Status-Q

Scene spotted at Aldeburgh last weekend. I have a feeling I should try selling this to a biking magazine...

John Addenbrooke, founder of the famous Cambridge hospital, was a fellow of St Catharine's College around the start of the 18th century. One of the treasures in the college's collection is his medicine cabinet, which has 27 drawers of assorted shapes and sizes.

If you open these, in the rather gloomy lighting of the room, you see some dusty items under dusty glass, and it's hard to make out anything of much interest.

However, the college now has some funding to get the contents properly catalogued, and, since I've been doing a bit more professional photography recently, they hired me to take some photos of the interior. I set up a lighting rig, and the librarian and I carefully removed the glass panels covering most of the drawers. Under proper lighting, the contents came alive.

There are seeds, powders, bones, fossils, stone axe-heads; even a wooden clog in one of them!

The full details will appear on the college website once the experts have done their job identifying the contents. My thanks to the college for permission to publish a few images here.

I can't wait to find out what some of these are, and where they came from!

Anyone recognise anything?

One thing I realised, when I got home, is that I needed to wash my hands thoroughly, since, for all I knew, I'd been spending the afternoon dusting my fingers in 300-year-old arsenic, or worse!

Some experiments with paint, ink and tanks of water at the Cambridge Camera Club tonight...

Click for larger versions.

Managed to visit Flatford Mill in daylight the other day, and in better weather conditions than last time...

It's a nice area, famous mostly because of Constable...

Looking back through some old photos from a visit to Russia about 11 years ago, I came across one that I took as a guide to the pronunciation of all those unfamiliar characters...

A couple of days ago we fired up our new barbecue for the first time, but, this being England, we had to wipe the raindrops off first. Weren't they pretty, though? My Australian cousins may scoff, but still...

If you click it to download the full-sized version, you may be able to make out a few self-portraits of the photographer.

Sing along!

Raindrops on Webers
and bangers on barbies...

My friend Hap and I drove from Cambridge to Grasmere today -- 280 miles -- using about a pint of petrol. It should have been all-electric, but we got lost trying to find one of the charging points!

You may or may not think that having to visit rather more M6 service stations on the way than one might otherwise do makes such a form of transport worthwhile. But I think you'd agree that paying about £1 each, to cross the whole country to a place where you can do this walk before dinner, is pretty good value:

What I like about this image is that, though it could come from various parts of the world, it very clearly is not in a British suburb.