Homo Habilis Divii

Yup … Dive the handyman.

For some strange reason (I truly believe I will suddenly understand women the moment before I die and will leave this world with a very surprised look on my face) Lynn and Petrea seem to find the fact that I put up some crappy shelves in the gym on Sunday somehow sexy.

To knock that sexiness on the head, here are the crappy shelves.

I just needed somewhere to put a whole load of CDs and DVDs and there happened to be a spare wall in the gym so …

Just as well I left room for expansion. I can squeeze another three shelves up there and there are hundreds more CDs in the studio …
Sheesh!

And yes, laydees; that is where I get nekkid and sweaty (not currently having any reason to do so in the bedroom).

So …
Let's get serious with a screwdriver …
At the risk of causing swoons and simpering from Tewkesbury to Pasadena, pray allow me to take you way back in the mists of time to when I bought my first house.

I believe the term for this kind of thing is "a fixer-upper".
Well … I fixed the fucker up myself.
It took me eighteen months and at the end of it I never wanted to see any of it ever again, so I sold it on the very day I finished it.

Hmmm … This doesn't look good.

Right! Throw some old curtains over everything and let's rip the shit out of this place!

Having re-wired and re-plumbed it (and stupidly not taken photos … these are about all I could find … if only I knew then what weemen find sexy), I started replastering the ceilings and walls.

Note the neat re-wiring job on the new dimmer switch.
And okay, Ming the Menstrual did have a sweet ass, I'll give her that.
I do have a weakness for a cute bippy, laydees please take note.

Katie says:
Fuck off! This is MY dust sheet. Go find your own.

She also got kinda fascinated by just about everything …
"Wotcha doin'?"
"I'm hitting crap with a hammer, what's it LOOK like I'm doing?"

Anyhoo …
Here's some Divery:
Before …

During …

And after.

I used to love all this stuff.

Ming even helped with the papering. Sort of.

Dive and Nigel put up a greenhouse …
According to the instructions it was supposed to be a table but you know what Ikea are like.

While Dive and Phil make a start on the front garden.
Cheeses of Nazareth, I wish I were that skinny today!

Phil celebrates ripping the old kitchen to bits by adopting a classic eighties bad hair-do.
That's dad on the right. I love my dad and miss him a lot. He taught me how to do all this crap (except wallpapering … mum's the expert at that … I thought I'd better mention it before SHE did … OW)!
Note the little red First Aid kit on the right. Probably the most essential piece of kit for home renovations.

Check out the Osama bin Dickwad beard!
Fuck me, what was I thinking?
At least I found a use for one of those crappy jumpers I used to get for Christmas.

Hey, I've still got that drill! I used it to put the shelves up at the weekend. Yay!

"Feed me! … Stop dicking around with all this kitchen crap and FEED ME!"

There's always one screw … one fucking awkward screw you just can't get at.

Yay for a nice new gas hob!
Actually I could do with a new one here but bollocks to making another kitchen; I'll pay some other fucker to do that.

Anyhoo … I kinda liked that kitchen.

It was bigger than the crappy one I'm stuck with today.
Hey ho.

So … There you have it.
I can cook, iron and put up shelves.

All I need now is a pretty girl to do all that stuff for …

… with a cute bippy, of course.

Worky

Much too rushed and busy to post.
Maybe tomorrow - when I am working from home - I'll look up some of the photos of all the work I did on my first house to thrill Lynn. Hee hee.
TTFN.

What's Cooking With Dive? Another Sweary Risotto

Hokay … Mark keeps asking for more cookery posts but I've not really got time to do much at the moment so to tide him over, here's yet another risotto (I'm gonna keep on posting risottos until the Yanks learn how to pronounce the word correctly) which I just made after spending the day putting up shelves in the gym.

Today, it's Squealy Piggy And Silly Mushroom Risotto.

Here's the piggy.
You know the drill: Local … Organic … Free range.
This is tenderloin from a local farm where the pigs are given free run of a huge deciduous wood and root amongst acorns, wild garlic, pignuts and herbs. It is my favourite place for pork; the flavour and texture of the meat is simply awesome.

And here are the silly mushrooms: Today I'm using yellow oysters, plus ほんしめじ andしろしめじ mushrooms (all locally grown and organic).
Sainsbury's do a non-organic "Taste The Difference" selection like this but I can get them cheaper, MUCH fresher and of course organic from the mushroom farm.
Flavour, people … FLAVOUR!

