This is a continuation of a comments thread on the linked Alex Roddie’s post; I decided it’s too long to dump on someone else’s blog (and also too importand, to burry in a comment).

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The 80mm lens arrived several days earlier than expected (these days it’s far quicker to buy second had stuff from Japan than the EU; another unsang Brexit benefit), so I had a chance to get a roll through in the house to test it and the impressions are also very good.

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As far as bullshit titles go, OpenReach’s Uber Complex Chief Engineer has to be right up there with the best of them. Not making this up, this from my most excellent ISP, A&A:

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Why am I only getting this camera now? The first impressions are very good indeed.

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For a number of years now I have been on a quest for the perfect hiking camera. There have been one or two candidates over that time that started promising but ultimately didn’t entirely meet the expectations.

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The Cape Wrath Trail has been on my ‘One Day’ list for around a decade now. Originally thinking of a self-supported run, but that isn’t going to happen; my distance running days are long over. Also, as the years pass, I am increasingly interested in being in a place, even of a place, rather than simply passing through a place; speed has lost its appeal.

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I think some progress is being made around the modern CT airport scanners, as I have not run into any problems with getting my film hand inspected on my recent trip that included passing through EDI, STN and TIA (in contrast when I flew about a year ago, EDI was still repeating the ‘safe up to ISO800’ mantra).

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Perhaps I don’t know where to look, but I am struggling to find any contemporary writing from the outdoors that would stir me, produce some sort of a meaningful emotional reaction in me. What I come across these days are gear reviews, more great reviews, some route descriptions, and accounts of pseudo-heroic deeds (that is, the artificial challenges we create for ourselves to break out of the day-today boredom and greyness). There is, of course, a place for all of this in sensible doses, but, on the basic level, heading outdoors has not really been about that for me.

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Yesterday I emptied the chest freezer in the garage, to check whether there is any 35mm film at the bottom of it; I thought there might be and turns out I was right about that. Thing is, I find myself in a bit of a bind just now. I have a mountain trip coming up later this spring, and can’t decide on what camera to take!

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‘People are utterly stupid, just look at them,’ says the oldest, as the six of them lie in the lush grass, relishing the rare winter sunshine.

‘Aye, they have this deep rooted herd mentality, following each other like zombies, questioning nothing, scared to be different. Not a hint of an independent thought in any of them’, pipes in another.

‘I used to think that was just evil talk, but FFS, you can see even from over here there is nay grass to be had there, just straw and mud’, adds the youngest.

‘You got that right, son, mind you, I find it rather entertaining, ken?’

‘Well, thank heavens I wasn’t born human.’

And so they keep chewing their cud, watching the detectorist convention in the next field. Aye, thank heavens indeed.

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A rather pretty sight, the velvet shank is one of the mushrooms that fruit in the winter and is most commonly found on dead elm trees (it can also be found in a supermarket, under the Japanese name ‘Enoki’, though the commercially grown specimen look nothing like the ‘real thing’ due to being grown in darkness and in bottles). The English name comes from the dense, velvet-like, hair covering the stem; it turns dark as the mushroom ages, in a lovely contrast to the orange cap.

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This rather pretty, straw coloured, brittle gill found under beech trees is easily identified by its distinct, geranium-like, smell. It’s faint at first, but if you bring it into the house for further examination you will soon know it’s there.

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It’s a hard life, being a selfie double, but otherwise a braw day in the hills.

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I see (via walkhighlands) that Mountaineering Scotland has issued a guidance on the use of microspikes. I guess better late than never, but I’d hoped for something more than this. As I have pointed out years ago (Regarding Microspikes), the big problem with microspikes is not their limitations, but the manner of their failure.

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to fly the aircraft we fly now, would require us to divert one half of the world’s entire agricultural production to aviation fuel … if we’re prepared to sacrifice the entire population of both India and China, we can continue to fly. But if we’re not, aviation biofuel — ‘green’ aviation fuel — is a cynical lie, founded on a preparedness to sacrifice half of the world’s population to starvation on the altar of fast travel for the rich few.

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Today was the first decent day in ages, so I went for a walk up through the farms near our home, and I came back with a bag full of oyster mushrooms. I would have walked right by them too, was it not for a large old clump of them lying on the ground, made me look for where it came from. They are commonaly found on beeches, or oaks, but there were three large clumps of them on a dead part of a large sycamore. We recently discovered an excellent mushroom stew recipe in the Hairy Bikers Vegeterian cookbook, this lot will be enough for three meals for four.

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