Signpost

Peter been waiting for me to upload this image of a canal signpost, taken on a recent BDO. Doubtless something embarrassing is in store. All I can say is that one has to suffer for one's art.

Absorbed

There's no surer sign that Dave's in his element than when he gets down and dirty for the sake of a picture.
With a sheer drop behind him of several feet to the surface of the River Severn, I was casting around for the nearest lifebuoy, just in case.

Mirrors

Peripatetic Postings is the virtual space in which occasional random, disparate strands of yarn are plucked from the time-worn fabric of the lives of two middle-aged men who like, among other things, their photography, then woven together, just for fun.

Dave, as those of you who are reading his journal this week will know, is, voluntarily, sensorily deprived, working long hours, mostly in the dark, which would explain his recent appreciation of the crisply delineated early morning light this October has been heaping upon our sceptred isle.

Even though he and I are now separated geographically, on Thursday evening I felt I’d made contact with at least an echo of my old mate. It was when I visited one of our common venues this week, when the delightful Emma (the boss) made her usual thoroughly professional job of cutting my wayward hair, which nowadays is an assortment of grey which grows at alarmingly different rates across my head.

As a photographer, I often like playing with mirror shots. Keeping my head as still and level as I could, I lowered my eyes to focus on an arrangement of scissors lying on the glass shelf in front of me. Once the cut was over, I explained my intention. Emma’s reaction was, thoughtfully, to clean the work surface, so that I could make a neater picture. It was all part of the service-with-a-smile attitude prevalent at my local branch of Sweeney Todd’s.

Tea time

If cups of tea and slices of cake are mandatory on Fab Four Days Out, imagine what happens on a Fab Four Long Weekend. If you can't, Dave's post below offers an insight.

This snapshot was carefully set up by the ever resourceful Sparkly, who improvised, ingeniously, a miniature camera platform using three sachets of sugar wedged under the lens of my pocket-sized point-and-shoot, which had been in danger of toppling forward onto the table and cutting our heads off, pictorially speaking.

The self-timer did the rest, while we four grinned at a brightly blinking orange led, wondering when the camera would actually go off. I leave you with the evidence, recorded in the below-mentioned Polly’s Café, Thirsk, on our way up North.

Feeding the Hungry Two

For a change I thought we'd get away from the obsession with cake and have a look at what Pixie and Sparkly consume during our Fab 4 days out (these are, in effect, augmented BDOs, with added shopping and bargain hunting and lots of male hanging-about at previously agreed rendezvous points).

So here it is, the traditional Yorkshire Pudding, served on its own and filled with thick onion gravy. The venue was Polly's Cafe in Thirsk, North Yorkshire and jolly fine food it was. It kept them quiet for a while (where while is defined as a period of time greater than a moment but shorter than long enough).

Three-shot?

The “Fab Four” had another one of their days out today, in the Welsh town of Monmouth. Sparkly & Pixie were in a ladies shoe shop investigating top quality, hand-made, limited edition Italian designer handbags, while Dave and I mooched around in the overcast light, checking the charity shops for bargain books.

We two had a discussion about how often we find opportunities to make pictures about “threes” not many moments before I spotted this dog on self-appointed guard duty inside the door of what were, presumably, his owner’s premises.

Actually, if you look carefully, it’s not really a three-shot at all.

Low cost lighting

Lighting on a budget appeals to me, as does an elegant engineering solution to a technical problem.

There aren’t many village halls with a fixed lighting rig. Those few which have a couple of front-of-house spotlights generally run them bare, by which I mean that the light coming out of the lens is in its natural state, what we might call “white”.

Whoever thought about how to add colour to the old lamp pictured below must have been a worthy addition to any amateur production team. Apart from offering a choice of four colours (five if you also count white), this lighting designer has used standard brass curtain track and runners, the kind that screeched loudly when my grandmother wanted small boys to get up in the morning.

Full marks to the Owermoigne village hall crew, for ingenuity, craft and thrift.

Steaming summer

Dave and I are interested in words, and interesting wording on some of the notices we discover on our travels often attracts our attention.

I found this example as I wandered around a splendidly organised summer street fair, held in the Dorset village of Owermoigne. The place was so named because the Moygnes family lived there for three centuries, dating from Norman times.

