On All Things Decrepit

Hey ghouls and boils…hope you all had a happy Halloween!

The Night of The Living Dead may well be over, but I was doing a pretty good impersonation of a zombie this morning…..and not just because my body clock is off kilter, thanks to the switch from British Summer Time back to GMT this weekend. Hate this time of year, when the evenings suddenly draw in and it’s dark by 5 pm! Here’s hoping Parliament agree to proposals that we shift to European Standard Time next March.

I’m feeling rather decrepit today thanks to a series of injuries (stiff neck and shoulder, bruised hand and foot) acquired during my first ever Aikido grading (6^th Kyu) yesterday evening. Amazingly, I passed…yes, me with the chronic performance anxiety and two left feet…. woot woot!  Must have been the hefty dose of adrenaline coursing through my veins, as I felt no pain at the time but could hardly move by the time I got home last night and I am certainly not fit for purpose today….

A bit like the “Squeezy Jet” plane on which I flew to Spain. Our Andalusian Adventure got off to a bit of a shaky start when, just as we were finally in the air - after a two-hour wait on the plane for take-off (apparently a  knock-on of the French air traffic controllers’ strike) and a refuelling (as we’d chewed up all the fuel running the engines and going nowhere) - the pilot cheerily informed us that we’d also been waiting on the engineer to come and check a technical fault... a fault that he was going to check on take-off... 

HANG ON! 

On take-off??? What exactly was this 'technical fault'….bit late to discover it was something to do with the landing gear when we were already airborne! Not being the greatest flyer at the best of times, I was in a heighted state of anxiety by the time we made our bumpy but thankfully safe landing at Malaga.

Decrepit house, Andalusia

Where there’s smoke there’s fire, or say they say…all I know is that if smoke is coming out of your camera every time you fire the flash, there is possibly a rather serious...er... technical fault with said camera. This happened the second day into the Spanish trip and had me slightly concerned that I would be unable to capture anything from the trip…or have to spend half the day in Seville desperately trying to buy a replacement. Luckily, Old Smokey held up for the duration…it’s now on its way back to the manufacturer for a check-up.  

In the meantime, here's some of its lesser known work….taken on the Isle of Wight and just about in time for Halloween…

Pumpkins