Chiquita

For my birthday Jayne treated me to a new lens for my camera: the Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II lens, which is often referred to as the ‘nifty fifty’.

What with one thing and another, I didn’t get round to really trying it out over the weekend, except for a really quick snap of the cat. I had intended to do some baby photos but couldn’t be bothered. I was also going to go out and try some bracketed shots so I can try out the HDR feature in the new Corel PaintShop Pro that I acquired last week, but couldn’t decide where to go.

I am a long way from being an expert on cameras and photography, but I think this lens could be useful for next week’s CCAR party.

Ruins of windmills on the hills above the Lasithi Plain.

As teachers used to say “this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you”. I’m sure nobody wants to read all about my holidays, and I’m not sure I want to write about them but it needs to be done so I can move on, so here are a few thoughts about Crete, EasyJet and other things.

The whole idea of the holiday was to just turn off and relax: no newspapers, TV, internet, work or worry. I left my mobile at home and even the big camera, travelling light with only the bare minimum of technology (compact camera, mp3 player, Flip video camera, e-book reader). It sort of worked, but I now regret not taking the EOS with me.

Everything started well when we found that our flight was from gate 103 which meant, as any aviation anorak will know, that we had to go over the bridge. I enjoyed that. I walked instead of using the moving pavement so I could linger long enough for a plane to go under it. It was just a shame that the plane at gate 103 was an EasyJet one. I can honestly say that I have never sat in a less comfortable airplane seat. I like to sleep through flights but it was impossible on this one.

Everything went quite smoothly though and we ended up at the hotel at about 11pm local time, dropped the bags in our room and looked for the bar where I had a pint followed by a pina colada. If nothing else, this holiday was going to do wonders for my resolution to drink more. By the end of the second day I must have drunk more than in the whole rest of the year so far, although admittedly that was not difficult to do.

About the hotel.

I thought it was fine. A lot of people were complaining about it and, in truth, it was easy to find things to complain about if you wanted to, but I thought it was fine. I think a lot of people were unhappy because they lost sight of two things:

• “All inclusive” does not necessarily mean the same as “all you can eat or drink”
• If the hotel is only costing you about £15 each per day you are not going to get 3 cordon bleu meals every day with loads of snacks and premium-brand drinks inbetween

Having seen a trailer for the Inbetweeners film after booking the holiday I had got a bit worried about staying in Malia and was half-expecting it to be like trying to holiday in the middle of a collision between a massive hen party and a massive stag party, but it was not like that. I’m sure Malia deserves its reputation as a maelstrom of debauchery during July/August but it had calmed down a bit in September, plus the hotel was not actually in Malia but nearly 2km outside the town, which was great for us.

For the first week we sat around drinking, reading, sunbathing, eating and taking a few walks along the beach up to the Minoan palace and into town. The first walk into town was during the day, which was really hot but the next day we took a stroll at night along a different road and ended up in the nightclub part of town at about 11pm where people were starting to get ready for a night out.

Techno-disaster!

After about a week I noticed that the battery level on my e-book reader was down to two bars. By this time I had read Oliver Twist, PG Wodehouse’s first Psmith book, a Hary Harrison short story and halfway through an EE ‘Doc’ Smith book. I wasn’t entirely confident that it would last until the flight home so I put it on the charger I use for my mp3 player. It turns out that the Sony Reader doesn’t like them. Charging from a computer is OK but the charger just sucks the life out of the battery. The book was totally dead and my massive collection of USB cables was 1700 miles away.

Jayne astride the mighty Kymco 50cc quad

This was not as bad as it could have been because I wasn’t going to be stretched out by the pool reading for a day or two – we had rented a quad bike for a few days!

I know. Renting scooters and quads in Greece is the sort of thing I would be warning our kids against but I was about due a mid-life crisis. In mitigation, I did wear the helmet some of the time although that was more to protect my bald head from sunburn than anything else.

For our first little trip we headed for the Milatos caves as they were only about 5 miles away as the crow flies. Of course we were not flying and by road it must be more like 20 miles the way the roads bend round the mountains, and it was a lot more hilly than I expected, but well worth the trip.

