Creative experiment!

Has anyone noticed the rather wistful profile picture (right hand side bar)? Sadly, the girl in the picture is not me but I found it by googling lyrics from my favorite song. Cheered by my success, below are some more of my findings.

It is lovely to see how other people have responded to them.

The first one was found after searching 'and I need you more than want you'




This is another one, found by searching 'lilac wine, I feel unsteady'. The comma makes all the difference...

Barney #2

So, my Mum was on the train on the way into London, this was itself fairly unusual as normally she worked in Bletchley. Something had come up so she was being sent to the head office for one day, which meant the early train into London Kings Cross (pre 1988 so it still had those archaic and ultimately lethal wooden escalators). Mum settled in her seat with no thoughts eitherway about the journey, she had found a seat which was a bonus and was thinking about opening her book when she noticed that those in the formerly silent carriage started fidgeting and straining to look out of the windows of the train, eager to catch a glimpse of something just out of view. As they were just pulling out of her station my Mum remembers being surprised, was the train running late? Were they checking the progress of the journey? No, 7.02: for perhaps the first time in the history of the UK rail network, the train was on time. Was it perhaps a jaded response? Collective disbelief at this unexpected punctuality? No, that wasn't it either, as a nation we were not yet that cynical. What was everyone looking at? Other than moderately pleasing hills coupled with a smattering of garage blocks the scene was bare, except for those nasty early 60s garages, and as my Mum's eyes wandered over these aberrations on the landscape she saw it: a small blob on top of one particular row of garages. Was it a child hiding so he wouldn't have to go to school? A freakishly large bird of prey? As the train charged onward so her eye keened on the blob... it was big and sandy in color and it was moving. Thanks to her astute rendering of local geography my Mum realized with a start that those garages were the very ones that were set back from our home. They were very close and despite the buffer of one sallow field and a 6ft fence she had to look at the grey concrete every time she looked out of the kitchen window. Oh yes, she knew those garages well and then it hit her, apparently she was not the only family member to know those garages intimately: that sandy, moving blob was Barney! Clearly he could jump over the 6ft fence but even in the seconds it took for this to sink in, a second revelation crowded in: the commuters around her not only looked for Barney but they recognized him too. He was what they had been looking for out of the dingy windows.

'Do you see him often?' asked my Mum, somewhat nervous of the answer, 'oh yes, virtually every day, he usually....'

but before he could finish his answer my Mum gasped loudly, for as they were more or less level with Barney and the stretch of garage roofs, Barney started running, in full afghan gallop, along with the train, as if he was trying to beat it. (What can I say? He really was silly) The passengers all started laughing and cheering, this was a ritual apparently, my Mum continued to enjoy that poignant mix of delight, fear and surprise. Barney meanwhile was thundering along the garages, pretty soon their length would be finished, would he know to stop? Mum asked the question, dreading the answer but apparently yes, he had learnt to recognize the end of the line. One chancer even suggested that he witnessed this learning curve one morning a few months ago as Barney had taken a tumble but this was largely viewed as apocryphal. Paws thundering, tongue flapping, ears streaming out behind him, Barney ran on, gradually but imperceptibly slowing his pace until the giddy gallop became a lollop and finally the graceful trot of legend. There was applause. The commuters were chuckling quietly, people were talking and smiling (remember this is Britain) and Mum felt a smidge of gratitude for the bounding fool on the garages. Despite the obvious danger element she was pleased that Barney had in his own way gained some notoriety and brought joy to a large group of people.
However the next day she did put up an 8ft fence.

Barney, the afghan hound

To set the scene, Barney was my Mum's beloved giant afghan hound who left his mark on the suburbs circa 1975 - 1983. Now anyone who knows anything about the afghan breed knows that for starters these animals are as stupid as they are beautiful. I cannot overstate this, to make up for their intellectual shortcomings they move with the utmost grace, trotting as if in water. This afghan in particular looked a little bit like a 1990s Sheryl Crow, not wanting to be unduly mean, this is purely an observation on hair/ear/face proportions:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDZNX4IM_Nk


Anyway, Barney, or Paws, with his beautiful long gleaming coat and high maintenance bath and blow-drying schedule was a joy to my Mum, if something of a liability. He swallowed the door key once, I even had a clear image of the X-Ray, with a comcially clear generic keyshape in the little guy's stomach. There is a chance that this is embellishment post-fact (for how would we have the X-Ray? I'm not sure Vets just hand them out) but the truth remains: our door keys, Barney's gullet. This is one of those scenarios that simply does not seem true and if it were to appear in a movie viewers would scoff at the implausibility of it all but happen it did.