As ‘Firstborn’ is one of the Instagram generation’s ‘selfie’ experts I can’t help feeling that this would be her approach to ‘helping police with their enquiries’ …
Postscript: Of course in real life she doesn’t sport sideburns and has neither a receding hairline nor tattooed biceps (much to her parent’s relief) and she can only dream of being 6′ 4″
My microcamper is ready to collect! It is a Hillside ‘Dalbury’ conversion based on a Nissan NV200 (see posts passim) and I’m soon off to Derby to take ownership. Insurance is sorted (at not too bad a price) and I’ve already bought my first add-on, a sticker for the back …
It’s completion was three months later than anticipated due mostly to Nissan’s extended lead time for delivery to Hillside, and that means half the summer has passed without it, but I’m already looking forward to its first outing to the west coast at the end of July; a short photography trip with a few friends from the RGU B&W film photography course (staying in a bunk house though, not the van). We’re off to Applecross so it also gives me a chance to recce the Bealach na Bà; the bike’s going too but I’m not intending to attempt to cycle over the pass on this trip!
Meantime, those friendly folk at the Daily Mash have a few words to say about campervans (a few pompous mobile home owners on one of the ‘anorak’ forums took these articles literally, not realising that the Mashters are satirists – sad really).
Postscript: Based in Derby, Hillside names its various camper conversions after towns within the county of Derbyshire, hence the ‘Dalbury’. Forme, a Derbyshire manufacturer of bicycles does the same with its products which is why the Forme road bike that I won a couple of years ago is called the ‘Longcliffe’. Good job neither were named after Fanny Avenue, (Killamarsh), Spanker Lane, (Nether Heage) or Butt’s View (Bakewell) all in Derbyshire, and I hope neither would live up to the name Knockerdown (Ashbourne) either.
This is a quote that made me laugh not so much through humour as in despair. It seems that the CV posted by one of the contenders to become leader of the UK’s Conservative Party may have been ‘sexed-up’ (which is ironic given that it appeared in the same week as the Chilcot review of events pre- and post- the Iraq war; events that had alleged the production of a sexed-up dodgy dossier):
“It looks as though the issue is that anyone who reads Andrea’s CV and attaches a lot of weight to that particular role may actually be under some slight misapprehension as to what it was she actually did.”
‘Sir Humphrey’ couldn’t have put it better himself.
Well, he had a good innings. Gordon Murray the creator of the stop-motion Trumptonshire Trilogy has died at the age of 95. Some favoured Camberwick Green – I don’t think Chigley was as popular – but for me the stand-out series was Trumpton. Perhaps it was Captain Flack’s weekly recital (Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble and Grubb) that called out his firemen to an emergency that seemed never to involve flames, or even smoke, that stuck in the mind. Or maybe it was the announcement at the start of the show that presaged the storyline for that episode:
Here is a box, a musical box,
wound up and ready to play.
But this box can hide a secret inside.
Can you guess what is in it today?
Either way, Murray’s were innocent stories for innocent minds, governed by his wish for children to have a joyful childhood (as quoted in the Graun’s obituary):
“I am very upset, because I’m an old man now, at the short length of childhood that children have. They don’t have childhood for long and I think that’s a wicked shame, because childhood is the most marvellous thing you’ve got to remember for the rest of your life.”
‘Amen’ to that. Here’s my tuppence worth:
You painted a bucolic scene
With your stories of Camberwick Green,
But with Pugh, Pugh
And Barney McGrew
It was Trumpton that lit up the screen.
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