My local acupuncturist reckons he can cure baldness with some needles.

I am sure they got the promotional picture from a wigmaker’s catalogue.

I tried acupuncture once for a bad back. Needles felt funny. The electricity they put through them felt funnier. The cupping (suckering cups on to your back using the vacuum from a match) felt a bit silly. Back felt just the same.

The kicker to acupuncture is the medicine. They give you a brown paper bag filled with assorted herbs and bits and bobs which you are meant to boil and steep and then drink. To anyone who has not had the pleasure, you can make your own brew by visiting your local park, grabbing a couple of handfuls leaves and crap from under a bush and boiling it in water. The flavour is fantastically nasty.

Mm, not quite what my back was in need of. I’ll take a good old-fashioned punch in the kidneys every time.

Here is something not for the children, despite its ‘yoot-kolcha’ graphic [click on the image to read the notice if it is too small]:

Clearly Hounslow council don’t want to get sued for letting kids get damaged by falling coke bottles. Or perhaps they are worried about a caffeine-fuelled teenager running amok in town hall, destroying civic amenities like a Hindu god on crack.

The Israeli authorities are much more child friendly. If anyone knows about respecting kids, it is them.

This must be worthy of some caption competition or other.

I have been in Israel for nearly a week now and when I get back I am going to blog about the situation here from a non-Arab non-Jewish perspective. Although it does seem nearly impossible to say anything for either side which does not end up being unfair in some way. Anyway, my solution to the middle-east crisis will have to wait because my outrageously good cheesecake has arrived.

In the meantime, look at these crazy snaps:

In the usual fire drill-gone-wrong of the days leading up to a holiday, space and time seemed to get on top of me, though less than usual if truth be told. I had loads of things to blog about but whenever I got time to write, my bloody mysql server seemed to be down.

But thanks to the new wordpress iPhone app I can sit with my feet in the sand in a beachfront cafe and leisurely tap out a blog. Despite the iPhone’s merits, I can only post photos at the end. But, nevermind, I have only two for you.

Firstly is the bizarre sineage at Heathrow terminal 4: all the prayer room signs have been put in back to front. In my extremely exhausted state, I genuinely questioned my sanity. What is the reason for this tomfoolery? Perhaps the person who put them in cannot speak English or doesn’t like religion.

Secondly, is a photo of the sunset on this beach. I love holidays.

I picked up the common yet furtive obsession with charity shops when I was at university, largely due to my hunger for vinyl. In Bristol they are particularly over-fished and it is hard to find good stuff. Nevertheless I became addicted to the heady scents of dry-cleaning and opportunity, and like to duck into the odd Oxfam for a sniff and browse at the most uncommercial shops on the high street.

Now I have found some gems in charity shops. Various records, books, or pictures or the like. Fancy dress costumes? These outlets are a boon. I once found two suits which I [read my friend Lucy] cut up, died and stitched together all for under a tenner. And you can always find new things thanks to the randomness of the wares.

Of course, the majority of the stuff is a load of shit.

Racks of crap early 90′s clothes, unlistenable records, depressingly tired books, and of course the inestimably unvaluable trinkets and crocks. But these are real.

But occasionally, just occasionally, you stumble across an item of utter genius. 

WITNESS:

[Please, you owe it to yourself to zoom in for a closer look. Just click on the image]

“What the fuck is that?” I heard a co-browser mutter to his baby son.

Well I shall tell you what it is. It is a tribute, nay, a holy relic from the shrine of Aerosmith. Only Steve Tyler’s leathery, preserved foreskin could top this in magnificence and splendour. It must have been difficult to keep the writing so neat, especially under the influence of all those anti-psychotics.

Charity shops really do provide an invaluable insight into the reality of British life. We don’t float in glacial rooms, we don’t drink pints of cider in comedy set-pieces the way adverts suggest, we don’t have polished zinc surfaces and universally enjoy life. We clutter up our lives and homes with junk from in charity shops, and at least one of us produces bonkers tribute art to comedy rock bands.

And what a piece of finery! The image of Tyler chugging on a fat cigar at the end of a rainbow is one I shall take with me to the end of my days. Just in case you are wondering, there is no decimal point on the price tag. I checked.

Aerosmith? Amazing!

I don’t know if you have ever noticed of the monkey-business bin men get up to. They work in the twilight hours when there ain’t many folks around. Rooting around in bags of used nappies, then scampering back to base before sunrise. I happen to know that bin men regard themselves as being a breed somewhere between vampires and a tramps.*

It must be an intensely antisocial yet highly social job. Imagine how popular you would be if you turned up in a caff / in bed/ at the opera after work at 8 in the morning smelling of fish poo and radishes? However, the teams of refuse-collectors always seem to be fairly tightly knit (I once saw one jokingly hold a razor blade he had just found to his mate’s eye then cut off some of his hair with it- ahh, the japes!).

Why do they do it?

The begged question.

There are the extras I suppose. They turn quite a bit of a side business by doing trade collections from scurrilous builders. You know how they will never take away that old fridge / tv / coffin that has been lying in your front garden for months? Next time they come round, pull on your pants (and bra) and run outside into the brisk morning air, and bribe them with a fiver. They will happily provide you with a bespoke waste solution. They probably make more by leasing the council’s civic facilities than by their regular pay. It all sort of balances out when you think about it.

Then there is the foraging. They love spending hours sifting through your rubbish like it is an episode of Bargain Hunt, looking for a nice figurine / desk set / wedding present. Check out these furtive snaps I took of the binmen, who jackpotted on our neighbours’ pile of about a dozen bin-bags.

They really relished it. First the clear the rubbish from the tray of the lorry, then they tear open the bags. They proceed to rifle through the stinking booty, with priority pickings ordained via a pecking order. This chap made a nice little pile of gayly coloured boxes, which he then stuffed into a recycling bag (fittingly). He then somewhat coarsely advise his colleagues that they were not to copulate with his stuff on pain of death

They spent a good fifteen minutes outside this one house. It was like they had found a fresh roll of lottery scratch cards in there. Now I could make out some of the tat they were rescuing from landfill. I cannot believe that anyone could find any financial value in any of it. But I reckon it is not about money. It is about the fun of hunter-gathering. Just like young boys hunting for conkers. Or the incontinent rush for bargains at a car boot sale.

It is funny how the hunter-gatherer habit comes back so naturally to us. Our ancestors, when gathering probably used every drop of daylight walking along, staring at the ground, discerning grass from edible leaves, poisonous berries from fruit. Every time they found something good to eat, they would have felt that that little pang of accomplishment, just like when a schoolboy finds a big shiny conker in the grass. 

I think this is also the feeling a photographer gets when he is out doing is thing. Whenever you know you have found a good composition, an interesting subject or the like, you get that tiny dose of endorphins. You carry on walking and hunt for more. It is totally engrossing. Your eyes start becoming sensitive to composition and colour, just like when you are searching for blackberries or mushrooms, your eyes become tuned to the shape and colour of those fruits. You get your eye in.

I first became aware of this parallel in Burnham Beeches, a forest west of London. I like to go there hunting for porcini mushrooms. But this time I had my camera, and I became addicted to taking photographs of the shapes and compositions thrown up by the black trees against the autumn sky (not the most interesting pics, I know, but I weirdly find them fascinating). 

Now this is not the first time I have taken photographs obsessively. I do that more often than sitting on things. But it was because of the association with mushroom picking that I noticed feeling a similar sense of gathering-pleasure. As though I was looking for bereft cutlery / door furniture / children’s toys in a pile of rubbish.

*this is clearly a lie