Lunchtime O’Booze is the name given by Private Eye to a certain vintage of Fleet Street era (i.e. when they really all did work in or near to Fleet Street) journo.  One of these (now long retired) characters was staying with me earlier this week, kipping down on my sofa-bed to be precise.  Tony now lives in France, but he was over here for a few days, to participate in a lunch, with a dozen or more of his old Fleet Street cronies.

I met up with Tony on Sunday evening, and we dined out, very well.  Thanks to my twiddly screen, I was able to take photos of him like this, with the camera resting in the middle of the table, and me just looking down at it:

Tony looks rather like one of those South African type villains in The Saint, which I have been watching lately from time to time, waiting for the IPL to start on ITV4.

Next day, Tony departed for the lunch.  Ring me when it’s over, I said, maybe we can do something in the evening.  Nine hours later, Tony rings to say he’ll be back soon, and eleven hours later he is.  I feared drunken disruption.  Which I would have survived.  Tony has been very hospitable to me over the years.  But the evening ended very pleasantly.

To give you a further idea of what kind of lunch it was, here is a limerick, which Tony brought back from it:

An Argentine gaucho named Bruno
Said I’ll tell you something I do know
Girls are just fine
And boys are divine
But a llama is numero uno

And here is a photo, taken by someone else with Tony’s phone:

The big guy - a very big guy indeed - in the middle used to play prop forward for the Harlequins and is now a wine correspondent, the sort of bloke who has a special table in his home for drinking guests under.  The ultimate oh-stay-a-bit-longer-and-have-another-one bloke.  I think the guy on the right drives new cars for a living, in such places as the south of France, and then writes about them.  Certainly, someone of this kind was involved.

Do not ask men like this to drink and drive.  They just might do it.

Madsen Pirie has a posting up about the Parisian origins of the Statue of Liberty, featuring one of my all time favourite photographs.  Which gives me an excuse to exhibit some snaps I took in Paris last February, of the Statue of Liberty.

There are two miniature Statues of Liberty in Paris.  Before visiting Paris I didn’t realise there were any, and since being in Paris until now, when I looked it up on the www, I hadn’t realised that Paris contained two.  There is a very small one in the Jardin du Luxembourg, and a less small one next to Grenelle Bridge, which is the one I went to see:

I still have tons more Paris photos to show off, but that’s a start.

Ici.

The usual routine.  Magazine publishes picture of Mo.  Moists firebomb the office.  C’est la vie. I got to the story from here, and here.

However, I don’t believe the Moists actually care that their precious prophet has had his picture flashed about.  I think they’re just looking for a fight, and I am giving them the oxygen of publicity.  Oh well.  But you can’t just ignore this crap.  Here’s hoping the Gendarmes get them.

Don’t agree with the French politician (second link) who wants everyone to “respect” all opinions.  Just tolerate, even as you despise and/or detest, is quite sufficient.

What’s Mo saying, by the way?  Anyone?  Ah, answer here.

LATER: Longrider takes a well deserved whack at a cowardly creature called Bruce Crumley.  He got to it from Julia.

A couple of days ago, Antoine Clarke dropped by chez moi, and gave me one of these:

This evening I had it for supper.  But what was it?  If Antoine told me, I immediately forgot.  Pate (please add appropriate accentage - also to Henaff above) made of pork, I think.  But my French is hopeless and I cannot be sure.  All I can be sure of is that it was delicious.

Around this time of year, I often take a break from regular blogging, and I will be again, this year, starting now.  Before I went on my recent trip abroad, I warned that my usual rule of something at least once every couple of days might take a bit of a hit for the duration, but actually, regular service here continued.  But now I feel the need of a break.  So, for at least the next few weeks or so, and quite possibly for as long as two months, things will only appear here if I entirely feel like putting them here, and this time, I think I can promise some quite long gaps.  I am not forbidding myself to blog here, merely saying that for the next bit of a while, you should expect only whatever you may happen to get, and no more.

I’ll sign off with another of Goddaughter 2’s editings of one of my Rennes pictures (see below), this time of crippled bicycles:

I hate it when people do that to bicycles.

And a happy holiday to me.

Many photographers get bored with photoing big photogenic things like famous buildings, gorgeous landscapes and spectacular sunsets.  I think part of this is because the more beautiful something is, the more people (as opposed to photographers) already look at it,and I mean really look at it, in the flesh, as it were.  And what they remember of the real thing is typically better than any photo the photographer may later show them.  Certainly better than any photo I take.  The trick therefore is to take photos of things that people don’t normally bother to scrutinise in any detail.  With your photo you are showing them something they wouldn’t normally bother with.

Like tables and chairs, without people.  I photoed a lot of these when I was in Brittany recently:

Those were my versions.  As usual here, click to get any of these pictures bigger.

Goddaughter 2 got hold of all the snaps I’d taken that day, and those two were among the ones she picked out to play around with.  I.e. she used Photoshop to pick out everything red in the pictures and make it even redder, and probably added several doses of sharpening to the mix too:

The reason I was photoing empty chairs and empty tables is that there did seem to be an awful lot of these about in Brittany while I was there, in Quimper, in Saint Malo and in Rennes.  (The above two snaps were taken in Rennes.) My guess is that the mostly very bad weather throughout the time I was there, together with, I suppose, the larger financial climate, had caused business, in the kinds of places with lots of tables and chairs to put out in the street and serve food and drink on, to be very hard hit indeed.  Every pile of chairs or clump of unused tables was money not being taken by people who are very much in need of it.

I don’t always do cats here on Fridays, but I often do.  For me they signify the fundamental point of this blog, which is to entertain, and in particular to entertain me, rather than just to be serious and political about everything.  There is more to life than the fact, if fact it be, that the politicians are making a mess of everything.  So it was that, when on my recent trip to France, I kept half an eye open for cats.

Another thing I found myself snapping was motorbikes.  The French really seem to love their motorbikes, perhaps because their roads are longer and emptier than they are in Britain.

So imagine my delight when, wandering around the centre of Quimper of an evening, I came across this:

And I wasn’t the only one who felt that this was suitable material for digitalised immortality:

My favourite snap of a fellow digital photographer in Cat-on-Harley action being this one:

Was the cat in any way disconcerted by all this attention?  On the contrary:

The cat loved it.

Here, I hope you will agree, is the appropriate song, sung by one of the all time great French sex kittens.  (I actually have this on CD.)