Very old till

I had a few blip possibilities ready and waiting, and then this came along and suddenly there was no contest. I need more of this decisiveness, not only in blip terms but in life in general, so this time I'm forgoing links to other possibilities.

I was due to host lunch tomorrow for the French Grand Prix, but my house is in a bit of a mess after the neglect it's suffered while I gamely ignored my multiple deadlines and I was feeling too knackered to face into all the dusting and hoovering and tidying and furniture arranging and recipe decision-making and food and booze buying and cooking and hostifying. Anyway, three of the original invitees had cried off for perfectly legitimate reasons and the socilaising wasn't going to have the same buzz without them. So I displayed the day's first moment of decisiveness and cancelled. I'll do the British GP the following week instead.

So I laid back for the day, surrounded by the neglected mess, and took it blissfully easy -- apart, that is, from blip duty. Two sessions between 4.00 and 5.30 produced two possibilities, but then an evening plan (to meet up with Carl the commis-chef anyway) was abandoned around 8.15. So camera and I headed to one of the few remaining petrol stations in the neighbourhood for fuel and bread and milk. A rather nice, cosy pub is conveniently located directly across from the filling station, so in we went, without any notion of blipifying. But the camera took a notion and sat on the counter looking around and taking surreptitious shots. The pub is quite nice, long established, quite big, with a good reputation for pub grub. It's also nicely decorated, in a homely kind of style (well mock homely, really).

It was only when reviewing one of the taken-from-the-counter candid shots that I noticed that what I'd taken for a functioning till is really only a prop. It's been a heck of a long time since the days of the Irish Pound and longer still since decimalisation came in. This till is proud of its LSDness, and is frozen in the act of ringing up a sale for the largest possible amount short of one pound -- 19 shillings, eleven and three farthings. Ah, nostalgia.