Imagine Peace

The Millennium Bridge in across the River Tyne links the city of Newcastle to the town of Gateshead.  Missy and I walked across it a couple of weeks ago and I snapped this one up with the Olympus mju-1 on HP5+:

Foma313 paper
The 'Imagine Peace' building just across the river houses the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art and a fine place to visit it is.  When we passed through, there was a superb exhibition of the photographer Franki Raffles.  You can read about it here and I will write more about it in another post.  Did I say it was superb?  It was!

I have to say again how much I'm enjoying the mju-1 and so far it seems pretty faultless for a (very) compact point 'n' shoot camera.  It's a DX camera, so reads the barcode along the bottom of the canister for film speed, number of shots and film latitude.  Since I bulk-load from 100' rolls I needed to remember to use suitable-coded canisters, although it isn't too difficult to make up your own DX barcode if you feel so inclined - there is plenty of online help available. 

Our daughter is in the first semester of her Masters and had a bit of wobble a few weeks ago - a good excuse for me to drop everything and fly over for a few days.  The flight from Belfast takes about 40mins - so that's about 2 hours and 40mins given the amount of time you need to leave for airport security these days, which is so hard to predict.  Once in Newcastle, however, it's a doddle - the metro takes you from the airport to the centre of town in about 20mins.   Anyway, we had a good few days together and talked everything out, so I think she's going to be OK.  It was harder for her than she thought, what with being in a new University, a new city (much larger than what she was used to with Oxford), and not being particularly close to her undergrad pals or her boyfriend.  To be fair, I think the transition from undergraduate to postgraduate is a big one.  At Oxford, she was surrounded by her pals 24/7.  Moving four hours north, knowing no-one and living pretty much on your own in a strange new city was all proving a bit much for her.  Completely understandable.  Your undergrad days are rather special and unique, I think - it does take a lot of adjustment to come to terms with the fact that 'those days are over' and that actually this next stage of life is going to be very different.  Fingers crossed she has weathered the storm.