Right!
Pinnies on.
Let's get cooking.

First up:
Slice up that yummy tenderloin into greedy bite-sized pieces and whop 'em in a red hot pan.
Slap!
Sizzle!
Yay!
Brown those suckers off.

Here's yet another reason (as if you need another one apart from taste, texture, health and animal welfare) for always using organic: try this with factory-produced industrial/chemical "pork" and all you'll get is a panful of bubbling water with some icky little bits of "meat" floating in it and … er … not going brown.

Not only was this piggy allowed a fun life in the wild woods but it was not pumped full of growth hormones and antibiotics, fed on the bits of other animals we deem unfit to eat and killed at six weeks old; this merry little porker took six months of squealing and rooting and running free to reach the same size as an industrial/chemical piglet (poor little fuckers) and got to eat what it damned-well pleased.

And after it was slaughtered, it was not pumped full of water to bulk up its weight for profiteering supermarkets (anyone idiotic enough to buy "meat" from a supermarket deserves a fucking hard slap around the head on top of all the health problems they'll be storing up for themselves).

Hence: Slap an organic piggy in the pan and it browns properly, rather than just sits there and boils in a kind of unpleasant scummy water.

When it's done, slip it onto a plate and then pour a generous glass of good chardonnay into the pan to de-glaze it.

Scrub the wine around until it picks up all of that delicious brown porky-flavour and - when the pan is clean - pour the whole lot into your stock (for which, see many sweary imprecations in past posts and in particular this post on stock-making).

Righto … Whap that pan back on the heat.
Good.
Next - as always - top-bollocks olive oil; I'm using my favourite Gallo "Grande Escolha" as the intensity will complement the richness of the piggy and mushroom flavours.
Sploosh a good load in there and whap the heat up.
When it's hot enough, throw in a rough-chopped strong organic onion and a couple of cloves of the best garlic money can buy, then stir it around and reduce the heat to minimum so that lot sweats out for a couple of minutes.

When that's done, add your organic Arborio rice and hit the heat again, mixing the whole lot well so that every grain is coated in the hot, aromatic oil.

You know what's coming:
Olfactory Orgasm Time! Woohoo!
Add another generous glass of totally excellent chardonnay and a handful of roughly torn basil leaves …
Stir …
I N H A L E …
If that isn't one of the finest experiences in the known universe then I'm Rush fucking Limbaugh.

Hokay; we've done risotto enough times now for everyone to know all about adding the glorious home-made stock a sploosh at a time, allowing each beautiful spoonful to soak right into the rice until it begins to get gloopy.
The wine and pork-browning from earlier will make this particular risotto a nice comforting autumnal brown. Mmmmmmmm …

When you've only got around a cup of stock left, toss in the guppins.
Browned pork and mushrooms.
Yum!

Slowly add the rest of the stock and wait for the Magic Gloopy Moment™ when it's time to add a tablespoon of white truffle oil (fuck me! Can you smell that?) turn off the heat, finely grate a heap of organic Parmesan in there, stir it around and then LEAVE IT for a minute or two to do its sex thang.

While it's doing that, avert your eyes in a decorous manner and rip the shit out of the herbs on the windowsill to make a garnish.

Plate it up.
Roughly grate some more Parmesan on top.
Garnish.

Eat the fucker.

Squealy piggy and silly mushroom risotto.
Enjoy.
I know I did.
And now I'm enjoying the aftertaste with some more wine.
Mmmmmmmmm …

Shopping With King Arthur

Norfolk's a lovely place, as my long-time Blogville neighbours will know from many a picturesque Dive photopost.

It is also home to some splendid people.
World's sexiest man Stephen Fry is a local lad, Bill Bryson lives just across the river from me and today - after our usual breakfast in the city, Phil and I bumped into another local denizen in the basement of the cheapo discount bookshop off Norwich market.

So who should we find buying a book of tales from King Arthur for £1.99 (reduced from £5.00), but the man who himself staged a musical version of King Arthur … er … on ice, back in the glorious days of prog rock, when bands vied to be the world's silliest and this man was unquestionably the silliest of them all.

There in the bookshop was Rick Wakeman, disguised as … er … Rick Wakeman.
I think he was even wearing the same jacket he wore on the HIGNFY clip (third one down, where he explains just why King Arthur was performed on ice).

