The Photographer Lady

Track of the day - A Picture Of You - Joe Brown.

The title of this post should really have been How I Became A Flasher's Assistant.
A professional photographer lady arrived this afternoon to take photographs of Mrs B's flowers. I didn't even know she had arrived until Mrs B came to find me and told me to get off my backside because a very nice young lady needed my assistance.
Always willing to be of service to a nice young lady, particularly one with a French accent, I found myself holding an umbrella in one hand and a remote flash unit in the other.
To be honest I was so impressed by the lady's equipment that I would have been more than willing to hold anything for her.
As it was I ended up being a flasher's assistant in my own back garden. Is this what it has come to I ask myself.
A week ago she was camping out with and photographing the Heathrow demonstrators and today the poor wee thing was trying to create something marketable out of Mrs B's flowers for a piece in a national magazine.
If I knew who she was I'd buy the photographs off her. Mrs B was quite right, she was very nice and if she can make Mrs B's flowers look newsworthy she's a creative genius.

I've just realised that tomorrow is the start of the August Bank Holiday. Why they have to arrange a Bank Holiday to coincide with our trip to North Yorkshire beats me.
Perhaps I should look at a calendar occasionally.
It might help if I looked at a map too because the week by the sea that I was looking forward to, turns out to be a week on a working farm miles away from the Yorkshire coast.
I think I'd better leave the flippers at home and take hiking boots instead.
Perhaps I will take the flippers and a snorkel in case there's heavy rain.

Elder son phoned tonight. He's off to play at a music festival in Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis.
Seems like a long, long way to go to batter a drum kit but you're only middle-aged once.
The bogger gets around a bit.
Last weekend he was somewhere south of Edinburgh and a couple of days before that he was somewhere or other in Russia.
Am I envious of all this gadding about?
Certainly not, because tomorrow I'll be stuck in Bank Holiday traffic somewhere south of wherever the GPS unit tells me that I'm going. Anyway, Mrs B says it will be very nice and she's always right. She was certainly right about the young lady with the camera.

Lady On A Flat Rock

Track of the day - Right Place Wrong Time - Dr. John.



Right now a couple of weeks on a sunny Mediterranean beach would be good but instead we're off for a week to a farm somewhere in the wilds of North East Yorkshire.
I think I'd better go and buy a new fleece, some waders and yet more rat pellets.

The rat and the rain have conspired to keep Mrs B indoors where she has cleared out a walk-in cupboard at the top of the stairs and found boxes and boxes full of my 35mm transparencies that were hidden away in there.
The lady on a flat rock in the South of France is from a Kodak slide marked Aug 1972.
I wonder if she's still there? Somehow I don't think she'll be on a farm in Yorkshire but you never know.

Monster Rat

Track of the day - Muskrat Ramble - Louis Armstrong Hot Five.



So much for my skill as a rat poisoner. The boggers positively thrive on the little blue pellets I've been putting down for them.
This monster rambled round the lawn while I was drinking coffee in the garden.
I blame it all on the local take-aways and the lady who keeps putting bread and seeds out for the birds.



Doesn't appeal to me but round here people will wear just about anything.

Brighten Up The City Week

Track of the day - Dead End Street - The Kinks.


This week is 'brighten up the city week' and there's more than one way to brighten up a Bogsville dead end street as this skipping lady is about to find out.

A Sleepy Shropshire Town

Track of the day - Get Away - Georgie Fame.

Accompany me on a pictorial tour of a sleepy little Shropshire town.


















I never did manage to find the long-stay WC.
I assure you that I was in and out of this one in 'a brace of shakes'.

Fart Uncontrollably

Track of the day - Punchdrunk - Bela Fleck.



In a futile attempt to avoid my cigarette smoke Mrs B spends most of her time at the Swedish flat pack furniture superstore. As a result I am now able to assemble a bookcase or cd tower in about the time it takes for the first ash to drop off the end of my cigarette.
This is the sad state of affairs at Bogsville Heights since our leaders introduced the smoking ban that has brought to an end my nights out in the Hole in the Ground and Tulip & Tiara bars.
The only place locally that doesn't have a smoking ban sticker on the door is Bogsville Heights so I'm sort of stuck here.
The local public phone box doesn't have a sticker but I might just as well stay at home as stand in the phone box all night.

The bus shelter has a no smoking sign, the local undertaker has a no smoking sign so even the local corpses are denied a last fag before they depart for the crematorium, which I've no doubt has a no smoking sign stuck on its door too. When I'm finally transported there I'm going to insist that I'm delivered with a full pack of Benson & Hedges.
I did wander along to the Hole in the Ground bar last Friday.
I sat in the back yard with a pint of something or other until it got too cold to sit outside and then wandered inside where I was immediately struck by the welcoming smell of stale urine and B.O.
I stood at the bar while the little guy standing next to me smashed the Bogsville record for breaking wind.
"Sorry about that mate," he said to no one in particular and broke wind again.
I wandered off to the other end of the bar. Smokers don't bother me. People who fart uncontrollably do.
No I'm not planning to give up smoking. I have no desire to have an even more finely tuned sense of smell.

Invaded By Brown Rats

Track of the day - Hoots Mon - Lord Rockingham's XI.


Here's a fun entry.
We woke up yesterday to find we'd been invaded by brown rats.
Three rats were gambolling around the lawn at the back of the house. One was a brown brute, the female no doubt, that dwarfed the other two. They seem to have decided that the Bogs bird food that gets dropped from the feeders is to their liking especially as they can wash it down with pond water and have dug themselves a handy home in a rockery.
Needless to say we've stopped feeding the birds and started leaving little piles of rat poison along the bottom of hedges and against walls.
I don't feel good about it, in fact I feel bloody awful about it but the rats aren't likely to toddle off to somewhere else before they've increased the local rat population.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed for the field mouse but I guess I've finished him off too.
Three piles of the poison pellets had been taken by this morning and another two by this evening. I've covered most of them with half sections of plastic piping and the neighbours don't have cats or dogs.
If there's no sign of the rats tomorrow I'll clear the stuff away.
Mrs B has, for some reason, decided she doesn't want to be in the garden with the rats so we spent most of today watching heron in a canal.
I suspect that we were a lot closer to rats there than at home in the Bogsville Heights rattery.

Here's some bedtime reading for you.

Yellow Jersey Shropshire

Track of the day - Pawn Shop Blues - Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee.


I can confirm that Michael Rasmussen, the guy who wore the yellow jersey in the Tour de France for 10 days before he was sacked by his team for telling them he'd been in Mexico when he'd apparently been in Italy all the time, has now set off on the Tour de Shropshire.
I was wandering around Ludlow in Shropshire when the yellow jersey suddenly appeared right in front of me.
I couldn't help noticing that the recent scandal seemed to have aged him.
Wonder who I'll spot tomorrow?