What Does A Baymaker Make?

 Mike and Su won't be coming this weekend because Sej has been invited to a birthday party. Ailz tells them that this is how things will be from now on: they'll be fitting their own lives round their son's social calendar.

It was another stormy night. No rain, but there were times when the wind was going "Hoooo" instead of "Wheee" and it only does that when it's being really forceful.

My sister's researches into our paternal ancestry continue. It seems that our great-great-grandfather is Colchester William not Romney Marsh William. This comes as a surprise. Colchester William was a builder's labourer and may have done some soldiering as a young man. He lived most of his adult life on a street that had been built by an 18th century  "baymaker" for his workers. This is going off at a tangent but I was curious to know what a baymaker did- so I looked it up- and it turns out he made baize- the sort of felt you put on billiard tables. Baymaking was a Colchester speciality.

William Grist

 I asked my new pal hotpot.ai for a portrait of William Grist the Victorian brickie and, after one or two tries which I rejected for various reasons (he had six fingers, he looked too posh, he was being lit by an electric light bulb) it came up with this, which I like. Here is a great-great-grandfather whom I can look up to- and with whom I wouldn't mind having a drink down the local....

Collaborative

 

I think of these two images as collaborative. I say, "How about this?" Hotpot says "This would be better"  And we carry on going back and forth until we arrive at a picture we both like. In neither case is the final image much like the one I had n my head when the process started. This one I call The Soldier's Dream And this one is The Last Lamp Post