Wednesday, June 06, 2018

Where does time go and the weather changes are also dramatic a catch up after a few days off blogging

Well we have been doing scanning of Photos for the last few days and sometimes the weather has been really fantastic but in the last few days its turned back to its well known Normandy weather of attempting to be nice but in fact it pours with rain so hence the photos scanning.

The software counts up each time you save an image and if you add all the different sets together we have scanned nearly two thousand photos since we got here and the end came on Tuesday the 5th Noel reached the last set of photos. All the photos produced by Jens Dad Cyril have now all been saved for posterity and some of the older photos and transparencies were in a poor state and so we are glad that we did it. Ironically the last photos that Noel put on the scanner both relate to Hong Kong Days. The first lot were the photos taken at the Hong Kong Club in 1975 where there was a large cocktail party of ab55 staff out 100 guests came to say farewell to Gero and hello to Noel. All the great and good of Dodwell and Jardine were there and it was a really scary occasion for me. The final set of photos scanned were of my FEI leaving dinner at a Chinese Restaurant in Kowloon with about  five tables, so about 55 staff in attendance where the major event of the evening was the sup[rise visit of Jennifer who had been back alone in the UK for about four months and the staff arranged a free ticket with Cathay Pacific to bring her secretly to my farewell party, an emotional moment.

In the meantime the weather has been rather poor since last Sunday with lots of rain and on writing this today the ground outside the caravan is a rather soggy and we understand that the weather should improve again tomorrow but we shall see.

So, for the past few days we have been filling our day with photo scanning, shopping and enjoying nice food with the odd BBQ thrown in for good measure so nothing really exciting but as Noel wanted to get all the photos scanned we are pleased to have finished this part of the job. The next part is to look at the photos and try to improve them by cropping and digitally enhancing them but really that can only be done back at home on a large screen with a much faster computer and this will also take some time plus collecting the hours of cine films which have now been transferred to a digital format so still lots of work to do yet on this and still not sure if we will complete prior to our departure on our next trip.

Noel has also given the trusty Acer notebook a clean out of old files as it was getting rather slow and now its much better. Last night we watched the German made film called DOWNFALL which is all about the last few months of Hitler in Berlin and his belief he could still win the war and blaming everybody else when it did not work out. A really excellent but long film but well acted and the guy who played Hitler was very good and as many people a certain scene in the film has been used countless times to talk about other events.

I am writing this report on Wednesday morning and we are booked for lunch in one of our favourite restaurants up in the hills in Beamont-en-auge and we have a table booked at the Le Petit Beaumont Hotel and Restaurant and we have actually stayed there some years with friends whilst touring France

Well that's it for the moment whilst the on/off meeting between Trump and Kim seems to be back on again and at the same Hotel in Sentosa Island, Singapore that Jennifer and I stayed at many, many years ago when on our way home from NZ and OZ visit.