We were told yesterday that the skip would be delivered at some point between 7am and 5pm today, which was neither especially helpful nor particularly amusing, but in the event the driver turned up at 8.40am, which meant that I’d at least had time to eat breakfast, and deposited it neatly up near the top of the drive. I then received my next shock of the morning, when it turned out that R wasn’t content with merely having it sitting there, but wanted to start actually putting things in it.
By this stage, having been up since 6.50am, I already felt as if I’d put in a full day’s work, and I wasn’t best pleased – which it’s possible I may have made reasonably clear – but then a couple of aspects of my character which don’t often make themselves apparent suddenly kicked in. The first is that I love throwing things away. Or over. I don’t care, really – I just like destruction. And the second is that once I get started, I’m quite hard to stop.
Thus it was that we didn’t make it into Stratford for coffee, walking, and in my case photography, until after 3pm, by which time the light was questionable and it wasn’t especially warm. On the plus side, the skip was more than half full, and having excavated to the far back corner of the garage we’d finally solved the long-running mystery of the current whereabouts of R’s old Scalextric, which turned out to be hiding in a large wooden shipping trunk I inherited many years ago from a retired Air Force Wing Commander. Sentiment trumped common sense in this case, and both the trunk and the Scalextric were spared from the skip.
Having finally made it to Lucy’s Mill, I wandered about for a bit without finding much (though I did spot a rather shabby Clouded Yellow butterfly in a field by the river, and managed to track it to rest). After half an hour I phoned R and said, grumpily, that I wouldn’t be able to join him in the café, and twenty minutes after that, when he called to say he was on his way back to the car and ask if I’d like him to bring me a takeaway coffee, I still had only a few shots on the camera. I decided to give it ten more minutes before setting off to meet R and my coffee, and it was about eight minutes into my countdown when this handsome male Migrant Hawker appeared, plonked himself right in front of me, and stayed hovering there for over a minute, while I shot scores of frames on high-speed burst. In fact, as long as he was still hanging obligingly in position I felt that I had to carry on shooting, because it would have been rude and ungrateful to simply walk away. So I was rather glad when he suddenly quit this reed bed and zoomed off to another location, allowing me to do the same.
