Last Frame

It's an odd skill to boast of, but I'm fairly good at loading film into a camera. I can load film quickly and efficiently, while standing in a crowded train, or in the middle of other distractions. But most importantly, by pulling very little film ‒ the bare minimum ‒ out of the cassette, I can get the film leader to engage in the take-up spool.

This may not sound like much, but if you pull less film out of the cassette, you can often get 38 or even 39 exposures out of a 36-exposure roll. I like this, because it feels like getting more than my money's worth, like squeezing the last smidgen of toothpaste out of a tube.

After the 36th shot, I expect the film to run out. When it doesn't, it's always a pleasant surprise, and though I'm generally quite economical when shooting film, for the last frame I feel like I can fire off a shot without worrying too much about the end result, because it's free.

Often, the last frame is the best.

This photo was taken in Greenwich Park in London. I like the patterns made by the snow and the branches, and the woman playing with her dog on the hillside. It was the last exposure on the roll, and the last of the dying light. I thought it was the last snow of the season too, but it snowed again this weekend, proving that my spring post was premature.

Shunbun no Hi: Corporate Post-It Haiku 2

Kitchen Gifts

Two recent additions to our kitchen from my last trip to India ‒ both gifts from my grandparents.

The pickle is home-made by my grandmother. She makes various kinds, and stores them in Horlicks jars lined up on windowsills. The stuffed chilli pickle (in picture) is my favourite, though it's not for the faint of heart.

My grandfather bought me the mortar and pestle; he went to the store with a magnet in his pocket so that he wouldn't be cheated. We used to grind spices with the underside of an empty coffee jar, so the mortar and pestle is a definite step up. Some day we may go so far as to get an electronic food processor.

Let Your Soul Delight Itself in Fatness

Wherefore do ye spend money for that which is not bread? ... hearken diligently unto me, and eat ye that which is good, and let your soul delight itself in fatness.

Isaiah 55:2

"Let your soul delight in fatness" is excellent advice which I have, knowingly or unknowingly, been following since early childhood. But of late I have rarely been spending money for that which is bread, because we discovered that baking bread at home is immensely rewarding, and the ingredients required ‒ flour, commercial yeast, salt and lukewarm water ‒ are virtually costless.

We've baked only twice so far, but I love the whole process ‒ the precise measurements, the kneading, gluten on my fingers, the yeast frenziedly feeding on sugar molecules, the physics, chemistry and biology, the miracle of the first rise, the punch down, the second rise, shaping the loaf, scoring the dough, oven spring, the hollow-sound doneness test, the smell of freshly-baked bread from the oven.

Here is a photo of a Sunday brunch with home-baked bread, but also some other things. For it is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but also by cheese (preferably of more than one variety) and tomato soup.

The knife in the photo is the Serrated Knife ‒ one of two knives in our kitchen. The other knife is the smooth-edged Champion Knife, so called because it's sharper and therefore used a lot more. But it turns out that serrated knives ‒ even not-so-sharp ones ‒ work really well on bread. I was thrilled to discover that the Serrated Knife has its uses after all. "The best thing before sliced bread," Anasua called it.

Calcutta, 6:38 am

Our apartment building in Calcutta has a chilchhad, a word which for I don't think there is an English equivalent. It refers to a supra-roof – a raised section higher than the main roof, e.g. the top of a rooftop room.

There are no stairs to our chilchhad; it is accessible only by clambering up a wall. As far as I am aware, no one else goes up to the chilchhad, and once on it, you are higher than the neighbouring windows and rooftops. It has always been my favourite feature of the building.

Among other things, it is good for taking photos of the sunrise.

In a complete volte-face from my earlier stance, The World According to Sroyon will henceforth use straight quotes and not curly quotes (unusually keen-eyed readers may have remarked on the straight-quote don't in the first sentence). I have been thinking about this for a while now, and I have concluded that the curly quotes in Verdana, currently my default font, are just too unsightly. Curly-quote lovers who wish to complain to the management are kindly directed to the comments section.

