I better start by declaring that I am no fan of super-hero movies. Men and woman in improbable costumes, often with unexplained powers, prancing around uttering breathless dialogue supported by shitloads of CGI. No thanks, although I would make an exception for the recent, rather fine, Chronicle. I also better declare that I am a fan of director Christopher Nolan. He had me at Memento and as far as I am concerned he has never made a bad film. He serves up lashings of entertainment without treating his audience like simpletons; so when he took on the Batman franchise and delivered Batman Begins, I went along for the ride. It was good, but The Dark Knight was even better; helped by the stand-out performance by the sadly late Heath Ledger as The Joker. A hard act to follow, but now we have the final film in the trilogy; The Dark Knight Rises.

I don’t read as many books as I feel I should, and what I do read tends to be from my Kindle. However, I do still enjoy a wander round a bookshop and yesterday I came across Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare - The World as a Stage. Published a while ago, but I have never seen it before.

I have no great affinity for Shakespeare; probably because I was forced to play Bottom’s second assistant fairy in a school play, inducing a trauma so severe that I still refuse to wear green tights. But I do love anything by Mr. Bryson.

The Son has pointed me towards a social media exercise by Shell* which has gone horribly wrong for them, with most amusing results for the rest of us.

Promote your proposed Arctic drilling campaign by sticking up some cute photos and inviting the public to provide captions, what could possibly go wrong….?

See the full horror here. But as I expect the exercise is likely to be terminated prematurely, followed by the sacking of all involved, here are a few selections (click on each for a readable version).

After a fairly torrid time with chemicals, it might have been wise to stay away from any sort of activity which I could potentially fuck up; but the vacuum cleaner went on the blink and in order to attempt to fix it, I needed a new type of screwdriver; the screws in the cleaner presumably being specifically designed to deter boneheads like me.

And so it was I found myself in the queue at Home Pro this morning, new screwdriver in hand, coincidentally standing behind a man who was purchasing a brand new vacuum cleaner. I was pondering the fact that there was a fair chance I would be back tomorrow to buy exactly the same, once my repair attempt had resulted in an electrical fire of impressive proportions; when he spoke to me.

So there I was with a couple of rolls of exposed film and three bottles of chemicals with which to develop them. What could possibly go wrong…?

Film development is a bottomless pit of options and opinions. Hit the web and you will find endless combinations of films, fluids, temperatures and techniques being discussed. To hell with that, I just want some photos I can point at and say “I did that”.

Variables were reduced by the fact that I had films I had already bought from the web, and chemicals Tic had found in Singapore; but even with these there were some pretty detailed instructions to absorb. We ran through some of these whilst consuming gin and tonic; but this turned out to be a bad environment for memory retention.

More amusing, but equally useless, was practising the delicate art of removing the film from its canister and transferring it to the processing tank. It’s fiddly when you can see what you are supposed to be doing, extremely difficult to do in the dark (which is what you have to do), and pretty hilarious trying to do it with your eyes shut after an intake of alcohol.

Come Sunday, and armed with a measure of sobriety and a small headache, I started by mixing up some chemicals. There are three to worry about. In reverse order (theoretically, see later), there is the Fixer with fixes everything that has gone before so your negative will not degrade over time. Prior to that there is the Stopper, which as the name suggests, stops the development process. And finally, and most importantly, there is the Developer.

The Fixer and the Stopper are non-critical in terms of application; and they can be mixed in bulk, used as required and then kept for re-use. So I mixed them first.

She who must be obeyed is many things; but fit is not one of them. Her idea of exercise is a long walk from a car parking space into the mall, and woe betide me if I choose that as an option if there is an alternative somewhere closer, albeit infinitely more difficult, to park. So it was with some surprise that I greeted her announcement a few weeks ago that she was entered for the Pattaya Marathon. Turns out she had been entered by her boss who enters every year and expects a couple of his managers to do the same.

“So, what training regime do you intend undertaking?” I asked with tongue firmly planted in cheek. “Pass the crisps.”

About three days ago there was a mild panic when she realised that she had done zero preparation. I pointed out that it was now too late to start any preparatory work, at which point she relaxed and settled back into her prawn snack.

The night before she readied herself with a light meal and an early night by going out for dinner with our visitor and ending up the meal with a slab of cake. She did turn down the offer of a grappa though.

Yesterday morning she was out of the house at 0430 and staggered home several hours later with these:

Those of you spitting feathers over the overdose of old camera photos the last couple of days will no doubt be pleased to be presented with another one:

Following a massive outpouring of enthusiasm* yesterday, here are some more Kiev internals photos shots; this time shot with the Yashica 55mm macro:

Finally reduced one of my spare-parts Kievs to component parts, or as far as I am capable of taking it and still have it working.

It’s a Kiev 4, which looks like this: