Scanning Malt And Bluebells

As many of you already know, I am addicted to scanning. I find it difficult to contemplate life without a scanner and my first thought on encountering any new experience or emotion is to scan it. I once got addicted to scanning my breakfast, but it took me ages to clear the crumbs of toast from my scanner afterwards and I have therefore stopped this eccentric practice.

I have often toyed with the idea of scanning my friends, but I fear that it might prove difficult and I suppose there is the danger of that bright, piercing light doing some kind of irreversible damage. The idea of scanning emotions is a challenge, but one that is worth some effort. Take Saturday night, for example : and if truth be told, well into Sunday morning. We had a house full of friends and we were celebrating either Isobel's birthday or World Whisky Day ... or perhaps we were just celebrating friendship. A good many bottles were opened, and sampled, and discussed, and enjoyed. The scanned bottle of Ladaig was one of my particular favourites. From the scan it looks full, but I can assure you it is not - it is just its horizontal position on the scanning bed. Along with its fellow offerings, it resulted in me having to adopt a similar horizontal position on my own bed for much of Sunday, but the last thing you need on a Monday morning is to see a scan of that.

Let me provide a little balance by sharing a scan of my morning walk with Amy. The bluebells are out at the moment. They only last for a couple of weeks at the most, but whilst they are in bloom they carpet the woods and the hedgerows better than any Axminster or Wilton could do. I know I could show you photographs of them, but scanning helps me to recognise the beauty of the individual : that essential element that can summon up familiarity without any trace of contempt.

The bluebells always come out for Isobel's birthday. Perhaps I really should try and scan the Good Lady Wife.

Sepia Saturday 177 : Him, Her And Her

I have never been very good at facial recognition. That is why I am always looking for a decent bit of facial recognition software : one which doesn't suggest that your mother-in-law is a Norfolk Terrier or your best friend's daughter is a character from the Muppets. Many years ago, when I was a young lad working in the mill, I was hanging out of a window with my mates one lunchtime, shouting mild obscenities at the young ladies walking by. "Hang on", said my mate Joe, "isn't that Isobel, your girlfriend!"

And then there was the time a few years later when I was walking through Halifax and noticed a chap walking towards me with recognition dawning in his eyes. As he threw out his arms in anticipation of a hug for a long-lost friend I mentally flicked through my card index of faces. The more I tried to match features, the more I panicked; and eventually I accepted defeat and threw my arms out in mutual welcome and recognition and decided I would try and wing it. Much to my embarrassment  the man walked straight passed me and hugged a woman who was walking down the street behind me.

Which brings me to my Sepia Saturday picture. The theme image features kids swinging and hanging upside down. My chosen photograph features a charming little chap (chappess) swinging on a park swing. It might be me, who knows. The woman might be my mother or might be Isobel's Grandmother. The young girl might be my wife or it might be - well who knows. No doubt, I will do what I normally do, which is print the photograph off and take it to the pub tonight. After a good few pints I will pass it around and ask if anyone recognises anyone. I will let you know what I discover.

Whilst you are waiting the outcome of my investigations you can swing on over to the Sepia Saturday Blog and follow the other links you will find there.

Feast And Famine And The Age Of Social Sterility

The world of beer and brewing is going through odd times : times. on the one hand, of feast, and on the other, of famine. I am mainly talking about Britain, but I wouldn't be surprised if the changes don't extend to a number of other beer drinking countries as well.

First we have the feast : and the feast currently on offer to the discerning beer drinker is the sheer number of different ales and lagers available to them. The last ten years has seen an explosion in the number of microbreweries producing and supplying a glittering selection of real ales - on draught and in bottles - to thirsty drinkers. Not since the seventeenth century, when each individual pub would brew its own beer, has there been such a bewildering selection available : pale ales, golden ales, bright beers, dark beers, hoppy and mellow, light ales and heavy ales. The variety - and in the vast majority of cases - the high quality of these products make sampling a delight and raises beer drinking well above the status of thirst quenching.

But then we have the famine : and that is the developing famine of pleasant places to drink this golden array of brewed delicacies. Yes, yet again, I am moaning on about the decline of the British pub. During a depressing drive from Hebden Bridge to Halifax the other week I think I counted more closed pubs en route (and by closed I mean permanently closed) than open ones. 

It would appear that if we are entering a new age of the super-abundance of different types of real beer we are also entering an age in which we will drink them in the social sterility of our own homes. Which, to me, is a great shame.

A Matter Of Balance

I remember when I was a kid, going for a walk through some fields with my parents and coming across a piece of old wood balanced on top of a small stone. I stood on the wood and swayed from side to side, flapping my arms around like counterweights, trying to keep my balance. It was a great game but it was suddenly brought to a stop by a shout : "stop doing that or you'll fall and hurt yourself".

Isobel (the GLW) has recently taken up Yoga in order to try and preserve her "core body strength" (whatever that might be) and returned home from one of her classes the other day with a plastic disk balanced upon an inverted circular plastic dome. It is used to help preserve balance, she explained, and you should spend a few minutes each day trying to balance on it. "Do it", she said, "or you'll fall and hurt yourself". It is strange : what comes around goes around, and so often the sins of our youth become the virtues of old age. It is all a matter of balance I suppose.

I seem to be having trouble with Blog balance at the moment. Sometimes it feels as if outside events have entered into an unholy conspiracy with lethargy in order to keep me from Blogger. Things will settle down soon hopefully; after all, it is all a matter of balance.

We're All Going On A Random Holiday

We are back from our short holiday. We were lucky enough to have had the best weather of the year so far, and we made the best of it with visits to both Surrey and Norfolk. It was really Amy's holiday and all those walks with the sun on her wooly back seemed to have worked their magic because she is back on top form again. If you want to get a flavour of what we got up to you can examine the collage above. The photographs were randomly selected and arranged by Picasa so I have no idea why there seems to be several pictures of pints of beer.

