funkypancake

more snail stories - lynda also sent me this picture of snails eating a banana. she said she watched them for ages. apparently it was a complete banana when she put it on the ground ...

some of my favourite signs are ones that warn of falling material

this one was sent to me by our friend lynda. it's very good.

i imagine this poor chap will go home and his wife will say "what's that indentation on your head" ?

and he'll say "it's an exclamation mark".

lynda is very keen on accurate spelling and punctuation so maybe it's a home made sign giving me a gentle hint to get my english up betterlier.

it reminded me of this pre-blog picture of jane and a very little kezia. you probably haven't seen it, so here you go:

here are uri geller's front gates. they are made of metal. surely that's asking for trouble ?

it was sunny today so after the car boot sale and the county show we went back to look for more scarecrows in sonning.

sonning is a very pretty village on the Thames:

here are a couple more scarecrows:

we found this on the floor by our car this afternoon. i think the answer is quite bored. and seeing as it was a field used as a carpark for this day only, i'd probably also have been run over by a tractor.

sign and reality rarely match. the sign promised red deers. we got muntjacs

the southern county show is definately one for the country folk. you can buy guns and other scarey things that only country dwellers really need.

one of the less violent / pointless animal destructive things was this game of archery. the most vulnerable creature he was the woman working behind the counter when esther had her go.

she was quite good actually and the only real damage done was to my wallet.

county shows are great for random chatter. the announcers feel obliged to talk non-stop for hours on end. this man told us for 10 minutes how he was about to let his bird of prey fly off in to the crowd and added "I haven't got a clue what he'll do as he's not trained".

very reassuring.

after 10 minutes of talking up the beast he let it free. it flew straight at where i was standing with the girls, narrowly missing kezia who was standing on a hay bale. it then stayed the rest of the afternoon in a tree looking at the man.

the man said "i thought that might happen" and tried to tempt it down by swinging a bit of chicken round on a rope. it didn't work and he said "i didn't think that would work".

classic non-entertainment entertainment.

esther looked at me and said "i came here to see animals and entertainments, not people talking". "fairysnuff" i said.

esther and kezia looking for the bird:

at the show they got anyone with a dog to enter the ring and race them all in one go. there must have been about 40 i guess. it was quite amazing to watch. here are the front runners.

a pile of ducks:

a mussled dog:

after the car boot sale we went to the Southern Counties Game Fair. there were some fantastic characters there.

this bloke was watching his steam engines:

and this bloke was poking a pack of beagles with a stick:

we went to a traditional bank holiday monday car boots sale this morning. we made sure we were in by 8.45am to catch the early bargains.

on the way out we saw this children's car on top of a hedge. i recon it was bought at the car boot sale by an irate parent. when their kid didn't stop nagging they probably shouted "shut up, or we throw your plastic car away".

he didn't so they kicked it on to the hedge. a different type of car boot.

we knew we had a tight intinery today. i wasn't surprised that esther had set her favourite toys up to discuss a game-plan.

there was a fanstastic scarecrow hunt in a lovely thameside village called Sonning this afternoon. unfortunately it chucked it down with rain and i hadn't brought the girls' rain coats or wellies (i admit it, i'm hopeless). we met our friends there and they got wet too.

before it got too wet we managed to spot a fair few of the 70 scaregrows on display. here are a few photos.

it's on tomorrow so if you are in europe you could probably get there in time.

uri geller lives just off the main street in sonning so you could pop in to see him too.

update: more pictures from the next day here

in a skip in a posh village:

as you may know lots of Saatchi's art got accidentally burnt in a fire in a storage facility. Many of this was stuff by the YBA (young british artists).

the most famous of the YBAs is arguably damien hurst, famous for his shark in formaldehyde. esther thouht she'd have a go at that and produced a cat head in a little pot of water.

is this the first piece in the new 'even younger british artists' movement ?

today's mystery doorstep food stuff is a bit of bread. a doorstep when referred to bread is generally a massive thick slice, but this is a chunk of french stick i think.

classic british birthday BBQ this evening for jane's friend lynn. Untypically the food was excellent. here is the birthday girl and her cake (and husband and mother-in-law).

