Early morning photo shoot for Western Gazette

Chris Sweet, Crewkerne based writer for the Western Gazette Newspaper, is doing an article about me next week. It is all about the launch in September of the new improved re-enactment company entitled Past Presence Ltd. He was hoping to arrange a photographer from the Wester Gazette to be around last night at the St Bartholomew's School Fete, but most of them had scarpered to the Glastonbury Festival apparently. Anyway, he phoned again yesterday and said he had found someone who could do the photo shoot today (Saturday), but that the photographer would be with me at 9am.

The picture you see with this entry is how I looked at about 8.45am when the front door bell went and the photographer I had completely forgotten about turned up. At the very moment he pressed my front door bell I was about to step into the shower - that's how unready I was. I spoke rather grumpily to the chap on the front step (apologies for that!) and told him to wait in the back garden and I would be with him ASAP. I somehow managed to get showered, shaved and something else beginning with "S" (scrubbed?) in about 10 seconds flat. I then hurriedly threw on the Henry gear and was almost ready for the shoot. Of course the one thing Chris Sweet and I had planned for the shoot was for me to be posing, in Henry gear with two books - one about the Second World War and the other about Ancient Egypt (the two new eras we will be covering when Past Presence Ltd goes "live"). Could I find two books at a seconds notice for this shoot? Luckily I had Roy Jenkins' biography of Churchill to hand, that would do for the Second World War, but Egypt? I tore round the house and the only thing to hand was a Terry Deary book. Now as you know, I love Mr Deary about as much as your average Hassidic Jew likes a nice pork chop, but it was the only book to hand. So next week you will see me gurning in my back garden clutching a book by Terry Deary. Don't hold your breaths if you expect to see it happen again.

Coming up this week - a return visit to Finton House School in Wandsworth and a new visit to Hillmead Primary in Bishops Stortford.