well, the first round of holiday pictures are up on the website at [vol1] – smaller versions at [vol1-small] – after some fiddling with the scanner this weekend; it’s fantastic to be able once more to convert old (and new) film images to digital format, and – being as I eventually went for the mid-cost option of buying a nice flatbed, an Epson 4870 – I also have some other ideas on how to use it.

The pictures at the above URL are a chronologically random bunch from the latter third of my 12 days off; there are several shots of the interior of Reims cathedral (and an existing-light shot of the Chagall stained-glass window) – plus:

• A picture of my colleague Luc, taken at the Brussels office
• A selection of the local entomology, splattered on the screen of Brad’s bike
• Three monuments at Waterloo, in one shot
• A landscape of Cafe Rouge Cemetery near Arras, wherein is the marker…
• …for the grave of TH Mapson, cousin 3x removed, and father of my Aunt Betty who is still alive and would probably appreciate a print.

I’ve been back for a week now and not felt inclined to write-up much about the trip, for a variety of reasons; external influences are probably the strongest as I and the team within which I work are under some threat from re-organisation at work – our job roles may go poof! at some future instant – but those are not the only reaons.

The most memorable bits? Hmmm… there was the occasion immediately after striking out on my own for a bit, mid-vacation, where I pitched down at a tearoom on the road that fringes Omaha Beach, ordered (in quick succession) a glass of water, apple juice, and apple sorbet, and then whilst sat unwinding in a garden chair I was pounced-upon by a Vietnamese History Channel filmcrew, doing a D-Day documentary, with a perky presenter bouncing in/out of the combat-era Jeep that had been parked-up on the roadside for that purpose. I ended up in some shots as background fill-material, a bit of local colour, which finally convinced me that this was karmically the right thing to be doing.

The fact that I did not eat for the following 24 hours was merely happenstance.

Beachcombing for 2 days was the perfect relaxation, walking on whistling golden sands past concrete machine gun emplacements, the ribs of metal hulk of landing craft sticking through the sand, and local teenagers rolling up their trouser bottoms and walking the beach while glued to the phone. I played as game of finding someone’s footprints and walking out-of-sync amongst them, so any subsequent observer would find someone’d been bunny-hopping along the beach with interchangably-sized feet.

One fellow flying some manner of powered parasail/parachute rig buzzed overhead, going west along the beach. The propeller strapped to his back must have been deafening.

I waved at him. He waved back. Sometimes you don’t need language to say when it’s good to be alive.

Food tip: There is a beer available in France, called Adelscott; I ordered it by accident. It’s disgusting. Neither one thing or the other, it’s beer that tastes of whisky. It’s a bad idea.

More later.