Smoking is a great comfort to me.
Not of course that I smoke myself: disgusting habit. No, it is because of my revulsion and rejection that it is a comfort.
One of the major sources of addiction; ill health; poverty and rapidly increasing social exclusion – and I am free of it!
I spend not a penny on this justly reviled compulsion – which means of course, that I can justify the spending of money on other and less noxious things.
All of this is by way of preparing the way for the appearance of another camera to be delivered courtesy of Amazon, possibly tomorrow. Yet another camera.
Toni has never really recovered from seeing the unbelievable number of cameras that I was able to produce before I left the UK. I gathered them all together in a sort of pile and stood guard Fafner-like over them all.
A whole history of the camera from the 1950s was there with each new fad or system represented by one, and sometimes more, machine or machines. Disk cameras, cassette cameras, Polaroid cameras, box cameras, SLR, instamatics – you name it, they were there!
Most of them were sold in Splott Market in Cardiff before I left for what were risibly small sums of money - but money nevertheless. I ended up with Dad’s SLR – which was Camera of the Year in the days before the invention of the laptop – and a couple of serviceable cameras which were unspectacular but, most importantly, small.
As long as it fits in a pocket I will use it; if it doesn’t (like Dad’s SLR) I admire it and never use it. Anyway, who buys actual 35 mm film nowadays!
I like Canon cameras and have two excellent ones including one with a x14 optical zoom with reasonable manual control which fits into my shirt pocket! But for the new one I have returned to an old love – Olympus.
In the days of 35mm film I had an Olympus Pen-EE which took half-frame photographs (there’s a concept from the past!) thereby giving you 70+ exposures from an ordinary film cartridge. It was an excellent camera but it went the way of all flesh when digital came into favour.
The new camera is digital (or course) with a x24 optical zoom and other bits and pieces which sound like fun. To me.
It is going to be difficult to justify – but there again, I don’t smoke do I, so . .
This morning is glorious with azure skies and wispy clouds for decoration rather than obstruction. We shall see what the afternoon brings in the topsy-turvy conditions that we have been treated to recently.
A glorious day spoilt only by the number of people enjoying it!
Lunch was from our local chicken place and was as tasty as usual. I am sure that Ceri will be expecting rabbit from the same place as he enjoyed so much the last time.
It looks as though Clarrie and Mary will not be able to come out this summer as Clarrie now has two meetings in the days when she said that she might be able to visit: and to think that I had bought replacements for the “drinking Champagne” goblets one of which was broken in the party. Not by me, I might add!
I have bought a book (surprise!) which purports to teach you basic Spanish in 30 days. I have decided to work my way through it religiously so that I revise the things which I am supposed to know already.
It is the sort of book, produced by an official branch of the literary establishment and fairly obviously demands a degree of previous knowledge of the language if it is to be successful. So it might be just right for me. And I am working on the “Anything is better than nothing” basis for progress!
I am now trying to persuade Toni to come out on the Ruta de las Tapas so that I can cross off more of my 24 remaining tapas before I can submit my form for the competition!
MONDAY 1st AUGUST 2011
Riddle: When is the morning not the morning?Answer: When you are a Catalan plumber.
It was not with a great deal of surprise that we failed to greet the promised plumber before the magic hour of twelve. We were assured that the gentleman would appear in the “morning”; the morning having gone we phoned to find out why he had not appeared.
The morning, we were told, stretches until 2.00 pm. Now there is a clue in the use of “pm” which might, to the educated, indicate that it is, to all intents and purposes, the afternoon. But the learning of plumbers obviously works at a much deeper level of Old Time than that which governs the rest of us! It is now a quarter past twelve in the afternoon (!), which means that there are one and three-quarter hours of “morning” left for plumbers!
On a much more interesting note my new camera, the Olympus SZ-M30, has arrived: thrown over the fence by the oh-so-considerate delivery service without so much as a touch on the bell to let the recipients know that it had come. I heard the arrival of a van and then the characteristic thump of careful delivery while lying in bed and was able to put one and one together and search out the brown parcel lying on the pine needles - which hopefully softened the fall of the piece of delicate machinery!
Considering how much the new camera does it is very light and compact. It sits in the hand better than most small digitals and the screen looks brighter and easier to see in sunlight. There is, alas, no viewfinder – but I have given up hope of finding my ideal camera in much the same way that my watches always have to be compromises.
The x24 optical zoom looks excellent and, more importantly, the image stabilization system that comes with it looks as though it copes with mere humans holding the camera at those sorts of magnifications rather than tripods and gives more than reasonable results.
The gimmicky shots named “magic” on the menu seem less enchantment and more of a waste of time – though it is fair to say that I have hardly tried out the system very much so these are initial judgements rather than exhaustive analyses.
There is a “3D” shot option – though god knows how these can be shown and the “landscape” feature will take some getting used to. There are prompts when you change the shot options but they contain just enough information to be thoroughly frustrating – at the moment!
The basic (how strange that word seems when compared with the instamatics of one’s youth) camera looks very decent indeed and I am looking forward to using it throughout the month to capture shots of The Visitors for inclusion in a book at the end of the month – and indeed part of the next so that The London Boys of September can be included!
With a tenacity unheard of in my approaches to foreign language learning I have made it to lesson 2 in my new book! This means that at the end of today I will be 1/15th of my way through it with complete fluency awaiting me at the end of this month!
On a serious note the book does seem to be purpose-made for me because it assumes all the scraps of Spanish that I already have are just about in place. It combines the insulting with the realistic which may just have a marked effect on my level of competence! I live in hope.
The plumber now has just over an hour of the morning left to make his promised appearance. I think I will start lunch as such nervous tension demands food!
30 minutes left. Toni has pointed out that all the plumbers are the same so that my idea of cancelling the present one at precisely 2.00 pm (the “end of the morning”) will achieve nothing, except to transfer the same level of nervous tension to a new set of layabouts! He might be right, but it is frustrating to be held captive in your house by arrogant, uninformative workers who seem unable to use the mobile phones which make communication so bloody easy.
Where are all the Polish plumbers when you need them?
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