Flu Recovery (Week Three)

This recovery is slow. I have had a three-day fever followed by a week's weakness before, but I was a sprightly lad in my late fifties when that happened, so it wasn't quite as lingering as this. I've gone out and about three days this week - Thursday was too wet - but I've avoided the mile walk to and from the local station and have been driving into Richmond instead. When I've come back, I have dived under the blankets to rest for an hour or so. I've watched so much You Tube over the last three weeks, the algorithm has run out of suggestions.

I have, however, understood my brief obsession with wild camping videos, and not just because the ones the algorithm served me were from Katie Roams and WIldBeare. Nope, it's all about building a cozy wrapped-up, place to sleep. Just like I do on the couch during the day and the bed at night. Except they have rain hammering on a thin plastic tent and the outside temperature is way lower than I could sleep in. And the ground is damp.

Katie Roams

WildBeare

In the UK, wild campers need the permission of the land-holders to camp on their land. However, camping without permission is a civil offence, not a criminal one, so the Police are not involved, leaving the landowner would need to prove that Katie Camps had camped on their land and then bring an action in civil court. Which means they would need to actually catch her doing so, and that would mean sending people to search for near-camouflaged tents in the hours between dusk and dawn. Which is not going to happen. Because the two rules of wild camping are: a) arrive late, leave early; b) leave no trace. Follow those and the odds of being caught are de minimus. This may explain why the sites these You Tubers choose are, at least in the UK, so generic. One recognisable landmark, and the video is proof enough.

I want my brain back.

A Brief History of My Fever and Flu

As far as I can work out - given three days' incubation - it was someone on SouthWest Trains on the 27th of November. According to one article about what pupils in various schools were being sent home for, I had three options: Covid, the H3N2 flu virus, and something called RSV (Respiratory syncytial virus). It can't be Covid, because the Government told me I would be immune if I had my jabs back in 2021, which I did. RSV is apparently always with us in winter, but the symptoms didn't match. That leaves the H3N2 virus, which gave me a three-day fever and left me weak as kitten for days afterwards: I lost four kilos in four days, and as of writing, have only got one of them back. I came down on Sunday 30th November and didn't leave the house until Sat 6th December when I went out to do some food shopping. For the next week, I managed to go out for a half-hour walk each day. Walking on level ground was okay, but steps and stairs required a rest half-way up. This last week I have made some trips by train (the persistent winter cough is calm at the moment, unless I get a severe change of air). Stairs and steps still need half-speed.

In the meantime, my brain is functioning at about 80% for 5-6 hours a day and then sends me to sleep on the sofa under blankets or to bed at night. (Eating too heavily at lunchtime also sends me into nap mode.) Routine stuff got done, but anything requiring thought and actual decision-making is still on hold. Yes, I have fallen asleep with far too many You Tube videos droning away in the background.

The bureaucrats (some of whom are doctors and "health experts") are saying that it's all our fault for not getting the "flu jab" earlier in the autumn, despite the fact that this year's flu jab is useless against H3N2. Flu jabs are developed to counteract whatever goes around Australia and the Far East in our summer (their winter) and that works about seven years out of ten. The other three, we have a "bad winter flu". I have had the flu jab once: I felt like c**p for two days afterwards and caught a really bad cold afterwards. So that works.

2025 seems a long way away already. A fever will do that to you.

Millennium Bridge

I'm not sure why I like this. Maybe because the perspective feels wonky? What with Blackfriars Bridge seeming underneath the Millennium Bridge. And all those people standing on something that looks unsupported?

Upgrading the Paranormal Telecaster With Creamery Pickups

Okay. I have the valve amp. I have the fancy wah-wah pedal and the Helix FX. I have double-humbuckers (McCarty 594 SE). I have the Paranormal Telecaster, which ticks so many boxes (Tele bridge pickup, Jazzmaster neck pickup, Tele controls, offset body, out-of-phase and in-phase series and parallel). What next? According to the Guitar Nerd Scorecard, at some point I have to change the pickups on one or more of my guitars. Not going to be the PRS, so it had to be the Paranormal. The stock pickups were a tad fragile and rough round the edges unless the treble was turned down, and if the treble was turned up, the sound was spikey and thin. There was a general lack of finesse about the sound.

The standard upgrade for pickups is Seymour Duncan. There are others, which are mostly about getting a more "high-performance" sound, and are American. As is Seymour Duncan. Dylan Talks Tone - who is an American pickup maker - said we should a) buy his, or b) support our local pickup maker. So off to Google I went, looking for UK pickup makers. There are more than I thought there would be. They have well put-together websites and descriptions of their products. Also very similar prices, none of which are too far from Seymour Duncan's. Guitar reddit had no firm views, so I went someone from the top of the search list who offered some "vintage" voiced pickups.

