Sleepy Ely, United Kingdom, 11th Mar 2007

The imposing Ely Cathedral in the background, ponies and rams grazing in the foreground. Classic small-town landscape. The octagonal tower you see on the right hand side is what differentiates Ely Cathedral from its counterparts in the rest of the country, and gives it the appearance of an ancient keep casting its grim shadow on the surrounding countryside.

Sun and stained glass combine to vivify the interior of God's House.

Suddenly it felt like I was in Spain all over again.

The splendour of these cathedrals is really quite astounding. One must not forget the sweat and blood of the many who laboured to this end. I don't fancy the idea of having so much money converted into gold and jewel when bread and milk were more needful.

But I might be taking it out of context. Religion and politics went hand in hand in those days, and cathedral-building might constitute some form of community involvement projects for the whole town, and vital both to its cohesion and its economic viability.

The house of Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of all of England for a time. If you haven't heard of him before, he went into the record books as the person who lobbed the King's head off during the English Civil War in the seventeenth century.

The River Ouse.

Jie Chao and Pui Man (the two are the ones placing their orders in the picture, the former on the left, the latter on the right) very kindly treated me to ice-cream , which was more cream than ice. Still, it was very good.

Crows roosting.

Warm In A Windy Place, Seaford, Cuckmere Haven, & The Seven Sisters, United Kingdom 10th Mar 2007

Colourful beach shacks lining the shoreline. I suppose these will be filled in summer.

Cuckmere Haven, and one of the most picturesque views I've had thus far in Britain (to be fair, I haven't been about a lot, but this is really quite something). Not very often the world falls nicely into place, at your feet, and you find good company and scenery next to each other.

When it does happen, however, smile and take a picture.

Rolling meadows, criss-crossed by rivulets, where I stopped aging for about an hour.

Walkers in the wind.

I have a rather inconvenient proclivity of taking the road less travelled. The experience was everything Robert Frost would have approved of, excepting the fact of course that I lacked that lauded appetite for derring-do. I don't consciously seek danger, but somehow I always end up crashing headlong into it, even if it seems I'm walking with my eyes wide open.

The Seven Sisters, pictures of which you should find in a standard secondary school geography textbook. And there it was, right before my eyes. Seeing something in a picture book and viewing it in situ are two entirely different experiences. The former yields wonder nonetheless, but the latter, for want of more inspirational phrasing, simply blows you away.

Beachy Head, and Eastbourne, where if you'll recall I visited a few weeks back lie just around the bend in the distance.

I can hardly believe the fact that I managed to walk from Seaford to within touching distance of Eastbourne.

Seaford beneath the westering sun.

How To Locate Excellent Photo Spots (Don't Try This At Home, Or Anywhere Else!)

Step 1: get to the highest point possible.

Step 2: look confident. And smile.

Step 3: look confident.

Step 4: look confident, and look harder, too, for a way down.

Step 5: trust in Providence, and jump.

Disclaimer: success not guaranteed.

Coming Between The Sun And The Moon, Cambridge, United Kingdom, 3rd Mar 2007

As with all uninformed ignoramuses, I only learnt of the lunar eclipse when I saw more than a few curious gazes drawn skywards outside the Great St Mary's. I was earlier wondering how it was that the full moon had dwindled into a mere sliver of light, and was working hard to descry the outline of that most fortuitously-shaped cloud which had left unobscured a perfect sickle!

Sunny Hunny - Hunstanton, United Kingdom, 3rd Mar 2007

Pooh strayed from the Hundred Acre Wood, and found out to his uttermost chagrin that Sunny Hunny was but a nickname given to this Victorian seaside resort.

I knew there wasn't a lot of honey to be found within a hundred acres in the first place!

What we went to Hunstanton to see - those layered sandstone cliffs in the distance.

The carcass of an iron vessel, clad in the brown and green of neglect and blending almost seamlessly into the beachscape.

We were just rather disappointed it wasn't a few hundred years older.

Makeshift lagoons beached by the retreating tide.

The wind was predictably quite strong where we were, and this made for a very bizarre sight. I cannot really decide here whether it was that these blokes were successful kiteflyers, or rather that the kites were unsuccessful in taking their masters out for a sortie.

The local lighthouse, now fallen into disuse, viewed through what's now left of St Edmund's Chapel, also no longer serviceable in the least bit.

It's been a long cold lonely winter, and it seems like years since it's been clear. But here comes the sun.

