I Made A Start,

on getting bits and pieces, 

together for my Namibia trip, bits for the camera, batteries, chargers,

 

South African plug adaptors, which had just arrived, and of course a list of suitable clothes, 

here is a map of the route that is planned, all in a 4 wheel drive minibus and open 4 x 4s phew! what a trip, it has all been arranged by master photographer Will Gray, going back to clothes, Namibia experiences extreme weather ranging from scorching inland desert temperatures exceeding 40°C to freezing winter night lows, so from shorts and 'T' shirts to thermal underwear! I had dropped Diana off just before 05.00AM for her early start, and it was now time to pop back and pick her up, in the afternoon she had a few ZZZZZZ's as I watched, a film based on actual events,

Khartoum, after an Egyptian army, commanded by British officers, is destroyed in a battle in the Sudan in the 1880's, the British government is in a quandary, it does not want to commit a British military force to a foreign war but they have a commitment to protect the Egyptians in Khartoum, so the British government sends in General Charles "Chinese" Gordon, a much underrated film both then when it was released and now, just as it finished Diana was up and about, so our evening meal, before watching a two part DVD

Longitude, a real gem, it is two stories in one running in parallel, in the 18th century Harrison builds the marine chronometer for safe navigation at sea, and in the 20th century Gould is obsessed with restoring it, great acting and story, even better so as we saw all 4 of Harrison's clocks when we visited the Royal Observatory in Greenwich in September 2010, back to the film, basically if at sea you did not have accurate time on board a ship there was a good chance that you could be many miles off course as many ships captains found out to their and their crews cost,

the film's main story is that of craftsman John Harrison, he built a clock that would do the job, what we would now call a marine chronometer, told in parallel is the 20th century story of Rupert Gould, for whom the restoration of Harrison's clocks to working order became first a hobby, then an obsession that threatened to wreck his life, for myself a must see factual film, after which we were off to bed.