IMAGINE......

.....that today is Thursday!

In all the time that "Derelict Thursday" has been running, I have never managed to find a derelict building on the right day.  I am one of those blippers who abides by the rule that a photograph is posted on the day it is taken - so as we were coming home from Boscombe and knowing we would be stopping at the little farm shop at Cholderton, just the other side of Salisbury, I decided that my blip for today would be “Derelict Thursday - on Sunday” and I don’t know that there is anything to stop me doing that!

Imagine our dismay when we arrived at the farm shop to find it closed!  Then I remembered that the young couple who run it had said they were going on holiday in January, after the Christmas rush, and a notice on the door said they weren’t open until the 16th January.

So - I could either abandon what I was going to do or walk round, through the mud - and remember, this is a farmyard - to the derelict stables and take a photograph anyway.  

Whilst wandering around, probably looking quite suspicious because I was trying to find a way through all the mud, a man driving a tractor, who later told me his name was Brian, pulled up and asked if I was lost - I asked him if he was the farmer, and his answer was “No, but I work here” - not quite sure what that says about farmers, but we won’t go there!

I told him we had come from Boscombe, on our way to Swindon, and often stopped to eat in the Farm Shop.  I then explained about blipping and also about Derelict Thursday - I think it is fair to say, by the look on his face, that he wrote me off as a silly old woman, who wasn’t quite the ticket.  Anyway, we chatted for a while and he gave me permission to photograph the stables, and here they are, "decidedly derelict” - not on Thursday, but on Sunday - but as they say, “Better the day, better the deed”!  

“We shape our buildings,
thereafter they shape us.”
Winston Churchill

I know I am getting older, but I hope I won’t ever look quite as “derelict” as these stables - how sad that a once-beautiful building now looks like this.