h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Don't try to pull the wool over the eyes of anyone who's driven the streets of London as much as I have. It took me a few minutes with the help of Streetview but I found it.
http://maps.google.co.uk/?ll=51.526281,-0.136735&spn=0.000715,0.002064&t=h&z=20&layer=c&cbll=51.526377,-0.136843&panoid=I8tY9KcpseVqpnGMN8FMKg&cbp=13,185.64,,0,1.64

Elementary, my dear Gosho

(squints) What are we looking at here

The street that is used for Baker Street in the Sherlock TV series.

I had heard others say that it wasn't really Baker Street, but they didn't know where it actually was.

Very well done in finding it, Gosho.


Geggs

Hmmm... I haven't watched that, but this gave me an idea. I think I found the hotel I stayed in when I was in London in 1985. It's changed names since then, but this has to be it. It was called the Prince of Wales then, and since it's located at Prince of Wales Terrace, and it's near Kensington High Street across from a corner of Hyde Park, I'm pretty sure this is it.

I was 18. I very nearly lost my virginity in that hotel.

Oh... Here it is, by the way.

http://goo.gl/maps/NOhS6

On our last night in London, a fire broke out across the street, directly behind you from this point of view. Or maybe it was that brown building on the right edge of that view... one of the two.

I was that close to Hyde Park and never went in. They had us booked at several cathedrals, The Tower, Madame Tussaud's at such not. On our last full day there, they gave us a day on our own. I and one other kid made a trek to the Battersea Power Station to take photos. I dropped my wallet outside the Battersea Dogs Home. (It was mailed to my home with the money still in it. Not that there was much, £50, but that was one third of all the money I had brought for a 10 day trip. I recouped some of my losses at the fruit machines at the hotel bars. I noticed a way to beat the machines. I'm still pretty proud of that, but I wish I'd been more aggressive with my bets.

I recently bought a high end scanner so I could restore and print some of those images, but I seem to have lost the best pics. I separated out the strips and misplaced them. I think my pics of the fire are missing as well.

I think I still have all my negatives somewhere. I kept them even though I didn't keep all the photos that were printed from them. For a while I thought I'd lost them in a move but it was one of those instances where something is staring you in the face but you can't see it If I'm ever going to do anything with them I suppose I should do it pretty soon - the number of specialist places where you can get film processed and photos printed is shrinking fast.

Some of them never actually got printed. I went to every day of the England v Australia test match at The Oval in 1981 - the only time I've ever done that - and took dozens of pictures, but towards the end of the match I was on my last roll and when the presentations were being made I came to the end of it, so I kept snapping until the film ran out cos I knew there was extra film at the end of a roll. The film processors only printed the first 36 images of course, but they sent me all the negatives and I still have them. I had a halfway decent camera with some good lenses too - a Zenit EM.

Somebody stole it

What I mean, of course, is that there's extra film at the end of the roll over and above the 36 it says on the packaging.

(Technically speaking, there is maybe one extra frame at the end of the roll, but 2-3 at the BEGINNING. Unless of course you meant that you wound your camera so tight it broke the tape holding the film on the spool. Then you could get maybe one more. On similar lines, I once missed a really easy Trivial Pursuit question: "How many rows of sprocket holes does the average 35mm roll of film have?" That word 'average' made me concentrate on the lengths of film, 12/24/36, I knew that there were 8 sprocket holes per frame and two sets so 16. I multiplied them by 24 and added a few frames for the leader and even added a few more for the tongue. I was quite when I was told the answer was 2.)

The images I lost, I had specifically separated so that I could scan them and then after months of not thinking about them, forgot where I put them or just maybe, they slipped out of my tablet case and I dropped them somewhere. I absolutely do not remember where I last had them

I'd have to dig them out of the box and then sort through all the hundreds and hundreds of strips I have to find the negatives from that day, but I remember that I got more than a couple before I could tell that the film had reached its end by the feel of the wind-on lever.

Y'know, I think I might have made a list of what's on all the strips in different envelopes at some point... I'll look at them later today, although I doubt I'll be able to tell which ones came after shot 36 on the roll - I didn't keep all the photos that were printed and I probably put all the negatives from all the rolls from that cricket match together.

I went to the Sherlock Holmes Museum on one of my trips over and got bookmarks and a few other small items from the gift shop for my summer reading kids.