I’ve had my camera two years but only recently realized it can hold hundreds of photos if I put in a larger memory card. Just as well, because I was able to take some beautiful photos of a recent visit to the island where I spent my teenage years, the Isle of Wight. Here’s a little gallery to start with, covering the ferry trip across the Solent, that busy waterway which separates the Island from the mainland whose ports include Southampton and Portsmouth.
Our ferry nears Fishbourne. The one you see in the photo is one coming the other way.
We pitched our tent at East Cowes, near a park on the shore, just beyond the bottom left corner of the aerial photo. This picture taken from the tent next morning shows a view of West Cowes across the River Medina.
In my next I hope to provide an account mingling the memories of 54 years ago (when I lived in East Cowes) with the memories of our recent trip. It may take several posts, actually. One of them will be about Queen Victoria, who spent most of her widowhood in Osborne House, at East Cowes. Another will be to commemorate Septimus Leslie Blackett Carr Charlton, previously referred to in this blog as Blackett. I hope. If the Muse favours the enterprise.
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PS This was the first time I published my stepfather’s full name, and must have been the means whereby his grandson found this blog and contacted me in the comments—see this post
a wayfarer’s notes 
clicking on the pictures of Portsouth harbour you can see in the back ground my favourite place for watching the world go by. I was up there last weekend taking some photos looking towards the Island. It is lovely to see the opposite perspective almost as though we were taking pictures looking towards each other.
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Is it that tower that you mean? What is it called?
I find the Solent exciting to watch at any time day or night. Or to listen to, when tucked up warm in bedroom or tent. Or to smell. East Cowes has acres of rank seaweed at low tide, that festers like a blocked drain.
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Are you going to publish any of those pictures, Lady IR?
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“kites?”.. have 60 hours or so in “gliders” but my log-book is not current. Have looked at attempting “hang gliders”, and “para-sailing” – even “free-fall” parachuting, but current personal economics seem to preclude that bit. Still a dream, though.
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Vincent I have never yet been up the tower, it was the hill in the background that I enjoy. I have published a few of my photos but unfortunately my camera is only a cheap one so they are not as impressive as yours.
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Para-sails, that is the other thing I thought the kites were, & it was puzzling not to see the distinctive outline of a human being hanging from any of them.
Yes, Davo, it is a dream. I'd planned to have a hot-air balloon trip (easiest of them all, especially as a paying passenger!) when I was 60, but for a start the finances weren't there.
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Good morning Lady Ir. Yes, the hill in the far distance. I think I have seen some of your photos from there & played a guessing game as to the coast you were showing, & won.
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[…] stop cloaking it in and spell out his full name, Septimus Leslie Carr Blackett Charlton: see this post. And thus was flung a letter in a bottle, into the oceans of memory and cyberspace, from one […]
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