General miscellany

For photos which don't belong anywhere else...

One ♣ Zwei ∞ Trois € Cuatro ¥ Cinque α Seis π Zeven © Osam

We'll start with food.  No idea what's going on here, but some sort of cheese on toast plus baked things in tomato sauce.  Looks like a mixture of Red Leicester and Cheddar.  Not sure what's in the baking tray, but it looks like chorizo, onions, peppers-type stuff.  Anyway, that's enough of food.  For now.

The bane of my life at City South.  Once every two or three months, at about 7am, this annoying machine cranks into action to clean the windows.  It's the noisiest damn thing in the world.  The annoying thing is: they used to get it out at 7am (which involves lots of noise) but because they weren't allowed to start until 8am (I think it was), they would then go off and have a break, coming back to begin the work proper at the allowed time.  I seem to remember complaining eventually that they started earlier than they were meant to and they pushed it back.  Still annoying, though.

Dave Henry Hallam in the office environment.  He's no longer at our work, of course, having left to chase the pennies / get as far away as possible from picture-taking loonies such as me.  He looks to have a really small laptop.  Read more about him here.  But only if you want to.

Hang on, what?  How did this happen?  *I* take the photos.

Sir Andrew of Goddardshire, also off chasing pennies, gives me a beaming smile.  His character is given more depth with this pleasingly brief autobiography.

Always ensuring full clarification (necessary due our lack of ability in comprehending his Scottish burr), Craig demonstrates a solid skill in sign-holding.  He can do other things too.  Not least, start a family and then sod off to another continent.  (It still hurts.)

More soon.

A few weeks later and we catch up in February 2006 with Dave eating again.  He is the only person I know who has multiple courses for breakfast.  This is lunch, of course, but stolen from a free lunch leftover from a training sessions (back in the day when we used to get such free lunches - these days we have to spend time out of the office fetching such lunch ourselves - ah sweet false economy).  He also has a Mark Rogers head for a knuckle duster, which is an interesting feature.

A random Friday (probably) evening in the pub, here the Britons Protection.  And for some reason I decide to catch Euan drinking a pint of lager drink, looking somewhat apprehensive (or a bit annoyed that I am taking a photo of him drinking a beer - one of the two).  Actually, I think this might be at lunchtime, although the photo dates and times seem to be unreliable on this particular phone.

Fun...

...and games with Dave and my mobile phone features.

We occasionally entertain the senior Barlows, aka Aunty Janet and Uncle Graham.  There is a familiar formula involving Graham and alcohol, although not always my green poker hat (which is very popular on these pages).

What I love about this one is the contrast between the seriousness of AJ compared to the joyfulness of UG.  This is normally witnessed when he has won a game of some sort.

We interrupt this broadcast to show the damage that a football can cause a pale leg on a cold night.  You can see the mark caused by the hexagonal patterns on the football, arising from foolishly blocking a power shot.  (Once a defender, always a defender.)  Ow.

This is a special behind the scenes shot from Lessons in Cookery, which I have oh-so-amusingly labelled "Warning - gaylord at work", although only, I think, because I had sent it through to Matt (and possibly because he called me a name first, so there).  Anyway, cheese and tomato on toast is the subject's subject.

This isn't from Lessons in Cookery, but it is probably from one of the many times that Matt asks me to take a photo of what I am eating and send it through.  I duly obliged.  This is a cracking tea - bacon and beans on toast.  All your major food groups.  Probably.

We're skimming through the months now.  This is July 2006 (evidently, I didn't take many random photos in that time, focussing instead on the Pub Stagger, or things like the Caribbean or Louise's 30th.  Anyway, this looks to be a trip to EastzEast (I'm good), with Gareth (and probably others).

This is Wes taking a picture of me in the Printworks, all the way through to November 2006, a shot that I have not yet put on the Pub Stagger's behind the scenes photo, but you can see some similar photos of the actual pub stagger night.  I think at this point I am asking one of the bouncers why we aren't allowed to take photos... as Wes (aka barney) takes a photo.

I thought this might be a poker night, but the dates don't stack up, so it may just have been a meet up.  They happen.  Anyway, this is the scary Robert stare.  Euan looks on, again pint in hand.  Either he spends a lot of time drinking or he is a very slow sipper.

Jonathan shows me the shady bit of his face which he'd had for some time.  He'd seen a lot of doctors but they didn't know what to do with it.  We seem to be in a temporary location, so presumably the Christmas markets.

Which brings us, neatly, to the 2006 Christmas do.  Or, at least, one of them, since we normally have two.  That's the great thing about a hierarchical structure - you can subdivide it any number of ways and thus have a number of different "teams".  Once or twice, we have managed to muster three Christmas dos, but two was the most common number.  Anyway, I think we congregated in Cast, the short-lived bar next to the Palace Theatre.  Euan seems eager to tell us about something - what, I don't know.  We're largely black-tied to the nines too on one of these Christmas dos each year.

Well, for some of us anyway.  Gerard and Peter look very seriously at something very serious, neither dressed up as the rest of us are.

See.  Gareth sups a bottle of Carlsberg.

Mind you, we all have some way to go to match the dressing-up derring-do of Andy Rodgers and his cronies.  The mind boggles.

I get in the face of a cheeky-looking Pete John (now of a different firm).  Nice bow-tie.

This, I think, is the first appearance on my cameras of young Mr Brunger, a recent new joiner (well, then he was).  He musters a mightily cheesy grin anyway.

We were in the Palace Hotel and, I think, fitting of such a grand location we, as is typically the case, messed around when a bit drunk with the materials we had.  Firstly, two long balloons on a wine bottle-filled bucket.  A classic.

And the more imaginative face-on-wax on a wine bottle.  With a Nigel background.

A visit to Boundary Park to see the mighty Oldham.  Ok, not so might any more.  But once, briefly.

Something was going on at half-time.  The usual spiel, no doubt, but perhaps a special guest.  Maybe Andy Ritchie?

That will do for now.  In fact, it's probably time for a new page.