Jubilee Olympics – a double whammy

Stephen says views with dismay a summer of unrelenting  jingoism. To have the Queen’s diamond jubilee and the London Olympics in the same season will be hard to endure.

While not a royalist, like most people I admire Her Majesty for the dedication and dignity she has brought to her role. Whenever republican feelings stir in my democratic breast, I reflect on how Cherie Blair could have been our First Lady and gratefully mutter God save the Queen.

The monarchy has had a boost from the charming Duke and Duchess of Cambridge (I typed Ambridge at first!) – or William and Kate as most of us prefer. They have brought their own down-to-earth outlook to their role, and are all that Charles and Diana were not and never could have been. I started to write that it’s almost possible to feel sorry for Charles, but to be honest it’s not remotely possible.

But the Olympics. Dear God! Traffic privileges for endless self-important gravy-trainers; Heineken (yes, Heineken if you please) the only branded beer to be sold in any Olympic venue; can’t take in your own bottled water, must buy what they sell, at their price. The whole thing is a ghastly commercial bean feast, with little relationship to the Olympic ideal. And I shudder at the prospect of the unrelenting media blitz. ‘Lord’ Coe, Blustering Boris, and the rest of them should hang their heads in shame at the way they have connived in the corruption and commercialisation of the Olympics.

We can’t afford to give our brightest young people a free university education; we’re slashing support for the most vulnerable in our society; our hospitals and schools struggle with under-finding; yet we can squander untold millions on this vainglorious, so-called sporting extravaganza, motivated primarily by political vanity and national self-aggrandisement, reinforced with naked commercial greed.

Don’t it make you sick? – as Private Eye’s Glenda Slagg might have said.

A look back at Romney Marsh

Romney Marsh, almost all of it in Kent, is a wonderful place – if you like that sort of thing. I do. Others regard it as a God-forsaken dump. It shouldn’t be God-forsaken: it is famous for the richness and variety of its churches. The modest population of Lydd is served by a church of almost cathedral-like proportions; in total contrast, the tiny church of St Thomas Becket stands alone in fields, surrounded by grazing sheep.

St Thomas Becket, Fairfield

I lived on Romney Marsh for a few years immediately after World War II. I was 10 when we moved there, and it felt like a magical place. After the war the countryside was almost completely deserted, and you could wander at will. I have no memory of ever being shouted at or asked ‘Can I help you?’ (meaning Clear Orf). It was on the Marsh that I found my first bird’s nest (Mistle Thrush) and saw Pale Clouded Yellow butterflies during their great invasion in 1947. It was on the Marsh that my parents’ improving finances resulted in my being given a pony for Christmas in 1947. I rode ‘Robin’ all over the Marsh, often on my own. You seldom saw a car in the lanes.

And the Marsh’s greatest treasure for any small boy was the wonderful Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway, which we used as a routine form of transport.

‘Winston Churchill’ at Dungeness

The people of the Marsh are a distinctive breed, and no one would charge them with excessive bonhomie! It mattered not a jot to me.

Then there is Dungeness, that great shingle peninsula, a place beloved of anyone who likes interesting or unusual wildlife.

Dungeness – the ‘new’ lighthouse

I have been making an annual pilgrimage back to the Marsh for over twenty years, showing my wife the places and things that delighted me as a child. On one visit, we explored some of the Marsh’s delightful churches, a few of which are pictured below.

St Clement, Old Romney

All Saints, Lydd – the cathedral of the Marsh.

St Mary the Virgin, St Mary-in-the-Marsh

Georgian box pews in St Thomas Becket, Fairfield.

You can see more church photographs here.

The ideal camera that no one makes

I am looking for a new camera.

My main camera today is a Panasonic Lumix G1, which is a micro-four-thirds camera launched in 2008. It is in many ways ideal. Significantly smaller than even an entry-level DSLR, so not too off-putting to carry around. Mine has the excellent 14-45mm (28-90mm equivalent) kit lens originally supplied with the camera, which came out extremely well in a What Digital Camera test, but which Panasonic later replaced with the inferior 14-42mm kit lens. Not that the lens is the issue. I like almost everything about the camera except the quality of its jpeg output. It isn’t bad, but it’s not very good. A bit flat, a bit low on dynamic range, some of the colour renditions a bit questionable.

With camera manufacturers bringing out new models all the time, you’d think it would be easy to find a camera that retained the G1’s advantages while improving on the jpeg output.  But it isn’t.

The biggest stumbling block on many modern cameras is the lack of a decent viewfinder. Almost all the new breed of compact system cameras have no viewfinder, though some of them offer an electronic viewfinder as an optional extra for some £200-300.

In theory, the perfect camera for my requirements already exists: the Fujifilm X10. A retro-styled camera with a modest zoom lens and an innovative optical-electronic viewfinder, it seemed to answer my photographic prayers. But then it became apparent that the camera had a serious imaging problem. In certain situations, bright highlights result in white orbs or discs in the image. Fujifilm has reacted by releasing a firmware update, but it seems to have failed to solve the problem. The problem has raised serious questions about Fujifilm’s testing and quality control procedures, and their attitude towards their customers.

