Chef hides round the corner to have a fag. Taken outside a café opposite the LRB Bookshop in Pied Bull Yard, London.
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Chef hides round the corner to have a fag. Taken outside a café opposite the LRB Bookshop in Pied Bull Yard, London.
A Bad Guide
Great picture ! Visible just above the cup, apparently mounted (?) on the wall behind it, is something with three vertically elongated holes and a narrow band of light above them. What do you imagine that is ?
Thanks, Stu. The narrow band of light is just reflection off the metal surface of whatever it is. It must be some kind of exterior electrical outlet or something. Truth is, I didn’t notice it when I was taking the picture even though it’s so prominent now.
It looks like a wall mounted ashtray.
As a smoker I find two things to suggest it’s not an ashtray: it’s too high to be conveniently reached, and it would encourage surreptitious smoking in the shadow of that projecting section of the building. Yet it could still be an ashtray put there by a clueless non-smoker.
That ashtray (if it is) is likely to be only for those café´s workers. There isn’t any butt on the pavement although that only means that someone cleans it. As for high position, there are some examples, like:
http://www.esi.info/detail.cfm/Smartstreets/SmartstreetsSmartbin-postmounted-cigarette-bin/_/R-PROFILE-115286_W43JF
I’m a smoker as well.
Jesús: from the design, it could well be one of those Smartbins ! However, as to “there isn’t any butt on the pavement” – look at the white object a few centimeters in front of his right shoe. When the picture is magnified, that sure looks like a stubbed out hand-rolled cigarette. The chef is smoking a filter cigarette, perhaps to reduce the effects on his olfactory faculty.
Smokers in Britain enjoy the outdoor life nowadays. In fact Britain is now like a hot country, what with its palm trees (there were no palm trees when I lived there) and all the outdoor cafés that have smokers’ bums on seats even in the wettest weather. The tables in the courtyard were all provided with ashtrays.
>Stu Clayton
Yes, it can be; really I only looked for a yellow filter, like those of Virginia tobaccos. A few years ago, some people here have started to smoke hand-rolled cigarettes because of prices. I smoke black tobacco. This kind of cigarettes has a white filter.
>A.J.P. Crown
I always enjoy the outdoor life but I don’t like having to go out when I am with non-smoker friends in a bar. And I confess that I smoke in my office (please, don’t denounce me to the police).
Well no wonder you enjoy the outdoor life. You live in Spain. Imagine sitting at an outdoor table in the middle of London, you and your companions obnubilated with diesel fumes, in the rain. It’s probably worse for one’s health than the cigarettes.
(I used to smoke in my office too).
I think that metal thing on the wall is a doorbell + intercom. There must have been a door round that corner, that the chef was using.
There is a novel where a young man from Madrid who went on a picnic near Madrid fainted. When his friends put a car near him to take him to hospital, he breathed in the exhaust fumes and he recovered from his faint. He couldn’t stand the clean country air.
I’ve only read that fanny part of that novel some years ago.
As for the weather, today the temperature reached 25.1 ºC here.
There’s that spooky shadow too. I think the metal thing with the empty eyes is just waiting to jump out and eat him. Lucky for him, he chose to hide behind the Tardis.
>Tron Engen
Oh yes! But there are others that look like a cousin of E.T., so inoffensive:
http://iseemonsterseverywhere.tumblr.com/image/78724241505
Lovely monster.
I know this blog is effectively dead, but I’m sorry, this is where I put goat-related news: Tree goats
I used to cycle past almost all the locations in the photographs on my way to work and back.
Stubborn goat ‘arrested’ after refusing to leave Saskatchewan Tim Hortons
Is “cold” one of those euphemisms for drunk, like “tired and emotional”? My guess is the goat was actually cold or hungry or just lost. It was probably looking for a police station, but they’re impossible to find nowadays.
http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/media/20151226/the-best-or-worst-news-media-corrections-of-2015
“The Argus would like to apologize for suggesting that the director of the Brighton Science Festival believes the ‘21st century will be remembered for a terrible war between mankind and goats.’ That contention, as well as another goat-obsessed comment, actually came in the form of a question submitted by a reader.” — Argus, Brighton, England.
The next paragraph, “People often underestimate how dangerous a goat can be – I personally know six people who have become severely injured by goats, and the annual death toll racked up by goats is over 2,000,000”, is also a reader question and not a response from Mr Robinson.
– But it’s still pretty shocking. Why are they keeping this news from us?
Nothing to do with goats, but I have to share this quote about Munch from the New Yorker:
“He took to leaving his paintings outdoors through the brutal Norwegian winters — to ‘kill or cure’ them, he said.”
That’ll do it. Nearly everyone in his paintings looks like they’ve got bronchitis.