Pig Sty Avenue

going home , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Ave . We've had a lovely day. Herself's maternal instincts made her want to withdraw Molly after the "in the name of the Father" splash of water, because Molly didn't appreciate it one bit. But she went through with the Son and the Holy Spirit after all. Left to right that's Alexander, his girlfriend Laura, Martin, and the Old Man.

first drink in four and a half months , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Ave . Fiona's Mam and her brother are visiting from Scotland for Molly's christening, and they're staying in a hotel in Newcastle. So we went up there tonight to see them... And as we were leaving realised that the Newcastle v Everton match had just finished, and the metros would be packed. So we decided to have a wee half in the hotel bar whilst the crowds thinned. No flash and the place wasn't well lit, so I'm quite pleased with this. Mind you, I got the focus all wrong...

We're having a do after Molly's christening back at our flat, so it's all go at the moment, getting the place tidied, getting the buffet prepared.

clare and molly profile , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Ave . That's Clare, my oldest baby, with Molly, my youngest. Clare's visiting from Brighton for the Christening, which is on Sunday coming.

This story about Prince Charles made me think: what would this dozy sod be doing if not for the hand of fate which put him into a position of great wealth and influence? If his mother had been obliged to earn a living by turning her hand to whatever she could get work at: a shop or factory worker, say. How would Charlie have turned out? Because he may not be stupid, but we can say he's no genius, either. Without all the money and servants and the innumerable houses and expensive education. With overbearing yet remote parents, too. Homeless, perhaps? Pushed by circumstance and social inadequacy into a squat somewhere, drinking super-strength lager for breakfast. Instead of which, he has sufficient influence to have almost any barmy utterance reported in the world press. A few years ago, Herself and I both got jobs at a residential school . The history of the place was that it had been a quite posh girl's school, but was bought by a rich refugee from the Iranian revolut

caught in the pub , originally uploaded by P.S. Ave . To make up for last week's visit to McDunglands, this Sunday I took Molly to the pub. It's also by the Asda in Boldon Colliery. We went there because it's avowedly child friendly, and the smokers are coralled into a small area. The pub's name is The Story Book, but for reasons now lost to us, Herself and I have christened it The Shoe Box. It was a very swift half I had, mind. I don't think Moll was too impressed at all with this venue, sad to say - so that's me mostly not in the pub for the foreseeable future. Which brings me to an interesting change - I'm not that bothered with pubs nowadays. Yes, I'll repeat that: Pig Sty Ave really did say: "I'm not that bothered with pubs nowadays". Strange but true.

February Wood Pigeons , originally uploaded by P.S. Ave . The buggers are having a conference, before they pair up and descend on the allotment and eat everything in sight... Lovely birds, mind - I love the sound they make, and their breasts cooked in red wine will make a rare treat. Good and bad news vis a vis the pond. We've given up, for now, on puddled clay. It would have been possible, but would also have involved a major reconstruction and we didn't have time. The good news is, we had plastic sheeting, and now it's filling up nicely. I got this photo during yesterday's walk with Molly. We went to the fish ponds by the Lakeside pub. Hmm. The paths around the ponds were muddier than they at first seemed, and the pushchair got all bogged down, and oh my God! Somehow got the pushchair out, and home, and then spent half an hour freeing the wheels from several hundred pounds of glutinous blue mud. Molly slept right through that adventure.

Molly and I visited the horrors of Asda-bloody-Walmart this morning - she's beginning to get a porridge habit which needed attending to. And I've been testing out the film development there: they developed some black and white negs I've had for a while, (another story, that is); and some prints of Molly for her maternal Grandma's birthday. Then we went to the Italian Restaurant nearby so that I could get a coffee. Despite this place being entirely not-the-real-McCoy, the waitress was charming and it was pushchair friendly. Whilst there, I realised that Molly is great cover for taking photos. I took some of her, like the one below, but also managed to get this one , which I really like. It's great working part time!

