Loot

A bit of treasure from yesterday. I was helping out a friend who had a stall at a stamp and postcard fair in Perth. Normally I'm too busy assisting customers and taking their money to pay anything more than functional attention to the merchandise. But someone picked this out of the 50p box and hinted to me that it lacked a certain je ne sais quoi. It certainly beats anything in Martin Parr's Boring Postcards collection.

At first I was disappointed that it was not a commercially printed postcard. There was nothing on the other side, at least so I thought at first, but a faint pencilled inscription lifted my spirits, for it told me that the photograph depicted 'old Newtyle stone sleepers at Glencarse.' Yes, here you can see sleepers from the Dundee-Newtyle railway - the first line to be built north of the central belt in Scotland and using stone rather than wooden sleepers - recycled after its closure in the 1960s as kerb drainage twenty miles away. Fascinating, eh?