Robin Waddell

I'm not at all sure in what order these pictures were taken, but will consult Prof Kendall next time we commune. Scruffiness and length of hair is a good guide, but this was the 1960's, when traditional standards were being abandoned anyway.

We did wash and shave (not the latter in my case) occasionally, but I don't think any of us got our hair cut the whole time we were there – this caused adverse comment later on: taunts of "Hey mister, you boy or girl?" were common, and one man threw down some money on the table at a café in Salonika, saying "Hey mister, you get a haircut". Needless to say, I got two shots of ouzo instead.

There are at least another couple of my Abu Dhabi photographs lurking in a packing-case, and I'll dig them out in due course.

The drawback to being the token human in a photograph taken by an earth scientist is that pretty often they keep you to the edge of the picture, the scenery or strata being their principal objective, and you're there purely to provide an indication of scale. Or else they don't zoom in on you, because they want to capture the awesome sweep of landscape.

But even if Chris did sometimes succumb to these higher priorities, the quality of his pictures keeps most of the detail even if the image is then quite closely cropped around the narcissistic human.

Khor Al Bazam, probably before shipwreck

Shipwreck, Qala Bay

Wild camping

Mirfa bivouac

Marawah Island

Marawah Island, mangroves

Marawah swamp

Khor Al Bazam

Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads (Episode 94)?

As delicately hinted elsewhere, I was at this time enjoying a 'lost year' between messing-up at the University of Nottingham and starting over at the University of London (where all eventually went well). I had been briefly tempted by a job-offer from the British Political Agent in Abu Dhabi at that time, Col Boustead, and who knows how that might have worked out, as Abu Dhabi went stratospheric?

But an extremely eventful overland journey home, stopping off in Athens for three or four months (of which the full story may one day see the light of day), took me back to crisis-ridden Britain and my relentlessly dysfunctional progenitors.

Four years to a doctorate at the University of East Anglia and Kings College London, followed by another 'lost year', led to three years' post-doctoral at the University of Bristol, and then thirty-three years in IT. Overall, the woefully amateurish managerial approach to IT development, whether academic or commercial, took its toll on my youthful enthusiasm and I was very happy to leave it all behind.

By ducking and diving, weaving and dodging, I've stayed off the ropes sufficiently well to reach a not entirely dishonourable or unrewarded old age, during which I spend most of my time snoozing in a remarkably comfortable armchair.