During the Turkish invasion nearly 3000 people hid in the caves until the Turks finally forced them out, killing many and enslaving the rest, so I was expecting big caves. What I wasn’t expecting was that there are no lights, no paths, no handrails, no guides, in fact nothing but dark holes in the rock with bats flying around. Being without torches we couldn’t penetrate very far safely, but what little we saw was impressive and it rewarded the tortuous trek up there.

I wouldn’t mind going back with some torches and long trousers one day. The real shame is that we never visited these places when we first visited Crete with the kids. They would have loved it there, although I’m sure we would have lost Charlie. Even now I’m sure he would not be put off by the lack of lights, and as an early teen he would have been unstoppable.

The chapel in the Milatos caves.

In one cave there is a small chapel built into the rocks, with an ossuary containing the bones of some of the people who had hidden there. A very strange sight after climbing the long footpath up there.

After the caves we went down to the beach at Milatos, which is a charming little place, for a much-needed cold drink, then headed back to base the pretty way.

Even though the quad struggled a bit on some of the steeper roads it did manage to get us up there albeit at speeds below 10kph in places, so the next day we tried a more ambitious destination – the Lasithi plain.

The Lasithi plain is where the caves on a big mountain range all collapsed many centuries ago, creating a large crater. The crater might be high up, but it is flat and fertile and largely given over to agriculture. There are only two ways in through the mountain passes so it has often been a refuge during Crete’s many invasions.

The views all the way up are spectacular, as is the view of the plains when you finally get there. We did a complete circuit of the plains, stopping off in one small town which was very strange. While all the coastal areas of Crete are dominated by tourist-related shops, scooter-hire places and bars showing football and X-Factor, every shop in this town seemed to sell cloth.

We went to a taverna for a coffee and the chap there was very keen to point out that the only other customer was from France. I had noticed that most of the signs and notices around that were not in Greek were in French. Another couple came in and they were French. Then another French couple came in. In side the taverna were lots of pictures of Paris. It was like a little French enclave high up in the hills.

On a stroll round the town we got ambushed by a shopkeeper who was so good at high-pressure sales I felt it would be rude to not over-pay for a couple of traditional Greek shirts. It was a small reward for the entertainment.

Looking down at the Lasithi plain from the pass.

Having been fleeced by a local weaver we continued our circuit and stopped off at the top of the pass where you can look across the plains in one direction or out towards the coast in the other. There is a huge restaurant there with a limited menu. It caters mostly for coach parties I think, and most of them get served the speciality pork chops which were almost as spectacular as the views.

If I ever go back to Crete I am going to go back to Lasithi again, but with more than 50cc to get me up there. I filmed a bit of our journeys on the Flip but I don’t think I’ll put them on YouTube until I have dubbed in some Steppenwolf to cover the high-pitched motor and speeded it up a bit so it doesn’t look like we are crawling.

Actually we did manage to get over 50 a few times which was quite thrilling until I remembered that the display was in kph and not mph.

On the last day of our quad rental we popped along the coast to the village we stayed at in 2009. It was a little depressing. The place where we had breakfast every day had closed down, as had a couple of other places.

The hotel we stayed at was still there and was doing a bit better. Apparently 2010 was hard but this year has been better – mainly because the large hotel next door has stopped being all-inclusive, leading to a lot more custom for all the bars and tavernas around it.

After that it was back to Malia because I was on a mission – to find somewhere to buy a USB cable and to buy one of the head-sized doughnuts that the bakeries in Crete sell.

The next couple of days after returning the bike were a bit overcast to the point of being stormy. No problem. We had our cards and my book was all nicely re-charged. It probably saved us from getting too burned as well.

I thoroughly enjoyed the change of pace and the change of scenery. Jayne enjoyed early morning walks for exercise each day and we had quite a laugh as well. We made friends with a German girl with an extraordinary collection of tattoos who was ‘doing a Shirley Valentine’. The way we met was quite amusing in itself. Jayne had gone off to the bar or the ladies or somewhere and the bar was quite crowded at the time. While I was there on my own a young girl asked if the seat at the table was free so I said yes and waited to see what sort of look Jayne would give me when she returned to find that after leaving me for just a few minutes I was with young female company.

I wasn’t disappointed. If looks could kill she would have been regretting my failure to take out travel insurance, but soon they were chatting away about all sorts of stuff and comparing tattoos.

