Cold Vehicles

Bad Pubs

2010-02-23T17:42:00.001Z

Some people smoke or take drugs, others can only bring themselves to find harmful people attractive, some stand right on the edge of train tracks, walk out into the road without looking or always make sure they take the darkest route home at night.

I’m addicted to bad pubs like this one. There’s not one forgiving corner here amongst the reconstituted wood tables, lino and glass. Cold puddles of lager splash underfoot and against my forearm. The television’s always on, the bar staff always talking to their mates and my fellow drinkers are all thick limbed, hairless and tattooed. They have eyes like crocodiles: cold but never blinking.

I catch the frothy acid tang of piss as I order my own lager, I sit down with it and drink and wait. Drink and wait. Maybe in this bad pub I’ll get what I deserve.

The Music of Men and Space Dogs

2007-11-14T14:28:00.001Z

I own, or share, what with being married and everything now, two albums by sort-of trip-hoppers Laika and, as of recently, the album Ard Nev by electronica boffin Gagarin.

This fact touches me in my geekiest places.

Last Good Day of the Year

2007-09-18T11:11:00.003Z

After the sunny weekend I acutely felt the season turn this morning.

Walking down the road to New Cross station Summer ran up to me wearing nothing but a yellow mohair jumper and a pair of hiking books and leapt at me, groin first, for an embrace. As ever, I was pleased to see her.

But Summer is looking pale and has deep lines under her eyes, she has the look of someone who needs a really, really good sleep.
And I sensed, from behind, Autumn creeping toward me, and all of us, with cold hands and sharp teeth, preparing to bite us all, very hard, on the arse.

The Museum of Text Messages

2007-08-28T15:11:00.012Z

I've been keeping hold of some text messages on my phone but they're taking up too much room and must be purged. So I thought the best place for them to live on is here.

Woolly pigs! Primroses & green loveliness! Big contrast with last night..
The better-half had spent long winter months in London and is nourished by spring in the countryside.

I'm here by mistake!
Bongo Tom said he wasn't going to Bonkerfest on Camberwell Green but somehow manages to turn up there.

Am lying here with gorgeous joseph Kyrle sparks on my chest! All v happy! Joe has big hands, big feet & other bit bits. He's a cracking 9lbs 4oz!
Took me a couple of reads to work out this was Helen announcing the birth of her son.

Just found something in Natural History Museum that is about 18" long, reddish-brown, head looks just like it's tail and shaped like a frankfurter...
I've realised that none of my friends have gone metric yet. Bongo Tom again, this time he's either getting all crypto-zoological or he's going through the bins and found someone's hotdog.

The smell was my hamster, it smells nice now
A text sent to me by mistake as I have never been driven from someones home by the stench of rodent. The way I read this is as reassurance from one teenager to another (who else can be bothered with hamsters?): They were planning an afternoon of cider and mutual fiddling but were driven out of their lust-nest by a vile odour. This message also says "the smell wasn't me! Please come back! I has best pants on!"

The Doors of Ikea

2007-08-17T10:51:00.000Z

The new Ikea adverts are doing my head in a bit and not in an “I must buy furniture now” way. There’s this poor girl I’ve seen on tube posters: she’s sat on her Ikea chaise-langue starring, in abject, lysergic, terror, at a small toy crocodile that is glaring at her from the edge of her Ikea carpet.

Where are the girl’s friends here? Why isn’t her best mate holding her hand and soothing her with words like “it’s ok, you’re just tripping, it’s not a real crocodile and it’s not going to get you and we’re all friends here and we love you, you’re ok”. Meanwhile her boyfriend should be bashing the cuddly reptile over the head proclaiming “See me! I defeat croc! Ha-HARR! I is mighty!”

But no; boyfriend, as I saw on the false-cover of today’s Metro, is in his bedroom burning out one retina at a time while staring at his Ikea globe lamp shadethrough his telescope. He is cackling “I stare at suns with telly-scope and I no go blind. It night time now no sun.”

The friend who should be comforting her is doing herself less physical harm: as seen in the television advert she’s wandering her own living room with a magnifying glass “oo-ing” and “ah-ing” at all the lovely Ikea things in her house until she lights on a very shiny lamp.

It’s so shiny that within it she can see whole worlds and new worlds and worlds within worlds until, at the heart of this multi-verse she sees an eye, blurred and concave, staring back at her. The eye does not flinch. She never sees it blink.

