inconvenienced both parties, just to be fair. Barter, business and big balloons that had gone up were negotiated over three long hours with a dozen high-fallutin' people sitting around their conference desk and a dozen tanked-up, cowboy yee-hah fakes hamming it up for all we were worth on our end, around our polished walnut conference desk. Contracts were hammered out, money was agreed, responsibilities divided and the meeting brought to a close by the firing of guns, the offering of maternal insults and the lobbing of dead cats into the air. Phew! Hallelujah!

Then [one of our team], anxious to get to the pub, stood up and commented loudly "For [very rude expletive]'s sake! They were a bunch of [R-Souls] and [Merchant Bankers] weren't they? I'm glad we stiffed them over x, y and z. I need a [serious expletive]ing drink ..."

Unfortunately, the link, the cameras, the microphones and the nice folk on the receiving end were all very much still "live" as they say in television studios. We were treated to a big-screen view of their entire team stiffening into silence and peering at all of us back down their camera... oops. They'd heard and seen every single word of [one of our team]'s summation of them ...

Still, once we'd all got new jobs and had a nice funeral for the boss (something to do with apoplexy apparently), things got better.

At my next company the cutting edge rocket science video conferencing suites all boasted expensive conference tables, mood lighting - and cameras and microphones that could be zoomed in on whoever was talking. There were little joysticks and the cameras could be controlled remotely from either end, they could change their angle of view of us and we could zip the camera all around their conference suite too. Very Star Trek indeed at the time. A little slow and clunky, but it got the job done nicely. Usually.

Well, the second or third meeting in there was boring. Very, very, very boring indeed with the "opposition" doing most of the talking. My Scandinavian boss was a chap of high testosterone levels, little morals and absolutely no restraint or political correctness. He started playing with the joystick that controlled the camera at the "remote" end. In particular he began to follow around and zoom in on a rather splendid young lady on the other company's team. A blonde - his favourite female intellectual talent in all the whole wide adolescent computer-world. In particular he admired the logic and attention to detail shown by her extremely ample breasts. When she moved doing "pointing at my presentation" and "here ist das chartings" things he toggled the joystick and followed her around. When she sat again he looked her up and down on-screen and then he focussed in on her cleavage, testing how close the camera could get him and all the while the voice of the chairman droned on and on and on ...

... until he stopped droning. What my boss hadn't remembered was that the little camera/microphones were actually physically moving, they were motorised, buzzing as they zoomed in and lenses extended, microphones flailing like little antennae. They didn't move far but they did swivel, tilt, turn and extend themselves out a bit from their stands in a very obvious way ...

The meeting was called to a halt and my boss was called to account - it seems that the folk in the "remote" part of the conference had grown weary of the little camera following and zooming in on the breasts of their chief technical expert. Especially when it was so obviously to the exclusion of all else going on.

The technology has moved on again since then, but there's still no safeguard against adolescent testosterone and boredom. Or the Scandinavian temperament. I suppose that it was at least an advancement upon Chinese Whispers!

You could hear a PIN drop ...

2012-01-16T19:16:00.000Z

In the hazy days of my youth I used to work for Her Majesty's Civil Service. I was more of a potato than a mandarin. My corridors were more well-worn lino and paint than hushed marble. If a buck had been dropped from a Permanent Secretary there would be a significant wait while it fell at terminal velocity, bounced off a few filing cabinets and then stopped with me (nowhere lower for it to fall). We had no room at my "the sharp end" for club chairs and the ties of old schools that bind like Japanese Knotweed. Fresh-faced and innocent, I began my service to The Queen in the trenches of the benefits office with the largest single local staff in the land, the three hundred and fifty odd lost souls of Crown House in Grimsby.

I wrote GiroCheques. I sat at a machine the size of a small dining table and typed names and amounts and I typed them so fast that the memory buffer would fill, the "golfball" print head would fly off like a demented missile and I learned to casually catch it mid-air and slam it back onto the gubbins before the machine even missed it. I was the giro writer of choice for rush jobs and crisis situations.

I mopped vomit when our customers had nasty reactions to their (non-prescription) drugs or the cider simply became too much for them (and when the only alternative would have been to leave it for the nice cleaning ladies instead, which would not have been terribly gallant). I visited wonderful people in foul hospices and I visited foul people with wonderful and colourful stories.

Having been identified early on as willing, able and gullible I covered absences and filled gaps on a whim.

I ordered oil, rode in oil tankers to our various outstations. I arranged office repairs. I chased intruders, rescued folk from broken lifts and on one delightful day had to stand on the roof of our seven-storey building talking to a suicidal gentleman while he walked up and down the parapet and we waited for the Police to arrive. I consoled security guards who had found fake bombs (remember bomb scares?) made from candles, alarm clocks, wire and biscuit tins. I put secretaries through disciplinary procedures when their real bosses didn't want to and so went off sick or all mysterious like and I represented H.M. DSS at tribunals and witch-hunts and appeals.

I did counter duty. How many pairs of knickers did madam's incontinence cause madam to get through in a week or did madam have any clues as to the identity of the father or fathers of any of her chidren? Payments issued by hand at 1100HRS and 1500HRS were fun, especially with those who had no payment coming but had queued anyway for the argument. One gentleman in particular used to arrive for a daily payment, always half an hour early, barge to the counter tugging his earlobes and patting his head, forget to breathe, pass out, disappear under the counter and then bound up again as large as life to repeat the process. Others used to bring their entire families as though it were a trip out such as a picnic.

I did visits, filling in for absent Inspectors and Fraud Staff - handed a pile of files and told to fly, my pretty monkeys, fly like the wind. Unaccompanied visits to some very dubious addresses. On one occasion I parked my nice (personal, private) car on one of our favourite estates in winter twilight only to have two dozen spade & gatepost wielding residents start to gather around me (I left at high speed, marked the file as "No reply to repeated knocking"). I genuinely, really, absolutely for real hand on heart truthfully was sent out one day because an Inspector rang in sick, doing his "sick visits" checking that claimants were still ill - only to knock on the door to be greeted by relatives dressed for the funeral (and yes, the hearse and cars arrived at the house just after I did and I had parked acoss the driveway)...

One particular visit was a review of circumstances in a block of flats within walking distance of the office, Bevan House - and the manager decided to come with me to watch as a "test check". After gaining extrance to the flat I noticed there were quite a few blokes waiting in the lounge and my boss started to giggle (I was too young to know how to giggle). I interviewed madam with me sat on the end of her bed, she in her flimsy working clothes (for I believe that she entertained lonely gentlemen) and both of us studiously following the law and ignoring the obvious fortune she was raking in - can't take account of "immoral earnings" of course. I remember that the boss did not return to the office with me immediately but found cause for delay, somewhere.

I lost count of the number of pensioners I visited who wanted nothing more than a small replacement television - that being the only thing in the whole world that still talked to them. What was top of the list of things we couldn't give grants for? Televisions. I developed the skill of listening to conversations about replacement televisions while simultaneously writing down "essential replacement bedding, clothing and etecteras" with the other hand and made sure that they knew that when the cheque arrived it was theirs to spend on whatever they wished and that it would be about the cost of a TV plus next year's licence fee too.

I got threatened, was physically attacked, got spat on and on occasion, like all of us, had to have a Police escort running interference in a patrol car so that I could drive away without disgruntled claimants being able to follow me to my home. Government after government told us that we had job for life and that folk with such security didn't need pay rises. Tabloid after tabloid made wonderful claims about Civil Service pensions (thinking "Mandarin" level, not local "Potato") and that brings me nicely back to my point. About ruddy time I hear you say.

Well, it's ten years early but I was just wondering...

Civil Service Potato pensions have been privatized of course and the company that ~~feeds off the system like lords~~ now runs the pension schemes efficiently has announced that I can keep track of my pension online - just register and they send you the logon-details. I registered, twice. Called three times. Have just received my third letter (see above) - the letter announcing the PIN number that will unlock the online holy grail and let me see my pile of shiny sparkling gold, silver and pirate rubies and emeralds. Except that the letter proudly proclaims 'ere is your PIN and points to an empty space. Blank. Nothing. Da nada. I had two other people check the letter in case I had lost my marble (I only have one remaining). Nope. Was it a peel-off? Nope. I x-rayed it - no watermark either. No PIN, none whatsoever anywhere on this computah-produced, automatically generated letter.

The call centre, naturally, insists that this cannot be the case and I am obviously running some sort of scam.

There I was all ready to have a hysterical laugh at my - cough cough, ahem - "pension" expectations and I now find that I have been frozen in my tracks until I can provide a Tupperware tub full of DNA and handwritten signed sworn references from any three of a Doctor, Bishop or Member of Parliament that has known me since birth.

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme ~~bollocks~~ eh?

A little bit of Morse Code from my Dad

2012-01-15T13:15:00.001Z

During my late father's retirement we cobbled up a morse key from a switch and battery, hooked it up to my early paving-slab sized laptop and I set him the task of sending the alphabet and then an SOS signal. Bear in mind that the SOS signal would have been repeated as long as the equipment stayed above the icy water - last men to leave the ship are Captain and Radio Operator (no mobile sets in the lifeboats in those days). Both are played at the start of the slideshow/video here - and the trawlers shown are all of the deep-sea trawlers that he spent eighteen years working on as the new-fangled "Radio Operator".

Given the shocking nastiness of the news about the Costa Corncordia cruise liner (sunk, methinks by sheer complacency and modern contempt for the sea) I was reminded of his job and working conditions. We all imagine that liners today are virtually unsinkable (hah!), I know that I have never given it a thought when I've been on the beasties. How extreme must it have been to live and work on relatively small trawlers in all weathers in the worst seas with very few of the current safety gizmos - often with borderline lunatics for Skippers?

The Hutson family is (was) a fishing family, traces of us are (were) strung up and down the English east coast.

Dad left school at fourteen, as most did but, unlike most, he had a plan... to make everyone else ignore the disability that he always ignored himself (little to no use of his left arm) - and to get to sea. He held down various jobs from being a stock-broker's runner to working for a dealer supplying radiograms and equipment - including servicing and repairs. While fiddling with radio valves during the day he took evening classes at night in Hull (commuting from Grimsby to Hull, long before the Humber Bridge was built). These jobs were deliberately near Grimsby Docks where deep-sea trawlers were gradually fitting the expensive new-fangled radio equipment - now down to the size of a small cabin full of electronics - and paying for the new-fangled radio operators. The equipment and technology had been around for ages but trawler owners are notoriously tight-fisted and radio doesn't directly catch fish! A few years at night school got Dad qualified as an operator, working his way around the docks got him his chances and his ticket - and he spent the next eighteen years sailing on what turned out to be the top Grimsby trawlers, mainly the "Football" class (all named after football teams).

Harry C Hutson on Wolverhampton Wanderers, pictured in 1957

Being Radio Operator had advantages - the equipment of the day was so large that it needed a cabin of its own, which doubled up as the operator's cabin too - luxury solo accommodation! It had its disadvantages - the aerials and gubbins were usually on top of the wheelhouse - the last place you wanted to go in a rolling trawler in high Arctic seas to de-ice or fix, one of the Operator's tasks. There were unexpected responsibilities aside from passing messages to and from the Trawler Owners and the Skipper and crew - the cut-throat nature of fishing in those days meant that everything had to be done secretly.

If the vessel found good fishing it had to alert sister ships from the same company so that they could join it - while confusing and confounding competitor's vessels. Prices for the catch depended on arriving in dock at just the right time to unload just before an auction, preferably without very many other trawlers also unloading and saturating the market. Positions and directions had to be kept secret and false trails laid - something of a problem if there was an emergency and the Radio Operator suddenly had to SOS or call for help from somewhere hundreds of miles from where everyone listening thought they were. Add to this the technicalities of hiding signals from simple signal-strength direction-finding - while also trying to track down your competitors and decode their information, just in case they'd found fish or were heading to market early... The Radio Operators were on duty 24/7 and a regular day at sea was a minimum of an "official" 18-hour shift.

Dad was so good at the whole of the job (not just the electronics but also the secrecy element) that Skippers approached and signed him on directly and he chose which vessels he worked on rather than being dictated to by the agents. No doubt this was part of the attraction - like all Hutsons he was a stubborn old git, quite prepared (as are we all) to cut off our own noses to spite anyone else's face if it so suits us. More of that in future posts! (Readers should take note that my sister of Pear Tree Log is not only of Hutson stock but also Taurean and a worryingly good match for the implied character description thereof - which is why when she breaks an ankle she drives home first and only then sees to it...).

This information exchange and trail laying (and any SOS or assistance calls) was all done using Morse Code - no fancy modern voice communication in those days. This skill with signals and secrecy led to my father's second career; working for the Ministry of Defence during the late Cold War and post-Cold War era, intercepting and listening in on the pesky communist Russians and Chinese - and blocking their signals as need be. What better preparation for covert radio operations than being someone who already did all of that while also in Arctic and Atlantic waters, bouncing around in a fishing vessel?

My dad loved his time on the trawlers and was lucky enough to leave before the government sold the industry out. He had many fantastic tales - which I will dig out and relate - and many, many horror stories, the worst of which I'm sure he kept to himself. Grimsby Docks are now a wasteland, deserted except for the occasional factory ship or car transporter. Dad shook his "double-six" in 2002 and i am incredibly glad that I got to record a little bit of him in his old role!

Bear in mind that he hadn't used a morse key for about forty years when we made the recording so E.O.E.! The second "SOS" message has a slightly more urgent tone - each operator had a style just like handwriting but that goes out of the window when your shoes start to get salty and wet...

Modern telephone etiquette and the awkward chap.

2012-01-13T18:56:00.000Z

You may have revelled, as did I, in the astounding news a few days ago that I now have an intermittent single bar of mobile telephonium signal at my abode (following Orange PLC allowing Virgins PLC to use their network and indulge in vice, or versa, or something similar).

Well - I just received my first single-bar telephone call!

Yee-hah! I present the gospel transcript verbatim, below.

CALLER: Is this Mr Jonathan da Souza?

ME: Is there no-one more local that you could ask? Someone perhaps in your immediate vicinity?

CALLER: Excuse me?

ME: Naturally.

CALLER: Is this Mr da Souza?

ME: Don't you have a name badge or something? Perhaps there's someone at the front desk who might help you? A security guard or receptionist...

CALLER: I need to know if this is Mr Jonathan da Souza.

ME: I so understand, identitiy crisis can be so disconcerting, especially in the evening. Do you perhaps have a mirror handy and a wallet with a photo-ID Driving Licence?

CALLER: What?

ME: I was thinking that you might look in the mirror and make comparison with the photo on your Driving Licence. Then all you have to do is read off the name... It may even have your home address and date of birth.

CALLER: Look, who is this?

ME: Are you showing me a photograph? I don't have video capability at this end, this is my old Nokia mobile...

CALLER: What number have I dialled?

ME: I'm not certain - I wasn't watching because my phone didn't ring until you'd finished dialling. You've reached me though, that's for certain.

CALLER: So you're not Jonathan da Souza?

ME: You've started to make me wonder if I ought to be. Is there any money involved? I could be Mr da Souza if there's money and no danger - do you want to know what I'm wearing?

CALLER: I think I have the wrong number.

ME: The wrong number of what? Some things aren't critical in terms of numbers. Have you decided whether you are Mr da Souza yet or whether I am? It won't affect what I'm wearing.

CALLER: No problem. Thank you. [Dialling tone follows]

ME: Oh - such a shame, I was just about to say "... crumpled boxer shorts off the hip, one sock at half mast and I'm holding a fish-slice made by Habitat"...

I LOVE the telephonium when I'm not in the mood for it. If only the poor chap had begun by asking 'Am I speaking to ...' or 'I would like to speak to Mr Jonathan da Souza' things might have been so much less confusing. A 'Hello' or a 'Good evening' or even, heaven forfend, an 'I am XYZ calling from ABC etc etc' would have tempted me away from being crabby and evil. But no, he dived straight in with the usual modern imperative and cooked his own goose. I assume that he was from one of those "call centre" things or selling triple glazing or accidental no-win no-fee compensation. The kind where they think that they have a right to establish who they are speaking to before introducing themselves. for security purposes.

No-one seems to teach businesses how to behave on the telephone these days. At least he wasn't entirely in TXT SPK I suppose, that's something. Will they ever understand that if they are calling on business then it is their business and, unless solicited, I have no vested interest in its outcome, as in I couldn't give a fig?

I may leave the one-bar mobile permanently switched on if it's going to be this much fun.

Reminds me of that lovely day in the nineteen eighties when I worked in Her Majesty's Civil Service and rang an office, politely asking for emergency stationery supplies. Some chap sounded exasperated and bellowed in vocal caps lock - 'Do you know who you're talking to?' I replied 'No - do you?' He was foolish enough then to confirm that he had no idea either at which point I took the "civil" out of "service" and made some very immoral and acrobatically-challenging suggestions as to how he might spend the rest of his morning (this was in the days long, long before caller-id). Classic, and we got our emergency stationery elsewhere.

My father taught me all I know about using the telephone. I'm going to spend the rest of the evening sitting in front of it in case it rings again... I may assume a falsetto and be Elspeth McGillicuddie I think, or possibly Churchill in The Cabinet Office.

Parp parp! Damned peasants on the road!

2012-01-12T18:02:00.000Z

I quite enjoy walking along quiet country lanes. Single track lanes with hedgerows and views and suchlike. Today I had an epiphany while doing so. As I dived for the ditch and lay among the badger carcasses, the discarded McNasties Burgers boxes and the empty tins of cider it all suddenly became clear to me. Sparrows in the hedgerow played trumpets and other stringed instruments (I failed Music 101) and the fluffy white clouds spelled it out in Cherokee smoke signals while the enormous finger of a bearded but familiar and Western deity helped me to my feet again.

I know why drivers of the younger generation are so universally rude and all want to kill me.

