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.

The Condescension Of The Clouds, Cambridge, United Kingdom, 4th Feb 2007

Not particularly very foggy, but my first such experience in Cambridge. (Jun Ming, who stayed over for a while during last vacation, recalled a day when visibility was less than two hundred metres.)

Your teachers tell you fog is created out of condensation, and they aren't wrong.

But it's really condescension. A cloud's way of saying, take that, you fools, we're more than just white and fluffy!

It really looked like that! My hand was (as) steady (as it could get)!

The Guildhall, just next to the market square, looking very much like a scene out of a Charles Dickens novel.

Spring In Winter On The South Coast - Eastbourne, United Kingdom, 3rd February 2007

Perched precariously atop a groin, built to prevent beach erosion.

I've been asked before why for somebody suffering an acute fear of heights, I enjoy having photographs of myself taken in positions that would induce the severest bouts of vertigo.

The answer, I think, can be found in the name of my affliction. Acrophobia is described in many dictionaries as irrational.

These groins are erected right beneath the very noses of the famous chalk seacliffs of the English South Coast.

I haven't read Margaret Mitchell's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, but I can pronounce now I know what going with the wind feels like. It's as close as it gets, grammatically at least.

Weight-watchers would have been pleased to be in my shoes. It'd be Nature's endorsement of their dietary successes.

On the slopes of Beachy Head, Britain's tallest chalk seacliff at 156 metres. Left to right: Joe, Jasmine, Michelle, Kelvin, myself, Vivian and Clarence.

Clarence and myself, making a mockery of the gravity of the situation.

Eastbourne, chalk cliffs, beaches et al.

We now know Dali really started off with signposts.

And that he didn't particularly like tourists very much.