Up early and down to Southampton with Richard on crowded train. Happily he had kept a seat for me on way out from Waterloo to Clapham Junction. Then took Red Jet ferry to Cowes for our meeting with Andrew Morlet, Joss Blèriot and Clare Mucklow of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. delighted to see a seal on the waterfront as we looked for somewhere to have what turned out to be fish and chips.
Great session, after which we headed back towards the ferry. As we walked, I caught a glimpse in a gallery window of a photograph I had seen before in the media or books, and we ducked inside. Proved to be a 1911 Beken photograph of the Susanne – and apparently iconic. Bought a print.
Then was so preoccupied with manoeuvring the print out of the taxi back at the rail station that I left my camera on the back seat. Once home, it wasn’t at first clear where I had left it: on the ferry, in the taxi, in a café at the station, on the train. In any event, several phone calls and an email finally tracked it down via the cab company.
[And, as luck would have it, I was able to pick it up from the delightful driver the following week when in Hampshire on holiday. First time I had been in Southampton for decades. I was first there in the early 1960s to sail from Hamble on the Sperling (yacht appropriated from the Germans at the end of WWII: only facts I can find out about it now are here) with my father, then in the ENDS days am pretty sure I visited Exxon Chemicals at Hythe.]
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