I know why drivers of the older generations try their level best to kill me.

Simples! The younger generation have never walked anywhere - they see pedestrians on a country lane as trespassing on motoring turf, if you'll pardon the juxta-mis-position. Roads is for cars, innit, yeah. The fact that there are no pavements and the roads is single tracks, yeah, is immat... is unimp... is nuffink, yeah? Roads is for cars and it is dat you 'as got no right bein' on da road yeah? Why is it dat you is not, like, drivin' yeah? A pedestrian on a roadway is as alien to them as Acker Bilk headlining at a rave (if raves are still the "thing", are they?).

The older generations simply don't see me. I'm only six foot two and built like a small JCB, it's only natural that I should blur into the, er, well, blur that is the world beyond the bonnet and the range of the reading specs (only ones I've got with me dear).

You take your life in your hands around Lincolnshire lanes. I guess that you do anywhere in the countryside these days. I am going to begin sentencing every motorist I see to a new punishment. Two hours of standing still with nowhere to dive to for cover while some nincomnitwit or clinically congenital genital drives repeatedly past them at 60mph+ trying to pass fewer than eighteen inches away. For the really bad offenders I am going to add a further two hours during which they must pile up all of their loved ones, pets, girlfriends, boyfriends, grandmothers and iToys while I drive past them at 60mph+ at an estimated, more or less, missed-you-anyway, just barely, distance of eighteen inches.I may even wear my specs when administering the punishment. Or I may not.

Only a few weeks ago one chap obviously saw me giving him the "thank you for that life-enhancing experience" finger in his rear view mirror after he'd changed my parting from left to right in his high speed wake. He squealed to a halt in a cloud of tyre smoke, reversed wildly and considered getting out. Then he noticed that I was coming to him faster and with more intent aforethought than he was coming to me - then he drove away again. How come he saw me in the rear-view mirror but obviously didn't see me through the windscreen? Maybe he was checking his score with a view to slapping another silhouette of a pedestrian (50 points) on the wing? Perhaps he was disappointed that he'd missed?

Where the hell are they all rushing to and why is it important that they get there at absolute maximum speed? Their wives can't all be having babies. Maybe their jobs are so super-fantastic or they love the supermarket so much that every second counts?

These lovely vehicles btw are from a Club Run that I was asked to cover a while back. The tables were turned there. Ever wondered what happens when you wear a black outfit plus yellow hi-vis jacket at the side of a busy main road and point a long black something (like a long camera lens) at traffic that has just sailed over a bridge? They slow down, curse you seven generations unto seven more and drive past at 59mph exactly. Great fun. I've never seen so many sedate and well-behaved motorists. I shall have to wear the hi-vis and carry a camera at all times in future... I must have ruined the day of several hundred "civilian" drivers while waiting for the club members to cruise past!

The Human Race. How long before Mr Darwin retro-fits us all with wheels or, at the very least, castors?

Or functioning brains?

Or universal manners?

Grr. End of rant.

A few schooldays that weren't pure hell ...

2012-01-10T16:00:00.001Z

Achmore School, Isle of Lewis

My schooldays were like Tom's - rather brown. I hated, loathed, despised, regretted and begrudged almost every second of every minute of every hour of every day of every week of every month of every year of every decade of every century of every millennia that I spent in school - almost. I co-operated to the extent that I am certain that my many teachers also regretted, begrudged, loathed and despised my time in their "tender care". Little sod, I was. "No" and "There's nothing you can do to make me" were my weapons. I used them decisively and often. If you have a punishment, Sir or Miss, then bring it on was the attitude - and (except on Lewis) the teachers always gave up easily and gave up first.

Achmore Village School was ever so slightly different. The twenty-three inmates shown here was about the average size of the ~~prison~~ school population and the whole place was run by one teacher - Mrs McNeil. I was the only sasanach in the place and about twelve of my ~~cellmates~~ classmates were Campbells, from the same family. That's me top right in the dashing white shorts and cosmic stripe fashion statement and dodgy buckle shoes. I'm on my way from being sickly English weed to seasoned porker.

Mrs McNeil taught all of us whatever our age and I seem to remember there being a variety of desk sizes so that our little legs would touch the floor. Before Miss Crichton of the Nicolson Institute in Stornoway (which was pure hell) and Mrs McNeil got hold of me I couldn't so much as read.

Tests at these schools were usually announced by the tawse being taken out of its drawer and laid at the front of the teacher's desk. The tawse, for those of you who didn't have the luxury of a Scottish school education during this period, is a leather strap, used for the percussive encouragement of reluctant young academics.

Oddly, I remember only fun at Achmore. The memory of every other school I went to is couched in terms of brimstone, agonised screams and the roar of volcanic fires. On the second day of my ~~sentence~~ tenure I had the inevitable punch-up that follows any young Englishman's appearance in a foreign school - the Campbell child roughly my size and age ended up hanging by his shirt collar from one of the huge brass clothes hooks in the cloakroom and I was never bothered again by anyone there. Deed done. Mrs McNeil witessed the fight and later told my parents that she checked I was holding my own (I was actually holding the other kid's gizzards) and left us to it, the better to get the inevitable over more quickly. My parents approved. In retrospect, so do I.

When it snowed - and, oh boy, does it snow on Lewis when it bothers, snow like you've probably never seen before (Canadians and anyone from Siberia excepted) - we rolled snowballs about until they were five or six feet in diameter. We occasionally started them off by rolling one of the younger children around until covered. We padded down snow into ice-slides and slid on our backsides for fifty or sixty downhill yards at high velocity until the stone wall stopped us just before the roadway. I can't remember anyone breaking bones, although the wall occasionally needed repair. Mrs McNeil was always delivered to school in a Vauxhall Victor driven by her husband - driving on the only road through Lochganvich where we lived, the next village along. To avoid the terrible fate of being given a lift to school by teacher I used to walk in the JCB cut drains alongside the roadway - a six foot deep one-scoop cut through the peat where I could walk upright and not be seen. It never actually collapsed on me, tempting though it must have been. Nor was I ever washed away in a flash-flood that I can remember (there were only a few places where the sides were shallow enough to get in or out of the drain).

School meals were a revelation at Achmore. A chap in a blue Morris Minor van used to deliver them in big churns and sealed trays half an hour or so before Mrs McNeil used to serve the food at our desks. Standard fare was something like herring and boiled potatoes - pure poison to an Englishman - so my lunches kindly consisted of several puddings with custard. Psoriasis tart (something in pastry made with cornflakes and jam), chocolate concrete, strawberry shortbread, custard chocolate, custard vanilla, custard strawberry, buttescotch tart with chewing-cream.... all magnificent stuff to power our days of running around like nutters. Days when it was semolina and jam were a disappointment, naturally. I'm sure that I must have eaten some savoury courses (that weren't herring related) but I just can't remember any!

The "Usual Offices" were the brick outhouse at the back - one side for girls, one side for boys. Woe betide you if you needed them other than at break times. They were somewhat open to the air too so "going" in winter meant being very quick indeed while still getting snowed on and blasted by the gales of Lewis & Harris. It was probably a very sanitary arrangement, given the proclivities of schoolchildren overfed on chocolate concrete, salt herring and custard.

Achmore is the only school I can reminisce about without reaching for my pills and the laudanum decanter.

Miss Crichton and Mrs McNeil are two of the maybe four of my many, many, past teachers who are not on my little list of people who surely won't be missed (and at that at my earliest and most violent opportunity). Brilliant people - and, belatedly, THANK YOU BOTH!

Sadly, when we left Lewis I had a few short terms in some hippie-run dump of a Junior school (the one the nice RAF Pilot saved by sacrificing his own life and having his spectacular crash a few yards away from instead of on top of) - followed by a couple of years in a 2,200 pupil comprehensive serving a London overspill estate... culture shock, much. From salt herring to uncut heroin in about five hundred miles and three terms. The place was rough as a badger's arse and all associated with it are on my little list, including the inventor of "comprehensives" and all of the dealers.

Achmore is closed now of course, but not, I hope, because of anything I did. Almost "Happy days"!

Achmore School, Isle of Lewis

Starship troopers and the Royal Snail Mail.

2012-01-08T09:09:00.002Z

Robert A. Heinlein. 1907-1988. Earth.

How big a leap does a thought have to be before it feels new? Did Einstein ever chuckle and think "ooh that was a totally fresh one" or did he just build Special Relativity up in baby-steps from bits of "old" thoughts presented in new patterns? New and unknown stuff has to creep into our world somehow or we wouldn't be where we are now - does "new" ever come in recognisably large pieces? Is a huge revolutionary thought just an old thought with 10% new surreptitiously added by some underhand psychological process? 5%? 15%? Or is the "new" elemement confined only to the "new" pattern made out of old thoughts? Einstein worked Relativity out in his head - we're only just now beginning to be able to test it. How far out does the diving board of "known" stuff go before the next thought takes you into the deep end of the pool of uknown?

One of the many prezzies that Daddy Yule exchanged for his glass of sherry, a mince pie and a couple of carrots for the engine of his sleigh was a pile of books that had been cruelly abandoned by their previous keepers in various rescue establishments run by charity. Among these was 'Starship Troopers' by one of my favourite authors, Robert A. Heinlein. Even on my fourth or fifth reading of Starship troopers it managed to collect up the blancmange of my mind and form it into a gooey question mark between my ears.

(Ignore anything you may know about 'Starship Troopers' from that ridiculous and outrageous liberty bearing the same title, the Hollywooden film - like most of Hollywooden's creations it bears little resemblance to man, beast, original story or sentiment: pure glo$$y pulp directed by an accountant.)

I first tripped across Heinlein in the late nineteen-seventies. Via his books of course, he wasn't prone on the pavement or anything. I read 'Time enough for love', 'Stranger in a strange land' and 'The number of The Beast' and then vacuumed up anything that bore his name, rationing myself to reading them only at my desk during lunchtimes - to make them last and to let me survive the incredible dreariness of my job. A cheese & pickle bun, a coffee and an hour in an alternate reality was all it took to make a day at work sort of just about manageable.

Heinlein is what I term real science fiction - not a (ruddy silly) sword or a (bloody stupid) dragon or a (chuffing) elf or an (aaaaaarrrgghh!) numpty magician in there. Human beings, planet Earth and its immediate neighbours, stretched technology and stories in which people still needed to eat, sleep and run from their government. The sci-fi genre has been almost utterly lost in the past fifty years - no librarian in England now understands that a book with some muscled, loin-cloth clad hero and buxom flaxen-haired heroine on the cover seeking the sacred jewel of Bingo-Bongo land is unlikely, very, very unlikely, to be science fiction. It will be fantasy - and not even science fantasy at that. I blame the lack of punctuation and clarity in library classifications - creating a lumpen category called "Science fiction and fantasy" is like grouping Cat Lovers and Dog Lovers together, or Lycra-clad Cyclists and Motorists; there's really very little true overlap and very little love lost. You can still find real science fiction but, my goodness me, you need to search long and hard for it (and thanks to PTL for doing so).

Two things struck me (again) on this reading. OK, three things struck me again on this reading but then I really shouldn't have been sitting and reading in the middle of the lane.

Firstly - I always fall into the trap of imagining that the author somehow lives in or is a product of the worlds of his or her creation. In this case, that Heinlein often popped to the Moon or to Mars and was a frequent flier (LME) between parallel planes and multi-braned universes, all while being a "good guy". Well, Heinlein was born in 1907, served in the US Navy, was as right-wing as Genghis Khan in some things and as liberal as [insert your own idea of a famous liberal here, I can't think of any] in others. His working life began in the nineteen-twenties and thirties when telephones were bakelite, wires were fabric-covered and exchanges fully manned and designed by Mr Strowger. He believed in "free love" (whatever the hell that was) but thought McCarthy to be quite a good guy overall and a positive in US politics. A weird mix (often the best kind).

Secondly - the peanut between my ears always pictures the fiction world, necessarily (to some extent) from the basis of my own here-and-now. Technology is shaped and coloured the way I imagine, not the way the author (probably) imagined. I slot modern personas into the cloaks of the characters in the book and I put myself in there too, changing things about me to suit as I read. Cars, buildings, colours and sounds are all cobbled together from my experience - which reminds me how amazingly literal and unimaginative a creature I really am on the inside.

'Starship troopers' was published in 1959 - a year before my world even began at all. It's a world where only those who have served in the military get to vote or hold public office, a world where vast (military, naval) ships race around space - and where conditions on those ships sound a lot like they might have been in the nineteen-twenties and thirties on real ships! Mail "catches up with" the ships where it can - it is sent physically and still as paper letters, Marines are dropped from orbit and then parchuted (albeit with very fancy parachutes) onto extra-terrestrial battlefields, battlefields where the action is organised very much along the lines it might have been in WWII... In some of his other works cars reach outrageous futuristic speeds of 200mph - and today half the cars on the road are electronically limited to 155mph (because while cars have progressed, the organic control unit in the front seat hasn't). Heinlein's protagonists are super-modern but gung-ho (possibly like someone in the US Marines in the nineteen-twenties). Women are strong and sort of emancipated and doing jobs that would have been revolutionary at the time of writing - but segregated and still put on some sort of Boy's Own pedestal. Sons call their fathers "Sir" and shake hands.

I'm literal and unimaginative - and in the worlds of the (sci-fi) literary demi-god Heinlein the military, the Navy, US politics, gung-ho characters and all-out wars reign supreme, a bit like they did in his real life too... odd that.

For me, Heinlein does two important things that are rare in (real) science-science fiction. He doesn't describe the technology in excrutiating detail, so even after fifty years the mechanics of the action are dated only by the forgivable gaps and by the assumptions of his day. He builds most of the story around something that's like a grown-up version of the Famous Five - peril and adventure and sticking your chin out at the world. I suppose the effect of doing these well in his genre is that the author has thrown his story as far as he can into his future and the reader has to reach behind themselves into their past and grab it.

I'm typing this on a laptop machine wirelessly connected to a global interwebnetonline thingy - technology that would have blown anything in 'Starship troopers' out of the water. Not a valve or analogue dial to be see. There's only the most vague suggestion of a hint of anything similar in the book (and in any of Heinlein's books). It just wasn't on his horizon and yet it's old hat for me. Hats off to an author who can still mesmerise (E19) after all these years!

Is there anything truly new under the sun or do we just make fresh and unfamiliar-to-us patterns out of the old things? What would it really be like to have a totally fresh thought? To think outside our own experience? To make that intuitive leap, totally miss the edge of our petri dish and land on the floor of the laboratory in wholly new and unknown territory? To write something that has nothing whatsoever to do with our real past lives...

We must in truth be doing some of that or else we wouldn't have gone from wooden clubs to iPhones in sixty thousand years. Each foot and each thought has to go out in front of the other for us to move at all. How big does one small step (or thought) for mankind have to be before it feels recognisably like one giant leap for mankind?

Boing boing, wibble... fetch me my canvas jacket please Nanny. How might we express a totally new and previously unknown thought/deed/world/concept without the constraints of the English language, itself part of our real past? Nanny? Quickly please - the jacket, the buckles...

Emergency, which service do you require?

2012-01-06T21:31:00.002Z

Gorilla on phone in San Diego Zoo where the only signal is near the door the keepers use.

By 'eck, do you know I'm reet chuffed! Apparently, so t'text message that I received while out today says, Virgin Mobile have combined with Orange Mobile to use each other's networks! Coverage will therefore be eleventy billion percent greater, possibly a tangible heat-haze of radiophonic electrons disturbing the air! They warn me that incoming calls may electrocute me because of signal strength! Future incoming text messages may scorch or set my pockets alight!

Yeah. Right.

I can now get a whole single intermittent bar of signal at home. This is one intermittent bar more than I used to get, which was zero bars or fewer.

Yee-hah!

All I have to do to get this new facility is to stand on the sink and wave the phone over my head with the cold tap running and the metal grill pan poking out of my left ear, a position from which it is slightly difficult to actually make or receive a call using my new nuclear (nucular) strength combined companies signal.

At least this is indoors. In the last property I had in Norfolk I had to climb a particular tree in the garden and sit in the top-most branches to make or receive a call. The number of times I was either catalogued by twitchers as a protected species of migrating Greater Balding Ugly-Bird and/or arrested by Police as an escaped tree-climbing loony was usually in double figures every month. OK, maybe some of that was my fault, I should have either worn pyjamas or not made calls at night. If it wasn't a plastic RSPB tag around my ankles and ten days in quarantine living off fat-balls and water then it was handcuffs around my wrists and a small fine for "indecent exposure with risibly inadequate equipment". I never knew whether to speed-dial Bill Oddie or my solicitor as they poked me out of my own tree with my own clothes prop. It was most disconcerting.

Why do they persist in calling them "mobile" phones when you can only use them in towns and cities where you don't really need a mobile phone at all and yet in the countryside, where you do need such a device, there's snafu or less?

I have to laugh at TV progs like Midsomer Murder and such, with H.M. Constables wandering through hedgerows and woodlands with phones that work everywhere all of the time. Written exclusively by folk who live in big towns and cities, mayhap? Folk who think that their local park is wildest tundra?

Apparently in towns and cities you can get phones that will let you browse the interwebnet and "do" video-calls and stuff. Amazing. Gods bless the towns and cities. Apparently they have "electric" street lighting and underground drainage systems there too!

Whatever will they think of next?

Sat-navs with up to date maps of all abandoned railway lines, sheer drops and BMW/Audi driver routes into the sea? Now wouldn't that be something to write home about (if you can find a post-box)? Or maybe you could call home about it (if you can find a phone-box that accepts coins)?

[Cynicism mode: OFF] [Ooh I could crush a grape!] [Probably] [Of course, we do get charged less for the service in H. M.'s Countryside... so that's alright then.] [Bugger - I thought I had turned Cynicism mode off] [Clicks head and neck to one side in that "android" way to disengage the entire printed circuit relating to services provided by raving international conglomerates]...

