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