It is so crystal clear today that we can see Sarn Badrig (St. Patrick’s Causeway) running all the way to Ireland.

Lackwits and dullards would have you believe that it is merely a shingle reef made of glacial deposits left by receding ice sheets at the end of the last ice age, but we Welsh know that nature abhors a straight line and that in fact it is an ancient causeway built to allow the famous Welshman St Patrick to walk over to Ireland and convert the heathen rabble there to Christianity.

Sarn Badrig is about 5 km south of Murmur-y-Don, beyond Shell Island, and in this photograph taken from the house with my cheap but excellent little Samsung point-and-shoot it can barely be seen.

I’ve blown up the image and marked the path of the causeway with arrows.

It’s a rare sight. I’ve only seen it once or twice before.

Sir Clement Freud, wit, raconteur, chef, gourmet, writer, MP, and the bedrock of Radio 4’s Just A Minute, has died. Grandson of Sigmund, brother of Lucian, father of Emma and Matthew. The Freud family has certainly made its mark. Clement will be missed. I loved his humour. He defined lugubrious.

But now he’s dead, I can tell a story I’ve been sitting on for years.

In 1972 I was publicity director of Ward Lock and I had a very beautiful secretary named Yvonne (not the Yvonne I married a year ago today). We published some fairly crappy books, and one was a cookery book titled Cooking Into Europe.

Previously, when I was at Collins, we’d published a instantly forgettable children’s book by Clement Freud called Grimble. So I had his telephone number, and it struck me that an intro by Clement Freud — he was then a celebrity chef, before such creatures existed — might help lift Cooking Into Europe out of the rut into which it would inevitably slide. I contacted him, and he agreed. He came to our offices in Baker Street and we sorted things out.

He phoned a few days later, and asked if Yvonne could pop round to his house, which was nearby, to collect the manuscript. Off she went, and came back in hysterics. “What’s so funny?” I asked.

“You’ll never believe what happened!” she screamed. “I was in his study and I had my back to him, and he said ‘Take a look at this’, and I turned round and he’d got IT out and was showing IT to me! And you know what? It was ENORMOUS, truly gigantic, I never knew men could grow them that big!”

I was horrified. “What did you do?”

“Do? I roared with laughter and ran back here. What else could I do? My god, it was HUGE. I’ve never seen anything like it. And I’m Jamaican and I know what I’m talking about.”

Yvonne was sensible, level-headed and practical. She knew how sad men were. She wasn’t remotely troubled by the incident, and thought it all a huge joke. She certainly told anyone who would listen to her about it — cackles and screams of laughter from next door always indicated the story was in its umpeenth retelling.

So there you have it. Sir Clement had a mighty todger. I hope it served him well.

I’ve blogged this same post on the fotoLibra Pro blog as well.

Networking and staying in touch is important, and blogs and group sites like Facebook and LinkedIn provide a chance for the shyest and most retiring among us to stand up and have our say.

I’m not the only person to walk into a roomful of strangers and be struck dumb with terror. I know it makes no sense, but it’s hard wired into me. So I force myself to blog, and Twitter, and post.

Sometimes I enjoy it, sometimes I feel I’m talking to a roomful of strangers. Hostile ones, at that. Or even worse, an empty room.

You can’t go everywhere, unless others circulate what you say (please!) So these are the rooms I’m often going into, and where you can always find me.

THE FOTOLIBRA BLOG: http://blog.fotoLibra.com
This is where I and other fotoLibra folk can chew the fat about picture libraries, images rights, sales, new formats for rights sales such as e-books, Picture Calls, cameras, markets, trends, publishing, photographs — anything to do with the business of visual content provision, which incidentally is the long name of fotoLibra’s holding company, VisConPro.

THE FOTOLIBRARIAN BLOG: http://fotolibrarian.fotolibra.com
More domestic and personal. Dogs, cats, tortoises, rugby, cricket, F1, food, follies, fonts, guitars, walks, cars, cigars, scotches, watches, beer, wine, women, song — the little things that keep me interested and alive. In case anyone didn’t know that ATB before my signature in my emails stood for All The Best, I’m thinking of changing it to IDH — In Deteriorating Health.

LINKEDIN: http://www.linkedin.com/in/gwynheadley
Professional business networking site. If you know me through work or want to do business with fotoLibra, this is my site of choice. I haven’t used it that often, but recently I’ve been attracted by the Ebooks, Digital Books and Digital Content Publishing Network group. When I have time to explore it, I’ll find or found a Picture Library group.

FACEBOOK: http://www.facebook.com
Yeah, I know. Young women and girls. But they’re my nieces, he protested! This is how I keep in touch with a surprising number of my family and old friends. Grand-nieces are included too, as well as nephews. Not generally a place where I post stuff of interest to fotoLibra. My Facebook name is, surprisingly, Gwyn Headley.

TWITTER: http://twitter.com/home
It gets worse. Yes, I twitter. There, I’ve said it. In 140 characters or less. It’s a way of pointing people to blogs. I hope. I’d love to know how it raised $35 million without a business plan. I twitter on pro and personal subjects, often directing fellow twitterers to a particularly apposite blog. My Twitter name is fotoLibrarian.

Five of these networking tools may be plenty for most, but there is room for a sixth, and it’s going to be on fotoLibra. You can read about it here. It’s a while away yet, but it’s going to be a great tool for photographers and picture researchers alike.

Finally, before we had all this internetworking wizardry, people simply met each other in crowded smokey rooms. And Publisher’s Lunch quoted me as saying “Networking is the opportunity to be ignored by people who’ve known each other all their lives.”