She is found by her mother three days later still staring into the lamp. She speaks, after a fashion, but she never uses a recognisable word ever again.

ing Plan

2007-01-19T11:34:00.000Z

I’m writing my intentions on writing. A blog seems to be a pretty good place to do such a thing too.

My first novel, the one I wrote about nine years ago and have been revising, plugging and thinking about everyday for the last fourteen years shall be going in a box. It’s being sealed up and left for a while because I think I need to do get some experience writing other pieces of fiction before I go back to it.

I wrote a few paragraphs as a start to a new novel, working title Cemetery Junction, the story is my latest attempt as putting themes of folk-stories and fairy-tales into a contemporary circumstance and setting without falling into the various pit-falls other writers trying to do the same thing have fallen into. It’ll be a fun challenge as will be trying to make Reading (the large town) seem like a place where magic can take place.

I’ve also got some short stories in various states of completion and, galvanised by what FandM Publications are up to, I intend to get some of them into a read-able state in the next few months. People are often told that starting a story, on a big, blank page, is the hardest part of writing. Finding the nerve to actually finishing them has turned out to be my problem.

Short stories in semi-made forms:

A ship-wreak story about Europe’s discovery of the Americas and Australia’s and the change of thought that took place between the early modern period and the Enlightenment. It’s called Skiapods.

A sort-of Lovecraft piss-take starring rats: Rat King

A fantasy story about urban legends and a piece of history moving from living memory to mythology and fictoin.

Some south-east London-inspired stories I may string together: The Temple of Bacchus: about where gods may now be found. A Secret Hero of All Humanity: a straight-ish horror story about a supposed haunted house and a fantasy tale about semi-sentient alien drugs: Atlantic Road.

That’s the creative stuff I’ll be trying to do this year. Thanks if you’ve read this far.

On 'Strange Dave's' Singing

2006-07-14T11:48:00.000Z

I work with a bloke called Strange Dave. He's called Strange Dave for many, many reasons but one of them is that he sings to himself while he's at work.

He's a jazz fan so I've no idea what it is he's trying to sing but I was asked to describe it today, Strange Dave being on holiday and so not in the office and singing.

Not wanting to actually try and make the noise; I came up with this description which I would like to share with you.

Imagine that you are a man who is hastily dressing in a dark wardrobe. Outside said wardrobe is a very large, very suspicious man who is on the look-out for things like semi-naked men in hiding.

In the large man captures you he will get very violent and cripple or kill you in a terrible, possibly sexual, way. You wish to avoid this.

However, while slipping your jeans on you close the zip rather carelessly and track quite a large amount of your genitals in the large-toothed, metal zip. The jeans are also quite tight on you, causing the zip to bite down all the harder on to your parts.

You want to, HAVE TO, cry out from this, to give some sort of release to the pain that is washing up and down your very blood and bone. To scream would free the pain for a short time.

You know, though, that this would result in the large man being alerted to your presence and pulling you from the wardrobe and doing terrible, terrible things to you until you either died or were, at least, painfully debilitated by them.

So you mark a stifled, high-pitched whining cry. You feel a little better or at least a little distracted, when ever you make this sound but you can’t fall to the ground and wail for fear of detection.
You try and punctuate it with each in take of breath or footfall that the big bloke makes so as to try and cover it by the noises he is making himself. There’s a rhythm to this keening, a terrible, sobbing wail, punctuated by silence and in-takes of breath.

And that’s what Strange Dave sound like when he’s singing.

2006-07-12T11:50:00.000Z

For some reason I decided the only book that could follow The Amber Spyglass is The Kraken Wakes. I think it's because the first person I knew who read His Dark Materials also once said she wanted to move to Edgbaston because it was John Wyndham's home land.

I have some great friends.

It's turning out to be highly quote-able, the first page of Phase One has someone called Phyliss, who's listening to a singer on a cruise ship, asking:

"Why, do you suppose, do people keep on mass-producing these decadent moanings?"

This could sum up most of my record collection and now, looking at it in this context, most of what makes up s lot of blogging.

Later on Phyliss's husband, Fireball Watson, starts receiving news clippings on strange phenomena after filing a report of strange fireballs seen at see. This causes him to reflect that:

“There must, I think, be a great many people who go around just longing to be baffled, and who, moreover, feel a kind of immediate kin to anyone else who admits bafflement along roughly similar lines.”

