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.