Al fresco leather, rubber and oil in Aby

2012-01-05T15:12:00.000Z

Aby Enduro 2011, Banovallum Motorcycle Club

As my grandmother used to say (when sober enough to speak), there's little so refreshing as the aroma of hot oil and burning rubber. At the time I thought she was referring to my style of cooking, but I may have been wrong.

There can't be many small villages that can boast not one but two very large motorbike events per year - we have the Aby Enduro at one end of the village in September and a Trials event in the quarry just outside the opposite end of the village in January. Banovallum MCC are kind enough to sign me onto their lists and let me loose on their events.

Aby Enduro 2011, Banovallum Motorcycle Club

The Enduro race (two two-hour sessions over a rough track of a few miles) takes place in the fields belonging to the farm that borders my sister's homestead (Pear Tree Log). A few folk in the village complain, other folk have been known to exercise their inalienable rights to use the public paths in the fields (and misunderstanding their perfectly legal temporary suspension), dodging the competitors - but most folk love it, turn out to see it and appreciate that it's just for the day. The Banovallum Club run the events like military clockwork - and all unnecessary noise is prevented, for example the competitors are not allowed to spend hours outside the race times zipping around, much though they would love to!

Aby Enduro 2011, Banovallum Motorcycle Club

In late summer I get to stroll out of the sister's back gate and wallop - I am at work. Sheer luxury - especially when compared to the usual mud-plugging, dust-eating middle-of-nowhere lunch-from-a-pocket settings of other events! At some events the courses are so strung-out that I have to join the convoy of St. John's ambulances and support vehicles and persuade my non-4x4 around the courses to find a half-way point and park, just to have a chance of making around the course in time. Those little drives have stories of their own to tell - getting off a cross-country course in a road-car is ten times harder after a hundred motorbikes have spent four hours tearing it up in the rain... To date I've only needed rescue the once!

The Aby Enduro takes place just after harvest, the farmers very kindly delaying ploughing as necessary. It is less muddy than some events and takes in the abandoned railway track as well as some demanding crossings over the many ditches, both wet and dry, between fields. Top speeds across the open fields can be... impressive - and my part is to stand in the middle and peer through a viewfinder, trusting to my hi-vis jacket, my (non-theist's special) guardian "angel" and to the riders.

Aby Enduro 2011, Banovallum Motorcycle Club

As with all events I have to keep on the move and I usually stumble around the course three or four times, looking for different backgrounds. During a full day I usually take between 1,000 and 1,500 photographs of which some 400 to 600 will be ones that I will let see the light of day - capturing a bike passing at 70-80-90mph is an accurate science, but my reactions are not so exact! I have to try my hardest to be ready to catch all of the riders at some point and if someone does a brillliant trick outside the range of my lens then it's missed for all time. In the course of the day I have to zig-zag across the track many times - picture a man with the look of an uncertain OAP trying to choose his moment to run across the A1 with a bag of shopping and using a zimmer frame ... The BMCC rumour that I close my eyes, scream and just run like a Teletubby flailing arms and lenses may have some substance to it.

Catching the breeze

Once the event is over then I have a couple of days work to sort out the chaff and put some touches on the ones I like before releasing the images into the wild. Many of the riders wonder why it takes so long but then it does take a wee bit of time trawling through 1,500 photos, backing them up, editing and uploading to the electric interwebnetonlinethingy.

Self-imposed rule Number 1 is about the jumps or yumps - I never stay at any one for more than ten minutes. It is a matter of pride with the riders to perform higher and higher and more and more unlikely jumps and stunts if they know that I am hiding just over the ridge. There have been many splendid occasions when clocking me at just the critical moment has sent bike one way and rider t'other (and usually both about six inches either side of me, at very high velocity). This has a deleterious effect on my assessment of my life expectancy and, occasionally, on the riders ability to father children - try to not picture the chap above making a bad landing... The female riders are far too sensible to indulge in such nonsense as amusing me and are a lot safer to photograph!

This leads to rule Number 1½ - if a rider drops it then I make a point of not seeing and, unless I know for sure they won't mind, of not photographing it. No-one wants their mates to see them picking up the pieces or hopping around the Lincolnshire countryside with tears in their eyes and hands full of dented, er, of bruised.. um, hands full of ... anatomy.

Is it fun? Yeah, just a little bit.

Would I do it for free? Well, in the case of this local club, if no-one buys the images, I do!

Roll on 2012 Season.

Vintage weddings and things

2012-01-03T09:52:00.004Z

London, Southbank

There are delights - and horrors - to being a photographer, and a few special problems with sometimes being a vintage photographer who uses authentic equipment from 1895 - 1975. The photograph above was one of the delights. Taken with a 1930s Zeiss (shown bottom left), this couple were trolling around the Southbank Centre and wandered into my primitive studio - and fell automatically into the most fantastic pose! Not only that, but they took their cue from me and held while I changed cameras, lenses and positions. I got the impression that they had been photographed once or twice before...

One of the major problemettes with the vintage equipment is with the so-called "pace of life" today. My theory is that no more actual "life" flows past than ever used to, today's average "life" is just thinner and flows more freely and quickly. Modern attention spans are... but anyway, that's quite enough of that, let's move on.

The Zeiss is relatively easy to use and almost as quick as a modern digital provided that I've done my preparation and my brain is in gear - but the big "view camera" or "field camera" that you see above on the [modern - elfin saferty rules] tripod is as slow as it gets. Whether portraits or weddings or events folk love it, squeal with delight or terror as I disappear under the velvet dark-cloth and then get up and rush off, thinking that the deed has been done!

I spend half my professional life running after customers and using a lasso to drag them back.

The view camera is a mahogany body with a (mismatched, modern - 1920s) lens at the front with a (mismatched, modern, 1920s) clockwork shutter, bellows to make a tunnel between the lens and a gizmo at the back that holds either a ground-glass screen or a film back. You often see these things being abused and misused in films and TV - the photographer disappears under the cloth, shouts "cheese" and lets off a flash - when at that stage, matey boy, there would/should be nothing whatsoever to be seen under the cloth! There's no viewfinder as with a modern camera.

Stage 1 - pose. Stage 2 - disappear under the cloth to check the upside down back to front image and focus. Focus is done by physically moving the lens back and forth. Stage 3 - calculate exposure by rule of thumb, thumbwheel gizmo and/or modern magic. Stage 4 - set clockwork shutter and aperture. Stage 5 - change ground glass focus screen for film back. Stage 6 - check that nothing has changed or moved. Stage 7 - remove dark slide to let the camera see the film. Stage 8 - with no need to be anywhere under the cloth, there's nowt there you can see or change, trigger the shutter and any flash. Stage 9 - push in the dark slide to protect the film. Stage 10 - thank the sitters, if sitters there still be, cross your fingers that you did everything properly and maybe go through the stages all over again just in case... Stage 11 - develop the film and print and scan it into the digital age.

Most modern folk tend to spot a shiny squirrel or some other distraction by about halfway through Stage 2!

Meanwhile some two dozen passers by have wandered up beind their iRaspberry phones or their Smart-Apple Pods or whatever, pointed, clicked, applied the "vintage it" app and wandered off to see something new.

This is a major problem at weddings - it's virtually impossible to hold anyone's attention for more than 1/8000th of a second - so I cheat a bit. Same camera, same equipment, but I just change the order of events. Instead of putting the camera where it needs to be to see the people I put the camera where I want it, do most of the steps before I shout "Oh I say - would you mind awfully saying fromage over here for a moment?" and pose the people where they need to be for the camera. It cuts down the incidence of getting back home, developing the films and finding Bride, Groom, Vicar and Families-in-Lore all beautifully framed and focused and exposed and all looking down at their iPhones.

I always presume that they are Tweeting, FaceBookin, TXTing or eMailing about how slow this chuffing vintage photographer idiot is and how they should have hired a modern one one who had a clue about what he was doing...

p.s. I love it really!

www.vintagephotographer.co.uk

The Going Gently 10 Things About Me Challenge...

2012-01-01T09:31:00.001Z

I'm the scrawny one.

Well, Going Gently started it, my sister Pear Tree Log stepped up to the challenge and, this being the first day of 2012 in my neck of the woods, it's time I found ten things worth confessing to too. So, in the strict random order that my hind-brain faxed them to fore-brain and sent them to my fingers:

1. I lived in a zoo for the best part of a year (and skipped school for the year too, with parental consent and connivance) - Banham Zoo in Norfolk. It was a little bit smaller in those days, started out as a private zoo to amuse the owner's business associates. We had temporary accommodation between the bear cages and the deer enclosure. Every night we went to sleep to a chorus of howler monkeys and gibbons. The village school was officially rated as "Useless" so my parents just let me play in the zoo all day every day - I loved it and learned far more than I might otherwise!

2. Once, while working for the computer firm EDS in the early nineteen-nineties I accidentally destroyed one of H.M. Government's accounting systems - and incurred fines of £2,000 a MINUTE, for three and a half days... That was how long it took me to fix what I had broken (and I got the biggest cash bonus I'd ever had for getting back the system I had broken in the first place - so unfair, but I took it!). The eventual penalty was negotiated down to half a million quid and a lot of "free" service from EDS. Lovely. I had two hours of sleep during those three days - and I woke up suddenly knowing how to fix it, having dreamed the solution!

3. For charity I once abseiled down a twelve story building. It was a fantastic experience but it was also the only time I have actually seen my legs shaking. Halfway down a big building on the end of a thin rope is as far away as it is possible to get from any other human being on the planet. And I managed to land on my feet, not my backside - there was an audience.

4. Despite being vegan I once swallowed a fly on Ayers Rock. Having climbed to the top I decided that everyone around me was looking tired and might feel better if I put on a distracting display of exhaustion, so I laid flat on my back, wheezing and zzzzzzzzzzzip - the biggest, fattest, juiciest bluebottle in Australia disappeared down my throat. To most folk it must have looked as though I had struggled to the top of the Aboriginal's biggest and most sacred rock only to vomit on it while on all fours... So much for "Dreamtime".

5. I spoke more Cantonese than English when I was the age you see in the photograph shown above. This was useful for the parents, because I could translate from Cantonese into pidgin English for them. When we moved back to England no-one else spoke it so the skill atrophied.

6. I am only alive today because of the incredible bravery of an un-named, unknown (to me) RAF Pilot - we lived in Hartford close to RAF Wyton and the American base Alconbury, and this fantastic chap stayed in his jet when the engine conked out to make sure that it didn't crash on the school that I happened to be in at the time. Thank you, thank you, thank you Sir. I was also the only kid in the school looking out of the window before the crash and witnessed his demise in a mushroom-shaped fireball and a pit of wreckage about thirty feet deep about a hundred and fifty yards beyond my classroom window. The scary part for me was being interviewed in the Headmaster's office by the crash investigators.

7. When I was a young sprogling I was so weedy and sickly sometimes that if someone closed the door of the room that I was in I was trapped! I was too weedy to turn your average door handle. Moving to the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides sorted that one out! I have a few weird memories of strange (to me) clinics but no idea what the medical problem was. All I can remember is that my bones seemed to hurt as though with pins and needles if I tried anything hard. What a wuss! I had a perfectly ordinary childhood though, whatever it was didn't seem to affect much other than leaving me with those few weird memories.

8. One of my work-commutes used to involve three motorways twice or often more a day - M61, M6 and M55 - usually at unsociable and/or rush hours. On one particular occasion I was - like the two dozen or so other cars in our impromptu convoy - on autopilot and not thinking at all. Driving through multi-lane roadworks I and the other two dozen idiot drivers followed the big lorry at the head of our hold-up into the roadworks. The first we all knew about it (baaaaa! baaaaaa!) was when the going suddenly got very rough and we were on the wrong side of the cones and flashing yellow markers... and no roadway, just the rock hardcore they lay as foundations. Then, to add motoring nightmare to motoring horror, we all discovered that the car at the back end of our convoy was a Police Patrol - on came the blue strobes. Most cars stopped, very meekly, to be booked ... while I and a couple of other drivers reckoned that Mr Policeman probably hadn't recorded our registration numbers yet and might have his hands full enough. We smashed very unsympathetically up through the layers of half-built tarmac and harcore underlay, through the cones and tapes and screeched off. Fortunately, the Police stayed to book the two dozen others for, presumably, driving while asleep, while I and my fellow Chancers made off at very high speed. Sometimes the lions go for the easier, if less tasty, meat.

9. On the subject of cars... I can perform a proper full "J-Turn" (or "Rockford Turn"), a 180° change of direction from slamming it into reverse to sliding the car around and accelerating back the way I just arrived without the car stopping. Automatic and manual gearbox (although I am out of practice now of course). My family only ever see me driving like an Old Biddie these days, and mostly, I do. In my younger years I completed the Police Advanced Driving course of the era, part-time over about ten weeks - and drove like a nutter.

10. I have looked a County Court Judge in the eye and lied while under oath (but it was a very "white lie"). NB., if pressed on this matter I shall lie again! After all, I have experience...

OK - who's next?

Talking smoke alarms

2011-12-30T15:40:00.000Z

My smoke alarms are the sort that shout extremely loudly in an American accent - "Fire! Fire! Fire!" or "Carbon Monoxide! Carbon Monoxide!" or "Low BATTERY! Low BATTERY!" and even "TOO LATE - YOUR DONKEY* IS TOAST FROM COAST TO COAST, JUST KISS YOUR DONKEY* GOODBYE, SUCKER!".

(* Actually they shout "ass" but a. I'm English and b. translating "ass" into "arse" might be too rude if Mitch's Mother the Dowager Duchess wanders by.)

It's crazy. All I really need them to say is ... "COOKING! COOKING! IT'S JUST ABOUT READY! COME AND GET IT IF YOU DARE! WHITE SMOKE MEANS IT'S COOKING - BLACK SMOKE MEANS IT'S DONE!"

That's what they really mean anyway. They're all just too polite to say so.

You'd think that in this day and age at least the emergency technology would be truthful.

On a more positive note, my (ancient, pre-politically correct) talking alarm clock (I am more short-sighted than a bat) just says comforting things in Generic Knockoff-English like "Ha ha ha - you gotta now up get" and "Sleep over - you get lazy arse up now" and "Tee-hee-hee it really Sunday but I wake you normal time anyway - good joke hey?" and "Ouch - why you hit SNOOZE so hard?".

God, how I miss the staff.

Horse Whisperers

2011-12-29T13:58:00.001Z

I had heard the term "Horse whisperer" long before I met one - and then I was convinced within moments. NB - in a lot of the images the gent looks as though he has a very "Third Reich-esque" moustache; I could not persuade him to abandon his wireless PA microphone with its little black foam cover tucked under his nose... sorry!

This gentleman is Adam Shereston and he can make a horse sit down, stand up, roll over, dance like a puppet or even just stand and wait quietly with one leg in the air. The impressive thing is that he does this, not by wrestling the horse to the ground, using pepper spray, withholding equine pocket-money or even staring into its eyes like Alligator Dundee and his water buffalo, but just by adjusting his own body-language...

As soon as he enters the horse's field of vision (i.e. from one horizon to the other) the horse is aware of him and reacts to his presence and, since Adam is doing what he does very deliberately, the horse is effectively already under his control. Without a rope he can stop the horse or make it walk, canter or mimic any of the repertoire from the Ministry of Silly Horse Walks. With a rope he can make it cross its legs and walk sideways until next Christmas and be happy to be doing so.

Horses just seem to spot him and then are very careful indeed to keep their beadie eyes on him - and not because they are scared but just because he walks, stands, talks and moves in a way that they understand and respect. His effect lasts longer than his presence - once he explains to a horse what some other idiot human wants them to do, or how to do it, or points out a better way of behaving in general to them, the horse remembers.

On the Beaufort "Does He Do That" Scale this gentleman has a "How the Hell" rating of "Buggered if I know" or higher. I saw him look at a horse and change the direction it was walking in, repeatedly - left, right, forwards, backwards. Nothing else, no rope, no wave, he just looked. It was amazing. I gained the impression that the horses didn't know how what was going on was going on either but, rather like the rest of us, nor did they particularly care. The nearest I have seen to this effect in the Human World is that all-too familiar feeling that Fundamentally Unloveable People sometimes get at parties when someone fabulous walks into the room and all they want to do is giggle and agree to anything, so long as they are being talked to.

~~People~~ Horses just seemed to go all coy, put down their drinks and agree that the world would be a better place if they just danced a little jig or walked backwards in a circle and then stood comatose for ten minutes.

It's not a totally unique skill though - I have a very similar effect myself on horses. As soon as I get close enough they knock me to the ground and stand on me. No commands or training necessary. I wave "Cooey Mr/Ms Horse!" and they say "Ooh - 'ello" and splat... Adam Shereston is a horse whisperer, I am a horse toy. We fill different social niches, that's all.

If you get a chance to go and see a horse whisperer in action I'd recommend that you do so - it's magical!

Rural photogaphers, quantum mechanics and eigenfunctions

2011-12-28T19:26:00.002Z

Damn those BT overhead cable interference patterns...

There is a lot of quantum physics involved in photographing a nice rural marathon (and a lot of very fast walking carrying a backpack of camera gear). Rather as any observation of a quantum state has an effect on the observed state itself, so photographing folk has an effect on the image of those folk. Until the price of Cloaks of Invisibility comes down to jobbing photographer levels, so shall it always be...

Thumbs up AND a bounce in her step at the halfway mark

The good thing is that - usually (although definitely not always) - the change in state is to one of Quantum Smiling, Waving and Thumbsing Up. Given that the effect cannot be avoided I usually do my best to allow for the problem by lying flat on my back in the gutter and photographing upwards, or taking a few gallumphing jog-ettes alongside or offering a few words of ~~encouragement~~ distraction. Once or twice I've hung from a tree for that special shot and, occasionally, I deliberately fall backwards into ditches (just to amuse the runners of course).

