In which I barter photos for a special bottle of vin ordinaire

I was shooting balconies in Shad Thames yesterday morning, squatting low down among the fag ends, when a voice said  "Do you want to take our photo?"  It was 3 young french guys who work at Pont de la Tour Restaurant. So I took this shot:

Then I realised they were all hiding their cigarettes, which was why they'd been loitering outside, so I told them to show the cigarettes, which made them look frenchier esp the middle one:

The name of the one on the left is Nicolas Clerc and I took him a few prints today - he was happy.

The punchline is that Nicolas was 'Sommelier of the Year 2007'. See this story. In return he gave me a bottle of red which I'm enjoying now. It's not often one gets given a bottle of wine by the Sommelier of the Year and it's not really vin ordinaire !

And here's a cormorant shot from the same morning for good luck, Tower Bridge and St Paul's nicely bokehed behind:

The horror, the horror, the horror

2 years ago I wrote a post about the official logo for the 2012 London Olympics - "the horror, the horror". Now the official Olympic mascots have been unveiled and I can't improve on Stephen Bayley's verdict:

What is it about these Games which seems to drive the organisers into the embrace of this kind of patronising, cretinous infantilism? Why can’t we have something that makes us sing with pride, instead of these appalling computerised Smurfs for the iPhone generation?