FebulousFebruary 2026: The Old Photograph

LOCKDOWN.

The gearbox shouldn’t have been visible through where the radiator grill was supposed to be.

In fact, even with the grill removed, it should at the very least been the radiator to rest my eyes upon.

But this venerable workhorse of adventure and toil; a lady probably of the desert or the savana, both radiators and engine had been ripped from her, leaving an unpowered, driveless gearbox with four forward gears, one reverse, and a choice of two or four wheel drive, impotent, stationary; a piece of carrion at the mercy of vultures and scavengers.

Dishevelled as she was, the venerable carcass was still beautiful, almost as exquisite at ‘The Iimes,’ a 1930’s double fronted Art Deco house and home, hiding behind a two meter high wall, only a hundred meters up the road.

Lockdown precipitated these discoveries with its hour of exercise. An hour’s exercise is a walk of three miles, five miles if you jog, maybe ten if you cycle.

My shoes pound the pavement; burning off calories, seeking to satiate that longed for hope of human interaction; ‘Hello, lovely day isn’t it,’ ‘What a lovely dog.’ Barely a philosophical discourse, but contact with another human being.

On foot, I almost stumble on a small bunch of snowdrops; springs coming.

On foot, a stream embolden to riverhood alerts me to its presence by a watery roar. It’s not a place to swim, it’s foaming breast fed by incessant rains is angry. Yet even here, a mother with four ducklings, webbed feet paddling for their lives, instantly think a source of bread crusts has arrived to feed them.

What surprises me the most? Ducklings so early in the season? Or that in thirty years of traversing this road, I’d never realised a water course of such volume awaited discovery.

On foot you see so much more. 

Without lockdown, I’d probably never have taken this walk.

Peter c-Hill, (60’ish) Whitstable