some corner ... that is forever england

there wasn't room for sixty-two candles

double stubble

charities at clapham junction were not exempt from attack on riot night

... so it looks as if my favourite shop dummies have gone up in smoke

here's one she took of me in barcelona

trouble at mill ...

Early in the day I must drive twenty miles out of my way because our pickers forgot the chutney yesterday for the chef at a posh country hotel who is doing a wedding feast later this morning.  All of my other customers must wait.

Except one.  He would have been the last of the day but I will now drive past his deli and he is already in there.  When I nip in with his box, four hours early, he is at first delighted and then utterly crestfallen.  Our pickers have sent provolone dolce, an innocuous white cheese, instead of dolcelatte, a strong and salty blue cheese.  He has twenty four cheese boards to arrange for someone else’s wedding.  I rack my brains and then drive thirty miles to a friendly wholesaler who very kindly lends me the right cheese, and back again.  All of my other customers must wait. 

Eventually, when I get back in to the yard two hours late and slump over the wheel before I begin to re-arrange the paperwork, there is a movement at the periphery of my vision and I look up see my rosy-cheeked manager giving me a cheery wave as he shoots off for a fortnight’s holiday.  Grrr, just you wait until my psychiatrist hears about this.

the one thousand and first post in this series ... i'm at home with the flu and there's nothing to photograph !

3 no 4 BT

A small pasture, maybe five acres, hedged and gated traditionally, and glimpsed from a speeding coach high upon a motorway embankment, is almost luminous in the intensity of the mid-day sunshine, and seems to have been subject to division by some invisible and quite mysterious force, because on one half stand seventy black and white dairy cows, whilst on the other is a parade of about two hundred shiny black crows.

A very old man cheerfully, sweetly, kindly ushering his desperately weak and fragile wife on to a crowded bus with infinitely loving patience and circumspection.

I am about to photograph a scene when an airliner passes over the city, and as I pause and wait for it to pass in front of a small white cloud, so I am confounded because the little cloud is the nearer to me and is so thin that the perfect shadow of the plane slides across it before I can press the shutter.

A posy of dark flowers (Cosmos atrosanguineus ? )  that smell more like cocoa powder than the real thing.

reflected colours

a fine blogger with lovely eyes, who shall remain unnamed, observed that pigeons flying across the swimming pool appeared to turn blue in the reflected light

this reminded me of an infant memory ... the big girls would hold a buttercup beneath my chin and could tell from the reflected colour whether or not i liked butter

and then, only this evening ... i watched a jackdaw fly across the gap between the tenements, passing beneath two large trees ... and for a couple of seconds the glossy feathers on his neck and back reflected the greenery

politically ethically humanistically incorrect ...

Struggling to undo a stack of small boxes that had been taped together with unusual thoroughness by our pickers and packers last night , i cussed audibly ... and then explained to my bemused customer ...

"Picked and packed by the company's Asperger's Division; unpacked by the Tourette's."

f-f-far f-f-fetched ....

... f-f-fountains

3 more BT

At the British Film Institute on the South Bank, Glen Ford and Rita Hayworth looking like gods in the digitally re-mastered Gilda. 

Great scriptwriters don’t waste words and great photographers add magic to each frame to cast us in to new oceans of emotions.

A troubled and agitated mother-of-pearl sky conceals and then reveals the huge and fugitive new moon descending over the city.

In the gloom at Putney Station as our electric train slips quietly away, so a steam driven Pullman rumbles through, the loco panting as it follows a curve into the night.

in the churchyard at ide hill

3BT

An undeserved and unexpectedly affectionate text from the loved one during a frantic hour of work-induced stress.

Near Sevenoaks, glimpsed through a high hedge as I trundle slowly down a narrow country lane, a broad-antlered stag and a dark-eyed long-necked hind, each smooth coated and with uptilted noses, treading slowly through knee deep wheat that really does look golden in the strong sunshine.

