feet 2, gout, crocodile,

These feet, part of   the new series, are outside a pub in Tunbridge Wells.

The compulsive walker, whose determined posture and swinging arms I described a few days ago, as she marched up and down the beach, today (from my notebook earlier this week), breaks off when she sees that a traffic cone has been left beside some wheely bins at the foot of the  sea wall. Scarcely changing her stride, she walks over,  picks it up,  and takes it to a man (probably her husband) who is seated on a beach chair.
Having placed it in front of him, she folds a towel, places it on top of the cone,  and helps him position his leg (swollen with gout?) on top of the towel he makes the arrangement with what appears to be a single fluid  movement, before returning to  her energetic striding.

|Alberto Bigaire is still at the corner table outside his restaurant Costa d'Oro. The restaurant has been in existence and in his care for at last 50 years . He demonstrates with pride some mauve carnations among the flowers from his garden arranged in vases on the restaurant tables. He reminds me that it was these flowers that I helped him order last year by telephone from a specialist  nursery in England. "They won top prize in Barcelona this summer", he says. Horticulture is not his only pass time.  In one of the rooms inside the restaurant there is a photograph of Alberto standing beside the suspended corpse of an enormous crocodile, twice his height. "I shot it, " he says, "... and lions and tigers... a  long time ago." They say that he is trying to find a museum to whom he can donate the stuffed trophies of his big game hunting days," but none,  it seems, in these less bloodthirsty times, is interested.