....sitting on a shelf

OK – at long last we have got some concrete progress – the den’s floor is back down after the pipes that will eventually feed our back boiler with cold water to heat up have been laid. They met with a slight problem yesterday in as much as they’d not allowed for the fact that the fireplace in the sitting room is in a different place to the one in here so they’d met a wall when they first tried to get them in.

Today’s progress has been limited because one of the four men who’s been working on our job set off to help someone in an emergency this morning, and smashed up his hand in the process so he’s out of action, one has disappeared owing a stack of money (thankfully none to us) and one has been away to help his son move house. That means only one has been here working – poor chap’s been going like the clappers but hasn’t made a huge amount of progress.

Anyway, the fact that the den is done has meant we’ve been able to move stuff back in there and therefore out of other rooms – we’re now in a position where we can go to bed without tripping over stuff!

I came into the room with an armful of ‘junk’ to find DM gazing lovingly at this little row of three M series Pentaxes, newly placed on a pristinely clean shelf (halelujiah) – they are three of the four we own (and we sold either two or three on ebay earlier this year). The three here are all newly equipped with Gordy straps.

Gordy is a man in the USA (Washington state) who makes camera straps to order. DM has fallen in love with these little wrist straps, which he reckons are a triumph of design functionality. He bought one as a trial and now has them on all his little cameras. Gordy has done OK out of him and DM is thrilled with his part of the bargain.

I must confess to a slight feeling of unease when he told me they’re colour coded to reflect what the camera is (and I checked this was by design rather than by accident) – the tan straps are chrome bodies and the black, black and – here’s the cunning bit, the black cord represents manual cameras and the white represents automatic – scary! I had no idea David could be so anal really - he is, after all, the man who never opens a letter and lives in a permanent state of chaos!

I was spending an evening with my friend Sarah last year.