Endangered species

Yesterday's Guardian included a picture of a butcher's shop in snowy Braemar, a picture which caught my eye as we don't have that many butchers left in the south of our island. So I thought to post it here.

The photographer was Jane Barlow of PA, so my first attempt was to ask the Guardian website for her. No luck.

I then asked Bing which had heard of her, but which was not much help. Google did rather better turning up PA (of references 1 and 2), Getty Images, Alamy and then various social media and various newspapers. But not the image in question. I got the impression that most of what was readily available was a bit old. Maybe either because a new image takes a while to work its way through the system, or because a new image is protected as long as it is new and has some value.

Barlow was clearly a serious person, with lots of her work out there, but who did not appear to bother with having her own website. Content to ride along with others.

I then thought to ask Google for the butcher, who very quickly turned out to be Neil Menzies of 6 Invercauld Road, Braemar, Ballater. And Street View could provide an image, if not the one used by the Guardian.

I wonder if he would still know how to do back rib and top rib of beef, two cuts which we used to be fond of and which were both easy enough to get hold of in the London of the 1980's. Special order at Ginger Pig (of reference 3) these days - which I have yet to get around to.

PS 1: reverse engineering does not work. When I ask Google Images to search for the Street View image it thinks the point of interest is roof shingles, which are absent, rather than a butcher, which is present. Upon which I wonder if image search bothers to read any words which are present in the image, or whether it just sticks with the pixels?

PS 2: a little later: while it gives up altogether on my rather poor quality photograph of the photograph in the newspaper. Doesn't get further than talking about sketching urban scenes.

References 

Reference 1: https://pa.media/.

Reference 2: https://www.paimages.co.uk/collections/6815.

Reference 3: https://thegingerpig.co.uk/.