Dreadful Nonsense

"That’s it!", we screamed at each other one night last week, as we lay in bed listening to the sound of drug-addled crack children stab each other in the hoodies, as police sirens squealed and screamed and screeched up and down the road outside and gangsters blared their loud music out of the stolen windows of the stolen cars while shooting both bullets and heroin, and across the street some foreign types took part in illegal suburban fox hunting, or something.

"That’s bloody it!", we said again, for good measure. "We’ve got to leave London!"

And so it was that we found ourselves going on holiday on Friday evening, catching a train from the centre of hell - or Kings Cross as its known these days - to the much more civilised environs where He Who Only… was raised. The village in which we were staying had that special quality we were looking for - air that couldn’t be both tasted and also physical felt as it entered your lungs. Clean. Crisp. Fresh. Not actually visible. Oxygen, in the purest of forms.

And stars! You can see stars in the night sky. And a serious lack of noise that made me think, for a while, that I had gone deaf. And the night time brings darkness, rather than an orange hue almost as bright as day, which made me think, for a while, that I had gone blind.

I will defend with my dying breath every last quality that makes London great, and I do love it more than any other city I’ve lived in. However, you really do need a break from it sometimes, and our weekend break was absolutely thrilling.

We had access to a car in which to zoom about, and so we spent an enormous chunk of our weekend in National Trust sites, wandering about staring at open fields, marvelling at the sheer greenness of things. I took to giggling every time I realised that there wasn’t a single person in sight, and began to take the series of photographs I kept declaring with great satisfaction were entitled "This. Is. Not. London." I also began a second, more disturbing series entitled "Sheep".

I basically spent the weekend taking photographs of sheep. I was trigger happy, in sheep terms, to the point of trespassing across golf courses in order to get closer to the sheep. We walked among the sheep. We walked around speaking directly to the sheep, and then telling each other what the sheep were saying to us, and what the sheep were saying to each other. I kept crouching down, zooming in and out, getting closer, leaning back, being the most crazed paparazzo these sheep had ever seen, trying to get some good sheep shots.

This is one of the approximately 800 photographs I took of sheep:

I like this one, because his legs look bendy.

The only other photograph of sheep that I am going to bore you with is printed below, and that is because it is one of the most extraordinary things I’ve ever seen in my (relatively short) life.

I always thought that the phrase "black sheep of the family" referred to the fact that there was occasionally one sheep in every flock that was a bit different and wrong. If that’s the case, they’ve either shipped all the bad ‘uns together from all corners of the country, and this is some kind of sheep Guantanimo Bay, or they’ve started breeding a race of Evil Sheep.

Sheep On A Plane, anyone? Anyone?

Just me, then.

Again, we literally strayed off the beaten (and National Trust affiliated) path in order to stare closely at some sheep.

We had a brilliant weekend.

This entry was posted on 21 August 2006 at 9:40 pm. 0 comments

Dreadful Nonsense

0 Comments:

Recommended Reading

Archives