Jobsworth!

With sweet timing the weather gods have chosen to grace my brief sojourn from the rigours of work with blazing sunshine and temperatures soaring into the high 20s C. The Lions expedition to the antipodes reached an explosive climax this very morning with a thoroughly satisfying drubbing of our friends down under – Andy Murray has made it to another Wimbledon final and the first of the back to back Ashes series is about to commence.

Things are looking up!

On Friday I met the Kickass Canada Girl and one of her work colleagues for lunch in Reading. I arrived first at our chosen rendezvous – an outsized retail ‘park’ which occupies much of the centre of the town and the name of which I will refrain from mentioning since I have no desire to furnish them with more advertising than they get already.

The centre of this excressence features a large open space by the canal, and it was here that I whiled away a quarter of an hour in the sunshine looking for interesting images to snap with the Fuji X10.

As I lowered the camera – after being thus engaged for a while – I found myself face to face with a recently pubescent ‘jobsworth’ (closest Canadian equivalent might be a ‘brown-noser’ – apparently) who regarded me humourlessly.

“You’re not allowed to take pictures here”, he informed me drily.

I was so taken aback that I couldn’t think what to say, but I eventually summoned up a stunned “Why not?”

“Company policy”, he rejoindered. “Inside the stores or out”

I was amazed. “That makes no sense at all. What on earth could they object to? It’s not as though I was taking pictures of people.”

Apparently had I been so doing that would have been alright. What I wasn’t allowed to photograph was the ‘architecture’. When I expressed incredulity at this deranged policy the jobsworth muttered something about people posting things on websites, before shrugging his shoulders and shambling off to annoy someone else.

You will be unsurprised to hear that I was not impressed.

Anyway – here are a few images that I am not supposed to post here and you are not supposed to see…