SOUR GRAPES

Yes, I know, I went up into the hills to photograph a restaurant that has a nice little story attached to it. Another day. I took one shot of these grapes and like looking at them more than I do the restaurant. I can never better my pic of the 21st. Nature and a good lens did that one and nature is not always so obliging.

This pic of me taken by Himself while I was foodling with my camera. I have been camera shy almost all of my life. It began when a boy called me "Squinty cross-eyed freckle face piano legs" upon viewing the class photograph. Decades later I realised that this, from a nine-year-old boy, was a form on endearment. Too late, I had become the master of the turned head and the blink-with-the-click manoeuvre. Scarred for life, I was. The fact that I was never squint or cross-eyed had nothing to do with it. I did have freckles and my legs are nothing to brag about. So here I am, none of these faults evident.

The boy, incidentally, grew up to write horror novels full of adjectives and to become a four-eyed, no-hair, pot-bellied wuss. blipper on the road