He was remarkably happy to be collared by a couple of fanboys and chatted away as we queued together and he signed our copies of "Grumpy Old Men" (another TV show he stars in where a bunch of grumpy old men sit around and complain about young people … not like me at all) which I spotted in the bargain bin at £2.99 each.
Yay!
Hoorah for Phil for always carrying a pen around with him.
And many a hoorah for the lovely, chatty, sociable grumpy old man Mister Rick Wakeman; the man who played that beautiful piano on Bowie's Life On Mars, who was my hero in the heyday of prog with Yes and who is now officially a national treasure.

Ah … the hair, the cloaks, the bombastic pomposity, the sheer, unashamed silliness of it all.
Sigh …
Enjoy these nostalgia-fests, fellow wrinkly prog fans.

"Six Wives", with Yes …

King Arthur on … er … Ice …

HIGNFY …

And many thanks to Lynn for this one … Rick on "Grumpy Old Men".

Yay!

Eleven And A Half Hours On A Train

So if anyone is wondering where I was yesterday, I was kidnapped by my train company.
It sook me five and a half hours to get to work and six hours to get home again.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck commuting!

Antidote

Maria's comment on the last post about God as a black woman reminded me of a lovely cartoon I have up on my bathroom wall to remind me to put things in perspective each morning.

I've posted it before, a long time ago but I make no apology for posting it again here as an antidote to all the crap in the previous two days' posts.



And to cheer you up still more, here's a lovely song from Crowded House: "There Goes God."
I love the lines:

"Cos I'd like to believe,
That there is a God,
Why sinful angels,
Suffer for love.
I'd like to believe
In the terrible truth,
In the beautiful lie …"

and …

"Hey!
Don't look now, but there goes God,
In His sexy pants and his sausage dog,
And He can't stand Beelzebub,
'Cos he looks so good in black …"

Yay!

Holy Crap (Yet Again)

So anyhoo …
This is carrying on from yesterday, so the easily bored amongst you can skip the whole damned thing and go do something useful like trash your TVs and put up bookshelves instead.
I mean it.
Go do that.
Now!

In yesterday's post and comments discussion we discovered that England - especially my own part of the country - is indeed a Godless place, and we wondered why and came to a few conclusions.

As Robyn and Shan have been making it abundantly clear to me for years now and as Mme B. pointed out yesterday, we Godless Heathens of Norfolk are kind of bucking the trend.
In the US (or at least the middle bits) and other places across the globe there has been a surge in religious fervour, most notably in Christian, Muslim and Hindu communities.

While some rejoice in this as a resurgence of faith I am saddened as it seems that the new fervour is of a fundamentalist nature, and as such is a form of religious extremism that regards itself as the sole arbiter of TRUTH and all others as WRONG!

This is not what Christ taught us.

Not that I am against fundamentalist thought; indeed I consider it necessary to the growth of any ideology, but like any other form of extremism it should be there to drive ideas and NEVER to dictate to people.

I've written about this before - at tedious length - and here's a little recap (a response to a Christian friend blaming a terrorist attack on Islam) which I consider needs reading again by anyone who welcomes the rise in evangelical Christianity, radical Islam or Hindu nationalism:

"I believe in the necessity of extremism.
Let me clarify that a little.
In politics - as in art and music and indeed religion - everything worthwhile and interesting happens out on the edges.
It takes a while before the sharp edges get worn down and bits begin to spiral down toward the plughole in the middle.
Left.
Right.
It matters not a jot.
It is the radical ideas that drive politics, religion and society forward.
Those ideas in the raw would scare the crap out of the general electorate / congregation / population but they get dulled and denuded over time and eventually reach close enough to the centre to become policy.

First off: Left and right.
I'm a Marxist. Lifelong and committed.
If you want to pigeonhole me, I'm just a smidgeon to the left of Anarcho-Syndicalism.
That's about as far left as you can get without falling off the edge.

But …
I often find myself agreeing with the extreme right and would far rather sit and talk politics over a few beers on my Republican friend Prudence's patio than listen to one word of wishy-washy, beige, insipid, compromised tosh from the muddy pit of ignorance that is "the centre".
Give me a radical rightist over a "liberal" any day.

Now …
Islam.