The two cameras that come nearest to meeting my requirements are the Olympus XZ-1 and the Canon G12. From the reviews, it would seem that the XZ-1’s jpegs are superb, and I have been on the brink of buying it several times. But – it has no viewfinder. You can buy an add-on viewfinder for about £200, but at that stage the camera will have cost you around £500, and who wants an accessory sticking out of the hot shoe all the time?

The other obvious candidate is the Canon G12, a highly regarded compact with a modest zoom and good quality output. But somehow it doesn’t quite appeal. Its optical viewfinder is small, not precisely accurate, in fact very much a last resort. And if reviews are to be believed, its jpeg output is rather less subtle than I would wish, very much in the highly saturated Canon compact style.

So, despite the plethora of modern marvels now available, not one of them matches my requirements. Almost all of them offer lots of things in which I have no interest: video recording, art filters, RAW recording, GPS, and so on. All I want is a relatively simple camera with a decent viewfinder, a modest zoom lens, and first-class jpeg output.

So it looks as if I shall go on using my Panasonic G1, despite its rather flat jpeg output, doing my best to enliven the images in a variety of software editors. But I find post-processing a bore, and wish to spend as little time doing it as is compatible with producing decent images.

I wonder which manufacturer will be the first to identify this market niche and fill it satisfactorily, not with a seriously flawed camera.

Ten things we don’t need to hear anything more about

Ten things it would be wonderful to wake up tomorrow and never hear about again:

1. Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone

2. The Olympics

3. Alex Salmond

4. Simon Cowell

5. Celebrity chefs on television. This does not include Nigella, whose raison d’etre on TV is not cookery. Nor does it apply to Delia, who is lovely and is not and never has been a ‘celebrity’.

6. Michael Gove (the Tories’ little chap who has just finished reading The Dummies Guide to Education and has got lots of really wizard ideas about it.)

7. Putin

8. ‘Sir’ Alan Sugar

9. The Metropolitan Police. Well, actually, we need to hear much more about them, but it’s depressing to go on finding out that so many of the police are possibly criminals.

…gosh, I ran out at nine. Dear readers, please suggest.

Sorry, mate, the guy in the coffee shop keeps hassling me…

From the BBC News website:

A coffee shop in Norwich is refusing to serve any customer who places an order while talking on a mobile phone.

Darren Groom, the owner of Little Red Roaster, created the ban after becoming fed up with having to compete for the attention of customers.

I don’t imagine many readers of my blog will be critical of the café owner’s decision. What could be more impolite than talking to someone on your mobile while being served by someone else?

The more relentless users of mobile phones and other technological communications media sometimes seem to have lost sight of what is decent conduct towards others.

A visit to St Mary’s church in Selborne, home of Gilbert White

Today I went to see the church of St Mary in Selborne, home of the famous 18th C naturalist Gilbert White. For a village, the church is large, with both north and south aisles and bays with huge, simple pillars.

A giant yew tree, many hundreds of years old, was brought down by a gale in January 1990. A plaque on the west wall of the church commemorates those whose resting place was disturbed.

Gilbert White’s father was a vicar of St Mary’s, and Gilbert himself became a curate of the church. Two stained-glass windows in the south aisle commemorate White the naturalist by allusion. One depicts St Francis, surrounded by many different birds and animals, all of which have been identified by modern naturalists in a diagram beneath the window.

Behind the altar is a painting of the worship of the Magi, attributed to the Flemish artist Jan Mostaert, about 1515. It is believed to have been given to the church by Gilbert White’s brother.

If you would like to see more photos of this lovely church, click on this link.

On being proper

Someone I knew at school, when we were about 13, recently read my blog and then looked at the albums in my photo gallery. About the latter he wrote: “Have looked through your slide shows too. England as it used to be – and should be.”

‘Should be’ interests me. Have you noticed how people call things from their youth ‘proper’?

Proper cars. Nothing like as good as modern cars – less reliable, less durable, less comfortable, less well equipped. But they didn’t all look the same. A Riley didn’t look like a Rover.

Proper trains:  in other words, steam trains.

A proper pub. OK – it didn’t serve any food apart from revolting looking pickled onions and one fly-blown Scotch egg in a grubby glass case. The beer was probably in mediocre condition if not downright vinegary. But at least there was a recognisable landlord who would be there again the next time you went in, rather than some spotty adolescent who has no idea what your regular drink is and cares even less.

Even proper girls, who are girl-shaped and sometimes wear a skirt.

We all tend to think the world as it should be is the one that existed when we were young, or at least a lot younger than we are now.

So will my grandchildren one day look back on gangsta rap as ‘proper music’? Cricketers in yellow pyjamas as ‘proper cricketers’? Jamie Cullum as a ‘proper jazz singer’? Or stick insects as ‘proper girls’?

Proper despair threatens.