The price of chicken

In this post I am meandering back in time again with a photograph of my mother when she worked for Mac Fisheries, a nationwide fishmonger, as a cashier in the shop on Market St in Loughborough.

Mac Fisheries Girls

This photograph was taken before the war and my mother is the young woman on the left.  What interested me in particular is the price of the 'local chickens and boiling fowls' which must be a bargain with prices from 4/6.  I wondered how much that would be in 'today's money' and came across a website that does the calculation for you (http://www.measuringworth.com/ ).  So I input the data - 4/6, 1938, 2011 - and hit the calculate key, only to discover that a range of values was given based on the comparator used:

£11.70	using the retail price index
£11.80	using the GDP deflator
£33.50	using the average earnings
£46.40	using the per capita GDP
£61.70	using the share of GDP

Using the RPI would be the most relevant comparator, but whatever I came to the conclusion that in 1938 chickens were bloody expensive.  

At the Exhibition

Every year in March, the camera club I am a member of holds their annual exhibition in the Huddersfield Art Gallery.  If they are like me, members of the club manically spend their Xmas holidays preparing their prints and digital images to meet the January submission dates.  In years gone by there used to be a separate category for black and white images but no longer, now they must compete in the same categories as colour.

Last week images selected by the judges went on display and certificates and prizes were distributed were issued to those deemed to be the better entries.  I am pleased to say that this year monochrome images were well represented and three of my images received certificates.  One, the Cloisters - Lincoln Cathedral, can be found on the first posting to this blog in December.  The other two are published here.

Football in the Park

The Hepworth - Outside from Inside

Barrows, wonky toilets and a flying brother.

This photograph is of my brother, Trevor, from mid 1960s.  It was taken in the 'garden' of our house in Station St, Loughborough in Leicestershire.  The photo was taken to capture my brother in the air, but it also tells another story of our family.  Station St is a terraced street, built at the turn of the 20th century.  At that time all of the houses had household toilets, but after the second world war there was a move to bring them inside.  My father, always the diy man, knocked through from the kitchen, bricked up the door and with additional construction work, we had our inside bathroom and toilet.  Some years later he found our that this conversion did not meet building regulations; toilets should not be accessed directly from the kitchen.  So he built an extension and moved the toilet into it.  The small window shown  is where the original bathroom was, at the time of this photo it also served as my darkroom.  The building on the left is the extension.  Note the brickwork, evidence that my father worked in engineering as a fitter, not in the construction industry.  The barrow, made by my Dad, was used to transport sand, cement and bricks from the building merchants in the goods yard of Charnwood Railway's derelict Derby Road Station at the bottom of the street.

Back in the mists of time

I decided to walk back home from Slaithwaite to Marsden after I had dropped my car of off at the garage for its annual service.  Hoping for clear spring light, my original plan was to take my telescopic lens and camera with me to photograph birds by the canal.  It was not to be.  The weather was damp and misty, so I decided to make the most of the exercise instead and just take my Canon G10 with me in case there was anything to photograph.  In the lay-by on Manchester Road, opposite the road to Linfit Hall, I noticed and read a plaque about the Slaithwaite Spa Park, which existed from 1825 when the Hall and baths were built.  For over a century it provided recreation for the people, until 1939 when it was taken over by the armed forces as a training ground. 

The mist had taken out all the colour from the landscape and reading this history made me feel as if I had stepped back in time.  With my G10 the walk home took on a different purpose, I felt as if I was taking pictures of a familiar landscape as history, not as it is now.

View over Slaithwaite 

Lock 24E at Slaithwaite

Canal in the direction of West Slaithwaite

The Mill at Cellars Clough

Meandering in Wooler

On our recent trip to Northumberland, we took ourselves off to Wooler.  Although we had not been there for several years, this was somewhat of a tradition.  Our trips to Northumberland always included a day or a part of a day in Wooler.  Why, I do not clearly remember.  The Cheviots were an attraction, but we rarely ventured into the hills.  The journey over from the Northumberland coast is particularly fine, involving open-sided roads over the moors.  But I think the main reason was to buy haggis.  We always seemed to be successful in this task, even though invariably we managed to pick half day closing.

Why did we go to Wooler on this holiday?  The introduction of vegetarianism into the Challenger household meant that haggis was no longer desirable to one of us and therefore not a motivational force.  The open road now passed through a massive but unknown construction project.  And the Cheviots were as distant as ever.  No the only reason why we went was nostalgia, a nostalgia reinforced by once again hitting the town on half day closing.  Memory is a fickle thing, but as I meandered though it Wooler seemed a tired place, not the self-contained town I remembered.

Market Place

Wooler High Street

The Black Bull

Northumberland Sheep

Well its a few weeks since my last post to this blog in its pilot form and still making my mind up as to whether to really go for it.  
Anyway to mark the end of dreary months of December and January, we went up to one of our favourite counties of England, Northumberland, where we experienced strong winds, wild seas and bright sunshine.  On our walk by Dunstanburgh Castle our path was blocked by a group of sheep and it was these that formed the subject of this monochrome post.

Northumberland Sheep

Welcome to 2013

I didn't manage a New Year's Day walk, but did get out on the moors on the 2nd.  So I joined my wife and her dog in rain, mist and wind for a walk on Marsden Moor.  My first monochrome of 2013 comes from here. 

Shooters Nab, Deer Hill

As ever the image was captured in colour and converted to black and white digitally.  With rain on the lens and low light creating such a flat image, there was so little colour in the image I could have left it as it was.