And the Good Lord (or possibly the small god of stallholders)

Looked down from on high and saith

"today, we will tempt Mig Bardsley a little further along the road towards Mammon"

Thus it did not rain, neither was it cold and windy. And many passers by stopped, looked, said extremely nice things, smiled pleasantly and walked on by to the other side of the aisles to buy cheap tat from another stall (but woman cannot live on nice comments alone, however encouraging and heart-warming they may be and a bit of bread wouldn't come amiss)

And one or two good Samaritans purchased very small items and chatted for ages about the pictures they and their spouses and children liked to take

Yeay! And in one case those taken by a friend or colleague (I forget which)

And the daughter and friend of the daughter of Mig Bardsley came and said

"the stall looks better than last week" and the friend of the daughter of Mig Bardsley bought two cards (and a pork roll for which thanks and praise be given - it was a very good pork roll)

And the companions in commerce of Mig Bardsley came and looked at the wares she had set out and said

"Those are very beautiful pictures. What a shame you haven't sold more. It's been a bad day for all of us too". (didn't I hear something like this last week)

And the kindly neighbour of Mig Bardsley said

"You should take a stall on the Portobello Road in London, where, on a Saturday, a host of people will come and they shall be more discerning than those few people of Oxford and they will spend great sums of money on your beautiful pictures"

And Mig Bardsley took the great sum of £12.50 which is not quite as much as the cost of hiring a stall which is £13.15 but is £9.25 more than last week and all of which is quite small

And the lovely Eddie said

"do you want to come back next week?"

And Mig Bardsley was tempted and said

"Er, Yes".

Oh! Did I? Oh, ok. Well I suppose I will then, seeing as how Eddie is going to put my name on a space (2nd row, third from the end) and all. All I can say is, if the good Lord sendeth not a great horde of discerning people and a few rays of sunshine next week, I may sleep in, the week after. 5 am is not my kind of time of day! In fact, unless it has dawn rays of light shimmering along the edges of trees and hills and things I don't consider it a time of day at all!

And Mammon, you know, I bet he's not such a bad guy if you get to know him. I would like to get to know him just a little bit. Next Thursday for preference.


Views from under a canvas awning are beginning to pall. I don't like to take pictures of the punters. Somehow I feel they might not feel welcomed by a camera pointing at them as they approach.
So here are some more of the canal holiday, for instance, two lovely ladies making the best of the bad weather while we were trying to empty a lock which was filling up busily behind them (the water's not supposed to pour over the top of the gates like that!)


The advantages of being slow and a long way behind the others is you get shots like this of them being blown around on a hill-top
The geese really hoped we had some more stale bread

and next door's boat cat had a great deal to say to our boat dog - through the window. I don't think he understood all the words she was using, he's a bit of an innocent when it comes to swearing cats. Our cats tend to say very simple things to him, like "take that" and "slap" and "mine! Piss off" and occasionally "oh I'm not hungry, you have it (you stupid non-cat person, you won't know what to do with it anyway)"

Now I'm going to continue recovering from getting up at 5 am. At least it seems to be day time now.