You all know by now that I will accept criticism of Islam.
But only from someone who has read and understood the Qur'an (preferably in Tarif Khalidi's utterly beautiful new translation) and the Life of The Prophet and has learned about Islamic prayer, visited mosques and discussed Islam with Muslims.
I have said this so many times, people:
Study the source material. Do NOT simply listen to what somebody says about it (including me). They will have applied their own spin/agenda to their comments.
Read the source material and make up your own damn minds. It's what your brain is there for.

I will NOT allow criticism of a certain colour by a blind person.

Islam means Surrender To God's Will.
The same God of Abraham that is worshipped by Jewish and Christian communities.

Islam is a tolerant religion.
"There is no compulsion in religion" states The Prophet in Sura 2 of The Qur'an.

Islamic prayer (as opposed to "greedy" Christian prayer that actually presumes to ask God for favours - a sickeningly arrogant act that I've never understood and a stale, stinky hangover from the days of the sale of indulgences … stop it, people!) is simply praise and thanks to God for His creation.

Here we return to extremism.
As I have said, I believe in the necessity of extremism.
However … and this is a big however …
We extremists should never, EVER be allowed to assume power.

A single, extreme ideology in power gave us Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and gives us General Tanh Shwe, the Taleban, Robert Mugabe, the Janjouid in Darfur and the Lord's Resistance Army in The Congo.

I equate any extremist religious group (and yes I'm afraid, Shan, that includes American Christian fundamentalists) as necessary but potentially dangerous.
Islamic extremists (a tiny minority) have gained control in some parts of the world with disastrous consequences.
I dread the rise in power of US Christian fundamentalism (what I have termed the American "Christian Taleban") as I see its growing influence on government eroding individual freedoms at an alarming rate in the same way that the Taleban did in Afghanistan when they were still a minor group of religious scholars.

In conclusion, what we need is BALANCE, not COMPROMISE.
Unfortunately we all too often get a fudged compromise on important issues.

The idea of a balance between Prudence's Republican ideals and my own Socialist ones stimulates me far more than the political mush of centrist compromise that is our de facto western political system.

A balance between the three major Abrahamic monotheistic religions is desperately needed in the world right now.
Please do not let what should be informed debate degenerate into mere petty mudslinging.

A balance of extremes is far healthier than a compromise.
A compromise will never solve the issues and will leave those on the edges embittered.
This seems to be where we are at this moment of the world."

So anyhoo … This rise in religious fervour that seems to be gripping every part of the planet except the bit where I live seems to me to be a dangerously divisive development, especially given the warlike tendencies of those three religions, currently happily killing one another all across the Middle East and through Pakistan into India.
Add militant Judaism into the mix (and a reminder to the Israeli government that your nation is founded on laws that include prominently the instruction :Thou Shalt Not Kill) and it's little wonder that the planet appears to be heading straight to Hell on a handcart.

Evangelical Christianity, Radical Islam, Hardline Judaism and Hindu Nationalism are necessary parts of those religions but should never be allowed to become the major voice in them.
Which is what appears to be happening today.
The lunatics are taking over the asylum.

I'm just glad I'll be dead soon.
If there's an afterlife I'm going to be so fucking angry!

Aww Crap! Who Let Him Out (Again)?

Hokay …
Lynn: you can stop reading now because you'll only doze off otherwise.
Anyone else who doesn't like the long, ranty, boring, Godbothering posts can go do something more interesting.
The rest of you (the two or three who actually miss "Dive" and of course, Shan, who will once again be very disappointed in me) can put the kettle on and settle in with a coffee.

He's back, and he's rambling incoherently and offensively and doesn't give a flying fuck.

I don't know if any of you can remember but just before christmas Dive got ticked off by an "official statistic" about Godbotherers:
Here's a recap:

"I just checked the stats for the UK; a frankly unbelievable 71.8% of Brits profess to being "Christian", with only 15.1% giving "none" for their religion.
I wonder how many of the people who fill in "Christian" actually gave a thought to celebrating the birth of Christ on Christmas morning; I wonder how many of them got off their fat asses and went to church instead of sat around opening presents and teaching their children greed and ingratitude.

I'm not talking about the Yanks here; some of them actually DO go to church; I'm talking about the millions of Brits who profess themselves "Christian" in the census but for whom that is the end of the matter.
They go to church for weddings and funerals and vaguely believe in some sort of "spiritual God thing", but that's the extent of their commitment.

