Trash Cans

This morning's photographic safari was not going very well. The sky was overcast, which made it a lot better for walking, but my mind seemed to be in a fog.

Then to add to my concerns, the battery indicator on the Ricoh, which showed three-quarters when I switched on, suddenly went to a quarter and the ominous yellow instead of green after just one shot. I now know from experience that I have between 10 and 15 shots available to me before the camera completely dies. And yes, you guessed right, I wasn't carrying the spare battery.

It became an exercise of simply taking something in order to have something to post. As you can imagine, a lot of those shots really weren't up to much. But walking down one of the back alleys that are common in Riverside, and quite often a good source of photographic opportunities, I espied a collection of trash cans.

Those of you who may have thought I must be white trash are probably now nodding with a sense of self-congratulation at your perspicacity. :-)

The trash cans reminded me of two things -- the pieces used in a game of draughts/checkers and, perhaps more bizarrely, Pontefract cakes, also known as Pomfret cakes.

For American readers, Pontefract cakes are discs of liquorice, about the size of a quarter in diameter and two quarters in thickness. Anyone who loves licquorice, loves Pontefract cakes. And I love licquorice but, alas, it has been many years since a piece has passed my lips. It's not that Americans don't subscribe to licquorice, I am sure they do, but I have never seen it on sale.

Oh for the days when Bassett's used to produce a box with an assortment of licquorice pieces available for a penny each. They also made licquorice allsorts from which this blip page takes its name. And if you were a real licquorice addict, there was Spanish juice - a small licquorice stick as hard as rock that had to be sucked on to become malleable enough to bite a piece off and swallow. In this politically correct world, it has probably been taken off the market at the insistence of the British Dental Association. :-)

Happy days, the like of which we will never see again.

B&W conversion in Silver Efex Pro in Photoshop CS3.