Rust Never Sleeps

Now. Between you, me and the lichen-covered gatepost, I have been busily putting together a portfolio of pictures that demonstrate John Piper's maxim 'Pleasing Decay'. I keep showing them to my publisher who just stares at me and then out of the window. He won't read this (he thinks blog is the name of a spaniel) so if any other bookmakers fancy a punt I'll slip an example under the door in a plain brown envelope under the pseudonym Maurice Mildew. The idea is to record things (derelict corrugated iron barns, rusty signs, discarded farm machinery) that are simply disappearing, not through any overtly planned destruction, but rather by a gentle and innocent neglect that gives them an uncertain beauty. So no to burnt-out hatchbacks, yes to abandoned horse boxes with trees growing out the roofs. Which brings me to Church Lane. Leicester cares for its cast-iron street signs (I've seen blokes up ladders painting them) and it won't be long before this example gets the once-over. It's on a wall in Knighton next to the eyecatching Queen Anne-style gate lodge to the hall. But on closer inspection I noticed that the rust on the sign is an exact match for the colour of the brickwork. How does this happen? Is it that I saw it at the precise moment in time that the deepening rust matched, and next month it won't? There's got to be an obvious answer that I can't see. And it isn't that the wall and sign have all been painted from the same tin. The brick is brick. Oh, pass me a beaker of WD40.

Hot Oil & Blue Exhaust

I include this old boy because there are frequent visitors to this blog (you know who you are) who will get very, very, excited by it. Not for them the pristine over-restored specimens paraded in front of admiring crowds at agricultural shows- 'And here's Dick Blogwort on his 1953 Mudslinger, good to see you here again Dick'- but far rather something half-disintegrating into a hedge.This will be pulled out by an equally disintegrating Landrover in order to spend another five years distintegrating further in the corner of a dusty barn with sparrows twittering up in the roof, half-covered in a grimy tarpaulin. I just love it, it's that Pleasing Decay thing that John Piper introduced us to, the fact that some things are very satisfying if just left alone to disappear of their own accord. Not that this tractor wouldn't be fun to drive again- at least two of my commentators would have it going in seconds however long it had been resting-up on this patch of Rutland. A tuneless fanfare through a rolled-up copy of the Farmers Weekly for the first to identify it.