Perous Secret Diary - Keep Out: June 15, 2006

maximum.

not that he really needs an introduction: natural born poseur.

uuuurgh...

had to get up at 7am, 5hrs after the night before and drive 66m east to kent.
hungover.
every bump in the road jostled me in the nasty way.

met a water engineer at our home-to-be who is the third (and final) generation of a family of well builders.
what we thought was a well in the garden, is actually a collection drain.
however, there IS a well but it's under the house and dried up.
i really want to renovate the original well under the house rather than put in a new one in the garden but it might be impossible as the kitchen (once the laundry room) was built over it about 100 yrs ago.

if we do have a well, we won't have a drought order and the swimming pool can get topped up and the gardens and vegtables can get watered (by hose) and we can have our own, naturally cold, pure(ish) water.

everytime i've been to the home-to-be, i haven't wanted to leave again.
despite everything going well and in the right direction, it seems to take an age to sort out buying a house.
when we bought the factory is was a bit different.
the factory was only advertised by a handwritten note in a dusty window.
we bought it off the vendor without an agent.

anyway, had to pull myself away to drive back to london, collect the hungover ms.hood and drive on to the fat duck in bray, to photograph Heston Blumenthal and Pravin Sharma.
we first walked into the restaurant looking for heston and had the very poshe equivilent of the scene from american werewolf where everybody just stopped what they were doing and stared at us: me and the frances were dressed a little 'casual', hence the horrified clientele and the maitre d's swift ushering of us out of the building.

heston is a mad scientist for sure.
photographed him and his protege not in his 'kitchen' but in his laboratory.
bonkers future food science: very interesting.

was disturbed that the shoot time was exactly the same as the england fooball kick off.
but it did mean we boosted back to london and home through minimal traffic.
weird driving through empty streets past packed pubs and bars with occasional bursts of cheering and chanting.

i'm fried.