A Postcard from Kendal

There's a long post - less unfinished than barely begun - about the comics festival, but rather than delay until that's completed, here's a single frame from Zara Slattery's image for Radical Roots, which I photographed from the Festival's Windows Trail.

It's been a weekend of contrasts, with Friday's winds and yesterday's torrential rain fizzling out into today's golden October afternoon. After the morning's comics sessions, a little light retail from the dealers' rooms and a sandwich from the deli in the Market Place, we agreed that durham_rambler would return to our Hideaway from a quiet afternoon at home, while I took my camera for a walk around the town. Which worked very well, and I took many pictures - and again, some of them will doubtless appear in due course, but I won't delay this to accommodate them.

All was well and happy, in fact, until I returned home, and could not open the gate. Not, this time, the door which had previously given trouble, and which has been behaving much better as the weather improved, but the gate into the yard. The problem was not the latch at the top, but lower down, almost as if someone had shot the bolt. This was evidence, at least, that someone was at home, and durham_rambler is inseparable from his mobile phone... Except that on this occasion, he had decided to take it off, and while he rather thought he heard some noises outside, he didn't come out to investigate. No doubt sooner or later he would have begun to wonder where I was, but I had hoped it would be sooner rather than later. In fact it was a neighbour from further down the lane who came to my rescue: he was tall enough first to confirm that the blt was closed, and then to reach over to the yard broom leaning in the corner, and to knock the bolt open. It turned out that all three of us had contributed to the problem: I had remarked this morning that if durham_rambler wanted to lock something overnight, rather than enclose us behind a locked door that we might not be able to open in a hurry, he should shoot the bolt to secure the yard; helenraven remembered this when she returned home and noticed that the keys weren't in the safe, suggesting we were home before her. But I do blame durham_rambler for choosing this moment to cut himself off from the telephone...

This lock-in also provides an element of symmetry, since Saturday morning began with an entirely different piece of lock-related entertainment. But that's another story, and one which, since durham_rambler has just gone out for Thai takeaway, I won't tell now.