See previous Shepton Mallet Pt. 1

You can tell a lot from the local notice board  Ctrl and + repeatedly for enlargement

more grinning people at a dentist surgery (uugh)

she is not showing off her teeth by any chance?

Nothing if not original

I can’t wait

If you know where to go, there is a flourishing community within this Aldi/Tesco town. There are two particular gems that I would like to draw your attention to.

My coffee shop  BA45AS

A lovely shop/community centre/cafe

We entered after some hesitation. It might as well have been part of the Viennese Cafe scene of the 19th century. We were greeted by the  enthusiastic Karen Mercer. Everyone was chatting. There is no better place to start your getting to know people if you have just moved in to the area. The products for sale are ‘fairly traded, eco-friendly and ethical’ but the coffee ain’t half good too. TripAdvisor reviews.

a living room setting is comfortable for all.

Tesco retro displays. Very early supermarket shelf. All products tested by the owner.

children’s wall?

We then went over the road to ‘The Hive’, a combination of a haberdashery, fabric centre and cafe. BA4 5AQ . TripAdvisor reviews.

Unusual but welcome workshop themes

threads

ribbons

wool

Seasonal window display

Again this is a welcoming place not for food gourmets but for mums, friends to meet and chat over a coffee and cake. Light eats are available.Come along if you don’t know anybody and you can strike up a conversation with anyone who is there including the staff who are lovely people.

*****

This evening, off to the Clutton Horticultural Society to hear a talk on organic gardens by a lady called Di Redfern.  This was a wide ranging and informative talk with many hints and tips – leave small holes for swallows to get in after their long trip from Africa – consider leaving dead and dying plants over the winter as eggs may have been laid on them and the seeds are valuable to birds. You do not feed the plants themselves, you feed the soil. the nutrition in the soil then feeds the plants. Comfrey leaves are rich in minerals because the roots go down deep and capture minerals that other plants cannot reach. Cut the leaves of the plants (they give about three ‘crops’ per year and put them in water. After a month the resulting bad smelling liquid makes a very good liquid fertilizer. Don’t underestimate beetles and insects and worms as they are part of the food chain. Make habitats for them for the winter. She described strimmers as ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and that if you are going to strimm hedgerows and verges make sure that all animals are out of the way. All life is interconnected.

Our worthy chair welcoming the speaker. There were 19 of us in the audience.

Although the talk was interesting, the same cannot be said of the speaker’s professionalism with regard to the photographs of plants. The projector was a manual one without a remote control and she had to coral a member of the audience to change the slides. Looking at the spec. on the Internet it does have a wired remote control but she did not seem to know how to use it.

Years since I have seen one of these

The quality of the images were very poor – they were old fashioned slides – and some of them seem to have been taken at dusk or at night. I figured that the macro lens of the camera if there was one was not switched on to auto-focus. The screen at the front of a fairly large hall was a 6′ x 6′ so we could hardly see the detail.  That did impair the visual enjoyment somewhat.
I am a detail person (polite term) but most of the others were blissfully unaware of these shortcomings.  She has been giving talks for the past x years so why not 1. get a decent camera 2. go to digital if you can 3. don’t rely on 5 year old slides.
I love coming out of a meeting into the cold night air knowing that I will step into a car and in a few minutes be at home in front of a warm fire. I tried photographing the moon but with a camera of a mobile phone, the auto focus does not know what to do so you get a blurred mess. Photography has its limits.