Heckling from a verge

One of the problems with marathons is that they are a bit long. I do not do "runnin" in the way that I also do lots of Not Jumpin and Not Weightlifting (unless a packet of Extra Strong Mints counts). My tactic at these events is to ignore the chaos of the start and finish line - every runner's relative and his pet panda will be jostling for elbow room there and the best to be hoped for is mediocre with backs of heads. Nope. I beg, steal, demand or (ahem) "borrow" a map of the route from the organisers and set off at an enthusiastic sashay for a few vantage points. I choose some early ones where I should capture most entrants - and I have to be careful to be able to somehow navigate across ditch, field and rooftop towards the end of the race route - to capture the runners after they have performed a large part of their task. Given my Immigration Status as "UnExercised" my route has to cunningly combine all of these points in less than full marathon distance and I also have to get everywhere BEFORE the runners. No easy task!

HUGS not DRUGS runners en route (I had to run to escape)

Aside from the obvious, the chief reason I have to beat everyone around the course is to scout out the pesky backgrounds so that as few runners as possible end up sporting lamp-posts from their heads or feature unmarried cattle mating energetically in the missionary position in the background. I also have to try to not get run down by St John driving an Ambulance or, these days, arrested as an obvious terrorist scouting targets for dirty-bombs and other exothermic protests.

No publicity please!

Depending upon who has asked for the images my own race begins as soon as the fastest runner crosses the line. Be it a wedding or a motorbike event or a corporate "do" I usually receive two or three text messages and/or emails as I drive away from the event or venue asking where [the hell] are our photos? Customers expect them to upload as they are taken and to spontaneously transform themselves into a slideshow with prices and all of the duds weeded out. Yeah. Right. I also do room-temperature fusion.

Thumbs up.

One of the funniest parts of the routine is usually someone - either in person or online later - brandishing a FaceBook album of iPhone photos of the runners who happened pass them as they sat outside the pub. Look folks - the professional's photos aren't even online yet and we already have seventy-eleven trillion "likes" on ours! Wearing the skin of an elephant helps sometimes...

The lady who won in my book - last in about an hour after everyone else.

One self-imposed task that I insist upon is to wait for the last runner home. If they have the strength and courage to run millions of miles like a loon then the least that I can do is to hang around for an hour or three to capture their mugshot. I've discovered that this is especially important because few other folk wait around! Even the organisers are usually packing up and the tail-end Charlies have to literally run the gauntlet of departing cars and minibuses.

The "winner" - the gentleman who finished the marathon first.

The "Winner" of course, is much too semi-professionally self-absorbed in his task to interact...

So, next time you run a marathon, spare a thought for the idiot with the "Press" Pass and the camera! There's a reason why he looks as ~~knackered~~ fresh as you do!

At least with marathon runners I have yet (yet) to cause yer actual nasty accidents (although more of those in a later post about photograhing motorsports...)

Mens are good with owls.

2011-12-27T08:58:00.000Z

The "F19" Bag Test.

These nice chaps are Scientifical Owl Experts. They are representatives of the many splendid Scientifical Owl Societies up and down Her Majesty's The Land. They test the Owl Wood owls for genuinenessnous just to make sure that we aren't harbouring cuckoos in drag or underfed non-bald eagles.

A good owl will give a C-Sharp when its legs are gently separated.

The F19 bag test looks awfully as though the chap is weighing the owl. Being A Man he can use the weight or, more proper, the "mass" reading suggested by the The Dangling Scales with "An Mathematical eQuation" to predict if the owl will be able to fly and, if so, how far on each of the various fuels available to owls (unleaded mice, diesel voles, bio-squirrel). In actual fact he's also checking for fakery - an owl from Taiwan or Africa when held upside down in stained canvas will stop struggling after just three or four minutes whereas your actual genuine owl will struggle for six or seven before losing interest. Ours passed with, ahem, excuse me - flying colours.

The C-Sharp man also plays the mouth organ and the spoons. He's a fully qualified "Folk Musicianist". It looks as though he's being very, very rude with that upside down owl and looking for its "Tinky-Winky" but owls (even our owls) are very difficult to sex. Even after putting on his thick spectacles and consulting the manual (with colour illustrations) he was unable to tell us whether this was an owl boy or an owl girl and the owls weren't saying either. Apparently, he says, the most reliable way is to wait and see whether they show an interest in cooking or in cars.

Our owls passed their tests and were given new licence plates, a certificate of airworthiness and a choice of lollipop from the Receptionist's Jar.

After fifteen or twenty minutes the blood had returned to their feet and they were also able to stop walking around in circles on the ground and could sit on branches (if placed carefully between two). We left them a leaflet explaining that the feelings of breathlessness, nausea and indignity would pass in a few days.

Who would have thought that owl care could be so technical and need Scientifical Men, F19 Bags and a Tuning Fork?

Lard-arsed Minister Jim Paice says today he "is in favour of hunting with dogs"

2011-12-26T16:07:00.003Z

Well, politically and morally, he does lie down with them every day (or more likely, most of the days) he claims his Parliamentary attendance allowances...

BBC story here.

Maybe I knew what I was talking about after all then?

How primitive and uncivilised does this berk have to get before he's comfortable with his masculinity (or lack thereof)?

Perhaps he thinks he's still some sort of chest-thumping hunter-gatherer with a wooden club?

Just how short is his... tenure?

Tally ruddy ho ho ho what?

2011-12-26T09:33:00.003Z

Team meeting to make sure that the hounds are all singing from the same hymnal.

Very little of life, except perhaps some of my extreme cooking, is completely black and white - and not all of it is in technicolour either. I love the spectacle of a hunt - and I despise the primitive old-fashioned cruel unfeeling idiocy of those who still hunt foxes, cats and incidental small dogs. Everyone seems to think that Huntin' with dogs was banned in 2005 when the 2004 Act came into force but... what the Act actually did was...

Chaps all over the lawn with The Hon Sir Justice Hangumall in the lead.

... to introduce the ugly spectacle of a couple of rural constables looking up at folk on horseback and agreeing that the kill was accidental/unavoidable/covered by one of the many loopholes. The black and white chequered cap gets quite worn out with doffing, yes M'Lud, yessir My Lord, yessum Chief Constable Sir. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose and other Frenchish things.

Hounds asking the way to the toilets being pointed in the right direction by Master of The Hounds, Digby Fortesque-Fnarrfnarr

I have first-hand experience of similar exchanges some two decades and more before The Act, from my days as a wussy hunt saboteur. The only difference then was that there was no pretence of exchange, it was simply orders being issued (usually "arrest that rabble" and "impound those vehicles" or "I'm going to get some of the chaps to charge and use whips now Constable, so look the other way and think of your pension"). We sabs weren't pretty (and I'm still not) but there is little so distasteful as the privileged or - worse yet - the wannabe-privileged on horseback, with whip and an unassailable attitude of "god given" rights and the virtual immunity from prosecution that money and contacts bring. Anything that likes seeing a fox torn to shreds (and that is why it's called "Hunting") is not going to baulk at physical violence towards long-haired louts, at slipping estate workers the odd fiver to slash every tyre and smash every car window (and yes, I have first-hand experience).

Chief Constable Herbert Oldschool-Clubwhat ridin' Tinkerbell.

If only these herberts would hunt politicians, television "reality" show "celebs", bankers and estate agents I'd begin a campaign to raise funds for the upkeep of the pack and poop-scoop for free. Hell, I'd close all roads and let them hunt through the lounge and the bathroom with my blessing if they were only after MEPs or Cabinet Minsters without portfolio, you know - hunting something that needs hunting down and ripping apart.

Head honcho and land-owner, Lord Sir Rear-Admiral The Right Honourable Thrash-Peasant O.B.E., K.C.G., T.T.F.N. and J.C.B., V.S.O.P.

It's England. But it's ugly. And a spectacular sight. And England. But primitive and exclusive and ugly and violent and a bit of a farce. But it's spectacular. But it's ugly. But it's England... ad infinitum.

The Reverend Blathering of the Parish of Cholmondeley on the Withers

Lovely spectacle but... no, not really. It's the fabulous-looking tail-end of the comet of landed aristocracy, and we all know that comets are portents of doom.

Keep the horses, keep the fashion statements, keep the horns, muzzle all of the hounds all of the time and then you can run around looking spectacular with my best wishes. Tally ho ho ho.

Merry Christmas! Consider yourselves very sincerely Mwuh-Mwuh'd!

2011-12-25T07:33:00.004Z

Pipsqueak

MERRY THINGY to you all!

or, as we say locally, Happy Brussels Sprouts Season!

May there be many hoof-prints on your roof, soot in your fireplace and a weird old bloke dressed in red and white passed out on the settee!

Time for brunch. Pour the sherry, Eustace.

Tis but a scratch.

2011-12-22T12:57:00.002Z

Tis but a scratch.

The Knights of Skirbeck put on a very decent show. A very decent show indeed. They are a bunch of semi-lunatic medieval re-enactors who show the modern public a taste of the Henry IV, Bolingbroke, era. They are also nice enough to let me follow them around and take the odd photograph. The fun for me lies in avoiding including modern telegraph poles, wires, cars and mobile phones in the images... and in the occasional Police raid to enforce EU Standards viz peasants carrying swords ...

Do you have a licence for that spoon, Sir?

In case you ever saw a re-enactment group and wondered, yes, the blades and armour are of iron and steel and the swords need to be de-burred after each performance, otherwise little chunks of metal get lodged in any cuts and bruises. I have seen sparks fly and - three times in two years - heard an involuntary yelp of pain (OK - of pure agony).


If the cap fits... and the cutlery matches...

When putting on a re-enactment they live in their fleet of around twenty medieval-design modern-build tents and remain in-character, even as far as cooking and clothing and sleeping arrangements. Only the beer is modern.

Tis but a toothpick...

MOPS are the lifeblood and the bane of a re-enactor's life. MOPS - Members of the Public. MOPS quite literally stick their hands into the cooking fire to "see if it is real". MOPS have been known to hit themselves and loved ones over the head with battle-axes to "see if it hurts". The favourite activity of the bandaged-head MOP is to point with a burned hand at the chicken roasting over the real fire and ask "Is that a real chicken?".

Tis me, but downside up and with the left righted and the right lefted and all of it en-smalled.

MOPS are also a good proportion of the fun. Sometimes they are like zombies, shuffling past between food-stops. Most of the time they are as scary as the knights. One of the shows I covered for these guys was quite close to a retirement home. The staff, seeing the encampment and hearing the clash of steel on steel, sensed a quiet hour or three for themselves and wheeled, carried, pushed and cajoled all of their residents out to the side of the roped off arena. Extension leads were run out to power iron lungs and plastic bowels. Tartan rugs were dispensed like beta-blockers and Aspirin. Commodes were switched to "Not in the Station" modes and guide dogs got to take a satisfying dump on real grass for the first time in months. Seeing the retired folk arrive transported me right back to my plague days - a rag-tag mob of zimmer-frames, saline drips on wheeled stands and spilled tapioca pudding on sensible tweeds.

Well, other than possibly a cornered traffic warden, there is no creature on earth more fierce than the walking-stick enabled "I bloody fought for you in the X/Y/Z War" pensioner. The younger MOPS were beaten back and the arena lined five or six deep with a sea of the rheumy eyes and blue rinses and hearing aids and wooden "best black oak" NHS false teeth of the OAPs.

They were one of the most amazing crowds! When the combat practice began it was as though the sporting philosophy of dear, gentle, ancient Rome had been transported to rural fifteenth-century Lincolnshire. Heamorrhoid rings, dead cats and incontinence pads filled the air as they started their own (A Knight's tale) "We will rock you" clap-stamp and bayed for spilled blood. Whenever a Skirbeck re-enactor was "killed" and fell to the ground (for a rest) they quickly learned to do so out of walking-stick poking range. 'Get up and fight you lily-livered spotty-pated ill-nurtured clot-pole!' was the usual expression of sympathy followed by the occasional kick of encouragement to the head.

Just goes to show, dunnit? I have a new-found respect for anyone who works in a Retirement Home. Given the inmate's lack of respect for burly chaps and lithe chapesses wielding axes, swords, daggers and poking-poles I have no idea how the staff got them back indoors. Possibly by leaving a trail of fresh meat back to their rooms?

How to stop two tons of charging Heavy Horse.

2011-12-21T09:25:00.000Z

Two tons of horse rolling at an unstoppable 6 - 7 mph

I've never really clicked with horses, the design of the regular horse seems so flawed that they don't look elegant to me - the centre of gravity is far too high and the legs far too spindly. The last horse I rode was about two thousand hands high and rather aptly named "Satan". Satan took me on his "Scream all you like, you're not getting off unless you have a parachute" Tour of all of his favorite mud-wallows, fences, ditches and walls of the Lake District. When he'd finished with me he took me back to the stables, threw me off in the yard and stood on my foot.

However. Just down the road from Owl Towers is the Northcote Heavy Horse Centre - a rescue home for Heavy Horses (we used to call them all "Shires" in my day but there are many, many splendid variations). In a very real sense the place reminds me of my club - chaps find their way there after a lifetime of abuse, spend a few ecstatically happy years being spoiled rotten in the reading room and are then wheeled out by the undertakers trailing gout bandages and bar bills. It's much the same with horses at Northcote.

Every horse there has been abandoned, neglected or abused and has a story to tell. Every single horse there is a loveable great lump with a character all of its own - and I discovered something. Heavy horses: Percherons; Clydesdales; Suffolks; Orpingtons; Derbyshire Redcaps; Norfolk Greys... they all look "right", everything is in proportion, I am not afraid of them breaking! Their legs aren't spindly!

At Northcote the horses get to lounge around some days and on others they play with Her Majesty's Public to raise funds - in this case what we have 'ere, by goin' all medieval on us and doing "Quintain" and horse-back cabbage-head slashing and things. As a photographer I get to step over the "Police Line - Do NOT Cross" tape and the Public/Private fence divide and I see things up close from different angles, usually dodging among the action in fear of my limbs. The horses absolutely love putting on shows. Seriously so. Two tons of horse can also be... full of character.

At one show I hid myself at the far end of the Quintain lanes away from the public, my lithe body cunningly disguised as an electrical cable behind a telegraph pole, and screwed on my favourite 300mm lens to get some shots of the hosses doin' what looks like jousting but involves a swinging target, not another 'orse and rider. The crowd are cheering, the hooves are thundering, the target clanking and then... (I think it was) Harvey ... spots me and my camera ...

He stopped mid-display and trotted over bringing his helpless knight in armour with him and from previous experience and also the "Hepburn" poses the horse was striking I knew exactly what he wanted. While the PA announced to the crowd of several hundred baying, paying public that the display was being interrupted (and exactly why and by whom) I had to grab another camera with a shorter lens, leap from my "cover" and photograph aforesaid two tons of horse until he was happy. All very "Mr DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up". Highly embarrassing (for me, not the horse). Who would have thought it though? A horse that loves the sound of a camera in paparazzi mode.

You do get some truly magical moments with these gentle(ish) giants. In search of an image of a horse charging towards the camera I stood on a bale of hay so that I was roughly eye-to-eye with the wee beastie while he was repeatedly charged at me. Every time (again, I think, I'm not good with names when in fear of my life) Harvey charged he thundered to a halt a little closer to me, stopping no more than 12 - 18 inches from me, nose to nose and with a very mischievious look in his eye. He knew exactly what was required and how to make it more fun for himself. For my part I didn't flinch, didn't squeal and just hoped that Harvey appreciated how enthusiastically my increasingly burdensome laundry needs were joining in his game. He'd charge, slide to a halt and I got to tickle him on the nose, then off he went again.

Getting action shots of them can be tricky, panning requires a shutter speed of 1/50th or more (they move, but not like racehorses). The shot above is one of my favourites and was used by The Lincolnshire Journal (Homes of Distinction) when they ran an article recently on the centre. Just enough to blur background and horse-hooves and yet let me keep head and rider sharp. Yee-hah!

Lincolnshire Journal

Marilyn Monroe's boyfriend was WRONG.

2011-12-19T08:53:00.001Z

NB., this, as with all of the other peculiar experiences and "ghost" accounts on the blog, actually happened, it's fact, not the fiction that is fenced off over in the column to your right.

A gentleman usually known as "Marilyn Monroe's bit of brainy fluff" reckoned (incorrectly in my view) that the top speed of the universe is some 670,616,481 miles an hour faster than I have ever driven any car I've ever owned. The weirdest thing about Einstein's conclusions is how he knew what cars I would be driving long after Marilyn had sent him to an early grave with a smile on his blackboard.

Einstein is wrong (and I call my usual witness, Pear Tree Log, and a fresh witness, Nephew-the-Younger, who were both in the car at the time). The car of choice for our Land Speed Record was a very pleasant and very competent but very domestic Citroen AX 1.4 Diesel...

I loved mine - its non-relativistic average was to return 80mpg at 80mph.

As part of our years of exhibition sales PTL and I thought it might be quite fun to go and visit our artists and trawl some new ones in the English county of Lancashire. We made a few days worth of appointments and set off a-visiting. Well, as you will know from your bathroom mirror, artists are a peculiar lot...

For one appointment in Preston we climbed to the fourth floor of a house that had been divided into flats - even the staircases had been divided, right down the middle, using plywood and MDF. It was not a comforting place. We arrived at the artists studio and entered.... only to find a very "highly strung" chap explaining to us that he only painted '...dentist's chairs, straps and large knives ...' Seriously, that was his only subject matter. We moved out pretty quickly, but nowhere near the speed of light (it took a lot of turning sideways to navigate the stairs and landings).