I took a few other photos with the flash which turned out better technically, but this one captured the mood more accurately.

we don't really do sport in our house. especially not football. which is probably why esther didn't really get the hang of the stickers for this football chap which appeared in her cereal box.

she's very pleased with the elaborate design. the chap looks more like a morris dancer (as seen as at the other May bank holiday - where the weather was also rubbish)

next door to the cat show was a soft play kids thing so we went there for 2 hours this afternoon. kezia is qute liable to get stuck in the middle of these things. she's driven by her determination which often takes her beyond her capabilities.

the end result is that i spent two hours following her up and down slides and ladders and all sorts and generally squashing down gaps which 5 years old find tricky to fit through.

but it's cheaper than gym membership.

we went to a very strange cat show this afternoon. it was siamese cats i think.

in this show everyone was a winner and by the time we got there most cats couldn't see out of their cages because of the amount of rosettes and trophies attached:

The cat-type is breed 32 which sounds like a government feline experiment to me. these strange felines were probably developed during the cold war. the rosettes are won by cats decrypting secret message produced using the most advanced algorithms.

It looks like an innocent cat show but is in fact a spooks convention ...

jane gave esther, kezia and myself a long shopping list and we spent a 'happy' few hours playing find-the-foodstuff round Asda.

here are kezia and esther having a telly-tubby style big supermarket hug

and here they are playing toilet brushes like trumpets.

if you think the blog entries today have been a bit tedious, then you haven't seen what my working day has been like ! it's all thanks to all the stuff published here yesterday. Yes, they are all as exciting as they sound. [actually some of them are quite exciting but you won't catch me admitting that in public]

but never mind. because it's now the bank holiday weekend. hoorah for 3 days of non-work (for me at least - jane's still marking exam papers).

it's a random roast potato on our doorstep. how bizarre.

great font. 'pub door sans serif' i think

this pub has a secret room that no-one can find an entrance to according the bar man. i said i didn't believe him. "there's always a hatch" i said. but apparently there isn't.

here is ian bowling. i think this photo is fantastic. the exposure time was just the right amount to keep his aura !

click for big

here are two people we've seen before. it's our old friend Big Eye and the lovely Sally.

it was bowling this evening. not entirely what i expected. bowling is all about cardboard shoes. but this was in a pub. so it should have been about throwing mishapen chunks of wood.

but this being the south of england it was about throwing small round balls (about the size of a baseball i think) at 9 sticks of wood. you have to put them back up yourself if someone knocks them down too.

anita organised it (very efficiently):

and here is everyone eating:

one of the great things about london is the mixing of people from amazingly diverse backgrounds.

i spotted these bollards just off the Edgware Road which is an appropriate place to see this multi-cultural bollard meeting.

i paid the gentleman holding this sign 30 pence for a photo of his sign. he said "30 pence isn't any good to me mate" which wasn't very greatful. i gave him the money anyway. just in case you know.

it was a job he wanted and not money apparently. and it was his first day homeless. a cause for celebration perhaps.

i'll go looking for him next week and see if he has incremented this sign or produced a new one. i may also get an update on how the 30 pence is going.

it's cold and i'm inappropriately dressed. so i went to the local charity shop and bought a long armed shirt for warmth (i have no meetings today so casual is ok).

john insisted on putting his hat on my head and taking this photo of me and my mug of hot water. i feel he may be making a mockery.

i know a lot of you like mysterious doors. my colleague harry pointed this out to me. i can see it from my desk out the window (why DO they put my desk out the window).

i've never seen anyone open it. perhaps i need a brick door webcam ?

ntoe the curving distortion of the bricks in this picture. hoorah for converging verticals (and horizontals). they used to be so uncool you know.

by request (via comments) here is a close up of the signage which only adds to the mystery:

i took our old telly back to Asda last night to exchange it for a new one. it was a bit weird wheeling it in on a trolley.

the new telly is a widescreen one so i can see what we were missing on the sides of the picture.

i assumed that all telly was broadcast widescreen these days. but it appears not.

i might fit some little curtains on either side of the screen like in the cinema for when the picture is not broadcast in widescreen.

look at this protruding screw. be careful not to scuff your shoe.

ho hum. raining and cold day today.

ideal conditions to spray water all over the street. note how the spray has created another Stars In Their Eyes moment.

i bumped in to Heinz Wolf this evening as i left a work meeting. he was heading south from Barbican station and i asked him if i could take his photo. he said "yes, if you can tell me where something or other square is"

i said yes, took his photo then we looked at his AtoZ and we both went on our ways.

i've mentioned before i'm a man of science and that's partly because of his influence when he did the Great Egg Race on telly when i was a nipper.

