Picture of The Day

Gone to Italy

Jane and I have decided to celebrate a significant anniversary by treating ourselves to a trip to Pisa, Lucca and Florence.
See you in few days, folks.

Royal Watan Balti House

I’m a “the past is past, the future isn’t here yet, so live now” kind of a guy these days, so it was quite an occasion for me to choose to attend a gathering of ex-colleagues. It was their leaving party. I went specifically to see one person in particular and was pleasantly surprised to meet a number of others with whom I enjoyed exchanging mini-biographies spanning the ten to fifteen years since we last met.
Afterwards, the trip down memory lane became even more fun when Dave and I officially  declared it an BNO (Boys Night Out), then we checked to see if a Birmingham Balti restaurant I used to frequent was still in business. It was thriving. You see its neon facade here, reflected in a bus shelter, on the Pershore Road. We ate fit to bust, before driving home along some old, familiar roads and some new ones. I think they were metaphors for our subsequent, respective careers.

Inside out

I am usually on the outside looking in when I make this kind of real drop-shadow graphic picture. This time I happened to be inside the shop, looking out.
Strangely enough, this is exactly what you get if you manipulate a digital image in something like Photoshop. "Flip horizontally" instantly changes the viewpoint. It’s a bit like how I imagine time travel, or teleportation, might work. I hope the inventors will remember to include an "Undo" option.

Austin Seven

I like it when old cars are in regular use. This dear little Austin seven was resting in a car park, making metallic creaking noises as its engine cooled. I suspected it was waiting for its owner to return from the nearby shops.
I couldn’t resist peering through an open window. The smell of leather and warm metal instantly took me back to riding in the sorts of cars my uncles used to have, when I was very young. No plastic trim in sight here, apart from, perhaps, some precursor to Bakelite.

A wet week

Wandering around Pershore town, under grey skies, inwardly bemoaning the lack of any decent light, I searched inside a pavement planter for something brighter than my mood.
A little patient teasing out of a few green leaves revealed this rich microcosm of colour and texture. These water droplets, magnetised to flower petals, shone like priceless diamonds, instantly dispelling my gloom.

Little Malvern Priory

Thursday’s picture was made looking out from the inside of Little Malvern Priory. I decided, for the sake of completeness, to show the whole building against the backdrop of the Malvern Hills. I’ve been wanting to put this vertical landscape up here for a long time, but the top of the tower has been covered in scaffolding and plastic sheeting until quite recently. It was pleasing to see the newly tiled roof catching the light again.

Triple blades

Malvern is home to the world famous Morgan Motor Company. This snappy red rooster gave me the chance to combine two of my recurring themes, “things that come in threes” and “bits of cars”.

Are we getting three times as much rain in England as we used to?

Miserichords, Little Malvern Priory

Monks would have spent a long time standing during their religious services. It must have been a relief to have been able to perch on these large wooden folding seats, which are called miserichords.
I doubt if the equivalent of the modern cushions pictured here would have been available, though given the relatively bountiful and rich diet in most monasteries, I reckon there would probably have been quite a bit of natural padding in place.

Little Malvern Priory

I seem to be looking at the world through glass at the moment. Technically speaking, I do this every time I make a picture with my camera, so this is really glass within glass.
Here's a view, looking south, from inside Little Malvern Priory, which dates back to the twelfth century. A lot of the exterior walls were razed during Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries some four centuries later, but the church is still in regular use today. There are plenty of vestigial remnants of the earlier, encompassing architecture to see.

Yellow shoes

The postman commented this morning that I would certainly have no trouble at all finding these shoes on first waking.
Why is it that here in England there is only a binary choice of shoe colour for men (black or brown, sir) whilst women can have any hue they desire?
So these days I buy my shoes in Spain, Italy and France. After all, it’s the peacock who sports the coloured plumage.