We visited another chap who was a phenomenally skilled artist and had deservedly served for years as portrait painter to the Saudi Royals. He was a complete, barking, arrogant twerp who only wanted worship, not agents. We felt less welcome in his house than we had in Mr Dentist's Chairs studio. When he failed to deliver (or explain or even make contact) we later gave him "White space" at every exhibition - his portrait and details with our explanation of why there was nothing else to be seen...

We saw timid and shy and retiring artists who produced the most outrageously brilliant work. We also had to be kind and gentle to chaps who "did" "installation artwork" in their back gardens using cardboard boxes and sticky tape. We saw work that put paint-by-numbers to shame. They were a varied bunch.

One of our appointments was in the middle of Manchester, a forty minute drive from my (then) home... and it was with this appointment that the speed of infinity came into play. I drove us onto the M61 (my house nestled between the M6 and the M61), put the car into motorway mode and wallop - we were sat at traffic lights in the middle of Manchester. Instantly. At least twenty-five minutes had disappeared - and we were twenty-five plus our usual contingency of ten, a total of thirty-five minutes early for our appointment. Elapsed time of journey - zip, zero, nada.

This wasn't some "oh we were talking" moment lost in heated conversation; one moment we were starting the journey and the next we were in the middle of the city, sitting at traffic lights. There were three of us in the car, it was broad daylight, we were all sober and of reasonably sound mind, all of us were instantly puzzled and there were no weird physical effects, just there one minute and many miles away the next. We were still mid-starting sentences in the conversation we had been beginning as we pootled down the slip-road onto the M61. Watches and the car clock all agreed on indicated time. It's a journey I had done hundreds of times and whatever time of day there is no way to get from my (then) home to Manchester's heart in the time we did it.

Most peculiar indeed.

I've always assumed that space and time were lumpy - we must have just driven through an exceptionally large lump! A mobius blip in the string of existence? I wish it had been a longer journey and bigger blip so that I could have checked how much fuel we had or hadn't used. It added to our already varied few days!

Maybe the hand of some giant sky-fairy deity had come down through the clouds to play with his Dinky cars? Vroom ruddy vroom is all I can say - and Einstein? You were wrong!

Carnivorous Wombles at Gunby Hall

2011-12-17T16:02:00.001Z

The greenhouse. Usually the scene of the crime. Associated with the potting and re-potting of young Maids-Scullery and Maids-Personal.

How many kinds of sweet flowers grow
In an English coun-try ga-a-a-rden?
We'll tell you now of some that we know
Those we miss you'll sure-ly pa-a-a-rdon ...

Gunby Hall in Lincolnshire in late Summer. Many splendid things grow in an English country garden: rickets; public school fodder; clog and morris dancers; spitfire pilots; poets with a penchant for the melons, the cauli and the melancholy. To appreciate an awful lot of them though it is necessary to be wearing cricket whites and to be pushing some crumbling old harridan in a wickerwork bathchair towards a tea of sandwiches, sponge cake and a choice of Indian or China. I only know a few of the Latin names and have given those below where appropriate.


Trees are wise old creatures. This one tends to reach down with a branch and pinch any ample behind wandering below. Then it looks very innocent and blinks its huge single eye.

This is the tree that Queen Victoria once hid in for three days when the Cavaliers were searching for her after the Battle of Tottering-on-the-Wold. H.M. Q.V. and her seven maids lived on chestnuts and squirrels that they baked over a small Primus stove in the branches. It was the bathroom facilities that amused her the least.

Corners are a vital element of English gardens. They must be right-angled and suitable for absent-minded musing.

Corners in an English garden are mystical and dangerous places, often home to Lupin-Nymphs and carnivorous Wombles. Should you find that you are losing gardeners at an unholy rate of knots then check your corners, for this is surely where their remains will be found. Carnivorous Wombles are also known to take small children and liberties with foreigners wearing culottes (that is to say with the foreigners who may be wearing culottes, not the carnivorous Wombles).

The sun dial. Bally useless at night. An English sun dial remains fixed of course while the sun moves about appropriately.

It is the responsibility of the lady of the house to demonstrate to guests how to move around the garden without wearing out the grass. This is usually achieved by dangling from the overhead archways while carrying any loose children or small dogs between the teeth. Sometimes it is necessary simply to hop from sculpture to sculpture. The better-balanced and higher noble ranks are able to move about thus while also taking blunderbuss pot-shots at pheasant, wild peasant and Clergy.

Antipasti Chuffingreatflowerius Yellowpettels nearing the end of season.

Towards the end of Summer many parts of an English garden lose focus and tend towards a colourful blur. This is quite normal and the only civilised way to avoid unsightly dead-heads or withered leaves. English aristocracy tend to do the same thing immediately after the wicker bathchair stage of life. A few days after writing their final Wills & Testaments the aged English tend to go all fuzzy and then they just fade away into the portraits in the Hall or Gallery. It's really rather tidy.

Prince worried about what happens when doves cry but the Englishman is more concerned about trees sneezing.

It is a legal requirement set down by the invading Icelandic King Magna Cattarh (reign: 0800 to about a quarter to eleven and soon after Alfred burned the cakes) that any garden over seven and one cable of marine acres should be fitted with a "Seekers" fence '... soe plaeced as to allowe fore the natturall separation of goode and badde appels ande futur pop-songes ande lyricse ...' Any Lord or Baronet in residence on the second day of Sandlemass with unmarried daughter or daughters must, if necessary, shake the tree to encourage the ancient process while aforesaid daughters ' ... myst singe and crye allowd - oh wen will the goode [crabbe] appels fall onn mye syde of the fence? ...'

Reddishpetalwotsit Blackmiddlyum looking delicate following an afternoon shower. And a morning deluge and an overnight monsoon (English Summer).

Shop Steward from the Florals & Borders Union addressing assembled flowers and calling for strike action.

Thistlethingy Brownandbluegreyish to use the full Latin term. Wonderful.

Gunby Hall - Built in 1700 by Sir William Massingberd, saved by The National Trust in 1944 and now the home of the Shenton-Harold family, this Grade I listed William and Mary Mansion sits in the heart of the Lincolnshire Wolds. With over 8 acres of stunning formal gardens and surrounded by 1500 acres of parkland, Gunby Hall makes a perfect and unforgettable visit. No idea if they have any ghosts, but they do have fantastic gardens and a house to make you weep pure lime mortar. Tea facilities are available and there is a compost heap for those visiting with the infirm. Well worth a visit sometime.

More daguerreotypes here on FaceBook - might take a double-click but should let you in without an account.

Igor says god bless us one and all (no, really, he does...)

2011-12-16T11:57:00.002Z

Tiny Igor (it's pronounced "Eegor") has no legs or tail.

Today I took one look at the weather, decided that ridin' was off the menu and decided to bung up the old Crimbo decs, what?

Here they are, I've managed to cram them all into one photo

Anyhow, meet IGOR the Christmas Decoration (pronounced "Eegor the Christmas Decoration" of course, the Eastern Europeans are so sensitive about such things). He's been settled safely and snuggly down into his little green working-sock hanging from the clock over the roaring fireplace. Igor is one Imperial inch tall (since the operation) and his sock is roughly three Imperial inches of felt loveliness. (I am thinking of making these sleeping socks in sizes for the fuller figure and marketin' 'em meself - I quite fancy dangling snugly from a wall or shelf all day, well out of the way of the servants, dorgs and draughts.)

Just a scant year ago Igor used to be a fit and healthy young mouse working on the estate, walkin' the cats, testin' cheeses in the kitchens, occasionally sorting out the clogs on the stairs in our old holiday mill near Amsterdam. Used to run the odd office errand too - willin' and eager, do you see?

Well it's the usual story, I asked him to deliver an urgent "squeal and a gusset-strainin' leap onto a chair" to old Mrs Harrison in the village, threw him the keys to the Bentley and thought nothing more of it. Nothing more, that is, until the phone rang - the Village Constable. Seems Igor had been at the cooking sherry since just about birth, lost control on a bend and parked himself in a corner of the Railway Tavern. Got totally rat-arsed and we all know how that looks on a mouse.

Sad, sad story. Sacked him on the spot of course and that's why he's got no legs and now works as a Live Christmas Decoration - says he had to eat his legs and tail during the year of unemployment to avoid starvin' or something. Whining stuff and nonsense I suppose, par for the charity case and such. No idea what he's going to do when I lay him off again in the new year.

I suppose he's always got his ears to fall back on if he can get his tongue around that far.

Splendid decoration anyway and ruddy cheap, considerin'. I've trained him to say "God bless us one and all" every time someone walks past.

Bit squeaky but no way to get him to hold a megaphone you see?

Don't just stand there Mr Mayor - HANG SOMETHING!

2011-12-15T09:06:00.001Z

The very first tentative exhibition sale by "Saxby Wymondham".

It was in the function room above the library in the Lincolnshire market town of Louth and involved a wee bit of planning and work aforehand...

Mid nineteen-nineties. The first of six that year in Lincolnshire, Lancashire and Manchester. The artwork came from all corners of the country. Well, when I say "came" it was more a case of "we fetched". Items from a fiver to £12,000.

Nothing was ever to be hung flat on a wall - so yours truly built 65 stained wood adjustable easels of various sizes from genteel and titchy to the nine-foot tall industrial wallahs you see between the columns. I built the columns too - industrial drainpipe and polystrene. Behind every item was a neutral bamboo screen hung on a system that - yep, more woodwork. We had mobile brick walls, metal racks with chains for the avant garde, potted plants around the twee and a six-foot tall Celtic cross made out of polystyrene and given seven coats of fake stone paint. We had ivy creeping, we had a live trio playing in one corner and music tailored to the artwork playing when the trio were resting, we had... so much energy and enthusiasm!

Elaine made our corporate protective bags for transporting hundreds of items in, sourced artwork, sourced food and drink, designed and printed cards, did a vast amount of driving around, unseen donkey-work and solicited. Damned punctuation, ruddy full stop in the wrong place, meant to read: ...and solicited the support of local "celebs" and officials. Plus a billion other things I've fogotten about from arranging framing to pricing. Actually, what the hell did I do apart from a bit of woodwork???

The opening night was an all-ticket affair to raise money for charity and our selection of very local English cheeses, nibbles, fruit and wines was served on a hundred and fifty "artists paint palettes" complete with food-standard daubs of "paint". Guess who made the eating-palette plates? The ribbon-cutting was to be performed by the Mayor of Louth and the nice gentleman duly turned up ten minutes early - to find that we were running a little behind schedule (it was the first time we'd ever done it...)

He appeared in the doorway, gold chains of office a-swinging, highest-elected town official face beaming and my sister, Pear Tree Log, took one look and said, somewhat forcibly:

'Don't just stand there - HANG SOMETHING!'

To his eternal credit and our undying gratitude he rolled up his sleeves and started work.

Nice man.

We opened (just, very just) on time. My Aphroditean niece was blackmailed into being a waitress for the night and I remember her coming back into the kitchen a few times, closing her eyes, counting backwards from a hundred and whispering that if just one more hairy old letch patted her etcetera-etcetera or snapped his fingers for service she was going to put the tray somewhere where a surgeon would take time to find it.

Happy days, I suppose - and not a single ghost or strange happening to be had at this venue!

Except one... During the frantic set-up I put a couple of potted plants down while I sorted out something else and then promptly forgot about them. One was on the floor and one was in the middle of a table, both ill-placed and ungainly in their abandonment. Everyone else assumed that I had placed them there in some fit of an artistic flourish and didn't - or more likely daren't - query them, and I was too busy to notice them for the three days we were open. So there they stayed until we packed away and I asked what the hell they were doing where they were. Even H.M. Public must have been working and walking around them,

My conclusion is that I was, and probably still am, an OGRE.

Our fairy has legs that go ALL the way up before they become cheeky.

2011-12-14T15:33:00.002Z

The season of [temporary] goodwill to ~~all~~ some men is upon us again and Norway have made arrangements with the Head Gardener and Under-Butler regarding delivery of our Christmas Trees.

Inspired by the Wartime Housewife who is today asking - with a splendiferous prize involved - what she intends sticking on top of her tree - we at Owl Towers have begun the Interviews for the Seasonal Position of Head Fairy.

I have never actually seen the top of our tree - it tends to get lost in the low cloud cover that predominates in the main hallway - but every year we employ several fairies and some ugly bwutes from the stables install them for us. They work a "continental shift" system with food and lodging (somewhere in the tree, usually) included. The going rate is fourteen shillings sixpence less tax and supply of costume.

The question is, what exactly makes a good tree-top fairy? It used to be a question of balance but since the advent of duct tape that has become so much less important. Mother used to swear by an affinity for sugar-plums and Father used to interview selected candidates in private so, other than a certain willing spirit and length of leg, we have no idea what his criteria were. In these times of high drug use in the village we always advertise for a festive something that won't drop its needles and can get by without a pot. What, I ask, other than the application fee in cash and a Licence to Beam, should be on an applicant's Curriculum Færie?

Furthermore, what - and you may wish to answer on the blogg of Ms Wartime Housewife here, since I am not offering a prize while she is - what, I ask, do most of you have at the top of your indoor 60' Spruces, Pines or Firs? We do so wish to keep ourselves a la mode du jour do you see? It's so easy to fall behind the fashion and rely upon tradition and before you know it the Smythe-Jjoneses have quite left one in their wake in terms of yule decoration.

Should I stick with something Daddy would have approved of or should I telephone Herod's Departmental Stores and ask for something in an "Star"?

Goose-killer at large in London's Olympic Waterways

2011-12-13T16:23:00.001Z

Aunty Beeb is awash with distressing tales today (and I don't refer here to the inadequate little twerps murdering folk in Belgium). Something is making geeses - goosies - big river birds - disappear so swiftly that they are just pulled under without a sound. News item here.

Now, before we all panic about the chaos this will cause for the synchronised swimming once this beast gets a taste for anything in a waterproof bobble-hat and a nose-peg - Doris? Doris? Where the hell are you Doris? Doris - you've broken the formation! - let us consider the matter dispassionately.

In my extensive experience of aquatic avian phenomena viz no longer being in the place they was a moment afore, this will likely have one of three rational exlanations.

1. I was educated in the sixties when free-expression, being like a tree and pupil-choice were the norm and I have watched enough Hollywooden "movies" (films to you and moi) to know that this is most likely happening because a rift in space-time has opened up and some prehistoric sabre-toothed goose-biter has swum through and is feeding. No biggy. A crack team of experts from some unknown Government Agency will sort it.

2. Gas. Methane. It's the way the ships sink in the Bermuda Triangle - big belches of gas from the sea-bed, the ship loses buoyancy and Bob's your Aunty, it sinks like a goose. Gases are so much less buoyant than water. There may even be something in the birds' diet that is causing them to produce their own gas. These birds could just be farting themselves to a watery death. One tin of baked beans, a couple of clenched goose-buttocks and there wouldn't even be time to send up a distress flare before the poor bird sank. It may be time to monitor birds for crossed eyes and that "oh-no" look to see if they disappear immediately afterwards.

3. Mr Going Gently has donned his aqualung and flippers and is cruising around kidnapping geese. At almost every incident a bystander is reported to have heard phrases such as "oh yes indeed Myffanwy" or "there's lovely for you" and, on one occasion when a particularly voluptuous bird went missing "is this the one, Boris boyo?" Enough said. The birds are safe and well and being cared for. He'll stop when he has enough.

4. They didn't teach counting or arithmetic in the sixties.

5. The Government is so concerned that no-one gives a Shih tzu about the Olympics that they have begun some sort of Benetton-esque publicity campaign. It'll be aliens over the long-jump sandpit next and then something even more ridiculous such a "potable food spotted in McDonalds". Mark my words, the Pope will announce that he will be entering the high-jump in February and ticket sales will go through the roof.

Or it could just be the bipolar bears who gave birth to Attenborough's baby in a zoo for his Frozen World ~~Documentary~~ Show. Or, as a British Waterways spokesperson said - wild terrapins.

Fake sheep put behind bars to stop driver confusion.

2011-12-13T08:42:00.001Z

From the venerable, if a little less than fully continent, Aunty Beeb, full story here.

Shoreham in West Sussex. It's a true story.

Dear gods, what are we breeding here (and I am not talking about the sheep)?

What did these southern wusses think was going to happen? That the sheep would leap into their cars and reprogramme the satnav or deliberately spill their McDonalds gum-based super-sized beverages? Sheep can be bullish and less than gentle and loving (if insufficient attention is paid to them or the wine is less than world-class or their hair-do has gone wrong or they've had a bad day) but they rarely tear your throat out.

Do these folks even know what a sheep is?

The Council is apparently looking for a long-term solution. Well, I can think of several but eugenics is frowned upon, you are no longer allowed to beat children in class and Soylent Green biscuits are not yet available to the UK public. I recommend putting a fence around West Sussex and letting the whole thing go back to Nature, proto-humans included. Then we could make it a theme park, call it (highly incorrectly) Jurassic Something or other...

You'll find much more common sense in this nonsense here. The next of which is due out in J.J.J.J...January and features lots of no sheep. Although, come to think of it...

Of course, if you knew sheep the way Pear Tree Log and I know sheep, well...

Photographers are pond scum (We photographers...)

2011-12-12T08:20:00.001Z

Wedding Fairs are a chuckle from start to finish - but not for any of the reasons the venues, the venue's organizers or H.M.Public would imagine. For a photographer who does occasionally "do" weddings (about thirty a year!) as well as commercial and sports work then the first hurdle is to find a venue with a wedding fair with an organizer who will let you pay to attend. *

It's quite common to see advertisements bearing the curt legend "no photographers or cake makers". The unspoken assumption of venue organizers is that Lepers, Double-glazing Salesmen and J's Witnesses are intelligent enough to know that they are not wanted, only snappers and cake-bakers need tellling. Should a photographer notice an advertisement without exclusions and still fancy coughing up his £150-£250 in folding rural notes to work a sixteen to eighteen hour day making the venue look good - and should he or she have the audacity to enquire - then the response will vary. For email, online form or old-fashioned letter the reply will be " ". Silence. No reply. Nun Whatsoever. (SIC). Using the new voice-telegraphy apparatus will like as not prompt a snort and a polite "we have enough photographers" followed by the dialling tone. This, in my case, before I can even get the words and phrases "Victorian", "old-fashioned bellows", "focused under a dark-cloth" and "big flash" out of my mouth. A lot of venues don't even advertise, they just net the first two of each supplier who is either known socially, wanders past innocently or learns of the opportunity by some sort of grapevine osmosis.

