Aspirations to be a right lazy slob

Dammit!

No sooner do I have one event out of the way than another rears its head.

This really doesn’t fit at all well with my aspirations to be a right lazy slob. Its just not good enough. Clearly I’ll have to try harder.

This latest flurry of activity, entailing madly dashing around town to attend to various absolutely necessary tasks and then rushing over to Bedford’s Civic Theatre for before one o’clock on Wednesday, was all the fault of my own stupidly opportunistic nature. And my tendency to chat to strangers.

Though I seem to recollect mum telling me about not taking sweets from strangers she never warned me against talking to them. But then, that was in the days before everyone was totally paranoid. And in the days before the internet. Bit of a coincidence, that. Wonder if there’s a connection? Hmm.

It started a few weeks back (the events that led to my getting sucked into yet more work… not the internet!) when, during one of my fairly habitual walkabouts around town, I espied some vaguely interesting happenings… er… happening.
I’m not entirely certain I blogged about it here (in fact, I’m fairly sure I didn’t… and a cursory search of my own past posts turfs up nothing)… though I did write a little post on one of my other blogs. Just in case anyone’s interested.

All about the local Borough Council’s Road Risk Advisory Team doing a bit of outreach to raise awareness amongst the general populace about the hazards of being a road worker. The hazards from traffic that is. Not hazards from things like inadvertently stabbing a pickaxe through your foot or tripping over a kerbstone or whatever. That’s all just plain bloody carelessness.

Well, I started chatting with one of these guys and, thoroughly pleasant chap that he was, he mentioned that the Team would be organising some sort of show at some point in the future and if I’d be interested in coming along to take some pics he’d get in touch with me about it.

“Too right” sez I (having always been a bit of a mouthy sod).

And so it was agreed. And so he did. Tuesday in fact. Talk about short notice! And me still trying to recover from my little jaunt down South… in between still doing various things with all the pics from that particular adventure (seems some of them are quite in demand). Bloody hell! Work, work, work!

Hence shrug on the old backpack again and off we go… all to take some pics of a kids entertainer and his “assistants”! It was a bit of a first for me as well… trying to take pics in a properly darkened theatre with only the stage illuminated.

Afterwards, when folk were asking me if I thought I’d got some good ones, I was prob’ly a tad over-enthusiastic in moaning about the crap lighting cos secretly I was totally convinced that all the pics would turn out to be absolute rubbish. And how on earth would I live that down? What with me supposed to be a proper photojournalisty-type photographer an’ all.

Though in fairness it has to be said that my speciality’s in outdoors type stuff. Well, sort of.

Anyway, jolly good he turned out to be. With a show focussed around the theme of road safety for kids… what’s known as the Green Cross Code basically. Which most folk would think is a very worthwhile cause. (Me now… well, my view of sprogs is a bit different. But that’s another conversation entirely.)

And as a bonus the town’s (fairly newish) Mayor turned up as well. Together with a couple of other local dignitaries. Whose names I completely failed to get (I really am quite useless at all this news gathering type stuff. Though I can tell you that the Mayor’s name is Dave Hodgson. But p’raps one day I might actually manage to get my act together, and justify the unbounded confidence some folk seem to have in me. Can’t imagine why!).

End result being of course that I grabbed me a whole load of pics. And fortunately they were rather more satisfactory than I’d anticipated. So some of which are now, inevitably, on Flickr.
Not the majority though. They’re being prepped for delivery to the Borough Council… and I wouldn’t have posted ‘em to Flickr anyway cos lots of them have kids in them. Er… lots of kids. All enjoying themselves.

But you can see all those I have uploaded in a dedicated set here.