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Isabel and I visited the ‘Decode: Digital Design Sensations‘ exhibition at the V&A – highly recommended and lots of slightly strange interactive fun.

A snap from the trip back

Christmas festivities seemed to go on for a very long time this year, I think we spent almost a week sitting around tables of food with large crowds of family and friends.

It started with Christmas Eve at Eva’s Name Day party. As usual the food and the company were both excellent. Here is a photo of just a part of the feast that Eva had laid on.

Christmas Day was spent with Rosie and Dom and more food and then some pleasant dozing in front of the TV

The next stop was Hackney – more food – and a long and chaotic game of Trivial Pursuits. The photos are here.

Then we gathered at my brother Chris’s new house for our usual sedate Swash family gathering. There were so many of us that we had to have a shift system for eating at the table. The photos are here

The highlight of the evening (it even beat the supremely entertaining secret santa) was a musical interlude when the kids demonstrated their nascent musical skills. Lucky you – here is a video

Next we had Ilse and Mick around for dinner – more good food and good company.

Here is a photo of Ilse brandishing some chocolate nugget

Finally we managed to get to Chris and Janice’s for a small new Year’s Eve gathering – time for a bit more food

We hosted my aunt Joyce’s 80th birthday party at our house last week – and a grand time was had by all.

Photos are here

Isabel and I travelled up to Bridlington at the weekend to meet up with John and Moira to go to a concert by The Specials. The journey up was wild with torrential rain and the motorway was littered with wrecked cars. When we arrived the sea at Bridlington was heaving and I managed to get a few nice shots of the storm waves.

The next day was sunny and windy and we walked out to Flamborough Head.

In the evening we went to the concert. The crowd was predominantly middle aged men, lots of cropped hair, two tone paraphernalia and the odd pork pie hat. The Specials came on with an explosive entry and the crowd went bonkers and several hundred blokes started to leap about  frantically reliving their youth. Isabel and Moria retreated to the balcony but John and I decided to get stuck in and proceed to leap about, crash into people, shout and generally get very hot and sweaty. The Photos are here.

I managed to shoot a bit of video in crowd and here it is. John is in the white T-shirt. The sound is not great because the volume of the band overwhelmed the mike on my little camera.

A generally tremendous evening. The next morning as Isabel watched me climbing rather creakily out of bed she gently sang “You did much to much much too old….”

We went to Debbie and Annette’s hugely enjoyable  joint birthday party at the weekend and I managed to shoot some photos of lots of old friends partying. I used the compact camera and the light was really difficult so I have rendered them as black and whites so that the image shortcomings look arty. The photos are here.

I shot this pleasing panorama of the Thames today using my iPhone from the balcony of the Tate Modern. This photo is actually made up of several photos shot on the iPhone and then stitched together into a single panoramic photo using software on the iPhone itself – very clever and great fun.

Jane Grant held a party dedicated to drinking margaritas and celebrating her birthday in passing. The food was great and the company delicious. I decided to process the photos from the party as Black and Whites, partly because I am just really into B&W photography at the moment but also because the colour information in photos taken in low light with a compact camera (as these were) is often poor and thus a distraction . The photos are here.

We gathered for a family barbecue at my brother’s flat in Caledonian Road at the weekend. It was also a chance to say goodbye to the place, scene of many a family gathering over recent years, because in a few weeks Chris and his family will be moving on. The photos are here.