Brisbane has been spared more flooding, the sun came out, and there were lots of nice things to see. And, well, in the end it was a choice between a photo of her and one of a lizard. But I’ll catch the lizard again some time.
This is Serge, a naturalised Australian but born in Belgium, smoking a cigarette as he shelters from Cyclone Oswald, which began walloping Brisbane pretty much as I arrived yesterday and hasn’t stopped yet. It’s been very harsh and today no one left the Kookaburra Inn – the backpackers’ hostel where I am staying (expect to see more of this place over the next few months). However, the worst seems to have passed. The rain has mostly stopped and the winds are high, but manageable. I hope. This was the second-worst day of weather to be featured on this blog (after 9/7/12).
There is a double meaning to the title of this post by the way. I realised today, after about 24 hours of being here, that a good proportion of the people staying here are not ‘backpackers’ at all but refugees being housed here by the Australian government, from Iraq and Afghanistan. Interesting. Anyway, you will see more of Australia yet, never fear – but we just have to wait for this cyclone to pass over, which in accordance with all natural laws, it will.
A 2-day journey through the global lymphatic system that is the air travel network, largely on night flights, is never going to produce great photography, so here’s my attempt to encapsulate this day of pure transit: me trying to keep myself busy in the good-value transit lounge in Changi airport. It gets another country onto the blog – Singapore – but in the most mundane way. Australia tomorrow…
Instead of more of that snow crap, here’s a more personal view on current events. Clare here helps me focus the definitive pic of the completed tattoo, first prefigured way back on 3rd September, and subsequently completed in five sessions, of an average of four hours each, of various degrees of pain (the most recent one, on Friday evening, being a shading session of exquisite agony).
Some people have said – ‘but you don’t get to see it!’. The thing is, I do. As much as I see my face incognito, at least. But I know what I look like, I don’t need to see it every day to remind me, and I think I look just fine.
This is turning out to be a rather different weekend from last weekend… and it’ll be rather different next weekend as well. In the meantime, here is Joe out gathering material for a missile. Plenty of opportunities to take cliched snow shots of picturesque old Hebden Bridge today, but I was trying to avoid that.
Last evening in Nairobi. We were taken out to this Ethiopian restaurant where, at the end of the meal, I had my first sip of coffee in about 18 years – having definitively given it up in favour of tea back in about 1995. Still, looking at this photo one might understand why I was persuaded to partake once again, even if just in a small way.
In case you thought I was just here to soak up some rays (though it’s a valid reason to travel, I admit), this picture is taken at the KAPC campus, our collaborative partner here in Nairobi. Evidence that much of Africa has totally skipped the landline era and gone straight into mobile. I wonder how the world would be different if Alexander Graham Bell had tried using radio for his communications experiment instead of copper wiring.
Another of my occasional drinking haunts, the Trades Club in Hebden Bridge, has yet to feature on this blog, but let’s allow it to sneak on today with its regular weekly chess club, held in the back room and run by the impressively bewhiskered gentleman (John) you see here. A black and white photo for a black and white subject.
Five hundred days. Well well. An ordinary day to mark this milestone, however. Captured this shot on the way to the supermarket; a more in-focus version of this shot, taken from the same spot some nine months ago.
As verified by the Guinness World Records people, the world’s biggest working pencil is 26 feet or 7.9 meters long, and weighs 984 pounds or 446.3kg. It lies suspended from the ceiling of the Cumberland Pencil Museum in Keswick, above Joe’s head as he rests after the exertions and celebrations of yesterday.
Tomorrow it’s day 500 of this daily photo blog – quite a milestone. To celebrate I will add some more photos to the Best of the Rest page, and also update the Stats page.