Their sole purpose seems to be to make the statistics look like we are a nation of fervent believers and regular churchgoers when in fact Sunday in this country is a day for lazing around in front of the TV and most of our professed "Christians" are no more Christian than I am.
Probably considerably less as at least I still read The Bible and try to make sense of it all; the closest to Jesus most people around here get is watching the fucking da Vinci code.

I've been down to my local church on several occasions; the big festivals where you'd expect the place to be packed out.
The most I've ever seen in there is around twenty people and all of those were elderly.
Which for a church that has a catchment area of over five thousand people gives a much clearer indication of the nation's spirituality than the official statistics …"

So … In my parish, a little under half of one percent of the population actually go to church, and most of those are little old ladies who go for a sleep during the sermon, then a nice singalong and the free tea and biscuits afterwards where they can gossip about TV and their latest operations with their biddy buddies, rather than to discuss theology.

I did a little test: I found Marion (who actually does go to church) in the queue at the village post office a couple of weeks back and as we got chatting I threw out a few Bible subjects at her.
She had no idea what I was talking about …

I started with Isaiah - which, for any Brits reading this is basically the ranty threats and imprecations of a bloke moaning to his mates about the way Jerusalem was being run two and a half thousand years ago - but which today's US evangelists somehow interpret as prophesying with alarming accuracy events such as a Democratic President heralding The End Of The World … or indeed anything else that they don't like (or that smacks of reality - something which scares the shit out of them) heralding The End Of The World …
… to which Marion replied "Ooh, it's been so long since I read any of that I wouldn't know what it said any more."

Similarly, Daniel elicited some memories from Sunday School (back in the 1920s) about the lion's den but nothing else at all.

Turns out that Marion - one of our more devout Christians - knows a couple of phrases from the sermon on the mount but the rest of the Bible is a closed book to her, far less important than the events on TV's "Strictly Come Dancing" … "Ooh, the dresses are so beautiful! You should see them!"

She goes to church because it gets her out of the house on a Sunday and she can have a nice natter.

Anyhoo … I won't spend today knocking the evangelists (much) as they're more than welcome to put whatever spin they want on those old stories as long as they don't try to push that crap on me.

No … today I am happy to announce a survey that actually seems to coincide with reality a little more than the official Christianity figures.

Here you go: check this out: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/02/

Turns out that four out of five Britons repudiate creationism (and most of those who actually profess to believe in that stuff are Irish and Welsh, so for England the figure is even higher).
"The survey suggests there is a widespread lack of religious sentiment across Britain … 89% dismiss intelligent design and 83% reject creationism as plausible explanations for the existence of human life."

And even better: "The East of England may be the most Godless region in the UK …"
Woohoo!
The most Godless region of a Godless country.
It's so nice to get official recognition at last.

Reading a little further into the article, however, I discover something else about this country:
The survey (to mark Darwin's 200th birthday) found that:

- five percent of UK adults think Darwin wrote Hawking's "A Brief History of Time";

- three percent of adults think he wrote Dawkins' "The God Delusion";

- and one percent (that's actually over TWENTY of the 2,060 canvassed; extrapolate that for the country as a whole and it's scary) think he wrote "The Naked Chef".

I've come to the conclusion that a tiny percentage of the population of England can truthfully be called Christian (those who believe without thinking, as I once did before I lost my faith/started using my brain - delete where applicable) and around four-fifths of us are rational people who actually use our brains and are not truly Christian.

But there are still millions of people out there who are too dumb to even think about anything at all.
They sit, drooling in front of their stupid fucking TV sets with their brains leaking out of their ears, stuffing junk food and becoming dumber by the day.

These are the people who come in to the office in the morning and start conversations with those awful, soul-destroying words: "Did you see …"
They are the lumpenproletariat; the "Duh" generation; the Daily Mail and Sun readers (in the US they'd watch Fox News); people who take no interest whatsoever in the world about them.
They breed in alarming numbers.
They TXT rather than write; grunt rather than speak; the only book they've ever read is the first Harry Potter, though most of them didn't get through it but just watched the movie instead.
They tick "Christian" in the surveys because if they don't someone might think they're Muslim.

If we don't start culling those fuckers they will be our future!

Anyhoo … disregarding The Dumb, we are indeed a nation who has lost our faith, big time.

Several theories have been put forward over the past few decades as to why Europe - and England in particular - is so "Godless" (though I prefer to wonder why the middle bits of the US are so obsessed with pretending to be prehistoric Hebrews); the successive traumas of the two World Wars being the most common and I am sure that has had some effect; forcing the survivors to question the existence of any God.

