FROM THE ARCHIVES: Jon and Graham in the Mexican Desert

As everyone knows, over the past few weeks Oll has spent every day scanning in our enormous archives so that we can make them available in a digital format. However, before that he spent several months going through the CFZ picture library.

At the last Uncon in November I was talking to Bob Rickard about the picture library that he was in the process of setting up, and the sprrawling CFZ picture archives.

He was amazed to hear that we have over 31,000 images in the CFZ archives. OK, quite a few are duplicates, and some are completely useless, but they do provide a unique and completely unreplaceable collection of images.

Just dipping into the files at random comes up with some amazing things that I had completely forgotten about. Here, for example is a picture of Graham and me in the middle of the Puebla Desert in Mexico. I had lost it for years and so it never made it into the paperback reissue of Only Fools and Goatsuckers where it belongs. It probably never will, so this bloggo is the only time that it will be married up with the requisite text:

"We eventually pulled into a tiny layby next to a small roadside shrine to the Virgin Mary. It was festooned in strings of small plastic flags which fluttered gaily in the wind like the prayer flags on a Tibetan monestary. Indeed, friends of mine who are much better and more devout catholics than I am have told me that for certain people in Central Americas they serve much the same function. Each time, or so they believe, the flag flutters in the wind it send up a tiny prayer to heaven. God and his Angels can see the flags fluttering far below them on earth and they act as a reminder to the Almighty of his subjects on this planet.

My personal brand of Christianity is far less concrete than this but I found it a comfortimng and oddly touching belief, and whatever your school of thought on the matter, and indeed whatever your religious or spiritual beliefs, the sight of these tint, gaily coloured flags fluttering bravely in the middle of the desolation of the Puebla Desert is a sight to warm the hardest of hearts."

This is not a shameless attempt to sell you the book, but every little helps, and you can buy the book on the link below:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Only-Fools-Goatsuckers-Jonathan-Downes/dp/0951287230/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239562375&sr=8-1