Molly had a third set of jabs (or "jags", as Herself would have it) today. It was horrible. The nurse stuck the needle into her chubby wee leg, and she cried in outrage. An then... the same again in the other leg! She was quite perky for the rest of the afternoon, but she's rather sad this evening. Ah well, no more such immolations now until the dreaded MMR at 13 months old. The pond's wanting a significant rethink. When it was filled with water, clay fell away from some of the sides, exposing topsoil and letting the water seep out. The problem seems to be that some of the sides are too steeply sloping, so we need to give them a lesser camber. The pond's been drained, but it's all very wet and claggy, so reshaping it should be a right laugh. Today I sowed Burning Bush , Birthwort , Angelica , and Alexanders , all of which had been stratifying, with the Lebanon Cedars, since last April because I'd gone back out to Libya and missed the planting

0364 , originally uploaded by Junkmale . The new group is ace. Look at this! What splendour.

A big realignment of my priorities on Flickr is nearly done. I couldn't find a group which catered for the sort of photos I love, people in public places - in the style of Tony Ray Jones : essentially British, unposed, informal, simultaneously real and surreal, gritty and tender. Most of the "street photography" groups are too American - the very term gives that away. So, I've set up a group today during my break at work - and already there are some excellent photos in it from people I'd never encountered before. Splendid. And I've given up on the voting groups like DMU and Popolos . The deal is with those groups, you vote and comment on ten photos for every one you pool, and then people vote and comment on yours. Trying to find constructive things to say about photos I didn't give a fuck about was becoming harder and harder. And some of the comments on my pictures were infuriating. For example: -- from P.S. Ave - (?) Now, I think this picture

Al commented: "...today saw day one of this seasons hot frog action - unfortunately it was all underwater so I can't post any shots but last year it was frogspawn overkill - be prepared down at your pond too". Hmm. The bad news is, our pond is leaking above the puddling level; (the good news being, the Old Man reckons he can fix it today - I'll be at work - and has drained it in preparedness). The upshot of all of which is, it's not ready, and anyway it's probably too new to attract frogs now. So there's a bit of urgency to get it repaired and refilled. One of our neighbours at the allotments has a pond of some description which attracts a lot of frogspawn each spring, he says, and we'll get things started with a bucketfull from him.

To check this out.

...This evening on my way home from work, I could smell the approaching Springtime, the earth getting warmer and the trees quickening. It makes your heart glad. It rained a lot yesterday. The Old Man rang me: the pond's nearly full and holding the water.

I've just discovered that many of the people I spend virtual time with on Flickr have blogs, so there's a new category on the blogroll. Three have been added just to get us started - I'll trawl through my contacts' profiles and add more when I've time.

1st McVisit , originally uploaded by P.S. Ave . I hope we won't be making a habit of it. Those gloves are something, though, eh?

I think the idea was, to regenerate Boldon Colliery after the pit was shut-down in the 80s. Hmm. So they built a trading estate, a massive supermarket, (Asda-fucking-Walmart), a multiplex cinema, a pub and an ersatz Italian "restaurant". Oh yes, and a McBloody-Donalds. Anyhow, this morning, the sky being leaden and unpropitious for photography, I took Molly that way for our walk. I got a paper at Asda and went to McDonalds. Well, I suppose a parent has to make a child aware of both the bad and the good things that life provides... It hasn't rained at all since we dug that pond at The Allotment. There's no tap water, but there is an ingenious system to collect rainwater, and we emptied the main collection tank into the pond yesterday, (crossing our fingers the while in behopes that Spring showers will refill it). And this morning... not a drop had drained away! We've rigged up a pipe from a nearby shed to channel rainwater into the pond, when it does

This must have been three years ago - the sheds and greenhouses have been moved around, and there's a wee pond top right now :)

To scale, except that the width on the plan is x2 - it's much longer and thinner in reality, but we need the plan to fit on A4 paper. The idea is, as we plant things out we update this plan, so we know what's where. Theoretically.

