Crisp

Found this image the other day and was struck by the crispness of it. It's the sort of crispness that can be found in a really fresh bag of crisps which some of our friends call chips, which, confusingly, are also made of potato and sometimes called fries. All clear? And anyway crisps can be made of almost anything these days - parsnips, swede, beetroot. Why anyone would want to experiment with the perfect snack is beyond me but they do. Why else would we be offered margarine or skimmed milk or any of the other abominations that the food industry thinks up? It's like being invited to imbibe Belgian Chocolate flavoured drinks. Have they got Belgian Chocolate in them? I think not.

Anyway I digress (and that is so, so easy). Summer has arrived in the UK at last and I've switched my desk fan on for the first time this year. It rattles but not in a totally unpleasant way. It's more of a swaggering sound, a 'look what I can do if I want to' sort of noise. It doesn't push it. It knows I could switch it off if I wanted to and then where would its rattle be.

So we're talking about crisp images, not crisp foods, although a nice crisp lettuce takes some beating. The contrail arrows across the picture in a pleasingly diagonal fashion; not perfectly so but striving in that direction. The little pennant on the top of the tower has some miniature diagonals in the letters 'MV', an abbreviation for something that probably has Monmouth in it as that's where I was. It's also very crisp and why is that? It's the lighting - clean, low, sharp, winter sunshine. I doubt it would be the same today; summer light in southern England is not as envigorating, or so it seems to me. It's short on rawness, short on effort; the sun has to try so much harder in January.