Which pretty much sums up the condition of being a fortean or being into forteana extremely well. It doesn’t touch of the fun we have chucking these ideas around and seeing what shape they fall into after each throw but the camaraderie of being into the unknown, off-beat and unusual is captured there. It's probably not what John Wyndham meant.

How to keep cool today

2006-06-19T11:43:00.006Z

Reptiles, of course, have no internal heating which is why they need to bask in sunlight to start themselves off in the morning. One of my favourite reptiles is the gecko: that magical lizard with the ability to scamper up and cling to walls and ceiling.

So, take as many sluggish geckos as you can find and place them on various parts of your body such as pressure points, chakras and / or erogenous zones.

The geckos will draw heat from you in their own inimitable reptilian fashion and you will be both cool and be aiding cute reptiles.

What could be better?

Well, also, while warming themselves the geckos with ingest small amount of your life force / chi and once charged up they will skuttle about manipulating things and people, in a magical, clinging lizard sort of way, to bring about your wildest dreams and protect your from your enemies.

This has been a public service announcement, please have a good summer. On no account may you substitute geckos for skinks.

Geckos....

.....not Skinks

The Two Sorts of Perfect Film

2006-02-19T11:59:00.001Z

In my opinion there are two sorts of perfect film.

There’s the film that tells a story perfectly like the original ‘King Kong’, ‘Spirited Away’, ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ and the Japanese original of ‘Dark Water’.

Then there is the film that is nothing more that a wild and bonkers ride that causes the viewer, me, to laugh out loud with joy as I am embraced by it's wonders.

This includes films like the time-traveling dwarf fantasy ‘Time Bandits’ (which, as far as I’m concerned, is way better than the grumpy and adolescent ‘Brazil’), the period-drama, ninja-native American, giant maid-eating monster film ‘The Brotherhood of the Wolf’ and, now added to my list as of Saturday night, the slap-stick, martial-arts, ghostly romance, Taoist musical that is ‘Chinese Ghost Story’.

It’s even got stop-motion revenants in it. What a fantastic film, does anyone know if one can get the sound track on CD?

2005-12-04T12:18:00.001Z

I awoke at Statford station at about twenty to one in the morning, cold, miles from home, my head pounding and with the knowledge that I had taken care to insult every single person who has anything to do with employing me hanging from my shoulders.

I really ,really, really hate work drinks.

Quote of the Day

2005-11-25T12:20:00.004Z

He had "delusional" beliefs that "were further complicated by his interest in mysticism, hence the development of his idea that he could communicate with animals through a third eye",

Dr Allnutt said. "At the time he really believed that he had been communicating with the rabbits, and that this interaction with the rabbits was of value to nature. He said that when this happened he would feel a 'joy' in his heart."

More meth-fuelled, mystical rabbit sadism and shagging here.

Haunted Blunkett

2005-11-16T12:29:00.000Z

My mate Andrew Donkin forwarded this to the SELFS list; it's an article about how Blunkett is still living, at the tax-payers expense, in his South Eaton Place home in London despite his second resignation. In the list of fact-lets at the end of the article, it turns out that, as well as being a corrupt and greedy lecher, David Blunkett believes in ghosts:

"Mr Blunkett has lived in South Eaton Place since 2001. He is said to believe the house may be haunted. He was reported to have complained of unusual noises after dark and a strange chill in some rooms."

Full story.

No wonder he has problems sleeping alone. I think it's the ghost of John Smith, returning to warn him that he will receive a visit from three spectres, each one more terrible than the last, who will warn him of the consequences if he does not change his ways.

New Labour politics and the supernatural, what a perfect blog post!

John Fowles

2005-11-08T12:35:00.000Z

Fowles, who died yesterday, was one of my favourite authors and I've been pondering on how to mark his passing. Lyme Regis is a nice place to visit but the undercliff is probably quite inhospitable this time of year so a pilgrimage isn’t really on.

I could, in the manner of a lot of his stories, fall obsessively in love with an individual and artistic girl but I think that box is ticked already, as is the one for ‘pontificating’ (I am writing this in a blog, after all) which Fowles characters tended to do a bit more than, say, a character in an Irvine Welsh or Michael Marshall Smith book do.

I could lock a blond in a basement, though I'd be missing the point if I thought that's what The Collector was all about so maybe I should try reading Aristos again. That could be tribute enough if I could finish it.

