York and Scarborough

Last weekend I went to York, and met up with Alix and Marcus.

Alix, looking totally unflappable

Alix undertook an epic drive from Nottingham to York, and then didn't even bat an eyelid when I insisted that we took a road trip. So we went over to Scarborough, to look at the chavs.

It was a gloriously sunny day, so the promenade was heaving with hairy bikers and their equally hairy husbands, day trippers from the council estates of Yorkshire and beyond, and one or two bewildered foreign tourists wearing baffled expressions and trying to find Scarborough Fair.

A daisy, Scarborough.

To escape the throng, we climbed up to the castle, where Alix proceeded to demonstrate the ancient art of daisy-chaining. She is a total pro at this kind of thing, so while I smashed up a mound of flowers, Alix calmly linked up a bunch of them in record time.

I had to clone out a couple of damn tourists in the background here, because they spoiled the flow of my photograph.

About five seconds in, and Alix has already made a fantastic chain. By this point I had realised my own incompetence, and wasn't even going to try and compete.

Shortly after the above photo, a giant dog bounded over, slavering and drooling, it's great eyes flashing with menace. Apart from clearly being rabid, it was the size of a horse. For all I know it was a rabid horse. Quick as a flash, I grabbed Alix's daisy chain and made ready to lasso the beast and subdue it, hence saving the day. Fortunately though, the hound noticed a toddler and chased after it, howling like a pack of Siberian wolves. Sadly I didn't get any shots of it, because I was busy trying to hide the wet patch in my jeans.

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Marcus and I had a good time too, though to everyone's relief it didn't involve daisy chains. Since York was experiencing winds rating between 8 and 9 on the Beaufort Scale, we got his Patang fighting kite out.

OK, I don't know if it is actually a Patang fighting kite, but whatever it is, Marcus did some deft flying and managed to cut a squirrel in two with the munja lines.

Flushed with success, I convinced him to pose for some woodland based portraits, which follow:

The chilled shot

The corporate headshot

Rocking some rimlight action

The 'Betty Page'

The 'Van Halen'

The 'Che Guevara', sans cigar

The 'Samuel L Jackson'

So there we go. A great time was had by all, and both Alix and Marcus proved to be brilliant subjects... when these shots are published in Time magazine I'll split the proceeds 50/50 with you guys.