Home and gardening
On holiday this week, spending it at home so, you know what that means...a trip to the garden centre. Where once a holiday was an excuse to measure your length on the sofa and ward off DVT by exercising your thumb over the teevee remote and the speed-dial for 'Hang's House of Curry', thanks to Titmarch and his ilk, back yards all over the nation have been turned in to gardening gulags. So it was off to the Big Orange Fleecer to look for plants and so on. Left with some bamboo poles and a faint sense of disappointment at not having spent enough.
Decided to check out local nursery. Not the type that might have me breaching my ASBO, but instead one where they raise plants. It was excellent, basically consisting of lots of poly-tunnels lashed together and acres of shimmering greenhouses. There was free beverages and the front desk was un-manned. Trying to neck free beverages while loading up the car with stolen begonias seemed like a tempting idea, but in the end we pressed the buzzer for assistance, me hoping all the while that some buxom land-girl might ring up my lavender. Unfortunately, that was not the case.
The nursery itself was lovely, but was about as hard to reach as Brigadoon. It was at the end of a road lined with very posh houses. (It was also next to a riding stables. I suspect that the reason all the nursery plants are so big has a lot to do with the diet of the horses). As one turned off the main road, the houses were normal and close together. Then they started to spread out and grow bigger, as if, like plants with water, they needed to suck up more wealth to survive. This was 4x4 country, you could tell because the road humps were so big that two had snow on the peak and one gave me a nose-bleed the ascent was so sudden and steep.
I expected to see a sign saying 'private road', but the only thing there was a sign saying 'no pavement'. This was a warning, rather than an instruction, although I can see it being added to in the years to come 'no pavement, blacks, lefties, beardies, sandle-wearing Guradian readers, moslems, homosexualists or gurning'.
In between doing the heavy lifting while Lou flits from sunflower to sunflower in a floppy hat occasionally tying things to bamboo and telling me to dig faster, I managed to get two minutes with a cuppa and the Observer Food Monthly.
There's an excellent competition in it. Basically you have to take a photograph of some food! There are three sections, Reportage (shot of somebody butchering a lamb, or some toothless type inhaling a bowl of noodles through a cloud of steam), portrait (food porn) and still life (hard-core food porn).
This appeals to me. I especially like the idea of reportage. The example in the magazine was an ancient Vietnamise fellow with a basket full of what might be green leaves or knock-off Nike trainers. Intrestingly (well, for me), he was walking away from camera. This highlights one of the problems of reportage - how can one get a photograph of say, a fat sweaty overweight trucker about to sit down to a full English with double egg cooked in sump-oil without drawing attention to oneself, with predictable consequences and the chance to do a follow-up photographic essay on hospital food?
I may enter. A couple of ideas have already presented themselves. There's a bakery in the village and there's always a queue. Nothing sways a judge of a photographic competition like a group of old people queuing for bread - it takes them back to the glory days of fantasising about being picture editor of a national newspaper and sorting out the latest images of Soviet life. I'm composing the shot already in my head and I can almost smell the wee - and the bread, obviously.
Then again, every Friday in the village Tony's fish van sets up. Fresh fish from Hastings. He has a crew cut, and ear-ring and a striped apron. He's like the 6th Village Person! Ahhh, I can almost smell the halibut. Yes, it does indeed smell like victory!
Or, I suppose, I could go for broke with photoshop and apply a Burberry tint to a photograph taken in McD's of some fat kid doing something unspeakable to a chicken nugget. Believe me, being eaten is only the start of its worries. The great thing about taking photographs of people eating 'food' in McD's is that it counts as reportage AND still life!
I think I shall take some photographs and post them. Feedback welcome. The only problem is that the sort of things I am interested in photographing are the sort of places where the owner might associate a camera with the environmental health, a private prosecution or, worse still, inclusion in a 'Time Out' guide.
Enjoyed your e mail very much. You appear to be a having an adventure. My Brussels kit is packed and ready and I await your summons.
Decided to check out local nursery. Not the type that might have me breaching my ASBO, but instead one where they raise plants. It was excellent, basically consisting of lots of poly-tunnels lashed together and acres of shimmering greenhouses. There was free beverages and the front desk was un-manned. Trying to neck free beverages while loading up the car with stolen begonias seemed like a tempting idea, but in the end we pressed the buzzer for assistance, me hoping all the while that some buxom land-girl might ring up my lavender. Unfortunately, that was not the case.
The nursery itself was lovely, but was about as hard to reach as Brigadoon. It was at the end of a road lined with very posh houses. (It was also next to a riding stables. I suspect that the reason all the nursery plants are so big has a lot to do with the diet of the horses). As one turned off the main road, the houses were normal and close together. Then they started to spread out and grow bigger, as if, like plants with water, they needed to suck up more wealth to survive. This was 4x4 country, you could tell because the road humps were so big that two had snow on the peak and one gave me a nose-bleed the ascent was so sudden and steep.
I expected to see a sign saying 'private road', but the only thing there was a sign saying 'no pavement'. This was a warning, rather than an instruction, although I can see it being added to in the years to come 'no pavement, blacks, lefties, beardies, sandle-wearing Guradian readers, moslems, homosexualists or gurning'.
In between doing the heavy lifting while Lou flits from sunflower to sunflower in a floppy hat occasionally tying things to bamboo and telling me to dig faster, I managed to get two minutes with a cuppa and the Observer Food Monthly.
There's an excellent competition in it. Basically you have to take a photograph of some food! There are three sections, Reportage (shot of somebody butchering a lamb, or some toothless type inhaling a bowl of noodles through a cloud of steam), portrait (food porn) and still life (hard-core food porn).
This appeals to me. I especially like the idea of reportage. The example in the magazine was an ancient Vietnamise fellow with a basket full of what might be green leaves or knock-off Nike trainers. Intrestingly (well, for me), he was walking away from camera. This highlights one of the problems of reportage - how can one get a photograph of say, a fat sweaty overweight trucker about to sit down to a full English with double egg cooked in sump-oil without drawing attention to oneself, with predictable consequences and the chance to do a follow-up photographic essay on hospital food?
I may enter. A couple of ideas have already presented themselves. There's a bakery in the village and there's always a queue. Nothing sways a judge of a photographic competition like a group of old people queuing for bread - it takes them back to the glory days of fantasising about being picture editor of a national newspaper and sorting out the latest images of Soviet life. I'm composing the shot already in my head and I can almost smell the wee - and the bread, obviously.
Then again, every Friday in the village Tony's fish van sets up. Fresh fish from Hastings. He has a crew cut, and ear-ring and a striped apron. He's like the 6th Village Person! Ahhh, I can almost smell the halibut. Yes, it does indeed smell like victory!
Or, I suppose, I could go for broke with photoshop and apply a Burberry tint to a photograph taken in McD's of some fat kid doing something unspeakable to a chicken nugget. Believe me, being eaten is only the start of its worries. The great thing about taking photographs of people eating 'food' in McD's is that it counts as reportage AND still life!
I think I shall take some photographs and post them. Feedback welcome. The only problem is that the sort of things I am interested in photographing are the sort of places where the owner might associate a camera with the environmental health, a private prosecution or, worse still, inclusion in a 'Time Out' guide.
Enjoyed your e mail very much. You appear to be a having an adventure. My Brussels kit is packed and ready and I await your summons.
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