Troughs and Peaks

Hello.  It was the photo session in Derbyshire today for the Waitrose Food Illustrated Magazine (September issue).  Coo, have I got some stuff to tell you about it.

You know that feeling you get when you leap over a stone water trough wearing fashionable clothes? Well I've had that feeling today.

Basically they had assembled seven young Waitrose suppliers for a special feature.  I was one of the older people in the group.  It's pretty charitable of anyone to call me a young man - professional sportsmen are considered past it at my age - but such is the nature of agriculture. 

We were all dressed in trendy John Lewis clothes and then photographed doing wacky stuff in a scrappy farmyard.  We were interviewed for the feature over lunch.

As I watched the others performing their individual stunts for the photographer, my heart became pretty heavy.  Two people were required to push one another up and down in a wheelbarrow.  One bloke had to lift a bale of hay above his head.  I had a trendy tie on for goodness sake.

As you know, I am painfully self-concious.  I thought that I might die of embarassment at one point and I could hear my Grandad turning in his grave but in the end it was pretty good fun.  There was talk of me laying on the ground with some chickens at one point so perhaps hurdling a drinking trough was a lucky escape.

The photographer was seriously good.  Let's face it, if he can coerce me into jumping about in the nettles in a bunch of fashionable clothes, he could probably be better employed negotiating to get hostages released or talking suicide victims down from the roof.

He was very passionate and, although I feel a bit of a knob saying this, he made me feel pretty good about myself for five minutes.  I offered to do my legendary squatting pose but he declined.  He also taught me that the quick hack photo that I am most comfortable with is known in the trade as a "sh!t shot". 

I will put the photos up here when I get them.  Unless they are as bad in which case I will be getting the necessary papers together to leave the country.