This morning Molly was up and full of fun at 5AM. So I used the time to put together a spreadsheet of the seeds to be sown this year. Here's the column of botanical names. Planning what to grow is the best way to get through February. Allium cepa Allium schoenoprasum Brassica oleracea botrytis Brassica oleracea italica Capsicum ?? Coriandrum sativum Leonurus cardiaca Origanum vulgare Spinacia oleracea Thymus vulgaris Hypericum perforatum Angelica sinensis Agrimonia eupatoria Galium verum Solanum dulcamara Cedronella canariensis Pimpinella anisum Melissa officinalis Monarda fistulosa Borago officinalis Sanguisorba minor Stachys officinalis Polygonum bistorta Chamaemelum nobile Silene vulgaris Petasites hybridus Beta vulgaris craca Brassica rapa nipposinica Brassica alboglabra Amaranthus tricolor Arctium lappa Cymbopogon citratus Valerianella locusta Apium graveolens Tetragonia tetragonoides Dictamnus albus Aristolochia clematitis Angelica archangelica Smyrnium olusatrum Cedrus l

Who says Americans have no sense of humour?

From Fellgate Footbridge II - INCH , originally uploaded by P.S. Ave . I like this motion blur metro shot best of all, though. Like a ghost train.

I went out with Molly this afternoon. The camera bag fits perfectly over the handle of her pushchair. I wanted to get some motion-blur pictures of the Metro going over a bridge - and did. This little expedition will be the first of many, I foresee. It'll be great. Molly gets fresh air and catches the sights, I get photos, and Herself gets a well earned rest. Brilliant. There's a better photo on the Jarrow and Hebburn blog .

The "word" was my "mentoring" session, to see how I'm getting on. Everything's fine, though I could ocassionally be more "pro-active" - which is a fair criticism on the mornings after Molly's had a fun-filled night. So they are more-or-less happy with me, and I'm more-or-less happy with them. That's about as much as you can expect at work these days.

... rattled a few cages - which is what I intended. Somebody on Flickr wrote: "I wish you the same as what you have done with this animal!!" But my favourite is: "Those chickens get eaten anyway. Catch it and bring it to a zoo. Sedate it and put it on someone else's land, but this is pure horror. Disgusting." Pure horror? You need to get out more. Flickr get on my nerves lately - all rather nicey-nicey. Actually, I really like foxes - I love wildlife generally. But, what kind of a man stands by and watches his chickens get munched, and his 68 year old father seriously upset? And I'm a tree-hugging hippy at heart, but these all-god's-creatures-cutesy-nicey-cuddly fuckwits do my nut in. It's pouring with rain tonight, and hopefully the pond is beginning to fill. Andrea asked about mosquitoes: we don't have 'em in these latitudes, thank God. And She's a Sprite suggested Koi carp. No, no! The idea is to attract frogs and toads, who

Above is the pond, nearly finished; below a diagram. The puddling was done to stop water draining through the topsoil. Fortunately, the subsoil is boulder clay, so we had plenty of material on hand. What we did was, we put cricket ball sized bits of clay onto the sides, and them banged (puddled) the clay into the topsoil with length of heavy wood. It was very good exercise. Altogether, digging and puddling took two of us about eight hours, though that was spread over three days. The right hand has a slope, so that the frogs, toads and newts we're hoping for will be able to climb out - as will any hedgehogs who tumble in. That sides slightly lower than the other, and we're hoping that water will drain away and we'll put a bog garden there. Water will feed in from the gutter of a shed away to the left - we'll put a culvert of some sort to channel it. We only need rain now. I'll post on its progress. I'm hoping for our first dragonflies before the end of

This is the fox - we presume - which took nearly half of our chickens before we gave in and stopped keeping them. She also killed nine of our neighbour's birds in one go. So that's me standing outside the now empty hen house. I've been doing some research and learned that another fox will move into this one's territory almost straightaway. So we won't bother to get chickens back. This photo upset someone on flickr who accused me of "not knowing the divine rules". Hmm. Don't get me started on that sort of malarkey. The pond's nearly finished - I'll post about that later. [SPA? Non!] , originally uploaded by P.S. Ave .

I dug up the rhubarb and the fennel at my old allotment and wheelbarrowed them across to The Allotment. The Old Man has gotten down into the boulder clay whilst digging the pond, and that's inspired us to go for a natural pond with puddled clay . We'll do the puddling tomorrow. We went to the allotmenteers' kind-of-shop in South Shields and had a shufty at the potato varieties they are getting in, so that I could do some research into the best ones for us. It was wonderful to get some fresh air and exercise.