Julie's Boggle

Our few early experiences with cameras and diving were notably a little sad. Our first camera was an el-cheapo model, bought in a dive shop in Cairns before our Barrier Reef trip. We filled the first reel with grainy reef shots, some photos of the dolphins we met on the way back to Cairns, and photos from the Club pool.

Having recharged the film, we carried the camera down to Weymouth for a club dive. Tom struggled with it on the first dive, finding it quite distracting, and on the second dive, the camera’s underwater housing flooded. And for a long time, that was the end of the diving photography.

Tom’s resistance to suggestions that we get another camera with an underwater housing remained strong for more than a year. He was adamant that he didn’t want to go “diving with a photographer”. (Because everyone knows that photographers faff about for ages taking pictures instead of getting on with the dive.) But 5 days of the Red Sea, and a boatload of amateur photographers showing off their photos cured him of that.

So the other day we headed over to Cameras Underwater who have a counter within the Embankment branch of Ocean Leisure. My existing camera (which doesn’t have an underwater housing option) is a Fuji, and the top of their new range looked quite good. So before we went, we investigated one camera – the Fuji FinePix F11. The staff at Cameras Underwater helpfully gave us three to play with: the Fuji and two of their Olympus range. Wow, too many choices.

We went away to do some more homework.

While researching, we found a superb site called Cameras.co.uk which had all sorts of data and detailed reviews on all the cameras we’d seen. And the conclusion: each of them had one specific flaw that seemed to rule it out. From there we moved on to the rest of the Cameras Underwater range, and came up with the Canons. The reviews on these seemed more positive…

So the next day it was back to Cameras Underwater to test-drive the Canon A540. This one had a lot of perks to it, we liked the feel and the operation, and the price was right. So we bought it! And the underwater housing that goes with it.
(Click here to see the review on Cameras.co.uk.)

We’ve had lots of fun playing with the camera so far. It has loads of manual options which have kept Tom busy for hours, and the simple point-and-click mode works really well too. (I’ll be sad to give up my great little Fuji FinePix A240, but happily we have found a good home for it.)

On club night at the pool, we had our first experimental snorkelling experience with the Canon and can report that all seems to be good on that side as well.

So… bring on the next dive!

A little while back, we took advantage of the lovely long summer evenings to go a bit out of our way to find our evening meal. In this case our destination was the Gourmet Burger Kitchen in Bayswater – about 15 minutes walk from Notting Hill Tube.

The GBK chain has been spreading like wildfire over London this past year. I had read a few reviews so I was mostly prepared for how things work there. Basically it’s a curious cross between a pub and a restaurant. A waiter shows you to a table, and gives you a menu but then you have to go and order at the counter, remembering to give them your table number (which cunningly is not marked anywhere on said table). You pay at the counter and then go and sit down, drinks and food are later brought to your table.

The scope of the menu is quite wide given that it’s all variations on burgers. It was quite hard to choose just one from the list! In the end I had the Kiwi-Burger, with pineapple, beetroot, cheese and egg (!), and Tom had a blue-cheese-sauce burger. We ordered one of their milkshakes, which come in big silver milkshake containers like the ones they use to have at the Tropicale in Durban.

Sadly, the milkshake was an area that rather let them down. Although I’d seen them putting real icecream in, they obviously don’t use very much of it, and they make up for it with some sort of thickening agent. So the milkshake looks thick and frothy, but acts runny and the foam is suspiciously springy. And it has that artificial “thick-mouth” feel when you drink it. To crown it all off, the chocolate flavour wasn’t very realistic – so big thumbs down on the milkshake.

The burgers were pretty good though. They arrive with a wooden skewer through them to hold the whole assembly together, and while the presentation isn’t awesome, the food is very tasty, meets most of the requirements of a first-class burger, and hits the spot. And for £16, it was a cheap and cheerful night out.

The week-plus since we got back from Cornwall has flashed by in a blur of work, evenings out and time-consuming admin tasks like photo-organising and dive-log updating.

I’ve been toying with the idea of using one of the online grocery shopping sites for a while now – mostly because for Tom, grocery shopping in his free time is an anathema. So I headed over to Tesco.com to see how easy all of this would be.

It was a bit of an effort to find all of the items on our list – especially dealing with the categories that they group things into – but I eventually had a list and felt ready to go. However the £5 delivery charge was still enough of a sticking point for me not to actually hit the Checkout button…

In the interest of seeing what else was out there, I wandered over to ASDA’s website. And was pleased to discover a loud red and yellow banner on their shopping home page proclaiming free delivery Monday to Thursday for a spend of over £50. Interesting.

Armed with my Tesco prices, and getting used to the whole searching idea, I quickly whipped through our list again. Almost all of the prices were identical to Tesco’s and there was the advantage of the free delivery… Sounded like a winner.

Once I’d decided to go on that one, I then had to contend with the fact that their silly website isn’t FireFox-friendly, and the buttons in the checkout steps wouldn’t talk. Sigh. Over to IE and carry on. As a final insult I discovered that the code to claim the free delivery was different on the checkout page and the homepage! And the one on the checkout page was wrong! Not something that their customer service guys could tell me, something I figured out for myself when I tried again two days later.

I raced home on Thursday night to make sure that I’d be available for the duration of our 18h00 to 20h00 delivery slot. As it turns out, the guy only arrived at 19h45. Fair enough. There were a couple of surprises – one was that they had “swapped out” an unavailable item despite the fact that I had ticked the box marked “no substitutes”. And what they had swapped was a 2-in-1 shampoo and conditioner for two bottles of conditioner! Odd choice. I could have got a refund processed with the driver, but I’d been thinking of buying some conditioner anyway so I kept them. Not two bottles though so in hindsight that was a mistake.

Anyway, along with the close on a dozen shopping bags, all my groceries had arrived (bar one or two that were out of stock.) So, all in all, a fairly successful online shopping experience that I might even repeat sometime! And with every leading grocery store at my fingertips, I might even try Sainsburys next time!

Oh, the other surprises? Well one was that I’d managed to order the world’s biggest box of Coco Pops (800g!) and the other was that the H&S “shampoo for men” item had metamorphosed into regular H&S shampoo. (Not that it makes any real difference I’m sure! )