Enough Petrol For Sunset

This morning was spent cleaning, tidying, and vacuuming the house, and completing bed-making. After lunch I scanned the next five of Charles Keeping’s inimitable illustrations to ‘Our Mutual Friend’.

‘ ‘There’s nothing new, I suppose’, said Venus’ gives the artist an opportunity to represent the distance between three men in the room by occupying a double page spread.

‘ ‘Yah,’ said Mr Boffin, with a snap of his fingers’

‘Mincing Lane’

‘Mr Twemlow lays down his aching head’

‘The two men looked at one another’

Later this afternoon we shopped at Tesco. The woman on the check-out normally worked in the attached petrol station, which was now closed. She told Jackie that they were receiving uninterrupted deliveries as usual, but were sold out early in the mornings.

This evening we dined on pizza, the remains of Jackie’s arrabbiata sauce, and plentiful fresh salad, with which she drank Diet Coke and I finished the Cotes du Rhone Villages.

Afterwards we considered our tank still contained enough petrol for

a nip down to Milford on Sea to catch the sunset.

We were not the only watchers upon whom

the Needles Lighthouse shone its warning light.

74 comments

  1. Such a gorgeous sunset! I have just heard of your petrol shortage. I hope that what there is, is not being hoarded by the toilet paper crowd. (or was toilet paper hoarding just a Canadian thing last year?)

  2. Love Mr. Keeping’s ‘Mincing Lane’! 🙂 Mr. Boffin made me giggle! 🙂
    OHMYGOSH! Your sunset photos are so so SO beautiful and healing to look at! A sunset state of mind! 🙂
    The clouds are sure putting on a dramatic show. 🙂 Love seeing the soaring gull! And the light house! 🙂
    (((HUGS))) 🙂

  3. What a good idea that the lady who usually assisted in the petrol station could be re deployed.
    Let’s hope the petrol situation settles soon… that red sky this evening bodes well, so fingers firmly crossed!

  4. Ahh .. you’ll know my favourite Keeping’s sketch today was ‘Mincing Lane’… and the ‘no.2’ of your ‘sunset’ photos was superb, and I adored the clarity of your ‘Needles’ Photo …

  5. That’s one fine lighthouse, and a gorgeous sunset. I’m glad you decided to spend the petrol to experience it, so that we could, too. I especially hope that the transport and supply issues get resolved in a timely manner.

  6. The persisting paucity of petrol appears to be paradoxical. How is it that the dealers in UK are receiving and selling the same amount of petrol and yet there is a scramble. It’s an interesting aspect of human nature.

    Advent of smartphones has rendered photography as effortless as breathing. Recently though, I tried to capture a neon lit sign atop a tall building when my mobile threw in the towel. The model is not a slouch, being a highly rated iPhone 12. Even the DSLR that I bought 15 years ago could have captured it with panache. My daughter reported facing a similar inability trying to capture a particular shade of the evening sky. What these mobile cameras are doing is producing a cocktail of dozens of images or maybe more into one single shot. Everything that we used to know as white balance, exposure, shutter and aperture have been thrown out of the window in lieu of digital jugglery. Those ladies appear intent on carrying the fading lights home in their phones.

    The use of double page to generate effects by Keeping is ingenious.

    1. Thank you very much, Uma, for your usual insightful observations. Petrol is like toilet rolls to selfish scramblers. We have carers who cannot get to their charges for lack of petrol while other sit with full tanks and block up the roads. That is a particularly interesting take on mobile phone photography. I am pleased you still rat Keeping.

  7. We have spent the last week in Northern Ireland where there was absolutely no panic buying. We returned yesterday evening and needed fuel but passed forecourt after forecourt with no diesel. I carefully drove the 100 miles from East Midlands Airport and finally came across a garage with fuel only two miles from home (25 miles left in the tank).

  8. How beautiful to watch the sunset and those decorative clouds. I spend some time last night catching up on your September blog posts but I tried not to interact as I read as would have been a bit too weird. What a month it has been, when you combine real life events with memories.

  9. Sorry about your petrol shortage, Derrick; I hope it ends soon. It did not prevent you from capturing a gorgeous sunset, though.
    Mr Keeping’s positioning of illustrations in various places on pages enhances the effect of his inimitable art.

  10. We have hoarders here as well, but our petrol doesn’t seem to be on the blink. Last time I used online food shopping at one of our chains. The shortage was in pasta, flour, Long Life milk, Pet food, of course TP but there were other things where you were limited to 1 packet … now the retailer bods are saying there’s going to be a shortage of Christmas Presents. And I just read USA has stopped all mail to New Zealand, along with other countries, sighting freight vehicles both air/ship.

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