There is an immediate tarring with the iPhone camera brush and a throwing off the proverbial premises by some burly chap summoned from below stairs (at a lot of stately and stately-esque venues the new commercial owners et al tend to keep the parkland look, the big front gates and the attitude of yer actual historical genuine landed gentry).

At one particular venue that I shall not name who allowed me through the vetting procedure by mistake, I coughed up the necessary moolah, packed the sister (Pear Tree Log) and three tons of display into the (Sister's) LandRover (thank you very much) and arrived at the appointed hour. This appointed hour is long, long before H.M. Public start to reach for their cornflakes and ironed copy of the News of The World.

We were (eventually) shown our patch of floor (for photographers are like dogs, really, in their needs), quite near the doors to the kitchens where we might ~~lie down and scratch and sniff the air~~ set up our display. In this case, a display of cameras that I use dating from 1895 onwards and a selection of brochures, plus period backdrop, period furniture and some bling in the form of chrome and velvet queue control stands (I take these everywhere, I love the irony). Our ~~basket~~ patch of floor was in the Orangery, a relatively new build joining up two older parts of the sprawling property. At the sound of ~~Pavlov's bell~~ the klaxon the fair commenced. So, unusually for these events, did the fun.

It was only at the end of the day that we realised we had spent virtually no time at all actually "on" our stand. We had talked to clients - but always, always away from the corner and looking back at the stand. At the start of the day I used a 1958 Box Brownie to photograph the stand and the venue. Bear in mind that I may be the only pond-scum in the village but I can still make a Box Brownie dance a bit. Same camera, same roll of film shown above. The only image of our stand that appeared at all is the lower one. Outside shots, fine, shots in other parts of the house, fine - shots of our corner, not a chance. And this in the Orangery - flooded with floor to ceiling window light. It looks more like a Victorian seance than anything and I have no explanation for the odd light in the backdrop, the fuzz or the enormous grain (these two shots came off the same roll).

During the day a 1938 Zeiss unbolted (bolted, not just clipped or screwed) itself from its tripod and smashed. The film holder from my "Mr Reliable" hard-working mahogany and brass field camera chewed everything I put into it. Jars and cans in the kitchen behind (it was serve yourselves, peasant dogs time) leapt off shelves to the floor. The temperature on our stand (or should I say near it) changed from moment to moment from too warm to perfect-for-penguins. H.M. Public often flung themselves into reverse gear to avoid the corner (although that should be discounted here, it often happens when either I smile or they focus and notice that I am a ~~Pond Scum~~ photographer).

Apart from that it was a really, really ordinary day. I have no idea what the venue think of the happenings or the photographs (because they don't reply to letters, email, online form or stealth-approach via internet social networking website, naturally). I think it's odd. The Box Brownie in question has performed wonderfully ever since!

Not the spookiest place we've ever worked by any means, but certainly odd.

* NB - Hemswell Court and GUNBY HALL excepted!

Whiskerburn Sloopscuttle & Vintage. Ghosts is extra. Here's a salvaged image from Woody.

The White Lady of Winnington Hall and Mrs Myhusbandwillpay...

2011-12-10T09:25:00.001Z

Poor old Winnington Hall (Wikipedia here). From beginning life as a 16th century timber framed home of the Warburton Family (we like our bakers to have at least a little experience in their field) it has now become "serviced offices" in Cheshire. Ugh. However...

During the nineteen-nineties when Pear Tree Log and I ran the family art dealership we rented the lock, stock and (then) still-delicious barrel of it for a three-day exhibition sale as part of a summer of introducing Lincolnshire, Lancashire, Merseyside and Cheshire to our particular modus and a variety of gubbins for wall, nook and cranny. It proved to hold more character than we thought...

We laid out the rat-run so that customers arrived through the main doors and were then channelled down a magnificent hallway and into the main gallery with all of the other rooms accessed by passing our reception desks down the far end of this gallery. It was beautiful inside then, oak panelling, plasterwork and fanlight ceilings - a complete dog's dinner architecturally, but some nice ingredients. The opening night reception was busy and crowded and without unplanned events or too many drunks. However, from the following morning things got a little bit weird.

Every room had shadows that flitted about in the periphery. All of our staff kept turning heads to look at movement and people that were not there. At one point my brother - probably the most black & white ho-humdrum prove it to me with science type of chap on the planet - was chatting away and turned mid-sentence to look at movement, only for the room to be empty. 'Did you just see that?' he asked. Yes, I had, I had turned to look at the same time - just a moving black shadow. Brother the almost tee-total was shaking like a leaf and took himself off to the bar for a medicinal drink in the middle of the day.

Later, I was manning reception when a woman walked in from the far end of the gallery and made for the reception desk at a brisk and businesslike pace. She was about five feet six tall, well to-do looking, dressed in an expensive cream-coloured something that wasn't quite full-length - and that was all of the impression that I formed as I stood up, hurriedly hid my coffee and collected up a handful of brochure, catalogue and price list. When I turned and looked up to greet her there was no-one in sight. There were no doors she could have gone through and no time for her to have made it back to the far end of the gallery - I was stood there like a twerp holding a catalogue for a customer who was no longer there.

We checked with the Winnington staff and they just breezily said oh yes, she's the White Lady of Winnington. Had I not already met her then the detail they gave would have been utterly news to us. The staff made me a "point of interest" on the public tours for the next three days - I had to take time out to stand in the orangery and explain to parties of H.M. Public that the White Lady was very pleasant but bought little in the way of artwork.

We set up a camera with a motion sensor - and every time we switched it on it shot off a full reel of film, but all with nothing in the way of the inexplicable on the images. In the deepening twilight of the third evening the tear-down and pack-up was the quickest we had ever done and I noticed that no-one seemed to want to work alone...

Nothing got broken, nothing got lost, no animals were harmed, it was just that the exhibition had a lot of visitors who weren't fully there plus one very distinct and distinctive White Lady.

The other highlight of Winnington was a lady who breezed in fifteen minutes before the exhibition closed. She smiled, stayed in corporeal form, waved away the offered catalogue and instead marched me around the rooms like some affable Cruella in elegant but sensible shoes. As she walked and I hopped, skipped and jumped to keep up she pointed. 'I'll take that, that, that, those, that, all of those, these and that. My husband will pay.' Then she smiled and walked out. A small gentleman in beige, dust and an air of resignation then walked in, got a chequebook out of his coat and quietly said 'How much do I owe you?' The cheque at least was real and didn't fade away into the shadows!

Calories - tiny little creatures that live in your wardrobe and make unwanted alterations to your clothes...

2011-12-09T08:39:00.001Z

A slice of Christmas in the Owl Wood (from Yule pause and Frosty Claus):

... Sparkling in the moonlight were millions and millions and millions of teeming little calories, each one waving coo-eey and assuming coquettish “bite me” poses. Millions of bright, shiny, tinned, jarred, foil-wrapped, boxed and cellophane-sheathed calories. Devilled sardines; candied turkey-thighs; smoked tangerines; salted walnuts; chocolate-covered hams; tinned oxen-bums; wafer-thin pickled marzipans; heavenly short-crust pastry liqueurs and even a box of the very, very strictly limited edition hand-rolled, highly illegal, internationally banned, double-handed Christmas Crackers with the tear-gas and individual Watneys Red Barrel Party-Sevens inside each! Pipsqueak briefly passed out, something she hadn’t done since that wonderful weekend away with an Irish Wolfhound called Eric Bloodaxe.

Waking, she took a deep, deep breath, put her front paws together and swan-dived into the hamper, scattering napkins, baubles and those tiny French waiters who help rich people eat, in all directions. One paw snaked out like the lashing tail of an alien from Alien and slammed the lid closed. Nothing but nothing was going to get away from her. ...

read more, or read less, more or less, in Yule pause and Frosty Claus, available on Kindle for laptop, PC and - surprisingly - Kindle from something called "Amazon". An "eBook". Owning and reading an eBook will make you feel young and useful and less out of touch with modern life. Owning an eBook, knowing how to use it and not being afraid to use it can assist with resisting Court Orders to sign Enduring Powers of Attorney or with Committal Proceedings Against the Elderly. Confound your young relatives and their insatiable lust for inheritance. Resist the slide into cardigans and liquidised foodstuffs for a few months more - buy an eBook today. You can get them all over the interwebnetonline.

Don't do drugs - do food!

And, yes, Pipsqueak did find that legendary Herod's Hamper edition of the vast box of After Eight Mince.

Biblical plagues at Hall Farm - only in the lounge.

2011-12-08T08:32:00.001Z

Following on from yesterday's account of an interesting night...

I awoke even earlier than I had planned, snug as a bug in a two-foot too short rug on the settee - to find that the room had, in November, succumbed to a plague of flies.

Not one or two but HUNDREDS of big, fat, juicy, fully-grown bluebottles filling the lounge and, oddly with hindsight although it didn't occur to me at the time, only the lounge. There were none in any other room. It was like a black, buzzing mist of the disgusting creatures.

Lovely.

I commemced chemical warfare and went to work.

The flies took about three days to eradicate. The vacuum cleaner was never so well fed on their stunned little bodies.

As for upstairs, it was as unwelcoming and cold and horrible as it had been the night before. Being a bloke - and being stuck on my own in the middle of Norfolk in a house in the middle of a sea of spuds, chickens and grain crops - I decided that enough was ruddy well enough. I could get in the car and run for the hills and never go home again or I could give whatever it was a run for its money. Our parents (Grimsby Deep-Sea Fisherman and latterly Cold-War Spy & Courier; Deep-Sea Fisherman's wife, Hong-Kong socialite and a woman with more spirit and pragmatic battle in her than anyone else I've ever met) had taught us well - head down and sod the world.

So, I changed the lightbulbs that had blown (and wasn't that a fun job working my way into the darkness), checked that the heating was on the warm side of toasty-toasty and told whatever it was (literally, out loud) to bugger off. It was my home, I paid the bills and it could either do its fair share or hit the road. Then I went to bed and (with slight trepidation) turned the lights off and slept.

It worked - there were no more disturbances that night (although more of a different kind later on in my tenure) and I slept well and the house was back to normal. My guess is that whatever malevolence was involved was not used to being lectured, hectored and ignored...

My sister (Pear Tree Log) and I seem to, if not attract such events, always be the ones to experience them. Broad daylight, out in public, at work, you name the place. From lost time to serving non-existent customers.

I don't know if we're weird or if the world is. My eyes don't glow in the dark or anything. I haven't checked Elaine's in a while. The occurences or "hauntings" or whatever they were/are at Hall Farm afterwards were all more easily dismissed and I'll detail them, and all of the others, in later posts.

Atheist ghosts and happenings at Hall Farm

2011-12-07T10:08:00.001Z

Many (seemingly millions of) moons ago I lived at a place called Hall Farm in Norfolk for a few years. The driveway shown to the right of frame was about ¾ of a mile long and led to a single track road that, after a couple of miles led to a single track road that... etcetera etcetera. The working farmyard that served the farm that my house was in the middle of was a source of endless farming frolicks from huge potato-washing machines to Portuguese-migrant staffed vegetable whatnotters, runaway lorries, dodgy smoked-window RangeRover deals and Young Farmer's Balls.

It was also the scene of a few very peculiar... incidents. I make no judgements about them, I have no idea what they were or what they involved, I just know - as a fairly level-headed relatively-sane atheist (or, more correctly and less value-laden, non-theist) - that they happened. This was the first of them.

The bedrooms were in an odd arrangement (the place was ancient and much-modified) where one could only be accessed by walking through another. I slept in the third bedroom. The middle bedroom always had an atmosphere, it was the sort of place where I constantly felt uncomfortable and didn't like turning my back on any corner of the room. I slept in there once and had amazing nightmares. That was why I chose the third of the rooms and kept the middle room as a "spare".

One night I woke at about two a.m. in the third room and immediately had that "waking nightmare" feel. Something big was flapping about the room. I flicked on the light - and the fluorescent eco-bulb immediately "blew". I used a torch - and discovered a jet black "moth" about three inches across was using the room for some very energetic military exercises and me for target practice. The whole place was cold in spite of the central heating, the room felt very unwelcoming indeed. The windows were all closed so no idea where the "moth" thing got in. It felt as though something just wanted me out and away - it was very uncomfortable indeed.

I moved in a dignified fashion (yeah, right) into the upstairs hallway and flicked on the light. The fluorescent eco-bulb "blew" as spectacularly as the one in my bedroom had. I turned on the next light down the hallway - and that blew too. Scurrying downstairs, as one does, I discovered that downstairs lacked that horribly tangible get the hell out of there atmosphere and the lights worked, so I made a drink, decided that I was going nuts but still needed to be awake for work in the early morning and slept on the settee in front of my log-burner stove... blissfully unaware of what the next stage of my "countryside no-one else around for miles but me" joy would be (and which I'll tell you about tomorrow).

The next step was oddly Biblical, and that's all I'm saying until tomorrow! Biblical - an odd word for an non-theist (I don't "lack" religion as implied by the word "atheist" - I just don't subscribe to it) to use but Biblical it was.

Tomahawk Missiles over Lincolnshire lanes in the Eighties?

2011-12-06T15:50:00.001Z

A recent conversation reminded me of something that happened while I was driving to work one day in the mid nineteen-eighties. My car was off the road (after being rammed up the bracket by a drunk-driver) so I was driving a nice Austin 1800 (hired from Rent-a-Wreck, I kid you not, for £20 a week). It was a brilliant car a bit like this one but blue (felt and drove like a tank, could be started with a lolly-pop stick instead of a key).

My job at the time was to man an outstation office in the sleepy market town of Louth in Lincolnshire so I was pootling along the A16 in the company of about three other cars... when suddenly something that looked very, very, very similar to the Tomakawk Cruise missile in the photograph above overtook us all. It was flying in the same direction, roughly south, and was to the right-hand side of the road, about fifty feet above the tree tops and following the road. We all saw it, in broad daylight, and all of us just stopped our cars and got out. By then the thing had moved well on towards the horizon. I don't remember any noise.

It was the most peculiar sensation, I - and I think the other drivers too - just assumed that the proverbial balloon had gone up, the button had been pushed and all we could do was wait for the mushroom cloud and the end of life as we know it, Jim. I became very familiar with the pit of my stomach (one of about four times in my life when I have been certain that I was about to, ho hum, here goes then, die).

After a few minutes nothing happened so, being English, we all just doffed our hats, got back into our cars and carried on to our offices, banks and shops for work. I can still remember the horrible sensation to this day. Google research tells me that the Tomahawk Cruise missile of the day fits the bill - subsonic, extremely low-level flight, terrain-guided. The one I saw was much more drab than the one in the photograph and had no logos or flags or markings that I could see. From memory and as an in-shock and the grip of terror guess maybe two car-lengths in size, a nicely proportioned missile if such a thing exists.

I guess that for safety I should really have got back into the Austin and locked the doors. It was one of the last British Leyland cars that would have had a fighting chance up against a nuclear shock-wave! Not an experience I would like to repeat. A test flight maybe? RAF Binbrook was the only nearby operational base at the time, hardly a known centre of aerodynamic nuclear fission as far as I recall.

Elephant ear pods (nudist youth wood bowls)

2011-12-05T08:16:00.001Z

Nearly choked on the old kedgeree brekkers this morning. Made ruddy mistake of checking the blog stats.

Thighsands of lovely visitors and tickettythankyou but ever so slightly discongallumphing to notice that the top keywords that lead them here were:

nudist
youth
wood
bowl
elephant
ear
pod

I have little idea what an "elephant ear pod" might be let alone if a bowl is a necessary adjunct to one. We have neither in stock. Just gossip, scandal and shipwrecks about an Owl Wood and the eBooks relating to an imaginery world in there.

Perhaps I ought to re-write the blurb to the right about "what is an owl wood" and remove the obviously popularly misunderstood and incorrectly weighted references to "... It is set aside for the benefit of ... owls. Not people, not squirrels, not walkers, not charcoal burners, not naturist bee-keepers or nudist twitchers: just owls. ..."

Any advice on how to turn around the elephant ear pods?

Yours affectionately, an innocent in Blog Land.

Note to self regarding template and aspidistra.

2011-12-04T09:08:00.001Z

Dashed fed up with nonsense of Bloggaz4U's new "the templates" and lack of control and side-bar content so ruddy reverting to classics, what? Steam pressure between the ears exceeding, touch of the old boggled around the eyes, heading towards loading the Purdey and running amok in the er, the er park again.

So, moving with all dispatch, links and things boxed, little chaps in warehouse coats bustling, that sort of thing. Just got to load the last of the old medicinal aspidistra into the back of the old Wolseley and off, yah?

Hope to see you all on the other side. Fine, fine then - both of you if we must be strictly Boolean about our audience. What? Only me you say? Me? Very well then, pedantic accuracy and all that, foundation of the empire - hope to find one's self later.

Sounds like some sort of Zen nonsense the Beatles might have come out with, find me ruddy self indeed. Long haired navel-gazing tone deaf hippies.

Toodle er - no, that was Trix. Pip was a black dawg. Sure of it. Where's the ruddy Wolseley? Toodle-Trix!

Mother Nature abhors a vacuum.

2011-12-03T09:44:00.001Z

She's not awfully fond of any of the other modern electric household labour-saving devices either.

