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Spellings: Greenlandic placename spellings have changed since I was in Greenland. I haven’t updated them here.
Dirty Pictures: Some of these slides spent several years lost in a remote Indian village, hence their condition. I hope you think they’re still worth showing! I took several boxes of slides and a battery-operated slide viewer with me to India, to show to everyone. But you can only show two or three people at a time with a viewer, so people want to hold them up to the light and hand them round while they’re waiting their turn at the viewer – or after the last battery goes flat.
I didn’t manage to round up all the slides. I thought I had, but I realized later that several were missing.
On the next visit, and the next, no-one knew anything about them. But eventually they turned up – somewhat the worse for wear. Considering that there was no suitable container for them available, that the only way people could look at them was by squinting at the tiny things with a bright sky behind them, and that most of the damage that is so obvious at this scale is completely invisible to the naked eye on the slides themselves, I think they were looked after very well.
The Camera: I took all these photos with my Russian Zenit B camera. The Zenith wasn’t bad at all. The build quality was very good, and it never gave me any trouble at all. It was very basic, but very well made, strong and reliable. It was a bit bigger and a lot heavier than the more expensive Japanese models, with less features, and the lenses were slow to change because of the screw mount – but there was less to go wrong, and it had top class optics.
Sadly, I stupidly left it on the Orkney ferry the following year. Realizing I’d done this, I telephoned the ferry company, and they promised to post it back to me. They didn’t even charge me postage. More sadly still, the postman left it on the windowsill of my flat, because it wouldn’t go through the letterbox. My landlord even saw the package there – and, sadly again, didn’t take it in. It had gone by the time I got home.
Back to Greenland? I still want to go back. I didn’t have a lot of freedom there last time – I was with my parents, with every day pretty much planned out in advance. A great trip, but not really freedom – particularly as I was a sort of emergency cover in case my Dad was taken ill. He’d had two heart attacks by then. He was remarkably fit and active considering, but still...
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