Superman = Wanker

2005-10-17T12:42:00.000Z

Now I thought the days of Phil Collin’s saying ‘wanker’ on Miami Vice were all over. American communications businesses had become aware of other versions of English out there and that some of those versions of English had words in them that could be regarded as rude.

I remember my first dalliances with internet messages boards and found that, while I couldn’t say ‘someone was having a bit of a bitch’, meaning someone was complaining, without the word ‘bitch’ being blanked out, I could quite happily sit at my desk and call American’s ‘wankers’ until the cows came home. And I did.

“They must have cottoned on”, I thought. So, I was flicking through ‘Prelude to Infinite Crisis’ a collection of extracts from various different DC comics which hint towards a coming event across DC comics (who, of course, publish Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and countless other comics) called Infinite Crisis. I think this event is going to last a year or so.

It’s a glossy thing they’re selling world-wide to plug the forth-coming event (which is to mark the 20th anniversary of DC’s ‘Crisis on Infinite Earths’, fellow geeks) so you’d have thought they’d have had a good look at it before send it out.

Well, in one extract, Superman is about to intercept some villains who are about to assassinate a woman prisoner, Amanda Waller, who knows “too much.”

Firstly, I like that twenty-first century super-villians say things like “Is that…” when meeting Superman and not “Curses, the Man of Steel!”

And to that the Australian super-villain Captain, um, Boomerang says: “Stop Starin’ and get the bloody wanker.” Which is how Australian villians speak, of course. No respect.

Ha, “get the wanker.”

Enjoy Sea Anemone

2005-09-19T12:50:00.001Z

was on the Central Line on my way to a gig on Friday night and there was this woman sitting across from me with a see-through flask of something.

It looked a bit a piece of scientific; it had measurement marks down the side and a top a bit like a baby’s beaker. Swilling inside the flask, in brown water, was what looked like a sea anemone. The ‘tentacles’ rolled as the train lurched and there were small, pale, bunched up things that looked like nerve endings or the interior of a snails shell on what I presumed was the ‘under-side’ of this commuting sea creature.

Now I’ve had some strange pets in my life, when I was in the infants at primary school I took my pet rock into school until one of the many bullies there threw it against some concrete, smashing it open to reveal its crystalline interior. After that I had a pet Dog Skull that I tired to carry around during a ‘music and dancing’ lesson until the, probably deeply freaked out, teacher suggested I put the dog skull down in case I break it.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is humanity’s taste in non-human companionship is as wide and deep at the ocean that this little thing may had been plucked from and if this woman sitting across from me wanted to take her pet anemone out for a trip on the tube, so long as the container was suitable for a sea-anemone, then that was fine by me.

Then she took a swig out of the flask. Sea-anemones are poisonous; they trap fish in the tentacles and sting them into submission before ingesting them. The only creature that can put up with them is the sinister clown-fish that can quite happily frolic among these tentacled killers.

She kept swigging the brown water, the narrow mouth piece of the beaker preventing the whole ball of feelers touching her. I kept staring, wondering if she were mad, suicidal, super-human or something other than human.

It really was a horror story moment, probably partly provoked by my re-reading of the 'Pan Book of Horror Stories Seven' at the moment, and when I saw this creature-ingesting woman getting ready to get off the tube, full of anemone venom and probaly a little freaked out by my staring at her I plucked up the courage to ask her what the heck was in her flask.

“Green tea” she said, “it is a bit unusual.”

Now I drink green tea a bit and it certainly doesn’t look like sea creatures. Clare thinks this person was consuming Chinese Medicine tea, she’s shared houses with people who’ve used it in the past, which may well include lion fish, angler fish, sturgeons, sea anemones or something else.

Or perhaps I’d seen something on the tube that wasn’t one of us, something that feeds in ways that we don’t feed and expects the humans around it to pay it no attention. I saw it and it had an excuse ready for its strange habits before skuttling off to be with it's own kind (Bond Street Station). That’s what I like to think, anyway.

Wedding Play List

2005-09-15T10:02:00.000Z

Clare and I were at a wedding on Sunday 4th September, my mate Tim Chapman was marrying his fine bride Ro at the socialist stately home Wortley Hall, Wortley, about twelve miles from Sheffield.

It was a good and fine civil ceremony and the bride and groom were the most relaxed couple I've ever seen during a wedding. Good day.