I would go back tomorrow if I could, even to the same hotel despite everyone there moaning about it. It may not have been 5-star but it was good for the price and the hot water supply was not just good by Greek standards, but a lot better than we have at home.

The trip home was better than expected. Heraklion airport was much less chaotic than on previous trips. The flight was delayed a couple of hours because of public sector strikes and working to rule but that was OK – neither of us were keen to get back in those dreadful EasyJet seats.

As far as I am concerned it was a great holiday and if I did it again the only thing I would change nothing. Except the airline if possible – plus I would have forked out for a beefier bike and packed a USB cable and the DSLR.

Right. Now that’s out of the way I can get back to bitching about the Tories, banging on about prog rock, and all the usual stuff.

Charlotte AKA Lottie, sporting a pink Rambo-style headband

We were babysitting today¹ , looking after the three week-old granddaughter while her parents went off to Ikea.  To say Jayne has been looking forward to this would be a something of an understatement.

The other day she was going to go to Hobbycraft to get paints.  Now I know that I don’t know much about babies, but even I know that three weeks is a bit young for messing about with paints.  I don’t know what age is right for that sort of thing but I’m pretty sure it is measured in months or years and not weeks.Anyway, Jayne went out this morning to pick her up and came back with so much stuff I thought we were adopting her or something.  I can’t believe how much stuff the logistic support for a small child  requires!

The first challenge was the buggy.  Frankie had very kindly shown Jayne how to collapse it to put it in the boot of the car but didn’t think to demonstrate how it goes up again at the other end.  There were a few phone calls, and I had a bit of a fiddle with it.  Somehow I got the thing unfolded but I’m not sure I could repeat the feat, and I suspect there is an easier way to do it.  One that doesn’t involve turning the thing upside down.

I took a few photos.

Later in the day we had to do something a bit weird.  Jayne had bought one of those kits where you can take impressions of a baby’s hands and feet in clay.  She spent a lot of time rolling this stuff out in its frame and then dangled Lottie over it while I tried to press her various extremities into the clay.  Couldn’t stop her clenching her right hand so the impression of that looks more than a little deformed and it looks like she has one foot bigger than the other because we had to have two goes at her right foot.  Got there in the end.

It wasn't all sunshine and smiles...

I’m not an expert on babies and, to be honest, not a big fan of them, if I was I would have made more of an effort to have one of my own at some point, but I am a bit fascinated by them, especially the tiny fingers and toes.  The nerd in me looks at a baby and nods appreciatively at what a lovely scalable design it is.   I still can’t get over a small person having a foot the size of my thumb.

Of course, the thing that is hardest to get used to is when Jayne shouts up the stairs “grandad come and have a look at this”.   It took a while to work out who she was talking to.

1. When I say ‘we’ I mean that I was also in the house but Jayne did most of the gushing and cooing and all of the feeding and changing

A restored Leyland bus and a tramocar, whatever that is.

Jayne and I went to Amberley museum for the second time in three days today.  They do a deal whereby if you keep hold of your tickets you can return for free within 5 days, so we did.  When we went on Saturday we left without seeing everything because we had to do some supermarket shopping and get home before Doctor Who the kids visited.

Really we are making the most of what may be the last time we will both be off work at the same time for a couple of days, now that Jayne has a new job that involves working at weekends.

The museum is worth a second visit anyway, and it is handy if you are close enough to do it in two halves rather than spend all day in one place.The museum is described on roadsigns and Amberley Working Museum, although in the guide book it admits that the place doesn’t have a real theme as such.  It is based around an old quarry and limeworks and features a lot of the features from that including the original engine sheds, lime kilns, workshops and so on, but has expanded to include other areas of industry in the South-East like timber working, pottery and printing and then to include displays about electricity, road-building, telecommunication and cycling.

A very uncrowded scene

The most specific they will get is that it ‘most’ of what is on display relates to the last 100 to 150 years and relates to industry but I reckon that if they got offered anything that didn’t fit in (suits of armour, a dinosaur skeleton, a Tiger tank, a Shakespeare first folio, 17-Century animal traps, a collection of early string instruments) they would somehow find a way to make it fit or use it for swapsies with another museum.

What was surprising was how quiet it all was for a bank holiday weekend.  Maybe everybody headed for the beach or something, but it there were very few visitors on both days.

In a way this was great because there were no queues for anything and you could take photographs without having to wait for people to get out of the way.

The downside was that quite a few exhibits were unmanned that would normally have demonstrations of various crafts and trades.  A lot of the old machinery is kept running by volunteers and you can see them working on restoration, demonstrating how they work and in the case of vehicles taking them for a spin.

The Fairmile Cafe - an old transport cafe from near Arundel that was relocated to the museum

That is not to say the place was dead: there were steam trains, buses and traction engines running, people showing how various printing presses work, and somebody operating the amateur radio station, but on busier days there would be lots more – people making walking sticks, potters, bodgers, blacksmiths and the rest.

The place really is an anorak’s paradise though.  It contains most of the sort of things that people get anorak-y about: loads of old buses, vans fire engines and cars, large pumps other engines and machines, steam trains and even some of the more obscure things that people get excited about – lots of vintage postboxes and telephone boxes for example.   The telecoms building even had something for those who get weak at the knees over the sight and sound of Straugers doing their thing.

As well as the original industrial buildings from the site, there are quite a few buildings rescued from elsewhere either completely or just the contents.  So there is an old transport cafe, a bus station ticket office, the interior of an old-fashioned cobblers all on site as well as some impressive switchboards and power control boards.

Mine tunnel entrance, as seen in A View To A Kill

One particular part of the site should be familiar to James Bond fans because the tunnel entrance there was used in possibly the naffest of all the James Bond films, A View To A Kill.  It was used for the exterior scenes of the mine where Max Zorin was going to set off loads of explosives to sink half of California.

In fact some of the rolling stock for the narrow gauge railway system is still painted in the Zorin Industries livery from when it was used in the film.

No matter how interested we are in how other people lived and worked in the past, I think we all also have a bit of a weakness for reminders of our own past and this museum caters for that too.

In the TV and radio shop there is an astonishing number of old equipment, including enormous old VHS machines – were they really that big?    Great to look around and recognising an old radiogram similar to one you remember your parents or an aunt having and for pondering on how much better home AV equipment is these days.

I wonder whether our children might come here in their middle age, bringing their children and showing them examples of the clunky old DVD players they used to have or the laughavly old-fashioned mp3 players.

An even better place to indulge in such nostalgia is the electricity exhibition.  There are some very old appliances there, but more than a few that I recognise from childhood: a spherical vacuum cleaner that I am sure we used to have one of for example.  They even had a boxed up Sinclair Spectrum to really get me going – although it was the pristine Morris Minor out of everything on the site that I was most keen on.

I reckon this would be a good place to take kids and elderly relatives together.  The oldies can go into fits of “Ooh I remember using one of those” and “we used to have one of those at work” while the kids can enjoy the rides on buses, pressing the buttons on the interactive displays, and so on.

Something for everybody is a bit of a cliche, but I would be surprised if anybody couldn’t find something here that interested them and, although we drove, it is easily accessible by train – the railway station and the museum share a car park.

Quizzes often have picture rounds, and it is really easy to get pictures of anything you want in the internet age and the invention of Google Image Search.  Of course going on an image search can get you into trouble – just ask Gary Glitter and, as Pootergeek pointed out on Twitter the other day, all you have to do is miss the H out of a perfectly innocent search for “Theresa May” and you end up with a screen full of images of British porn star Teresa May.

I’ll just wait while you all verify that.

All done?  Good.  Anyway, to avoid such a situation, and any possible copyright violations, I limited myself to photos I took myself, combined with some very shoddy Photoshopping.   So you can’t cheat in the traditional way, but any regular readers who know who I have met and where I have been will have a head start.

Who?

Who?

Who?

Who?

Who?

Who?

Who?

Who?

Who?

Which city?

Which palace?

Which bridge?

Which country?

Which island?

Which town?

Which ship?

Whose autograph?

What?

Most of those photos have appeared on this site or on my Flickr account, so any stalkers should get full marks.

Epson Stylus SX515W

My printer has been playing up a lot lately.  Lots of error messages about the ink system failing, and it would also lock up a lot when scanning.

I did a bit of research on the net and found that it was most likely a hardware fault that could easily be fixed with a couple of 30p components from Maplins – but that would depend on me also getting the special screwdrivers to get at the components, a decent soldering iron, and then not causing more damage soldering componentson the circuit board.