We too believe in the old-fashioned methods here at Owl Wood Towers, so we've had small non-electric maids installed in every room and employed something deferential and sombre with a built-in hat stand to answer the front door. We haven't been connected to mains services since they turned off the Town Gas and tried to hook us up to the North Sea supply.

In spite of the amount of care we have put into avoiding the new technologies yet another small document of ours appears to have fallen into the cyber-space bucket. This one was in the usual brown folder, typewritten with one of those little green laces with the metal ends holding the pages together. So far copies have surfaced on the Welsh whistle-blowers website, WikiLeeks, and also on something used by young, hip and trendy people, called Amazon. Apparently an eBook a day keeps the library at bay, or something.

The file in question related, albeit obliquely, to the activities of one Margot and Todd (file photo shown above) and contained more sorely strained metaphors, Carry On-esque cliches and general nonsense than is either legal or acceptable in polite civilian society. There is just a slight risk that Clinical Anthropomorphism above and beyond the recommended safe limits set down by Government Scientifical Types may have escaped into the atmosphere. We urge Her Majesty's Public not to panic unless you're really good at it. However, care should be taken to avoid owl hit-men with Cold War fixations, any dog displaying aboriginal camouflage techniques and all pub quiz teams hastily formed from intellectual pheasants.

All references in the stolen file relating to The Railway Tavern, to Licensees Keith and Dawn, and to their award-winning food and arrays of chewing-whiskies and spitting-baccies must be taken with a pinch of salt.

Carry on and keep calm. Take nothing seriously. Steps have been taken.

Wibble.

That is all.

To Going Gently today.

2011-12-02T08:10:00.001Z

With my best wishes.

Going Gently.

It's an ill wind that lifts your kilt.

2011-11-30T08:25:00.001Z

A stormy sky over the Owl Wood. Couldn't decide whether Independence Day aliens were about to hove into view or whether the enormous hand of a popular Western deity was about to poke through the clouds to point a finger at Adam and say 'Get out of my Sistine Chapel and don't come back until you're wearing underpants.'

Every year I get a token cold some time in autumn. Just the one to show willing and that's all. Not this year though. I am currently enjoying my FIFTH two to three day sneeze-yourself-to-death "cold" in just four to five weeks.

It feels like the same bug that I defeat, it goes away, morphs into something slightly different and comes back for more.

Until this year I wouldn't have believed it possible to sneeze oneself to death or want to cut your own nose off because of the endless oops-you're-going-to-sneeze-again painful pins and needles.

I've tied a tight blindfold over my eyes so that they don't ping out across the room when I sneeze and I have a vevuzela stuffed in each ear and am disrupting shipping in The Humber. With the addition of a French horn I could be a one-man band.

I'm buying shares in Kleenex.

Lovely.

Yeah.

Infomercial - mendicant rats and satnavs with Tourettes.

2011-11-28T08:51:00.000Z

Yule pause and Frosty Claus (AMAZON) - is imminent...

Christmas lost, Christmas saved, the stars in peril, the stars saved from peril (and that's as complicated as the "plot" gets). Delicious stuff and nonsense. A bedtime or breakfast-time C-W-P for grown-ups who are less than fully serious on the inside. An episode a month, all may be bought anonymously from Amazon - no-one need ever know what you are reading.

The Christmas edition of the 2011 Owl Wood Publications. Another 10,000 word CARTOON WITHOUT PICTURES - I supply the words, the blancmange between your ears supplies the pictures.

A cast of millions. Well, almost.

A satellite navigation unit with Tourettes Syndrome
Pipsqueak - poledancing bitch with a heart, looks like Margaret Rutherford
Toby - ex public school, slightly nervous
Number Six (an owl soaked in the Cold War Era)
Margot - goes gangster
Power-tools Todd - forgets to cancel Christmas
Native Red Squirrels - beer-swilling xenophobes
Swish invading Grey Squirrels - Grey Pride Marchers
Hubert and Cyril, drivers of the Herod's delivery van
Nine reindeer - from Donner Kebab to Rude Alf
An order of mendicant rats...

'Arse! Drink! Girls! If possible perform a U-Turn!'

Bloke food (but I feel like a fake)! I am an OMNI-blogger!

2011-11-27T18:06:00.001Z

A little bit of heaven on a plate.

Well, I feel like a fake - I only took over the reigns of this blog a couple of weeks ago - but, on the strength of my sister (Pear Tree Log) having seen some (future) foodie posts for the Owl Wood, she has asked me to answer these probing questions as though I were a food blogger and not (just) a food+life+fiction+miscellaneous blogger. Most true full-blooded food blogs specialise in high-end fancy arty-smarty food but my pragmatic interest is in what I term Bloke Food. Day to day stuff to fuel me up while I work and to keep me from nodding off as I chew.

Food is a bit like the jars on an alchemist's shelves to me - lots of magical, magical ingredients like ginger, vanilla, lemon, the humble decent potato, tomato, Marmite (!), coffee, OJ, grapefruit, pepper, onions et al - all of the fabulous things and more that I am privileged to enjoy as a human being, far too many to ever list. Vegetarian for thirty-five years, vegan for the past three makes shopping a touch difficult, currently cooking for a Billy No-Mates one makes planning both a bonus and a bugbear (nothing, but nothing, can easily be bought in real portions for one in England).

1. What, or who inspired you to start a blog?

An odd amalgum of Pipsqueak (a foodie dog we lost very recently), the Owl Wood which appears to be a nexus for the "Aby Effect" (like the Bermuda Triangle but square,with more civilised weather and weirder occurrences) and the fire-brand wielding villagers who came banging on the door demanding access rights and fiscal restitution the moment rumours began after the Sister and Brother-in-Law took over responsibility for the patch of woodland here. This blog is a mix of the fiction I write that is set in the wood, practical information to keep the village mob at bay and whatever I think might interest anyone else. Food fascinates me and occupies me - but so does everything else, they're inseparable.

2. Who is your foodie inspiration?

I would love to say Fanny Cradock, Delia Wotsit and the Blue Peter presenters in the days when they did a food spot - but in reality it's more Benny Hill than that. I can't abide the current crop of television "celery ebrities" who are so far down the self-glorification creek without a spatula to paddle with that they often forget to cook any food. Benny Hill it is, and then I eat and clean up the kitchen after myself.

3. Your greasiest, batter - splattered food/drink book is?

The Animal Free Shopper. That gives me a list of things to look for in the local shops and Co-op, what they then have in stock from the list then gives me goodies to play and experiment with.

4. Tell us all about the best thing you have ever eaten in another country, where was it, what was it?

Warm lavender bread and vanilla ice-cream in a corporate dining suite of the Intercontinental Hotel in Prague. Sublime. I was dragged into the meal (with a bunch of Directors from IBM) without any notice, dressed in jeans and rugby shirt to their Savile Row suits, had no choice over the food and was being made to play the technical expert late in the evening after a very long day - I dug into the plate thinking Oh yes, ice-cream and something that looks doughy. Wow, whizz bang wallop and did my taste buds ever have an orgasm, shout awoogah! and run around my mouth. Vanilla, fresh from the pod, lavender in perfect proportion fresh from Heaven and the contrast of just on the hot side of warm bread with just on the cool side of cold ice-cream... there were other things too but those are the flavours that haunt my ambitions to this day.

5. Another food bloggers table you'd like to eat at is?

Pear Tree Log - my Sister's table. Her sandwiches are a thing of bewildering quality, artistry and beauty. Fresh, crusty bread, artichokes, tomatoes, capers, salads of every flavour, sea-salt, pepper, olives... the list goes on and on. Elaine - through years of slaving over a hot family - combines derring-do with practicality and the swift delivery needed for hungry people. A Rolls-Royce product delivered in short order. She can create anything else you might like in the way of posh food but, if you want the most direct route to culinary heaven, choose a sandwich.

6. What is the one kitchen gadget you would ask Santa for this year (money no object of course)?

Walls - and a roof. Kitchen walls and a roof of my very wery independent own again. I'm still betwixt houses at the moment and my kitchen gadget would be - a kitchen!

7. Who taught you how to cook?

Mother Necessity, repeated failures and the lash my own hungry stomach - one minute tied to my late mothers expert apron strings, the next afloat in the world after leaving home, and feeding myself. If you want to eat well you have to learn to do it yourself!

8. I'm coming to you for dinner what's your signature dish?

Depends. My mind is not on a leash - I always have a current favourite dish, book, car, drink, music or film but none that will survive until the next crop of favourites ten minutes later. I'm not one of those people who grew up wanting to be a railway engine driver - I set off and just chased shiny things around, tee-hee - ooh, a squirrel! You might be treated to a Marmite and fresh strawberry sandwich (ate one once for a bet and it was almost nice enough for a second) or you might find yourself in a mushroom curry or a blokes' pasta with a salad on the side. I did warn you that I don't have pretentions! If you're lucky - see Q9 below.

9. What is your guilty food pleasure?

The Hutson-Hovis Chip Buttie. One (maybe two) medium (or large!) unsliced loaf (preferably white and fresh as a daisy) per person, cut off one end, hollow it out, slap super-cooled olive spread around, shovel in proper double-dipped fresh from the living potato super-hot chips, salt, vinegar... bung the end back on, flatten it - you must flatten it carefully - and enjoy. To make it posh enough for royalty just add a sprinkling of surprises like tomato, olives, HP sauce...

10. Reveal something about yourself that others would be surprised to learn?

I once knocked half a shop premises down with a hired van in a small town in the Australian outback. We settled on $50 Australian dollars compensation which I paid in cash before driving away.

Five tags? I only took over this blog a couple of weeks ago, five may take some time...

I have told 'em all!

You know how to whistle don't you, sweetheart?

2011-11-27T08:16:00.001Z

... ‘I am an Englishwoman. Of course I can whistle - I just put my lips together and ask one of the maids to blow.’ ...

... She moved closer to Number Six. ‘Makes no mistakes – I wants those dorgs. Can owels floy, Number Six, underwoyter, wearing a cawncrete overscoat with lead buttons?’ menaced Margot, speaking a language that Number Six had obviously decided he would understand.

Number Six was having none of it in spite of the concessions to his spats. He was the best in his field (and also quite good along neighbouring hedgerows at dusk and dawn). He snapped back ‘You’s in a real penny ante stew for a pretty fine dame with a set of gams that just won’t quit – what dese dirty dorgs got on you? Dey see you whack somebody or what?’

Margot began to walk back to the car, wondering how they’d suddenly found themselves lifted from a brink-of-nuclear-disaster Eastern Europe and plonked down in some sort of Hollywooden gangster film where the most serious problem lay in getting the idiot-savant pianist called Sam to play a favourite tune. Then she turned and struck a pose over the (padded) shoulder of her dormouse-pelt coat.

‘Let’s just say dey owes me. Noybody leaves my oyganization without I writes ’em a lead reference foist – boi hand, up close and poysonal. Jeez, I’m speakin’ real gangster here, who woulda thoyt oi had it in me? Don’t make me come give yous a reference.’ With that she swept away and poured herself into the car.

Actually, playing Chicago moll was as much fun as playing Estuarial Cruella, she’d have to add it to her repuh twahree (that’s French yous know, for “what oi can do”) and maybe get a Harllywood agunt. Catching her pout in the vanity mirror Margot slapped herself – albeit still very “twelve ways till next Toozday” – and slowly regained her sense of reality. ‘Good grief, for a moment there I was actually worried about getting gum on moy gown. Take me Home, Todd, and let’s go via the root vegetables – I need to breathe in some solid England, quickly!’ ...

Pear Tree Log - I can't think who might have been the inspiration for the character of Margot.

Yule pause and Frosty Claus - Christmas lost, Christmas found, animals in (contains mild) peril, animals saved. That's as complicated as the bookmark where the plot should otherwise be gets. Anthropomorphic nonsense and stuff. Episode II, 10,000 woyds, another cartoon without pictures. OUT SOON.

Molasses and the Brother-in-Lore

2011-11-25T10:46:00.001Z

The Brother-in-Lore is an ex-military chap. He was a Bosun's Mate or a Navigator/Bomb Aimer or somethin' in my late Mother's outfit, the West India Regiment. She was Colonel in Chief, had her offices in the bar and was never without her swagger stick and a map of enemy forces. I think he got drummed ight for trashing the Taj Mahal or something during the annual Battle of Waterloo party - fairly certain a trebuchet and a recalcitrant sommelier were involved. Well, anyway, when he does something, he does something.

Moles recently invaded the property of B-in_L and the little Memsahib; small, cylindrical mammals adapted to a subterranean lifestyle (a bit like me) that like to kid on that they are cute and cuddly and only 'avin a larff. In other words, little buggers whose saliva contains a toxin that paralyses earthworms so that they can store their still-living prey in underground larders often containing thighsands of living, immobilised, terrified worms for later consumption. Cute little buggers that pull these still living worms through their paws in order to squeeze out the earth and dirt from the worms gut before eating them alive. Aw bless!

Well, Brother-in-Lore has strict policies regarding animal on animal violence so the sight of a cutesy wutesy moley woley poking his nose above ground (the mole's nose - Brother-in-Lore's was already above ground) and saying 'Air hair lair - do you know the way to San José?' naturally provoked a reaction. B-in-L got on the blower and hired himself a mechanical elephant skilled in diggin' and set to work, chasin' the little sod through the garden until he could catch it and smack its bottom soundly. Nightfall was no excuse for calling off the hunt - when the going gets pitch black an old military man just switches on the headlights (all mechanical elephants have been fitted with these since seat-belts became compulsory). Damned splendid beast, the elephant, damned splendid.

Of course, if anyone asks, he says he was diggin' an urgently needed extension to the cesspit soak-away...

Nice chap really; didn't see him use the whip on the mechanical elephant once.Odd ridin' position though - arthritis of the ears or something he says.

*****

Volume I - Asylum! on Amazon Kindle. Volume II due ight next week... (NOTHING whatsoever to do with mechanical elephants or moles).

David Bowie and the Hippie Spiders from Mars

2011-11-23T10:25:00.001Z

Generally speaking, spiders are conservative creatures. They wear ties, sensible shoes and lots of tweed. Their homes are usually strictly two-dimensional and orderly, fully in compliance with planning consent. Occasionally though one trips ('scuse the pun) across a hippie commune of arachnids with the ability to think outside of the box, spiders who can touch base with blue sky and make the intuitive leap over the Ho Hum Gorge.

I like to think of whatever built this as one such. A spider with a few beads perhaps, with dreadlocks, four pairs (think about it) of flared jeans from a second-hand shop in Carnaby Street and the obligatory sandals. Look man, keep as cool as you can. Life's not about hard work so why not just find a neat plant, sit in the centre and enjoy being a spider who gets to spray crazy crazy crazy-string all around from his Arsenal Villa are doing awfully welll this year don't you think? You get this groovy geodesic dome effect and you don't have to do too much of the walking around in circles thing. When food comes you end up surrounded by snacks in any direction you look - you get to live in your own fridge, man, and no matter how far you run in a straight line you get back to where you started! It's impossible to get lost, even when you're tripping on LSD! Pull up a beanbag and chill for a while!

3D, baby, it's the only way to go, the way of the future, right on and power to the little people...

[Actually, Grand Designs are doing a feature on this place next week. It was built by Lucinda and Tarquin. Tarquin works in the City for an investment bank and Lucinda runs a gallery in Chelsea. The marble for the kitchen worktops came from an organic free-range quarry in northern Italy and the Danish solar panels are based on a Le Corbusier property they saw while doing charity work for "Tofu sans Frontier™" in the Benelux countries during their gap years. The web walls are made from recycled teak sourced from a smoke-free rainforest.]

Doris wept - it was the first time anyone had sent her flowers...

2011-11-22T08:32:00.001Z

Doris wept, it was the first time that anyone had sent her flowers for her birthday. Oh, certainly, people from the office had left cards on her desk before and she once had been given a free pudding in a pizza restaurant but nobody had ever gone to the trouble of ordering a bunch of Trifiliata Chuffinenormus Plantything before. She wondered who her admirer might be - the muscle-bound gym-bunny butterfly from Accounts or the sleazy roach from Personnel? Someone she didn't know at all? The Boss???

She'd grown accustomed to being overlooked and had settled into the social position of neat and tidy typist in recent years, presentable, personable, always happy to make up the numbers at office parties but usually found in the kitchen. The sort of girl you could take home to your Hive Queen but would never see on the cover of a magazine. In truth, Doris had given up on love. Love had always been something for other bugs, not for Doris. Oh she'd had her crushes in school and there was that unfortunate year when she had taken to drink and been all over that young dung beetle in the PR Office - so embarrassing - but generally it was just Doris, a weepy movie and her cat.

Perhaps this year, in what she liked to refer to as her Miss Jean Brodie prime, she would finally get to canter along a moonlit beach on horseback, being chased by... by whom? She decided that it didn't really matter and dabbed at her eyes with a tissue.

ASYLUM! on Amazonian Kindling and on Universal Studios PDF eBook.

Doris doesn't feature in either.

Dawn over the Owl Wood

2011-11-20T08:56:00.001Z

The dawn didn't break over Owl Wood this morning, it was more a case of it turning up for work still smashed from the night before. Mr Sol, light of my life, levered himself up on one elbow, had a quick peer through the misty curtains and then disappeared again. The throbbing glow over his head is all of his own making as he checked the colour of his tongue in the dense damp grey mirror hanging over us at the start of this day. Blurrggh. Once fully up on his elbow he assumed, for a few brief minutes, the bloodshot look of Sauron's Eye and then let the mists swallow him up again.

At least he took the time to demonstrate to me that my 300mm lens needs cleaning.