Tim and his best man DJ'ed and played a selection of songs that would be perfect in an indie disco, never mind a wedding reception. Pleasing the elderly relatives was not an option.

I've been to weddings in the past when The Buzzcocks and X-Ray Specs have been played but the the set list included new, noisly greats like 'Bang' by the Yeah, Yeah, Yeah's and 'Johnny Cash' by 'Sons & Daughters' and played 'Toxic' by Britney Spears (twice) as a concession to the pop-tarts, though I suspect the songs appearence in a recent episode of Doctor Who may have helped too.

Other than that, if was straight into early to mid-nineties indie disco and bedroom pogo greats including:

Add it Up - Violent Femmes
Freakscene - Dinosaur Jr
Turning Japanese - The Vapours
Too Drunk to Fuck - The Dead Kennedys
We've Got a Bigger Problem Now - The Dead Kennedys (which is the lounge-jazz/thrash version of 'California Uber Alles' which I've never heard played in public before)
Touch Me I'm Sick - Mudhoney
Hit the North - The Fall
Girl from Mars - Ash

There may have been others there, I want to say 'Another Girl Another Planet' by The Only Ones and 'Echo Beach' by Martha and the Muffins but they may have just got in there as songs that MAY have been played. I danced myself to near-death and there was a late-night, drunk busting buffet of pizza, chips and onion bhajis which distracted me.

I also ended up talking to a cat outside. I was cooling off and there was a black cat slinking about and I followed it, it walked beside me, not getting too close, and I said "meow" and the cat said "Mrr-oww-ow" so I said "Mr-OWW" and the cat replied, walking all thew time, "Nr-oww-ow".

Clare was a witness to that too, I didn't dream it.

Kingsfishers

2005-09-13T10:29:00.000Z

It's just occurred to me that I've seen quite a few kingfishers in the last twelve months. I'd not seen any at all, ever, until September.

Clare and I were at The Letoon, a sacred site in Lycian Turkey that contains temples to Leto and her two children, Artemis and Apollo. There's submerged buildings there, broken columns and foundations, two thousand years old, that peer out from water that is populated by turtles, terrapins, ducks and dragon-flies.

Flitting about the place where kingfishers, they’d grab something from the water (the terrapins would poke their head out of the water in their slow outrage at the trespass) and glint past in flashes of metallic blue.

The next time I saw a kingfisher, he or she was perched on a fence post at Keyhaven nature reserve by Lymington on the edge of the New Forest in Hampshire. It’s a salt-flat on the edge of the sea, with the Isle of Wight looming, on that day, out of the storm clouds like a fat Daily Mail reader looking for something to tut at.

We were there early March this year, trudging through the sleet and had already twitched away by the Turns, plovers and oystercatchers but to see a kingfisher in the UK; I had thought at the time, is a rare privilege.

Then we was walking along the rubbish strewn river Don that runs through Sheffield. The red brick industrial past was rotting around us, pallets and shopping trolleys were tangled up in the weed of the river and Sheffield tried to smothered the river where it could, it seemed.

Then I saw the metallic blue flash, it skimmed the river and disappeared under one of the bridges. The river must have life for the bird to live on it, must have been cleaner than I thought, despite the crap people had thrown into it and despite the cars grinding past it.

A kingfisher lived here, too.

Jason Godwin - Crime Fighter!

2005-09-02T10:40:00.001Z

My alter ego
Originally uploaded by Jayce.

I’ve got a mate called Jason Godwin who lives in Holland and is the proud owner of ALMOST ALL of the original Star Wars figures.

I've got a bit of a rubbish comic habit. It started when I realised that Book & Comic Exchange where selling off comics for 10p a go and I've been steadily loading up on them.

They vary from nineties Marvel and DC to good indie comics like 'The Badger' to silly comics such as Warp to very, very bad comics that never got past their first issue.

Once comic features a superhero called 'The Messenger', a scientist named Jason Van De Win (I think) who was developing an adrenalin-enhancing formula to create super-strong soilders.

This being the world of comics the mob get involved and hold De Win and his fiancée hostage until he completes the formula for their own evil purposes but, of course, De Win over-hears a monster saying “Once we have the formula, we’ll kill De Win and his missus” (or some American equivalent, ‘broad’ or ‘old lady’ probably) so De Win take the formula himself. “Must save Kitty, Must…save..Kitty” (or whatever his wife’s name is) he says to himself as his new muscles ripple and he lifts a table for no other reason than he bloody well can now.

