This was pure chance. Tamara and I were coming along the covered walkway at Covent Garden. In the distance I heard people shouting and saw men in yellow hazard suits. I figured it was either a protest, an emergency, or someone advertising something. It turned out to be a happening for Run, a zombie thriller that describes itself as the first independent Black British zombie thriller.

It was about 4:00pm and the light was fading. A glance at my camera and I just knew I had to crank up the ISO. Things were moving fast and the people were coming towards me, so I just spun the dial and didn’t exactly look at what ISO the dial had landed on.

I see now from the EXIF data that it was ISO 2000. I also see that I shot at 1/30th of a second at f7.1. If I had had my brain in gear more I would have opened the aperture so I could have a faster shutter speed.

But that is the thing with street shooting – it happens fast.

The man in red in the photo called out to me to ask if I wanted to take a photo and of course I did. He told me he was the producer of the film and handed me a survivor pass that confirmed I had been cleared of zombie infection.

The premiere of Run, a short film with a run time of 30 minutes, is on Monday 26th October at Genesis Cinema at 93-95 Mile End Road, Whitechapel, London E1 4UJ. The blurb says for the film says:

London has fallen. Food is gone. Hope is fading. The undead roam the streets.
Two survivors, having run out of food, set out on a dangerous supply run.
After encountering the infected they’re separated, both forced to survive alone long enough to find their way back to each other in one piece.

The photo above links to the image file, so click it, and maybe click again and you can see it bigger.

Fenton House is in Hampstead in London. It is now owned by the National Trust, given to it by Mr Fenton who made his fortune in Latvia and retired to this house towards the end of his life.

It is a modestly grand house, but what caught my eye for a photo was this corner of the garden with greenhouse, high wall, water butt, and wooden gate.

The house is made interesting by the collection of twenty-three harpsichords rescued in time from another house in London that was bombed in the Second World War.

Tamara and I went on a tour in the house of the instruments being played by a man who knew oodles about the history of the instruments.

He knew who made them and the variations in their layout and capabilities, and also about the development and waning of the harpsichord as an instrument against the coming of the piano.

He played several of the instruments and it was a magnificent tour – really memorable. And all the more special for Tamara because she plays the piano and is a good pianist.

These are men, presumably Yemeni men, on Whitehall in London yesterday protesting the Houthis killing the civilian population of Yemen, destroying the country’s resources, and dragging children off to be child soldiers.

They are asking for international action to protect the country and the civilian population.

In case you are wondering at the similarity of the the flag to the black-white-red descending imperial tricolour of the Third Reich before it was phased out on the mid-thirties and replaced with the swastika flag – the flag of Yemen is the other way up, with red-white-black descending.

The flag dates fom 1990, when North Yemen and South Yemen came together to create the Republic of Yemen. The design though was copied directly from the Arab Liberation flag, which was created in 1952 after the Egyptian Revolution.

And Egypt still has the red-white-black descending but with the golden eagle of Saladin against the white central band.

Today, variations of the red-white-black descending are also used as the national flags of Iraq and Sudan, and were formerly used by Syria and Libya.

I borrowed a camera to test it, and then returned it to the shop.

Now where? So I decided to walk up to Covent Garden, and at the station was a small crowd listening to poets – poets of the Underground. They were people who had had their poems published on tube trains and at tube stations.

I love the poems. Some I know, having seen and read them several times.

Luckily I had my Fuji X100F with me, and took these shots of the poets. In this first shot below, not the best of shots, the woman is describing how they have collaborated with London Regional Transport, now renamed Transport for London (TFL) and that the positivity throughout had been a delight.

The next two shots are of Valerie Bloom reading a poem from her book They Sent a Cat to Saturn.

Finally, I didn’t manage to take a shot of the woman who is standing behind the white-haired woman in the first shot. I heard her recite a poem and she was so nice I forgot to lift my camera.

Tamara and Madelaine and I went to London Zoo for a pre-booked capybara experience. That means we got to sit with them and stroke them (Gizmo, a male and Kiwi, a female) and just look at these big peaceful animals inches away from us.

Facts

Capybaras are rodents, the world’s largest rodent, and a big adult can weigh up to 65kg, which is the weight of a small adult human.

They are known as the most chilled-out animals on the planet, closely related to guinea pigs. They have four front toes and three back toes, just like guinea pigs, and they have a split upper lip like guinea pigs.

Just like guinea pigs, they excrete pale-coloured caecum pellets along with olive-coloured faecal pellets.

Caecum pellets are made in the caecum, which is a huge pouch between the small and large intestines. The pouch takes up three quarters of the whole intestine in a capybara and it is where microbes break down tough plant matter to be re-ingested because it is full of protein.

Capybaras stick close to water because that is their escape route if attacked by jaguars. On the downside, that makes them vulnerable to attack by caimans and anacondas. To combat attacks they live in groups of between ten to twenty animals and gather around to present a tougher target and keep the young in the middle of the group.

In the wild capybaras raise the hairs on their bodies so that small birds can groom them and remove insects. The capybaras we saw reacted the same way when we scratched their backs, with their hairs standing straight up while they chilled out with their eyes almost closed.

Their hair is really strong and tough, and down between the hairs we could see their ribbed, bobbled hide that, if anything, looks like elephant hide.

Life is more complicated than we used to think as children. Without the billions of microbes in their gut, capybaras wouldn’t be able to extract nutrients out of plant matter, and without birds to peck insects from their hide they would be attacked slowly by burrowing insects.

And that makes me think about where one animal starts and ends and exactly what it is. Of course, we see the big animal – but below the surface it is part of an ecosystem.

What do birds think when they land on a capybara and it opens channels down its hairs so the birds can eat? Are they friends? Or do they think capybaras are just giant dinner plates providing a dish of insects on command?