Coming back to London down a long hill into Norwood, and having seen him some way off, I stop to let out a car who has been creeping from a side turning.  I might just as well give him space as try to wobble around him, and no skin off my nose because the crossing lights twenty yards on have turned red.  However, the cyclist who was a hundred yards behind me has now caught up and is sadly lacking in road sense, shooting by me in the face of oncoming traffic, unaware of either car or crossing.  Incredibly, he bounces off the car and lands on his feet as the oncoming drivers stand on their brakes, and then walks away shocked and shaken, but without a scratch.  

let there be light ... above the lovely big tables at the back of notes cafe in the lower end of saint martins lane next to the coliseum, so mis-spelled since 1710

ignore those flies ... this is the nut or seed that the rose-ringed parakeets go mad for ... will some kind nature-lover tell me name of the tree, please ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose-ringed_Parakeet

shake a tail feather baby

the york house water gate

sorry, i don't know anything about the painting

yet another visit to the leonardo cartoon prompts a minor brainstorm ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Virgin_and_Child_with_St_Anne_and_St_John_the_Baptist

i've probably sat in front of this drawing forty times in forty years but usually with less than full concentration

today i consciously searched the picture for fresh details and allowed my attention to spend some time in the lower "incomplete" part of the drawing

leonardo has been quoted as saying  something like "art is never finished, only abandoned"

ho hum !  i'm not sure if the suggestion i'm about to make can be taken seriously ... i have no scholarly axe to grind because i am not a scholar, i don't have the mental strength to do serious research and juggle other people's ideas ... but i want to ask, are the ladies' feet cooling in a stream of water ?

someone may have suggested this before but how would i know ? ... and if they are cooling their toes, then how would roman catholics have interpreted the image six hundred ( correction: WHOOPS ! ONLY FIVE HUNDRED AND ELEVEN ... ) years ago ?  your scholarly answers on a postcard, toot sweet, please ?

the mystery subject is ...

... old father thames turned upside down

on newick green

one thousand and twenty kilos of butter safely off the truck ... thanks lads !

As Hercules used to say, "Mustn't grumble !"

But what if The State were to print little books of National Moaning Tokens ?  Their use could serve both to legitimize grumbling and to limit it at the same time.  There could even be randomly distributed Golden Grumble tokens, entitling the lucky finders to a few extra minutes of indulgence in The National Vice.  ( I only mention this because our sales people, the ones who get the commission, have asked me to deliver a ton of butter to a smart country restaurant tomorrow and they expect me to unload all one hundred 10 kilo cartons by hand. )

Entering Reigate from Redhill, the large plate glass window of a smart hairdresser’s shop is covered by a patchwork of sheets of A4 paper proclaiming an irresistable offer of “60% OFF LASH EXTENSIONS”.  Blinking instinctively, I reach for my credit card.

On sunny Lavender Hill, I draw the truck alongside a red double decker bus whilst we wait for the traffic lights and then just at that moment when we slip off the handbrake and engage gear again, a girl in a white dress with a very pretty smile cycles slowly through the diminishing gap between us with a pocket AtoZ atlas raised directly in front of her face, about seven inches from her nose. Perhaps she mislaid her spectacles upon the psychiatrist’s couch.

stubble trouble

southwark ... the golden hind, the cathedral, and the borough market

i woke up at my usual work time so i used my wonderful freedom pass to cross the city before sunrise ... this was early on saturday whilst it was still friday evening in los angeles, hence the friday byeline at the top of the page

3BT, 21st July 2011

About an hour after a wet grey dawn the clouds began to fragment and then a dozen silver sunbeams formed an inverted fan in to which the relatively tiny smudged shape of a distant jumbo jet descended and slowly turned. I had forgot how big the sky.


Later, in the Sussex Weald, I drove the truck quite slowly up a steep lane through a darkly shaded tunnel of trees and far away at the top of the slope there gleamed an oval patch of brilliant green, too bright at that distance for me to know if it was field or foliage … and in that second, two very tall and long-legged thoroughbred horses pranced into the pool of light with their riders.


At day’s end, the lumpy grey clouds re-arranged themselves around the setting sun and caught fire, as if Tiepolo and Turner had taken sides in some kind of Heavenly Paint Wars. This would be the ideal setting for an allegorical painting featuring the apotheosis of all of my favourite bloggers, tinted with a glowing distillation of all their many shades of sweetness and laughter. I’m not sure if they would prefer to be dressed in skimpy arrangements of fur and feathers, or seamless raiments. Fight amongst yourselves, friends.

3BT 19th July 2011

A grey silhouette, the statue of a soldier on a Great War memorial seems to glance sideways across Streatham Common through the early mist towards Flanders.


In the early sunlight of the same misty morning, the miles of grey razor wire curled all along the dewdropped netting of the airport perimeter have sunlit cobwebs in every loop.

The loved one returns from her brief exile in the Isle of Wight, cleans the bath, and later serves a perfect supper … a glass of prosecco next to a dish of pasta cooked with fennel and garlic, raisins and sardines “al limone”.