Have a good weekend, folks.

Thanks to the stories run in the daily papers suggesting that Jon Venables (who was convicted of murdering Jamie Bulger) was going by the name of David Calvert, David’s photography site has had over 50,000 hits in the last two days. Normally he’d be delighted that his website site is suddenly so popular, but at the moment he is obviously very concerned.

David is a well established photographer trading as David Calvert Photography, specialising in family and child portraiture in Hertfordshire.  He’s not related to David Calvert of Fleetwood, who has also been highlighted in the press and who is also not connected in any way with the Jamie Bulger case.

David has our support in these difficult circumstances and we hope very much that they pass without impact on him, his family or his business.

“I am arrive by passenger train Ahmedpur station and my belly is too much swelling with jackfruit. I am therefore went to privy. Just I doing the nuisance that guard making whistle blow for train to go off and I am running with lotah in one hand and dhoti in the next when I am fall over and expose all shocking to man and female women on plateform. I am got leaved at Ahmedpur station. This too much bad, if passenger go to make dung that dam guard not wait train five minutes for him. I am therefore pray your honour to make big fine on that guard for public sake. Otherwise I am making big report to papers.”

A gentleman by the name of Okhil Chandra Sen wrote that to the Sahibganj divisional railway office in 1909, and it’s nowadays on display at the Railway Museum in New Delhi.

Apparently this letter led to the introduction of toilets on trains in India.

Picture copyright VII/John Stanmeyer

So I did, while Ann attended to urgent matters in the greenhouse.   Past two schools with the lines of 4×4′s parked right outside on the yellow zigzags, their drivers having a ciggie with the window open while they wait for their little darlings so the paedophiles don’t get them, and eventually to the post office.  Gosh!  One customer in it and three staff behind the counter – a sight never seen before, at least by me.  One member of staff fully occupied practising her advanced customer-ignoring skills and another deep in conversation in her mother tongue with somebody in the back room, which left The Ageing Hippy happily dealing with the selling of a stamp to a confused OAP.

Eventually it was my turn, but I only wanted to post a letter to Cyprus, and The Ageing Hippy obviously found this singularly unexciting.  I almost apologised for not wanting to send a badly-wrapped package containing bacon rolls to an incomplete address in Iran, but decided instead to keep it simple and just leave her hoping for a more interesting customer later.

Being by now in something of a silly mood, I nipped into Waitrose for a copy of their new products booklet, a publication which we enjoy reading nearly every month for the completely OTT copy writing, and headed home in the sunshine, doing battle on the way with some trainee hooligans from the local primary school engaged in a competition to see who could get run over first by a yummy mummy in a Tonka Toy.

Waitrose has excelled itself.  The October new products booklet contains what is undoubtedly their finest yet.  There on page 17 is a picture of the happy family “who make dairy ice cream for us”, smiling at the camera from behind a very pretty cow.  There’s the usual blurb about how the family have been dairy farmers for generations and so forth, but then we get to a truly wonderful bit about how “the cows are pampered, with mattresses to sleep on, and a system that lets them choose when they want to be milked”.  Really?  Does the smiling farmer tuck them up at night and read them a bedtime story?  Do they have pillows too?  Honestly, who comes up with this stuff?

It was only when I’d finished reading about the pampered cows that I noticed what it says on the back of the up-market envelope something came in from the bank this morning.  Obviously they wouldn’t put “Not made from recycled paper” on an envelope that a tree has been cut down to make, and presumably people might nowadays get suspicious about their corporate commitment to planet-saving if they put nothing at all on it, so by virtue of a little lateral thinking and emphasis-shifting, some bright spark somewhere has come up with what is surely a little gem.  Would you believe”The mill producing this paper supports sustainable forestation”?

And there’s plenty more where that came from …

Just found this video on the website of an Italian photo magazine. OK the kids with the skateboards are pretty darned clever but how cool is some of that videography?