De Win defeats most of the mobster and the FBI arrive just in time for shot the mob boss to shoot, and kills, Kitty.

De Win is inducted into the bureau and given a new name, Jason Godwin, and, grief-stricken, he finds a jet-pack from somewhere and fights crime as THE MESSENGER.

He’s rubbish at it, too.

Down the tube

2005-09-01T11:00:00.000Z

Yesterday I passed a chap at Baker Street tube whom I recognised from such esteemed gatherings as London Earth Mysteries Circle. He didn't see or recognise or want to say hello to me and that was fine but I remember thinking "There's psychic-questing Simon, I wrote a story about him once."

Well, not exactly about him, it was about a jolly nice and friendly but slightly-scatty chap who got wrapped up in, what he thought, was a powerful alignment between certain parts of south-east London, Herne the Hunter, the god of the Vine and an off-licence that has extremely neat bottles on its shelves.

And when I say "wrote", I mean, I wrote a lot of it but certain sections has things like [EXPAND] and [MAKE WORK] where paragraphs and descriptions should have been. My point here is that here I am, blogging away, when I've got some quite interesting story ideas moldering in a draw in my bedroom and in the ever-eroding archive of my head and this thought makes me feel a little sad.

It makes me wonder why I do this, why can't I keep a diary or something for myself and concentrate on what I want to write publicly instead, which is fiction and on folklore.I think that quite a few people I know write blogs so I read theirs and think "I should get me some of that blogging action" and it's ludicrously easy to get one of these and, once you've started it seems a crime not to update the thing.

But I would like to write other stuff more; I got that feeling that I have things living in my head that need telling.

Automaton & Pig

2005-08-24T11:40:00.000Z

Automaton & Pig
Originally uploaded by skitster.

So we arrive at the Museum of Estonian Music in Tallinn while we were there in July 2005. We just want to learn about, and perhaps hear, some Estonian music.

We’re asked if we want a “musical guide” while we’re going round and, thinking that we’d get a CD with a commentary linked to numbers on exhibits.

After climbing the three flights of stairs (viewing some fantastic Estonian cabaret posters from the 1940’s on the way) we find that there’s a little old lady who showed us round the exhibits, invited us to play some of the grand piano’s and cranked up the musical boxes when requested. These included this thing, an automaton with a pig on its lap.

While running, the waistcoat rose up and down to suggest breathing and the pig looked at its master, out to the viewer, that back to its master. Possibly strange and beautiful, possibly scary at hell.

A Half Litre of Hell Hunt Light

2005-08-24T11:37:00.000Z

A Half Litre of Hell Hunt Light
Originally uploaded by skitster.

They do beer there, too.

Hell Hunt

2005-08-24T11:36:00.000Z

Hell Hunt Pub
Originally uploaded by skitster.

Clare and I spent the last week of July exploring Tallinn & Finland which has, finally, given me something to write about.

'Hell Hunt’ is a pub in Tallinn, Estonia, the name means 'friendly wolf' in Estonian, apparently, but an older, pre-tourist pub sign that's inside the pub depicts a stag, not a wolf.

I'd like to think I was drinking in the 'Wild Hunt' pub, and the wolf bit was invented to not-freak us out, but I do like the new logo with the naked lady straddling the ‘friendly wolf’ too.

Good bar. Good beer. Good cheese platter, served with an entire roasted garlic as a garnish. Slurp.

Camberley Kate

2005-01-20T13:06:00.000Z

Camberley Kate
Originally uploaded by skitster.

Camberley Kate was famous around the Camberley, Surrey, area (near to where I grew up and where I lived for a few years) for taking in stray dogs and promenading around the town with them en masse. Most of them walked, others, perhaps the favoured ones, were pushed around by Kate in her, presumably custom built, trolley.

I'm not sure what is going on the left-hand side of the picture, the dogs in the carriage seem to have merged and morphed into some sort of cyclopean, hairy hound-like horror. I don't think one can leave massed dogs unattended for long beofre this happens. Observe the Greek Dog cerberus.

This picture appeared in November 1972. Kate Ward, her true name, was 72 when the picture was taken. Another mention of Camberley Kate appeared on b3ta here and another picture can be found here.