Bowie

Scanning in some old negatives I took of David Bowie 20 years ago reminded me what an enormously nice guy he was - but also how many hours we used to spend removing the dust spots from negatives in those days!

G1X

Just messing about in Newbury with my pocket camera - that's a coat pocket not a trouser pocket by the way - when I realised it was set on ISO 3200.  No problem!  It is Canon's G1X and the quality of the jpeg is amazing.  If it wasn't for the eccentricity of the two control rings around the lens, which do different things on different settings, and one of which sometimes goes on strike for a few moments, I would use it on assignment. The shutter response is so quick for a compact camera, comparable with an SLR, that I find myself over anticipating the shot and pressing the button too early because I instinctively assume that it is going to behave like all my previous compact cameras. My fault not Canon's.
It also survived being doused in salt water on the Sail Training Ship Tenacious in a force nine in the Bay of Biscay, and never missed a beat.  A year on it's working fine.

Autistic School

The complete innocence with which M. helps himself to my lukewarm tea, then offers me the empty cup to dispose off. He gives up waiting for me to take it, and tidies it himself.

Canon GX1

Great excitement a few days ago tracking my new Canon GX1 from Hong Kong, watching this single small package make its way swiftly around the world.  I unpacked it in my break that evening from helping the young autistic chaps, set it on manual focus and 12800 iso and rested it on the car park fence. With the illumination from the windows of just three cottages behind me I had to guess where the lime tree in the field in front was.  I could not see it in the dark. 1 second at f2 produced this jpeg. The quality is not fantastic; the fact that you can see the tree at all is fantastic. This was black night.

Tall Ship.

Last Saturday took the young chap for a day-sail on Tenacious.  The air was so still that the sails were pressed back against the masts, but the sun was out, the food and the company were good, and the sails still had to be set and furled, even if the engines were doing all the work.
Coming back into Southampton, the skipper and the pilot decided to slide gingerly out of the main channel for a few minutes to let this monster pass, and Tenacious passed over Bramble Bank, home to an annual cricket match at low water spring tide when the sandbank briefly emerges from the sea.  http://www.yachtsandyachting.com/news/143271   Only the crazy English................!

Rain

A small thunderstorm just curtailed rose planting, and even shut up the noisy coal tit that has been bustling around the garden with its second batch of fledglings.

Aged 97

It is a truth little understood that a mind riddled with dementia so bad that it cannot remember ten seconds ago, has the determination to hold on to a single particular thought through days of increasing physical pain. 

The thought is this; "If I refuse water and food,  I will be released from this intolerable existence; I will die, and that is now my greatest wish."

It can take a week. The strength of mind is astonishing.