The Sun scares me. It's a lousy rag of a newspaper. The local star they named after it also scares me. One shoddy-workmanship 23° tilt in Earth's axis freezes me in Winter and makes me fear for my safety in Summer. Where other folk feel bright and direct sunlight blasting down on them and think "ooh yeah" I can't help but feel too close to a crispy destruction. The Pierson's Puppeteer in me worries what a 33° tilt would do, or an orbit just a million or three miles closer... I'm one diagnosis away from wearing a tin foil hat on my head and reading my mail while wearing rubber gloves. What the world needs in Summer is not a great big melting pot but rather an awning or some sort of beach umbrella over the planet.

Of course, on a misty moisty morning in Lincolnshire - when cloudy was the weather - the Sun God seems a little less thunderous, hardly murderous at all. Did anyone else poke their snout out of their nest this morning, yawn, scratch all that may be scratched, then look at a cold, damp sunrise and worry about returning to their Aztec days and ways, with human sacrifice?

I remember my first car very well. A single-seater 1/2 horsepower convertible.

2011-11-19T08:42:00.001Z

It was a bit of a bugger to start during rainy season and the engine sounded like a bag of old bones. Drove the things with a touch of the old whip you know, sort of like an 'orse but without the spurs. Quite useless for Polo though. The acceleration was simply staggering for its day but once you got up to about fifteen miles an hour on the flat the emissions were appalling. Seemed to go faster in reverse than in forwards as I remember it. Ruddy thing backfired once just as we were comin' into Kathmandu - in a bit of a race with some wallahs from the Plantation Club at Bharatpur - dumped me down most unceremoniously. Absolutely lorst the bet of course and the first rind of drinks was on me. Eventually sold it on to a dealer in Nepal and bought meself a little two-seater racin' elephant.

p.s. Was the "chap" in this photograph really serious? I mean, I know that the world was a lot more boing-boing two-step titter-ye-not and don't beat me too hard Nanny in the years of my youth, especially in some of the less sanitary climates of the British Empire but, well, honestly, surely not?

The Owl Wood Publications.

ASYLUM! Amazon Kindle eBook for PC/MAC or handheld "gizmo".
ASYLUM! Universal PDF eBook thingy.

The significance of my mother's dumplings, and Owl Wood gastronomy.

2011-11-16T17:56:00.001Z

It's that time of year when cold weather and grey skies over Owl Wood make me all rheumy-eyed with nostalgia over my late mother's cooking. She could produce three hot meals a day for six hundred inmates for elevenpence ha'penny a week, provided that the authorities let her out regularly to hunt wild straggler or seasonal sightseer on Dartmoor. Her recipe for my father's favourite, affectionately known as Snake & Pygmy Pie, went to the grave with her along with the proceeds from the Alford Road Post Office job. We got both back of course once the authorities had calmed down, but it took a lot of digging.

My Mother was a modern woman with dollops of style and panache that the rest of her family could only dream of emulating and she combined this elegance with a very pragmatic JFDI attitude. She embraced the new, provided that it worked, and was something with scrambled egg on her shoulders and cuffs in the Civil Defence during the nineteen-sixties. She could make a bomb-shelter out of two coffee tables and a pot plant in thirty seconds flat. Her favourite cooking pot of choice when each or any or all of money, food and fuel were in short supply was The Nuclear Pressure Cooker. Things - things - went in and wholesome, filling food came out the other end, all cooked to the same texture, flavour and colour and by golly it was good.

The significance of my mother's dumplings only struck me very recently (and that sentence is so very wrong in so very many ways). The fun and the games of any meal in the lean times was the size of the dumplings - I seem to remember them being between somewhere between cricket ball and American softball sized - four of them would be cramped in the industrial pressure vat. Thing was - they were brilliant, fluffy and tasty! It's taken me decades to cotton on that their purpose was to stretch the rest of the ingredients past breaking point...

My sister will confirm but I would guess that the average recipe was along the lines of "Take the nutritious fumes from some greaseproof paper that had once been wrapped around some kind of meat, add a carrot, two spuds and four chuffing enormous absolutely fantastic fluffy hot dumplings..."

Yule pause and frosty Claus

2011-11-14T11:20:00.001Z

Front covers

It took three pots of coffee and a roll of used notes waved under the nostrils but our graphic designer finally regained consciousness and delivered the front covers for the first two of the The Owl Wood Publications publications.

Asylum! is the introduction to the woodland territory as seen through the eyes of two desperate refugees from the home of Margot and Todd (Pear Tree Byre). It will be released upon the baying crowd of our loyal fan in the next few days (assuming that our loyal fan doesn't lose interest and reduce club membership to less than one).

Yule pause and frosty Claus gently leads us through what actually really truly happens in a dark, dank patch of English woodland over that time of the year when we all celebrate Santa Claus's birthday (Christmas). Cliches abound and there is very little in the way of a silent night combined with lots of No-Owl, No-Owl. A book-signing session will take place in front of the usual two mirrors cunningly angled to give the impression of a crowd smiling back at the author.

Toss Mother Nature unceremoniously out of the window and embrace your inner animal. Punch sense and sensibilities on the nose and join us in losing what little there ever was of a plot. Tug at the starting-cord of your outboard brain and come and see the world as it really would be should the medication ever wear off.

Asylum!

2011-11-13T11:02:00.001Z

Tobias, caught in-character and on set while 'Chanel Number 5' film the first episode - Asylum! - of The Owl Wood Publications series.

This epidode features a script-writer who can't say "episode" properly and stars Pipsqueak and Toby. The Owl Wood is introduced gradually as they run away from home to claim sanctuary and have to blag their way through customs and learn how to cope independently in the big, bad, wide world. Toby has his swearing of the oath of allegiance interrupted, is threatened with a night under canvas and begins to learn the what money is and how some dogs get it.

Also available very soon indeed via Amazon.co.uk and as an e-thingy book download wotsit. Details to follow. It's all so much stuff and nonsense.

... ‘Look, Pippa - facepracticalities, preferably before we’re completely out of sight of the house –how will we even know what to eat inthe wood?’

‘Rest easy Watson my dog-eareddear old dog. Were you never in the Girl Guides? I got all of my badges, one way or another, mostly another. Field Catering 101: once youhave eliminated the inedible then all that remains, however improbable, must belunch.’

Toby feigned a little optimism.‘You haven’t by any chance seen an improbable truffle omelette with a crisp,chilled Australian Chardonnay remaining anywhere have you? I don’t half fancyeliminating one right now. No sign of an inn in our current without and about Isuppose?’

Pipsqueak peered through heropera pince-nez at a conveniently buzzing neon sign a few gruelling yards further up the ochre-brick road. ‘As it happens –yes.’ ...

Callum returns to the Owl Wood

2011-11-12T08:01:00.001Z

A Police statement this morning apparently announced that Callum had returned to the Owl Wood after the disgraceful riots of the past night. They added that they were also actively considering discontinuing use of the currently fashionable Scottish-accented spokesperson. The violence followed the discovery of two little feet and a beak believed to be the remains of one Constance Sparrow who disappeared barely thirty-six hours ago. Two owls have been arrested and are being charged under Section 2 of the "Having pudding after not eating everything on their plate Act". In a statement issued by their solicitor the owls said of their arrest that "coming as they did from a deprived background, a broken home and a long string of flammable schools what the pair really needed was love, cuddles and compensation".

During the night several leaves were overturned and there have been reports of the Natural Order of things being ignored or sidelined. Author Captain Whiskerburn Sloopscuttle V.S.O.P. described the disturbances as "awful" and "the worst I've seen since Thursday week". He added "One elderly Ladybird I saw was clinging upside down from a mushroom, desperately trying to get out of the way of the rioters and looters".

Statements from the Owl Council of England have been issued condemning the violence as the work of "extremist owls" and "nothing whatsoever to do with the great majority of peaceful, non-violent owls". Anti-owl graffiti - believed to be "Go vegetarian" and "All owls are birds of prey" has been sprayed on owl-boxes in the vicinity and the Poe-liss suspect that "...jus pished young mice, skelpit as skunksh after a wee dram oot on the toon...", may be to blame. Or something.

The family of Constance Sparrow have asked for privacy and said that anyone wanting to leave a tribute to Constance could do so in the bird-seed feeder that has been hung near the scene of the crime.

Reginald Perrin Syndrome strikes again.

2011-11-11T09:24:00.001Z

Another mysterious pile of clothing found!

Owl Wood Police have issued a statement to the effect that another pile of feathers has been found in the wood overnight. This is just the latest discovery in a long history of discarded clothing that has centred around the neighbourhood of the owl box on Tree 1573. Detected Chief InspectorSydney Flatfoot has refused to speculate on whether the find (of tweed feathers, reading glasses and some unfinished knitting) has anything to do with the sudden disappearance of Constance Sparrow, an elderly spinster of the parish.

Police are investigating two theories, the most plausible of which is that the little piles of discarded feathers indicate a surge of interest in naturism with birds simply stripping down to let the breeze tickle their fancy. The second theory is that foul play is involved. The occupants of Tree 1573 are reported to have been taken in for questioning.

Authorities are asking for anyone who may find Constance Sparrow to please give her a blanket and then ring the station. Constance was last seen at dusk, sitting on a branch and fiddling with the heel turn of a sock she was working on in a burgundy cashmere-acrylic mix on number 2 needles.

2011-11-10T09:26:00.001Z

There is a new resident in the Owl Wood today and she goes, still, by the name of Pipsqueak. Fewer people can see her now, that's all.

Pipsqueak, Pip, Pippin, Moo-Cow and all of her other aliases shook a double six and departed yesterday, 9th of November 2011, in the care of her regular veterinarian and with her nose in a big bag of hitherto forbidden Cadbury's Chocolate Drops.

Pip was a bitch of ... character who did pretty much what she wanted, when she wanted, where she wanted and all in a manner of her choosing.

She will continue to do so in The Owl Wood Publications, a collection of such anthropomorphism and mushroom-fed stuff and nonsense that every library on the planet hasn't even bothered to ban it yet.

Several real-life anecdotes come to mind when trying to illustrate the essence of Pip. In particular I recall one frost-filthy, dank, dark early morning when I was tasked with the well-being of my Sister's bricks and mortar and all of those souls, namely Pipsqueak, Toby et al within it (while the Sister was away, doing "time" or something). Six of the morning o'clock, sleepy and blurry-minded, I was met by Pipsqueak at the door grinnning up at me in full zombie mode. Her left eye - always a bit dodgy - had managed to turn itself around during the night until only the white of the eyeball showed. Was she bothered? Not a bit. Did she delight in my laundry-inducing scream and leap? Absolutely. She recovered, I never will (the nightmares linger on).

Life was a battle of wills for 'Squeak and while she may not have won she most certainly never lost either.

I miss the old hound and I'll try to do her character justice.The first of the The Owl Wood Publications is the story of Pipsqueak and Toby running away to the Owl Wood. Owls do feature - and will feature heavily in later stories - but for this opening volley we concentrate on introducing a pair of dogs. Their arrival in the wood will lead us to the rest of the characters, to the setting itself and thence to the anthropomorphic life that goes on there, right under our noses.

Woof!

Valuable information on owls:

2011-08-13T19:46:00.000+01:00

Tickets are now available for the Owl Wood Stock Concert.

2011-06-27T07:25:00.000+01:00

Headline act this year will be a tribute act to the Fab Four.

Since we have lots of No-Owls this year (2011) we thought we'd keep an eye on the lesser-known species instead.

2011-06-21T10:17:00.000+01:00

Here we have a fine example of the Throck-Morten's Lesser-Knee'd Eagle. And very splendid he is too with his truffle-crested bi-feathered wing-tips and the distinctive travertine marbling to the cheeks.

This splendid gentleman at rest is the only Rotating-Stomach Golden Gannet-Hawk we have ever seen in the Owl Wood. Fantastic! His call is a wonderful Mbiri-style yodel thought to have been picked up during Winter seasons following the ululating tribes of Western Namibia.

Des Res: FREE OWL HOME 1up none down no facilities nice area nr2schools.

2011-02-18T13:06:00.001Z

Desirable new residence FREE TO GOOD TENANTS:

Single room dwelling of timber construction, no facilities, no plumbing, no heating, no electrickery, front door missing but nice area and within fifty miles of local amenities. Tenants must be feathered and prepared to breed like rabbits. Well, breed like owls anyway.

Avian criminal record not a problem - we don't mind if you've been up before the beak. Tenants must promise not to get their feathers ruffled if invaded by squirrels or crows (the Squirrels and the Crow are the two nearest native American Indian tribes). Eggcellent outlook and, aside from the geese, peacocks, ravens, occasional seagulls, rats, rabbits and local loonies with guns, lots of peace and quiet to settle on down and start squeezing out those owl-lings. Owl-lets. Owl pups. Little Owlers? Mini-you's. Not mini-ewes, obviously, otherwise you'd be sheep and have a hell of a time climbing the tree to get into the new owl box. Mini-owls. Younglings. Ow's? O's? Whatever! Baby owls!

Honestly? This place is a hoot.

No need to apply, simply poop on any of the cars in the driveway, move in and start chucking those little rodent bones and bits of pesky inedible fur right out of the door.

Wild Owl Wood Wood-Trout:

2010-11-09T10:41:00.001Z

Wild Wood-Trout. Walking the dogs in the wood presents many delights - fending them off stinky-dead rabbits, stopping them mooning at horses & riders passing in the lane, training them to not poop down badger setts, protecting them from swooping Borg-Owls - but today's dawn foray takes the biscuit. ...I give you the Wild Wood-Trout, found in the middle of the wood, fresh as a freshly dead (I'm a non-fisherman vegan but I'm assuming it's a) trout. Clear eyes, no obvious damage, fully intact, no claw or talon marks, just nestled, dead, among the autumn leaves under the trees. I know it's been windy and we've had a lot of rain but... it had to cross two hedgerows and a minor road to get where it got. Dragged there and abandoned by sporting rabbits who went off to put their rods away? Very, very, very carefully caught by a heron that then walked in to the woods and gave it the last rites? Is it the new genetically modified Tree-Trout? What? More importantly - what will tomorrow bring?

Harvest Time in Aby village...

2010-09-01T18:18:00.000+01:00

Finally there's a long-enough break in the weird weather for the neighbours to get to work on their fields:

It's all gorn terribly quiet on The (Dusty) Owl Wood front, Maud. Splendid!

2010-07-20T11:56:00.002+01:00

Rather magnificently, it's all gone rather quiet across the road. Splendid! So we've organised a marching band to celebrate peace breaking out. The Baghdad Rottweilers Band will be performing Pomp, Circumstance and selected early Beatles covers 24x7 for the next week while they trot up and down double-time in the woodling.

Lake ~~Geneva~~ Aby seems large enough to be tidal. We await the arrival of the presumed single, huge, trout that's going to live in there and hope that he doesn't splash around too much.

And here, just for the record on the Owl Wood Blog, is a picture of an "owl" to be going on with:

Bug looking little Smugger, isn't he?

After The Somme we now have had a week of Sahara World... OK, so where are the meerkats then?

2010-07-09T13:11:00.001+01:00

And bear in mind that these are just the cars - the houses look very similar inside!

This is not the surface of the moon but the bonnet of a previously blue car. Presumably the insectoid whatever-it-was died because of breathing problems, brought down faster than an Easyjet flying through Icelandic volcano dust.

We still have no idea who the contractors are but we do thank them for changing from Arctic tundra chill-mode communication (with diesel sound effects) to Winds-of-the-Sahara-mode (with diesel sound effects). Friendly and considerate, guys, and we thank you especially for the 7am starts and the 8pm finishes.

Once we've finished wiping, washing, vacuuming and coughing it up we'll return your muck and mud to you...

Thank you, thank you, thank you...

2010-06-28T16:08:00.000+01:00

...to whatever agent of the Universe it may have been that gave us Saturday night and Sunday without the diesel tinnitus. Take an immediate French smooch from our pooch:

If you live in ABY and are wondering what the horrendous diesel clatter is overnight, all night...

2010-06-26T08:29:00.003+01:00

... then this is it. The (not so) gentle constant thump-thump-bang of an un-tended (and very, very poorly "silenced") diesel pump throughout the evening and night, mostly sucking on air but occasionally soaking up the trickle of ground-water seeping into the new Village attraction - SOMME WORLD.

If you also wondered what it was that had been rattling the tea-cups during the daytime, day after day this week, then these are they:

Ho hum.

Still, you do have to give the contractors credit for apologising and doing all that they can to minimise disruption and disturbance (and lack of sleep). Oh hang on though... [listens to the chill arctic windblown rattle of frozen tundra tumbleweed blowing past].

Well, fortunately, this is England so we'll all just ignore the elephant in the village and quietly pretend that we can't actually hear anything at all. Diesels at 2 or 3 a.m. my dear? No, I don't think so... more tea, Vicar? I said MORE TEA VICAR? TEA, VICAR - MORE? TWO SUGARS? I SAID... OH FORGET IT AND HAVE ANOTHER RUDDY GIN.

You lookin' at me, kid?

2010-06-12T21:55:00.000+01:00

At last! Whoo-hoo! An owl...

Look, I'm desperate here. If I say it's an owl, it's an owl.

She's called "Doris" and she'll do for now.

There were these tree fellas...

2010-06-02T12:11:00.000+01:00

Alternative title: When Ents die (by the artist formerly known as Prince).

Always sad when a tree has to go but, when it has to go tis best it were gone (to paraphrase). This particular beastie was not healthy so it's making way for new planting.

We saw a bear in the owl wood today!

2010-05-24T07:51:00.001+01:00

We saw a big bear in the owl wood today. He was carrying a shovel but we're hoping it was just a wild-fire safety check after the long hot Summer of yesterday, or maybe a belligerent truffle-hunter...

A postcard from our owls.

2010-04-30T09:30:00.000+01:00

We know now why our owl-box is empty, bereft of owls, deserted and ignored:
the owls are all in the Kielder Forest. Aunty Beeb has the details.

We have voles too. What's wrong with our nice juicy voles?