About Me

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No Fixed Abode, Home Counties, United Kingdom
I’m a 60-year-old Aspergic gardening CAD-Monkey. Sardonic, cynical and with the political leanings of a social reformer, I’m also a toy and model figure collector, particularly interested in the history of plastics and plastic toys. Other interests are history, current affairs, modern art, and architecture, gardening and natural history. I love plain chocolate, fireworks and trees, but I don’t hug them, I do hug kittens. I hate ignorance, when it can be avoided, so I hate the 'educational' establishment and pity the millions they’ve failed with teaching-to-test and rote 'learning' and I hate the short-sighted stupidity of the entire ruling/industrial elite, with their planet destroying fascism and added “buy-one-get-one-free”. Likewise, I also have no time for fools and little time for the false crap we're all supposed to pretend we haven't noticed, or the games we're supposed to play. I will 'bite the hand that feeds', to remind it why it feeds.

Monday, October 9, 2017

N is for Nature and Gnome's Stools!



Mixing the 'small scales' here with little animals, small plants and small plastic plants, it's a sort of 'News, Views - Bits & Bobs' with a ragged thread running through it!


I shot these over a few days at the cusp of the months just gone and just arrived, I'm sure they are Ink Caps (Coprinus), but which one (there are a dozen or more) is not so clear, my bible for such things (Philips - of course!) doesn't have a perfect match, these (in the pictures) being a bit small for the 'standard' Shaggy Ink Cap (Lawyer's Wig), but a bit big for the Coprinus Lagopus they otherwise more closely resembled.

The detritus left in the third shots is what you can make the ink out of and which gives them their common-name, except you should harvest it before it gets to the state shown here!

Apropos the Wade / Not-Quite-But-Probably-Irish-Factory-Wade Leprechauns we saw the other day, Peter Evans sent me this a couple of days later and I was saving it for the actual 'News Views' but thought this was an ideal way to mix toys and naturalism!

Those of you with a good eye will have realised - immediately upon seeing the above - that what I wrote the other day was a load of cobblers, he wasn't carving a boat OR a crib . . . he's a shoemaker!

He's plastic and not sitting on an Ink Cap, but rather a Fly Agaric, or at least a hand-painter's idea of a Fly Agaric! And there are shade's of Fontanini in the Carrara'esque sample of Connemara marble beneath the Fly Agaric!

A distant relative (by time rather than blood) used to breed Connemara Greys for the London taxi trade and is known in the family for his pronouncement in the 1900's that petrol engines were noisy and smelly and would never take-off! He (and the taxi trade) lost his horses to the hell of Flanders and as the Western Allies grabbed large chunks of the former Ottoman Empire with its cheap oil (throwing electric vehicles on the scrap-heap for three generations), he chose to retire

Sadly although not distant by blood; he's far enough away for me to be unable to apply for Irish Citizenship - so I'm pinning my hopes on the Tories wreaking Bwreakxit!

Shades of Tintin!

This is meant to be a Fly Agaric too, it's a Hong Kong (branded to a 'KT') plastic cake-decoration version of a Japanese cast-lead miniature garden ornament, the lead versions themselves replacing the even earlier ceramic/pumice ones. It's posed in an apple I rescued from three Hornets . . .

26th September 2017

. . . these three Hornets! Note the nervous beating a retreat . . . twice! I'd chopped a few of the rotten apples up with the mower and they were emanating a cider-smell from the top of the compost-bin!

24th September 2013

They get so drunk on apples at this time of year they can't fly! This chap (probably a barren chap'ess!) fell of the woodpile several times before I started filming and went on to make several more attempts, getting caught in the spider's web again too!

Like human drunks struggling to make their legs walk in a straight-line, it just couldn't get its wings to work properly, buzzing furiously, it was going nowhere, flight-wise!

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