the train now departing ...

calling in for a quick pee and a glimpse of something hot and smokey on 28th february 2006, i took a little picture of a forlorn tanker engine standing in the car park at sheffield park station, the southern terminus and loco shed of the bluebell line.

today i arrived at the same spot, for the same reason, and found the same engine about to depart for the national rail museum at york.

she looks a bit smarter nowadays, and i was amused to notice that she'd been built in nine elms, which is where i start my working day each morning

Carmina Figurate by Charles Sandison

In a tall room to the left of the entrance to the V&A, high above the stimulating exhibition of and about books made by artists, which is rarther pretentiously named Blood On Paper, (pretentious if only because it displays mostly comfortable art by comfortable artists who were not in immediate danger of being murdered for what they made) … high above all this, words of projected light fly slowly around the walls, thousands of glowing words which seem to move in random orbits, and if you focus on just one word, and follow it’s trajectory for a while, then, as it flies past another word and another, so your mind will distil tiny transiently random phrases … and if the words that drift past occasionally have a deeper significance, so much the better to prod your sleeping subconscious … some say that it isn’t an entirely original work, but I say that it is beautiful, or at least it is elegant, and it fulfils its purpose.

they have their instructions ...

... they must go in to the forest and they are not to come back until they have gathered several wagonloads of firewood, hunted down the largest wild boar, and then roasted it for my tea

a couple of harry redknapp's boys

i expect she could do with a nice cup of tea ...

oh ! the lamentable decadence of pre-revolutionary france ...

voltaire ... bright as a button, sharp as a pin

nosferatu royal blue

i wanna be their age again ... but smarter !

ten years ago, twenty, and some ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVoiV1O67JY

sylvia forward

violet reeves meeting sylvia forward in 1989, probably for the first time ... note the hands

re-iterating the russell blog ... and the value of scrapbooks

after georgeyboy commented on the russell "ten commandments" i dug in to some boxes of ancient scrapbooks ... not being a trained historian, i didn't retain the marginalia and am unable to say when and where these images came from, but it was probably the sunday times in the early seventies, perhaps the photographer was snowdon, i wish someone would tell me

as for scrapbooks, if your memory was as woolly and moth-eaten as mine ...

one of my favourite trees ... just off the A23 as you turn towards ansty ... i've been admiring it in passing for seven years

drunken lamp-posts leaning against one another ... might they be seven drunken sisters ?

myself, when young

some first impressions

a) mystification at the shapes of the letters we were asked to copy with chalk onto a framed piece of slate

b) an inability of the infant mind to process the changed perspective of the world when i first travelled on top of a bus ... the flat fields appeared to spin, each turning in its turn

c) the distinct multiple echoes of footsteps crossing the square, especially of the coalman's hobnails, and of the hacks and hunters being taken to the vet

what's the plural of tempus fugit ?

walk this way ... at alpha ba lgw

although i always carry a black marker pen, it was impossible to decide on what to do with this head ... should i have inked-in the aerosmith bouffant or the run dmc homburg ?

Crime And Punishment

In last night's ultimate dream sequence I was back in Malmesbury, although you wouldn't have recognized it because it was more like the Appalachians in the nineteen-fifties.

I was trying to scratch a living as a local news photographer and had been told by my editor that the young Michelle Vater ( pictured ) had just got a job in the local police force and was busy arresting every villain in town, most of whom she had been on first name terms with since infancy.

But every time that I dashed to the scene of a crime, I was too late because she'd already subdued and handcuffed them, completed the paperwork, and sent them off to Devizes Prison, pending trial at the Assizes. There was no question of bail, and no possibility of an action photo.

more dithering at the V&A

the cafe at the V&A

V&A ... in the castings gallery ( i )

V&A ... in the castings gallery ( ii )

V&A ... eternal struggles in the castings gallery

british museum islamic arts ( i )

british museum ... islamic arts ( ii )

an assembly of 13mm fibre-reinforced concrete panels forming a pavilion in bedford square

to the woods !

one of our customers built their posh offices in the woods ... and in case you wondered, there is nothing like laying down among a bank of bluebells ... their perfume is delicate but sensational, and the smell of damp living earth is purely elemental

it's a bit like waxing your legs, owen ... only different

All but blind

In childhood we were advised to, “Try to see ourselves as others see us”, but it seems equally useful to try to see others as they see themselves … which somehow reminds me of a little verse by Walter De La Mare …

All but blind

In his chambered hole

Gropes for worms

The four-clawed Mole.



All but blind

In the evening sky

The hooded Bat

Twirls softly by.



All but blind

In the burning day

The Barn-Owl blunders

On her way.



And blind as are

These three to me,

So blind to someone

I must be.