Dream Tricycle

I got to work early this morning, so once I had finished filing yesterday’s emails and making my to-do list for the day, it was doodle-time.

2 months and 13 days ago, I had a (very pleasant) dream involving a curious vehicle – an old-fashioned penny-farthing, but with two rear wheels. Passengers could stand on the rear axle, but had to backpedal constantly, as one does on a rolling log, to avoid falling off.

My work notebook is filled with sketches of this contraption drawn from various angles, some more detailed than others. Here is a sample.

The black cat did not feature in the dream, and is in the drawing only to show scale.

Guessing the Light

Last weekend I was in Bath, taking photos of snow with a manual camera.

My light meter, like all in-camera light meters, measures reflected light (as opposed to incident light). It is calibrated to assume that all objects are midtone grey, i.e. reflect about 18% of incident light. This works fine in most situations, but when it meters an object that is unusually reflective (such as snow), it is fooled into thinking that there is a great deal more incident light than there actually is. Following the meter reading would therefore result in an underexposed image – grey snow. Taking photos of snow, or other scenes with unusually light or dark tones, thus involves an element of guesswork.

Saha and I often shoot with film, and because film is less forgiving and not all things are midtone grey, it helps not to be wholly reliant on the light meter. To develop a better sense of light (and also for fun), we sometimes play a game. One of us will point at, say, a wall, and call out a film speed and an aperture. For instance, “ISO 200 at f/8.” Then we both guess the shutter speed, and we check it against the light meter.

This photo is from the day Saha and I test-rode tokyobikes in Shoreditch: I over-exposed by one stop to get the right exposure for the light tones.

The label Sports has now been changed to Sports/Games.

Oncethmus and Other Oddities

Some recent articles in the British press, about a government-backed drive to encourage children to learn poetry by heart, reminded me of my schooldays. For each English or Bengali exam, we had to memorise at least five poems, many of which were quite long, or hundreds of years old. On top of that, our teachers insisted – and this strikes me as somewhat unreasonable when I think about it now – that in the exam we reproduce the poem with original punctuation (marks would be deducted for, say, using a dash where the poet had put a semi-colon). It did not help that most poems had seemingly random punctuation, almost as if the poet first wrote up the whole poem, and then thought “Right, what mark of punctuation shall I put at the end of this line?”

Many of us therefore preferred to memorise the punctuation separately, almost like a different, parallel poem. The first verse of The Solitary Reaper, for instance, is the charmingly mellifluous “comma, exclamation, semi-colon, exclamation, comma, semi-colon, nothing, stop.” And who is to say that this is any less poetic than Behold her, single in the field etc.?

***



When I was a child, from reading books I derived certain stereotypical ideas of how people from different countries spoke. The English spoke like Psmith; Americans spoke like the Lone Ranger. Russians were always hatching intrigues in smoky train stations and wrestling with terrible moral dilemmas.

Most of these stereotypes I have now let go of, but when they are conformed to, there is still a moment when I am secretly pleased and I think, “Ah, this is how it should be.” The Dombai zorb ball incident, an otherwise tragic mishap, had such a moment. The Guardian describes it thus:

[The zorb ball] then hurtles leftwards down a ravine. Onlookers watch in horror, one asking: "What's down there?" A voice replies: "Nothing. Catastrophe."

“Nothing. Catastrophe.” Tolstoy would have been proud of that.

***

The other day we were playing Balderdash, and one of the words picked was oncethmus, which means ‘braying’. Later we were discussing possible uses of the word, and Nirmalya’s suggestion was the most popular: “Maybe in the title of a sequel to Silence of the Lambs.”

The same evening, shortly after an intense game of Snatch, the Quaker walked over to the sofa and his eyes alighted on an open page of our vintage cookbook. “Check this out guys, a cooking game!” he exclaimed, only to realise that the chapter in question was about cooking game.

I am thankful, especially in winter, that I know several people in London who like to play board games.