There's always something to say

If you're so busy doing boring work all day that nothing worth blogging about happens, what do you do? If you've been paying attention to the outside world you can comment on current affairs or politics, or the neighbours' affairs, but apart from dog- and cat-watching I've not seen anything worth commenting on.

Well, you could try picking a photo at random from your 2018 pics on Flickr and commenting on that. (Two thousand and eighteen photos? Can this be true? And the ones on Flickr are only about 10% of my actual stash of photos taken since I got my first digital camera, which can't be more than about 5 years ago. And then there are the boxes and boxes of slides and prints and dageurrotypes and hand-tinted sepia-toned Victorian photos, and the little black & white snaps taken by my mother on her Voigtlander during her Indian travels, and the hundreds of prints made by my father while cooped up in his smoke-filled darkroom, and my grandfather's collection of prints of engineering works in India, taken on a home-made camera on hand-made film, and the pictures of various ancestors, posed formally in a succession of professional photographers' studios from Blairgowrie to Darjeeling, and the stereoscopic pairs, also created by my grandfather, showing views across fragile rope bridges spanning precipitous Indian gorges, and many many others.)

OK - random photo coming up. Well, not completely random - it had to be something vaguely interesting.



So, what's this about? I took this photo on 15th December last year, just after I'd parked my car in the big car park in Carlisle, just under the castle. Glanced into the cab of a white van as I passed it, and realised the smiling old man was only the face of a smiling old man.

Is it a mask? Did someone wear it while committing a crime? Was it for a fancy-dress party? Is it a copy of the actual face of an actual person, or is it an invented face? (It does look sort of like a real person, doesn't it? Even in its hollowed-out state.)

Why did the owner leave it so conspicuously on the headrest? Is it to deter car thieves? Is it to provoke controversy?

Or . . . was it a real man, whose insides and torso have been sucked out and consumed by hungry aliens/vampires/monsters? You know, the sort of hungry aliens/vampires/monsters that can eat anything and everything apart from elderly people's faces? They know from experience that this sort of thing is likely to make them sick. (Well, would you want to eat an old man's face? You can't blame them really, now, can you?)

Now, if you happen to be the owner of that van and that face, and you're reading this PLEASE talk to me!