It will take me a few days to catch up with things so I may not be around as much as usual until things get back to normal.

Sepia Saturday 175 : A Ciggie And A Breakdown In North Norfolk

Our Sepia Saturday theme this week features an archive image of a rather alarming vending machine which dispensed lit cigarettes! I can think of few things more frightening - other than making running repairs over a motorbike petrol tank with a ciggie hanging from your mouth.

There is a degree of serendipity about my choice of photograph for Sepia Saturday 175. That's my father there with the oily hands and that's .... errr ... someone else with the dangerously drooping dog-end. The description written on the back of the photograph is simply "King's Lynn" and therefore what we have is a ciggy and a breakdown in North Norfolk. My post is going up early because we are going away this weekend : first of all down to South London and then, on our way back north, we are spending a couple of days in North Norfolk. There will be no ciggies (the only dog-end will be dear Amy) and - hopefully - no breakdowns. There will, however, be some photographs which The Lad, when he is old and grey, can feature on Sepia Saturday 1798.

If you can't be bothered to wait until 2054, take a look at what everyone else is featuring for Sepia Saturday 175 by going to the Sepia Saturday Blog and following the links.

A Poorly Dog And Some Happy News

"You need to get down to her level to know what the problem is", someone said. So I did and, if the truth is told, I had difficulty getting back up again. Amy was off colour last week. Not her normal self. Her tail wasn't wagging, the doorbell would be rung without her leaping up, there were piles of decaying debris on her daily walk left unsniffed and unexplored. So we took her to the vet who examined her, prodded her, listened to her heartbeat, felt her lymph nodes and concluded that she was "off colour". He gave her the canine equivalent of a bottle of Wincarnis and told her to come back in a few days.

I had my own theory about the cause of her malady : I strongly suspected it had a psychological origin. You see Amy likes to be the centre of attention, and for a week or two she had been coming a close second in the attention stakes to The Lad. It was The Lad's final exams and we were nervously waiting to find out whether he had passed, whether he had become a doctor, and whether he was due to cease being a storm drain on the family budget. Finger nails were being bitten and corridors were anxiously being paced. And Amy was being ignored. So she threw a sickie and had to be taken to the vet.

By last Friday the news came through that the Lad had passed and nothing now stands between him and his job as a Junior Doctor starting in August. We could relax and spare a moment to tickle Amy under her chin and feed her a sausage. She immediately perked up and started bouncing around like a teenager again. I would have liked to include a picture of The Lad and The Girlfriend taken on the day the news of their success came through. But Amy might see it and get jealous again. Perhaps if I make it a very small picture tucked away at the very end of this post, I might just get away with it. 

Sepia Saturday 174 : One Small Step For Revie's Stars

The one advantage of taking photographs featuring people reading newspapers is that you have a good chance of dating them when you come to look through your collection of old photographs a lifetime or so later. That is particularly the case with our Sepia Saturday archive photograph this week : which features a group of readers discovering that man had finally reached the moon. That one small step for man back in July 1969 wasn't too far away (in time) from when my photograph was taken. I can't precisely pin down when Revie's stars grabbed revenge, but Don Revie was manager of Leeds United Football Club until 1974 and if they were playing Everton in what was then the First Division, it must have been the late 1960s or the early 1970s. My photographs features my father, Albert, catching up with the news. The name of the reporter writing about that Leeds v Everton match allows me to identify the newspaper - the Sunday People. The People was still a broadsheet when my photograph was taken so I need to try and track down when it changed to its current format of a tabloid. But at least I have been able to discover which newspaper it is; that's a start - just one small step for a man.

Take a look at what others are doing with out Sepia Saturday theme this week by following the links from the Sepia Saturday Blog

The Penny Magazine And A Town Built On Shalloon

I was in an Antique Shop the other day and I found a bound volume of the Penny Magazine dating back to 1834 on sale for the ridiculous price of £6 (about $8 to those on the other side). It was even more of a bargain as this particular volume contained a short description of my home town of Halifax. The Penny Magazine was a nineteenth century precursor of Wikipedia; an attempt to tell everyone everything about anything. Most of the articles are illustrated by engravings and the subjects cover all aspects of science, the arts, industry and exploration in the 1830s and early 1840s. The full set of editions covering the period 1832 - 1845 has already been digitised, but there is something rather grand in thumbing through those age-caked pages and picking out delights to share via this Blog. I will start with the article on Halifax which caused me to snap up the bargain. Unless you have an unhealthy interest in the West Riding of Yorkshire, don't feel that you have to read it, but you might like to look at the rather fine illustration.

NOTE : A "shalloon" is a lightweight wool or worsted twill fabric, used chiefly for coat linings.

A Mucky Postcard To Lady Luppell

I bought a mucky postcard on Sunday. It was dog-eared, and torn, and stained and cracked, but it was only 50p and that isn't much to pay for a bit of one hundred year old history. The picture is of the Stray in Harrogate which is an area of open parkland much traversed by generations of gentlefolk who had visited the Yorkshire Spa town to take the sulphurous waters. It will be a machine tinted illustration, but whoever mixed the colours seems to have captured the greyish-yellowish-bluish skies that so often are a feature of Yorkshire. Flipping the card over we can make out some of the message:

"The weather is perfectly delightful place very full and amusements still going on. We return Friday week boys go school - - How long are you staying ----"

It was sent to what looks like Lady Luppell who was staying at the Valley of Rocks Hotel in Lynton, Devon, a rather grand establishment which still exists. I have been able to find no trace of Lady Luppell : she seems to have passed through the world and left little record of her passing other than a mucky old 50 pence postcard.