Not being a practical type I decided to get a new printer instead.I went for a Epson for a change – the SX515W.   Previously I have had a variety of different HP printers, so this was a bit of a departure.   There were cheaper machines out there, but I thought I would go for something with a wireless connection so that it is easily shared by everybody else in the house.

First impressions: being black, it looks better than the old HP, which was that beige-y colour that all computers used to be.  I reflected a bit on how complete the change has been over the past few years and now you can’t get a beige computer and yet, at least in the corporate environment, printers are still sticking with that colour scheme.

Had a bit of trouble setting it up because I chose to use the laptop for that and the laptop is Windows 7 but the CD that comes with the printer doesn’t have all the drivers for Windows 7.  I had to download them from the net.  Then I forgot that I had MAC address filtering on the router so would not be able to get the printer working until I added its MAC address to the list of allowed devices.

Got there eventually, and it all seems fine now.   I prefer the paper tray on the old HP, which had a separate tray for photo paper and had the paper tray horizontal underneath the output tray, but I’ll have to get used to feeding paper in from the top.

Jonesy

First attempt at scanning was a pleasure though.  I used the full-auto mode and just threw in a photo of our old snake that had been sitting on the table for ages.

The photo was not only scanned but straightened out and cropped to the right size.  I have been doing all that manually.

Not sure yet how to do a big batch of scans, but its early days yet.  So far it has been easier.

Even better, thanks to our new location Comet is only about 100 metres away as the crow flies so once I decided what I wanted I was able to go out and come back with it in a few minutes.

Have a look, but don’t blame me if, afterwards, you feel that a little bit of yourself has died.

It appears that she took photographs, thousands and thousands of them, around Chicago from the 1950s onwards, possibly for her own amusement.  Many were not even developed before she died.  Somebody bought a job lot of her photos and films at an auction and has been developing them and putting them on the internet.

It is all very poignant.  She did this as a hobby while holding down a job and presumably very few people even saw the results.  You have to wonder if some small piece of chance early on could have led to her becoming as well known as, say, Cartier-Bresson.

An unfortunate photo from the Daily Mail website. You can click on it to make it bigger - the photo that is.

The Daily Mail website has a story about ‘Osborne’s plans to hit workshy’. Scroll down to the bottom and there is this remarkable image.

Not the first time I have looked at the DM website and felt like clawing my eyes out, and it won’t be the last I am sure.

One of our home-made lighting gantries at New Barn House

I have been putting off going through my photos for a while because it was a bit daunting, but now I have started and it turns out to be a much better way to pass an evening than watching TV and I have already scanned in some of my favourites from two albums which cover my last year at school and the year or so immediately afterwards.All these older pictures would have been taken with little instamatic cameras, probably with those 110 or 126 cartridges.  The nostalgia is not just in the contents but also in the very format of the prints, some of them with the rounded corners and with that peculiar 70s colour to them.  How times change.  With digital cameras now we think nothing of taking several hundred photos on a day out, but back then a 24-exposure film might last months.

Having a quick flick through the albums I came across some pictures taken in Tunisia the first time I went.  There were only 3 or 4 of them.  Last year I went for a week and took 300 or 400 in the first few days.

The picture above is of the grounds of New Barn House in Lindsell, Essex.  It was a grand but uninhabited house which we took over two years running to do Shakespeare in the open air.   We hired proper lights but built our own gantries by nailing planks of wood together.  Cables ran back across the grass to a control panel in the house and sheets of plastic were thrown over to protect them from the wet.   This was in the days before health and safety.  We are probably lucky to have survived.

Fyfield: the middle quad from above

One set of photos has a particular significance for me.   They are only tiny pictures – 35mm across I imagine because they are cut from a contact sheet.

The significance is that I developed these myself in the darkroom at school.  I didn’t take them – that was done by one of our teachers – but when he developed the film he let us do prints of them to learn how to do all the timing and everything.

I never did get into developing my own films, too much hassle finding a space and having all the chemicals, but I do appreciate having had the chance to do it.

Not looking forward to the next few albums.  I had a quick look through and they are very 80s indeed.  There are a couple where I look like I am auditioning for a Haircut 100 tribute band.