Littlehampton Camera Club and Nabokov’s Blues

My new detector arm cuff arrived from the U.S. on Tuesday, so I have been catching the morning low tides to try it out, finding two pound coins and a 1933 sixpence.

I gave a talk to the Littlehampton Camera Club last night titled ‘The  Maldives – a Coral Reef Paradise’. It seemed to go down well as I had plenty of questions at the end. I met another underwater photographer, Wendy, and it was good to chat with her as she and her husband travel to exotic dive locations regularly. I used PowerPoint as usual which I find easy to produce and edit. I had music on a separate CD player rather than embedding in PowerPoint – Pan Flutes by the Ocean by Ken Davis, which I purchased in Australia years ago. I attended a meeting  at the same club years ago with Bruce Bailey when a professional underwater photographer gave a fantastic 3D underwater show.

A bad car week – a Surrey pot hole on Sunday cost me a new wheel and tyre - £322, then found an expensive dent by the fuel cap which was not there Sunday when I last put fuel in. I I noticed it last night and will probably leave it as the paint is not damaged.

“I found it and I named it, being versed

 in taxonomic Latin; thus became

 godfather to an insect and its first

 describer — and I want no other fame.”

– from “A Discovery by Vladimir Nabokov, New Yorker, May 15, 1943

Sussex Butterfly Conservation posted a link to a fascinating article in the New York Times about Vladimir Nabokov, who apart from being the author of Lolita, was a leading Lepidopterist in his spare time. Like many brilliant people he was not recognised by his peers. His hypothesis of the distribution of  Polyomattus blues from Europe and Asia to the New World in five waves, has now been validated by DNA evidence exactly as he postulated.