London and Oxford

Breakfast at Carluccio's with the F11.

The temperature in London and Oxford has been on either side of freezing. It is cold but does not feel bad. I guess I was prepared and am preparing for -7 degs in Chicago. For a tropical body, these temperatures are quite extreme, but I tell myself that it is just for a month or two. Although Rajasthan was not as cold, it caught me off gaurd one day as I was prepared for around 10 degs and the temperature hit 0 degs. It was the coldest in Rajasthan for like 30 years!

I exchanged 3 slr bodies (2 contax, 1 canon) and an Olympus 8080 for a fuji Finepix F11. Sounds like a bit of a bum deal but film bodies are going for a song nowadays. And the Finepix F11 is a real nice low light performer, at least for a compact. There is some noise and jpeg artifacts at higher iso, but it is acceptable to me at iso 800 and 1600!



Selfridges

I guess that some of my friends will identify this shot as a manifestation of my desire to shoot nudes! But it is the unclothed mannequin in winter that struck me as odd, honest. :)

And nudes or not, I was in Selfridges to buy wollen underwear. I kid you not. The world's freak weather may turn Chicago into Florida or Siberia, I don't know, not taking chances.


Sasha, Zoe and Sian Bothy Vineyard, Oxfordshire

I visited my sister in Oxford on her birthday. She is not really into cakes anymore but having 2 daugthers, a cake on a birthday is mandatory.



Richard and Zoe

Singapore is where my future is. Even if I manage to break into the international scene, Singapore will be my base of operations. Still, I cannot erase nine years of living in the United Kingdom. My sister and husband Richard have lived in various houses in Oxfordshire over the last fifteen years. Thanks to them I have seen a bit more of the English countryside than I would have planned for by myself.

Lodon is a living city, changing daily, but even after nine years back in Singapore, some landmarks remain. The buildings do not get torn down as fast as they do in Singapore. The shell of buildings I am familiar with now carry shops that are new to me. In some ways it is like meeting an old lover who has remained a friend. At one time the relationship was so intimate and intense, and now even though some of those deep links cannot be severed, layers of new experiences slowly pry you apart. And to keep living and moving forward, one accepts the drifting apart, even though a small part is marked by that past love.

I also wonder if the final, ultimate parting with life, would be a similar experience. How do we remember a lifetime of experiences when our minds are imperfect tools? That drifting away of experiences, never to be repeated. But so many people wiser than me have said words to the effect,

The past is a memory,
The future is a dream,
We only have the present.

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Chilling in London.