This was Jamie at Creamery Pickups. I sent him a mail with a photo of the Paranormal and an explanation of what I wanted, and my guess that what I needed was his Classic 58 Jazzmaster neck and the Vintage Nocaster bridge pickups. A couple of mails later, I put in an order on his website, sent the money and sat back for the four-five weeks it takes. (All of them gave that kind of lead time.) Right on time Jamie sent them by mail, and I hustled them and the Paranormal into the guys at Richmond Guitar Workshop (no website, only Facebook page). They fitted the pickups and gave the Paranormal, a clean-up, re-string and fitted a better selector switch and cable socket.

Did it make a difference? Oh hell yeah. Jamie's pickups are rich and full, as in... oh so that's what a Jazzmaster neck pickup is supposed to sound like and ah, a Tele bridge that sounds clear but not twangy. Turn up the treble on the Jazzmaster neck and it reveals a complicated sound, put the treble near the middle and it's clear and full. I can crank the volume up and run it into the Princeton at about 3.5 and get a satisfying bedroom-volume sound. It's now a "proper-sounding" instrument, rather than a cheap (it is a Squier) curiosity.

London Bridge Concourse

So this week's sunny day was Monday, and on my way to lunch, I went to London Bridge and then down and across Tower Bridge. Nice walk, even if the wind was chilly halfway across Tower Bridge. Anyway... London Bridge has a new clock for people to meet under, there's an obligatory Passenger Asleep On A Bench, and the People On The Escalator shot may be one of my favourites from this year already. The last two are the kind of architectural angle-y shots I like. Despite its heavy use over quite a few years, the concourse is still clean and shiny. Somebody cares, or maybe somebody else wrote it into the contract.

Autumn

 

Fujinon XF 18-135 - If I Get A Zoom

So I went back over what I had taken in Photos. Because Photos has the Get Info panel, and that tells you the lens details - at least if the data was available.

Sometime in 2009 I started using the Canon Powershot A590 IS. The lens is said to be 5.8 - 23.2mm, and the Canon specs say that the 35mm equivalent is 35-140mm. I seemed to have stopped using it towards the end of 2011, which is when I stopped going on holidays, and switched to using a C510 phone camera and then the iPhone 4S, sometime in 2012.

In 2013 I started using a Canon EOS1100D, which was an APS-C camera with a 35mm equivalent of 24-80mm. It's a chunky bit of kit.

Sometime in 2014 until sometime in 2018 I started using a Panasonic DMS TZ-40, with a 35mm equivalent of 24-480mm, some of which may be digital zoom. I used the iPhone SE camera for a while between 2019 and 2021.

At the end of 2021 started using the Fujifilm X-E4, with the 50mm-equivalent lens, which I swapped in late 2024 for the 40mm-equivalent pancake lens. Because it's easier to carry and made a change.

None of those cameras were expensive by the standards of the time. The EOS110D was about half the price of the X-E4, which shows in the quality of the Fuji kit. I still have the EOS1100D and the DMS TZ-40.

That Get Info panel also tells you the focal length of the zoom lens. Which is super-useful.

(All sizes are now 35mm-equivalent unless otherwise mentioned.)

The majority of the shots I have kept are taken at one end of the range or the other of the lens. The more zoom it offered, the more I seemed to look for shots that would use that much zoom. A lot of the landscape / cityscape shots I liked enough to keep were either around 35mm or 120mm. Some went the full 480mm the TZ-40 would allow. I feel that 82mm is really just cropping the picture in camera, whereas 100-120mm is a different picture. The silly focal lengths of the TZ-40 were a bit of a spoiler. The shots that have intermediate focal lengths are really me cropping in camera. (Cropping in camera is not a Bad Thing: the picture quality is higher than a cropped picture would be.) All the people shots I like were 120mm or more. Do that with a small camera and no-one will notice. Try to get a 120mm zoom shot of someone sitting a few feet away with an APS-C lens and they will notice. That takes a certain amount of social skills I might not have.

The Fujinon zooms that are not too large, too heavy or too silly, are the XF 16-80, the XF 18-135, the XF 18-120, the XF 16-55, and the XF 18-55. The 18-120 has internal zoom (which is cool), but Fuji says that it is really for videographers. Shame. The x-55's are not zoomy enough: 55mm feels like cutting-out-clutter-around-the-subject. I can see why portrait snappers use it. That leaves the 16-80 and the 18-135. Both are about the same (second-hand) price, size and weight. Both lenses extend during zoom, which is a little... naff, but unavoidable.

Looking at my pictures, the more zoom I have, the more zoomy pictures I can see and will take. On that basis, the answer is the 16-135.

So why am I not rushing onto the Interwebz to buy one?

Zooming is a little like photography candy: it's sweet and addictive. It's one reason I deliberately bought a prime when I got the X-E4. Taking shots with a prime between 35mm and 50mm is a discipline. Anyone can zoom in on a neat detail, and I have enough shots to prove I can do it well, but composing a whole shot is much more of a challenge. So there's that. You know, suffering for my art. And this whole exercise is assuming I am buying second-hand. New prices for these lenses are... I mean, you can a Player Series Strat for that kind of money. It's outside my costs-as-much-as-a-256GB-iPad (£429) rule.