Broadway

I had to go into Broadway today - it's unusual for my dogs to get fleas (I suspect they're generally not clean enough to be attractive hosts), but I found one on Roley yesterday, so I needed to pick up some treatment for him. After my visit to the vet I thought I'd pop up to the Market Pantry to get a couple of takeaway coffees and some cake, and my eye was caught by the display of seasonal vegetables outside the Broadway Deli.

This business has done extremely well over the past fifteen years - it used to occupy a small, out-of-the-way shop in a dark corner of a covered arcade, but the produce was so good that people who happened across it tended to return, so that after a few years it was able to move out onto the High Street. Again the premises were small, but the shop was close to one of the main inns in the village, so there was a lot of foot traffic past it. And now it has moved across the street into this prime double-fronted store, which for many years sold gifts and fancy goods.

My first thought with this photo was to render it into mono, to try to give it the kind of timeless look that seems to suit Broadway - but I like the colour of the autumn vegetables, and colour pop isn't really my thing, so instead I've played with the tone curve to create a slight matte, and used some split toning to bring out the reds and greens. I'm hoping that this gives it a slightly retro look - although I have to say that I very much doubt you'd have seen a display of food like this anywhere in England back in the days I'm hinting at with this processing. R and I have regaled the Offspring to the point at which their eyes cross with stories of being raised on stew and dumplings, tinned fruit, and salads that consisted of a piece of lettuce, a slice of ham and a sliced tomato.

"...with salad cream, by the way, not mayonnaise."
"What's salad cream?"
"Trust me, you don't want to know. And another thing: avocados. I never set eyes on an avocado till I was fifteen."
"Or a mango."
"Or salami. The first time I saw salami I didn't even know what it was for."
"And curry used to come dry in packets that you reconstituted with water."
"Is any of this even slightly true?"
"Scouts' honour. Your generation does not know it's born."
And so on....

R's favourite of my shots today was another one of Broadway, which I've added as an extra. This is the upper part of the High Street, which is now a no-through road and therefore the kind of premium residential area where you get scowled at for getting out of your car to take a photo. The hill at the end of the road is part of the Cotswold Edge and is called Fish Hill, and until a few years ago Broadway High Street joined the bottom end of the main road which runs up - and, unfortunately, down - the hill. The road was extremely steep and had a couple of very nasty bends on it, and on a wearyingly regular basis people would lose control of vehicles on the corners as they were driving down. Cars crashed, lorries overturned, and on at least one occasion a large vehicle careered into the centre of the village with its brakes burned out. Eventually a new road was built up Fish Hill, bypassing the village and with a slightly shallower slope and longer bends, plus some escape lanes on the downward side. The villagers must all have breathed a huge, collective sigh of relief, I would think.

As I was coming home from Broadway with flea pill, coffee and cake, I met a LandRover towing a sheep trailer, which put up a huge stone just as we were passing each other. It almost missed my windscreen, but not quite. My insurance would have covered a windscreen repair with no excess - but a 15cm crack can't be repaired, so I've had to shell out £75 in advance of Autoglass coming to replace the thing. I've been making Muttley noises - along the lines of "Sassafrassarassum Rick Rastardly"  - for much of the afternoon.

Hey ho - worse things happen.