She Stoops To Conquer

Jackie lunched with her sisters yesterday. As is not that unusual this resulted in a printing project for me. She brought back three more photos of her parents.

The first was of her mother and her friend Sheila, the pairing who had featured in ‘A Statuesque Beauty’. My task today was far more difficult than the scanning and printing of the earlier photograph. Indeed, it was the most daunting challenge of this nature that I have, naturally most willingly, taken up. This time I was presented with a print of 8 x 5 centimetres, including the margin, in size. It was badly torn, ink stained, and taped up on the reverse. The tearing had effectively created holes in the print. Correction of all this requires careful application of the retouching tool.

As I understand it, the essence of retouching is that you are transferring pigmented pixels from neighbouring areas in order to mask blemishes. The missing sections are effectively blank paper, and beyond my skills to cover completely. This is what the original looks like:

And here is the result of my effort:

These two sixteen year olds were dressed in their outfits for their school presentation of Oliver Goldsmith’s comedy, ‘She Stoops to Conquer’.

Compared with this, scanning and printing a couple of photographs of Don Rivett c1959 was a piece of cake. From the little wallet in which these have been contained, they are the work of Penge Studios of 82 High Street, London S.E.20. That building is now occupied by a cycle shop.

Jackie’s father wears his uniform of the Kent branch of the Civil Defence Corps. Wikipedia has this to say about the organisation: ‘The Civil Defence Corps (CDC) was a civilian volunteer organisation established in Great Britain in 1949 to mobilise and take local control of the affected area in the aftermath of a major national emergency, principally envisaged as being a Cold War nuclear attack. By March 1956, the Civil Defence Corps had 330,000 personnel.^[1] It was stood down in Great Britain in 1968, although two Civil Defence Corps still operate within the British Isles, namely the Isle of Man Civil Defence Corps and Civil Defence Ireland (Republic of Ireland).’

My favoured paper for making these particular 5″ x 7″ prints is Ilford Gallerie pearl. I only had one sheet left, so this afternoon Jackie drove us to Wessex Photographic in Ringwood, which is the nearest outlet where I have found it. They didn’t have any, so I bought some Canon Photo Paper Plus Glossy II, which is all they had in the size I wanted. As this is also the only place where I can be certain of finding my Series 8 inks, although I didn’t think I needed any, I bought a few spares. Almost as soon as I had begun printing, two of the inks were exhausted. One that I had just acquired was Cyan, and I hadn’t already got a spare. The Canon Pro 9000 printer uses 8 different inks, and, even if you are printing in black and white and have an active black ink, it will not work if there is just one colour missing. So it was a bit of luck to have bought the right one.

This evening Jackie drove us both down to Mr Pink’s Fish & Chips shop in Milford on Sea, to buy our takeaway dinner.

We enjoyed cod and chips, pickled onions, and gherkins. So free of grease is this superbly crisp food, that ‘The Great British Take Away’ paper bags in which it is presented are perfectly fit for recycling. Not least is the requirement for pickled onions to be kept crisp. The one on the plate was bought at Mr Pink’s. Those in the jar are Garner’s. In order to retrieve them from their container, we now use the “Auto” silver plated retro pickle fork complete with its original box that Elizabeth bought me for Christmas. If I don’t mention that I was very confused about how to use this very simple implement the first time I tried, I am sure that one of my dear family readers will make the obvious comment.