London Lights, London, United Kingdom, 23rd & 25th Feb 2007

London lights, looking eastwards from Waterloo Bridge.

Trees of blue on the South Bank, on a most evocative walk.

Daylight, as I struck gold in Chinatown on Sunday, and that's me posing smugly with my prize - a box of Koka Oriental-style Stir-fried Noodles.

Hoi Polloi Hobnobbing at Bath, United Kingdom, 24th Feb 2007

Tantalisingly was the closest we ever got to the famed Roman baths.

Grandpa's road, and Grandpa's army.

The Royal Crescent, a row of Georgian luxury houses.

Who needs roses when life can be a bed of daffodils?

Preaching the inalienable truth to the obdurate.

The gulls' great feud with the chimneysweeps, another of the world's intractable rivalries.

Ivan plays (with) the ukelele by the Avon.

Recreating Familiarity, London, United Kingdom, 17th Feb 2007

Our protagonist, Mr Clarence Lim, being led helplessly to his surprise, all the while blindfolded, spun remorselessly like a teacup gone off its rockers, and bundled hither and thither by very thoughtful well-wishers.

The very thoughtful well-wishers.

A group shot of the MOE Scholars who attended the celebrations, the reddish 1970s hue is owed to the fact that my camera was set accidentally at the Sunset function.

Bucolic London in Richmond-upon-Thames, United Kingdom 17th Feb 2007

One reason why the dog is often known as a man's best friend. Who amongst your friends would plunge without forethought into water to retrieve an article thrown at the merest fancy? You'd count yourself extremely lucky if you had even one such friend.

How, in that event, do you then show your appreciation? Buy him a leash, put him on it, and tug on it should he ever decides to jump off after a random twig again. It'll keep him dry.

Stags! What we, or I, rather, came to Richmond Park for.

Signs erected all over the place tell visitors 'they move with great speed and strength'. I need no proper warning. Those antlers are quite enough to keep me away.

Nothing completes a scene out of the country like running water does.

I felled a tree once before. That was two and a half years ago in Brunei when I was still in the army. We were each given a machete, and told to clear enough room to put up our hammocks. A sapling (standing at about three or four metres in height) stood between where I wanted to tie either end of the hammock, and it took me a good fifteen minutes of rather furious hacking to get it out of the way.

Would probably have taken me more than fifteen minutes for the one above.

The duck pond in the Isabella Plantation, where Michelle fell under the spell of evil mandarin ducks.

Peering through the looking glass. It's a straight line of sight where I'm looking to St Paul's Cathedral some miles away.

The Thames, not a river you'd associate with trees and meadows.

It Snows In Cambridge But Not In Stockholm, Cambridge, United Kingdom, 8th Feb 2007

That would be Main Court, St Catharine's College. Now you'd seen it in both the light of day and the dark of night, and in mist and snow.

This is only the second ever snowfall in my life, and the first comparatively heavy one. (Days later, everybody was asking if I played in the snow, which they did, and to which my pithy reply was, however implausibly, that I was reading.) I met Niklas, a Swede historian, in lecture and he remarked at how surprised he was to experience snow here and not in his native Stockholm, which was a good ten degrees of latitude north of where we are.

King's Parade, and the thoroughfare that passes King's, Trinity and St John's Colleges, arguably the three most attractive colleges in Cambridge.

I've shown you ducks perplexed by the snowfall. This creature is a moorhen, wary and highly suspicious (and positively freezing, I should think) amidst a white blanket of unfamiliarity.

Probably has to do with their gait. Ducks waddle, and that doesn't come off very well as a swagger. A moorhen, on the other hand, skulks, very much like an armed farmer sinisterly concealing himself from heedless trespassers. And I would want to go within a mile of these jealously territorial birds if I was no more taller than a foot.

Just a little creek in the Backs, along Queen's Road. The Backs is so named because because it stretches along the rear-sides of Queen's, King's, Clare, Trinity and St John's Colleges.

Only a thin layer on the surface is frozen. Yet one would still freeze if one fell in, and I speak not in the figurative sense.

The King's College Fellows' Garden, looking every bit like a scene out of Siberia.

Those would be my footprints. The very discernable leftward turn in the nearest footprint would be me swinging around to take a photograph.

Empty stalls in Market Square at two in the afternoon when business would normally go on as usual, and an excellent example of how it is possible within the advertising industry for creativity to be perfectly compatible with economy.