This clarion-clear proclamation seems quaintly out of place today: I doubt if there have been many steam-driven tractors clanking slowly though Owermoignes’ narrow lanes recently, but a local ruling must, I presume, continually enforce itself, a lack of vapourous locomotion notwithstanding, until either someone revokes it, or the paint peels away.

Almost but not nearly a Poem

We have not gone, we two.
It's just we've been away,
Dave working in the dark,
Pete by a pebbly bay.

A sure entrant for most dire poem of the month

Kneads must

The dark interior wood and stone kneaded a little lift from a judiciously placed electronic flash unit, in order to balance the lighting against the bright exterior.

I had to kneal down, because that was knecessary for framing the shot. My kneas were hurting, but knot as much as my brain, which was dealing with knumbers.

Knealing in Church

One of the purposes of Peripatetic Postings is to chronicle our joint outings; what the other purposes are we don't know as yet but I'm sure it will come to us.

Regular followers of the Boys' Day Out will know that we spend a lot of time in church. It sometimes worries me that it might begin to rub off and that my essentially humanist approach to life will be corrupted. Judging by this picture from today's jaunt, for one of us it's already on the way.

For the sake of his knees, please pass him a knealer.

A bit o' flash

Dave and I had a splendid Boys Day Out today, a jaunt full of nerdiness concerning photographic lighting experiments, random conversations, an excellent lunch and time for an afternoon, toasted teacake for Dave with even a wheat-free flapjack for me.

It’s not every day I get to sit inside a Yew tree that’s a thousand years old. This one is in the churchyard at Saint Bartholomew’s, the parish church of Much Marcle. The trunk of this old timer is about thirty-one feet in girth, and there are nail holes still visible from where bygone parish notices were affixed.

It was as dark as a dark place inside, sheltered under a light-blocking canopy of lush green foliage, even though the sun was shining brightly in the graveyard behind. I pressed a small electronic flash gun into service, to see into the shadows, just for the fun of it.

Boys’ Toys are essential prerequisites for a fulfilling Boys’ Day Out.

Family life

I drove over Eckington Bridge today, for the first time in over a week. A set of temporary traffic lights replaced the waterlogged fixtures. The flood waters had retreated significantly, though the river was running fast, brown and high. The sky was blue, peppered with puffy, pure white clouds: a perfect summer afternoon.

When I got out of my car to survey the scene, the air smelled of rotting miscellanea. A thick crust of damp sludge covered the entire surface of the riverside car park. The grassy banks were everywhere coated with a crisp shell of dried mud.

A family of swans paddled purposefully upstream against the strong current. Life appears, superficially, almost normal again, as the land recovers from the elemental devastation wrought by the torrential rains of last weekend.

Experiment

A little test to see if I can post from my PDA while drinking red wine.

Road closed

I was out and about today, driving on those roads which were open. A local journey of about seven miles had been extended, by detours and doubling back tactics, to over forty.

I visited a workplace, where the staff present were on duty, in spite of many having had their own homes flooded, endured power cuts and suffered an absence of piped drinking water supplies. Representing a large Social Housing Association, they were, ironically, patiently answering questions, as responsible landlords, from anxious tenants, about the planned repairs to the weather-damaged properties the not-for-profit company manages.

Tewkesbury is, today, still a difficult place to access by road, even though the surrounding flood waters have receded. Now begins the long, messy and expensive business of assessing the damage, verifying the insurance claims, and, slowly, painstakingly, putting things right.

And a Hat

Well, while we're on fashion, here I am on a drama shoot somewhere in central England after the costume department thought I'd look better in a hat. (To be honest, I'd look better in almost anything)

The make-up team suggested my moustache should come off a part of the make-over but I resisted. That salutary event had to wait several years until I got bored one stormy night on the west coast of South Island, New Zealand.

Time travel

Dave’s courageous revelation of yesteryear’s fashion prompted me to ascend the attic stairs, to rummage through my scrapbook files, whereupon I discovered a similarly telling record of what now seems to be “not a good look”.

I am the bearded one in the flared trousers. Well, at the time, I knew no better, nor, I suspect, did any of us.