Twisting by the 'Pool

Beginning to emerge from hibernation now, and first exercise was some evening exercise somewhere in Liverpool. These undoctored mobile-phone-camera shots will bring back fond memories for anyone who used to smoke Three Castles cigarettes.

The hue is neither due to the camera being on one side of a glass of brandy nor my red-eye control being deficient but more or less as it was.

As you'll spot later, or may have spotted already if reading this after I add the daytime snaps, the taxpayers fund a unique combination of tedium and excess on these occasions when I am sent to wilder places. I guess that's fine as it all works out OK in the averages.

The idea of twisting by the pool has concerned me since the Seventies when the aptly named Dire Straits brought it to my attention. Never having been one for either twisting or pools on the grounds that I look ridiculous doing either and two wrongs would make a big, probably final, splash all right, I was glad to have this fine selection of pillars, ropes and chains to hang on to when the early Sixties Beatles tracks which I think the local Council insists are played at every club brought on the urge to sway.

There seems to be some robot rolling towards me in the three pillar shot which has a somewhat disturbing air. Especially as I would have thought that I would have remembered the fellow.

This marks the end of the LSDera as that fine old quango that has brought us such gems as 'Q for effective practice', 'm-learning: reaching across cultures' and possibly the worst freebies in the history of freebies, in the shape of plastic beer mats containing a suspicious-looking straw-coloured liquid which was supposed to gloop around when you ran your finger over them but didn't, gets extinguished at the end of the month.

Hopefully some of us will get vacuumed up by the LSN Noo-Noo and I'll still be able to provide some glimpses of the hyphen in Post-16 education.

Rod Rubber writes to say that there has been an inordinate amount of scraping and banging in the village but precious little evidence of life after my departure. Indeed no-one has been seen for some time and I no longer get reminders to Open This Way Up on my car door in the Towcester Tesco car park. There is even a rumour that the Colvo has been vrumpled by an even larger tank in the shape of a truck on the A43 but these have yet to be confirmed.

I really quite like this last picture.