pumpkinstrokemarrow

To add to the festivities, given that the oven was being heated anyway and for the very first time, I thought I would have a bash at baked apples. Take three large windfalls from a neighbour's Bramley tree. Maybe three inches in diameter. Remove cores and any livestock that may be present. Score the skin around the waist of the apple. Fill core with raisins and drizzle in as much golden syrup as they will take. The book said bake for an hour which is the same time required by the potato pie so that is what I did. Apples dissolved into a rather pretty pancake of baked apple goo topped with the brown shell of the top half of the skin. The only catch was that I could not get them out of the baking tray without disturbing the pancake. So not too many points for presentation but they went down OK. Luckily, apple goo did not overflow the baking tray so did not have oven cleaning , or the domestic strife which it might have occasioned.

All of which led an interesting dream the following morning. Interesting in that the dream appeared to continue until I was awake enough to think coherently. It seems that I was project manager of a project to produce a large and important powerpoint presentation to be used as a training resource far and wide. Chapter and verse on how to buy drain covers for prisons, including all the latest buzz from the Council of Trent or some such. In order to help with this there was a project team, a rather heterogeneous gang including various people I used to work with or for. Now it had been decided that while I might be knocking out most of the text we needed maybe 100 images to adorn the 400 slides envisaged. So we had a meeting of the project team to work on the images. The project team had to do something and I had no text for it to bite on, so images for hypothetical text it had to be. A meeting which I completely failed to chair properly. My end of the table came up with one solution and the other end of the table had a more or less separate meeting and came up with another. I had to do a rather clumsy job of splicing the two together at the end. There was lots of discussion about who was to chose the pictures and where we were going to get them from. As author of the text I was fairly uneasy about subcontracting the choice of illustrations. Could I give indications of what sort of images I was looking for? On the other hand, it was clear that if there was not going to be any subcontracting, the job was not going to get done. And then, how would we buy the images? Did we need a license for unlimited use, so that the people to whom we gave the powerpoint to (for free) could make whatever use they chose of the images - which could, given that we wanted to distribute the powerpoint in an open form - be readily extracted? Was such a license going to be terribly expensive?

By the time I was reasonably awake I had decided that the answer was to hire a photographer to take the pictures specially. Then we could own them outright and the whole question of copyright and license would evaporate. A decent photographer ought to be able to whack out 10 images a day. So 10 days at £500 a day should see the job done. A snip at an important project of this sort running into hundreds of thousands of pounds. But then one had another worry. Would one land some arty type who wouldn't knock out more than a couple of images a day. And who more or less froze up if you tried to push a bit harder. Who really got the hump if you made constructive and helpful suggestions about his works of art. Maybe a catalogue would be a better option. At which point I decided that it was clearly time to break my fast.