Locked Bucket: Lock Up Your Waters

We came across a locked bucket. Neither of us had ever before encountered a bucket, locked. Except that is, say, in winter when a bucket’s full of water and the water’s frozen. But then, it isn’t the bucket but the water that’s locked: 'lock up your waters'. No, every bucket I’ve known (seen) up until now has been a Free Bucket - unattached. Funny, finding this one so ‘attached’, when we were on our first date, on a country walk. Do you believe in signs? I thought. Would have been a stupid thing to say – could have been taken the wrong way. The railings not only enchained the bucket, they imprisoned it. And you always associate buckets with prison cells.

Imagine a couple arguing, arguing over who lost the keys to the bucket: “I’ve not got them, you were the last person to lock it”. Or worse, before they go to bed at night: “Are you sure you’ve locked the bucket?”

I know, I’m going to buy a load of locks - bicycle locks – and carry them on country walks, and whenever I see a bucket I’m going to lock it and throw away the key. No, I know. I’m going to give my love a locked bucket to wear as a locket: a Chastity Bucket. 

The Love-Bite and the Lap-Dancing Plate

The love-bite and the lap-dancing plate – there's a correspondence. The plate, it’s moving (spinning?), whilst the thighs supporting it, remain still. Food- for-thought; good enough to eat; must have been quite a dish… but it’s a ‘dirty picture’, look at the colour of his fingers.

Giraffes Would Make Good Firemen

Re the last blog (First and Last Traverse of the Fireplace): I’m going to offer my next-door-neighbour this ‘lost’ photograph of a headless giraffe, to hang in place of his missing chimneybreast. Look at the legs. They have all the ballet-grace of a Degas. And anyway, this ‘lost’ giraffe is the perfect replacement for a stone fireplace. I’ve counted 227 stones on the fireplace, and I’ve counted 129 patches (is that the right word for them?) on the giraffe. Now the giraffe’s lower-legs are blurred (he’s moving out of the picture), but that works in our favour, as there must be more than a hundred or so tiny patches beneath each knee. But all is not lost. If you count the number of dark stones on the wall of the barn in the background – only counting the stones as dark as the dark patches on the giraffe - the figure comes to 98. Add that to the giraffe’s 129 and you have a total of 227, the same amount as the number of stones that make up the fireplace. Giraffes would make good firemen, too.      

First and Last Traverse of the Fireplace

I followed Perec’s advice, but I didn’t expect to make the first and last traverse of my next-door-neighbour’s fireplace. I’ve lived next-door to an unexplored climbing wall – slept a brick or so away from virgin rock – for years without knowing it. And to think all this time I’ve been pulling (on a bar) in my hall, I could have just popped next door and hung on my neighbour’s wall.  But it’s gone now - the firewall - I had to help him dismantle it, stone by stone. Degas’ The Ballet Rehearsal hangs there now.

I wonder, would it be perverse to blow-up the fireplace traverse – life-size - and paper my sitting-room wall with it (on the other side of the wall on which it once really existed), like a mural? And why not, I smoke a lot? I rather like the idea of a fireplace leaving home - moving house. But looking at it now: I don't think so. The rubber-gloves suggest surgery. The removed chimneybreast looks too much like an operation for throat cancer.

Focused on a Fungus

I opened the curtains first thing this morning, to spy my next-door-neighbour, flat on his face in the garden, focused on a fungus.

Round and Round the Dovecote

Cause and Effect

I entered this photograph under the ‘Mongrel Section’ in the ‘Photographing Domestic Animals’ category: mongrel, even though the image is a blend of two thoroughbreds, both, the colour of shortbread, titled: 'Mixed-bred Shortbread'.

The judging panel commented favourably upon the well-seen shoulder-strap dualism - evident between the reigns of the blind-dog and the shoulder straps of the rucksack. But they were critical of the way the Labrador’s tail comes out of the standing dog’s ear - suggesting an undertone of unicorn. ‘Whilst one dog, entering or exiting another dog, is 'good photographic subject matter', tails, like trees, should never grow out of heads’, the head-judge said. ‘And tell me’, the said head judge continued, ‘did you have any small change on your person when you took this photograph?’ ‘I might have, I can’t remember, and how would loose change have improved the image?’ I replied.

‘Do I have to spell it out in Braille?’ this most visually aware of head-judges blurted. But he enlightened me in plain English. ‘When I look at that spot of vacant pavement beneath the near dog’s rear – the exact spot pointed at by its tail – I see a small deposit of loose change on the ground… that spot of street just cries out to be paved with gold’ ‘But first you should have asked the owner of the trainers to put a coin in the slot of the blind dog’s head, and snapped him doing so. Then you yourself should have dropped some coins and kicked them under the dog’s tail, before taking a second photograph: the resulting diptych illustrating, cause and effect.’