(by the way in the last week i've also stood next to Steve Wright (radio 2 DJ) in the street and Tim Burgess of the Charlatans in a record shop. I wasn't 100% sure they were who i thought they were at the time so i didn't take a photo, so sorry about that. i'm pretty sure they really were them though. ooops)

update: thanks to tony for pointing out that Heinz was on the BBC website today. great quote:

Heinz Wolff is a self-confessed boffin, and the affable professor is quite proud of it. When asked to define exactly what a boffin is, he pauses, and then says, "Well, I am one.

"It isn't a negative word," he says. "It is no more negative than egghead. It describes a person of some intellectual ability, who has unconventional ideas."

i'm loving the weather at the moment. it's great to have sunlight until after 9pm. today it's been a bit colder and cloudy and i've spent lots of time in the underground due to work meetings all over the place.

just as i got off the train this evening it chucked it down with rain and then suddenly stopped. everywhere looked and smelt so fresh and all the leaves were covered in perfect little rain drops.

this picture doesn't do it justice, but you get the idea.

we're not in to carrying weapons of personal destruction about in the UK. it's considered a bit 'off' to carry a real gun or mace for example.

however, are police advising cyclists to purchase electrified bike chains ?

if so the warning should be to the thieves not the bike owners.

i love paint dribbles on the street. i'm not sure which way up this one goes.

this one is great. there must have been some barrier or something up at one time and the paint seaped underneath giving this fantastic pattern !

now, i'm in no position to pick people up on punctionation and spellling, but i did wonder why "winner" was in inverted commas. I suspect it's because winning a hair and beauty contest isn't really winning at all.

or maybe the nice judge said to the losers "don't worry, we're all winners here tonight" and they took it literally ?

random sheep graving in the middle of london on a tiny strip of grass.

i forgot to tell you that the toy museum opposite my office which was going to shut down now isn't.

So there's good news for you.

If you are going to visit, drop me an email and i'll wave at you from my window.

where do you put all that stuff you want to throw in the bin, but might go off and stinky if it gets too warm ?

answer is the fridge bin.

there's still the problem of what to do with your half drunk half pint of beer (as seen here)

graffiti is notoriously difficult to comprehend. it's all tags and squiggles these days.

i was delighted to see that some people are still using plain old english sentences like "i am canadian" and "just whistle".

here is a burnt green door. it's well worn. i'm sure there's an interesting story behind it.

but i didn't knock ...

london is constantly under construction (insert tacky animated gif here). as a result new walls appear without warning.

here is one such wall. it has a pleasing line to it.

our telly died again so i got the old PC out and set it up in the living room. i think the scruffy office look works well in this room.

jane is less keen.

it's bagpuss on the telly in case you can't see it clearly

i'm working from home today in our dining room. i like to choose different seats around the table to sit at when i'm working and at this moment i'm sitting on jane's chair next to kezia's high chair.

from this angle i can see where kezia puts her feet. to my amazement there's a small man there. he looks quite stern and a little bit like a school teacher.

he can't talk (or at least he's refusing to speak to me right now) but if he could i bet he'd tell us a fantastic story of how he got there.

i walk past this building quite regularly so apologies if this is a repeat ! i really like this one though so click for largeness.

here's the houses of parliament through the side of a bridge.

more rats like the previous ones (note the link in the comments).

i was fooled for a little bit as i walked towards this wall which appeared to have two UK electric sockets on it. Of course it's just a very good sticker.

imagine how convenient it would be if we could install new electric sockets throughout the house with stickers. it could work for water taps too. it certainly works for holes in cartoons.

perhaps this is the way of providing electricity and even broadband Internet connectivity to inaccessible areas. it could solve the third world's problems.

i think we might be on to something here ...

kids love balloons. it seems that grown ups like them too. classically they are used in car show rooms to encourage people to part with many thousands of [appropriate local currency unit] for a new car.

who is it that impulse buys a car based on the fact the showroom has balloons hanging up ?

this pub has gone for a similar approach. oooh look. balloons. i think i need to buy myself a pint.

sing from st james' park

i spotted this outside Buckingham Palace this evening whilst walking back from some meetings at the House of Commons (just thought i'd drop that in !).

it's a stick but it looked like a beconing finger. very eeery.

i spy road pie.

my recommendation to you is to always carry a pie crust.

it's ideal for wrapping roadkill.

i've just received a letter in our internal mail with these two post-its randomly attached to the envelope. very mysterious.

update: interestingly the contents of the letter was from (and about) Wales. makes you think ...