Christians in the US find that hard to understand but then their country came late to both conflicts and didn't arrive until years of slaughter had reduced both sides to depopulated, exhausted and brutalised wrecks who had fought to a standstill and then dropped, only for the bright, shiny GIs to mop up what was left and wonder what we were all so depressed about (hokay, I know that's oversimplification and cannot praise or thank the American service personnel enough for the glorious sacrifices they made, but basically, for the average US citizen who wasn't being bombed to shit every day and starving, the war in Europe was a long way away).

Our cities bombed to rubble and whole generations dead, damaged or traumatised; followed by decades of austerity and depression as paying back US war loans bankrupted us (ironically, the US used our money to rebuild German and Japanese economies while we struggled, managing to pay off the last loan in 1980 and are subsequently left a third rate country … thanks, guys! We love the GIs, but that still kinda rankles).

No … My own theory as to why we are a Godless nation is that - as the statistics show - four out of five of us have better things to do.
Now that we no longer need to wonder where rainbows came from or why the sun comes up and goes down we don't need to invent a God to explain that shit.
We are smart enough to look at Christianity and say "No, thanks".

Take the Bible:

Sure; as a very one-sided and biased history of the Hebrew tribes living in a small part of the Middle East two and a half thousand years ago, the Old Testament is sporadically entertaining and occasionally hilarious.

Sure; as rules for living in a nomadic desert tribe, some of the Laws make sense, though most of them would be deemed utterly barbaric in any form of society other than neolithic desert tribal warfare.

Sure; the "prophets" are a great read, especially out loud when a bunch of you are drunk … they are so fucking unhinged as to be some of the funniest things ever written but they read like drug-addled ravings of madmen and should be taken as such.
Just because some village idiot claimed he saw a vision of a goat with three heads does not mean that two and a half thousand years later some imbecile fundamentalist can pick and choose something he doesn't like that has the number three in it and start screaming about The End Of The World (though that doesn't appear to stop them).

Sure; the Hebrews' "My God is bigger than your God and is gonna stomp all over him" idea was a fun thing to yell in a fight, but the Hebrew God is theirs; they made Him up and they (not you, modern Christians) are His chosen people.
Besides, there IS no God unless you're too dumb, frightened or insecure to be able to cope with reality and need to make up an invisible friend to help you.

To read the Old Testament as anything other than an historical document about bickering tribespeople is truly insane.

As for the New Testament:
Sure; trying to apply Jesus' teachings to the way you live your life is a good idea; I try to do it myself.
Above all he taught compassion, which nobody can really argue is a bad thing.

But the main message I take from the Bible (and which is actually much older than the Bible itself) is the common sense and totally fucking obvious rule:
Don't do anything to anyone else that you wouldn't be happy for them to do to you.

Stick to that and you won't go far wrong.
You don't have to be a Christian to do it. Or a Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, Moonie or Scientologist.
You can be Godless, like me, and still try to live a good life.

There's no God really, and no afterlife either so don't worry about it.

No Post Today

Sheesh!
I can't blog at work any more and tonight the trains were so crappy (those that weren't cancelled like mine was) that I am only just home and now off to bed with no bloody dinner, ready to get up again in the middle of the night and go back and do it again.
Sigh …

The Art Of Poor Photography

A couple of days back, Katie posted a cool little Messerschmitt bubble car from the sixties that we'd found in a Cold War exhibition last year.

I was sure I'd photographed those little fellas tearing round Goodwood motor racing circuit in a very wobbly and unsafe manner.
A delve into my photo files produced these:

This was probably the slowest race I've ever seen at Goodwood, yet I still managed to get it blurred through crap panning technique.

And this one was even worse … a pity because the little cars are hilarious on a racetrack.

That got me thinking … and a further rummage in the archives confirmed my suspicion that I am in fact a totally crap photographer.

For every successful shot I take of rally cars …

There is a mistimed crap shot.

For every successful panning shot …

There is a crap panning shot.

It's not just going right to left …

I'm crap at panning the other way, too.

For every successful grandstand shot …

There is a crap grandstand shot …

… or two.

For every stunning sunset …

There is a crap photo of a blurry piece of sky.

When I get it right, the result can be wonderful.

Woohoo!

But … er …

Let's face it …

I'm crap! But I could make a good living producing desktop patterns for Apple.