Anyhoo (yes "anyway" was already taken).

I feel like crying.

First came Port Meirion. That left my camera embedded in the mud.
Then came the clean up, which left less mud, but a sickening grinding noise and lumpy resistance in the zoom.
Then came the great solidifying. Trying to rinse it out didn't help, but did allow water to creep between the lenses.
Then came getting home and trying to fix it.
Then came more trying to fix it.
And more.
But each time I had to stop as I was blistering my hands.
Eventually, after WD40ing, unscrewing the screws which I could unscrew (which wasn't all of the them), a few rolls of loo paper used to soak up the oiled clay, I got the zoom and focussing moving again. But the aperture no longer worked.
Then came a month of cycling through various methods of trying to extract the lens, with occasional successful attempts at unscrewing parts of the lens.
Then came the last week of trying to dry out the front block of lenses which remaining infuriatingly sealed.
Then last night I managed to unscrew the ring round the very front element. Realising I was tired, I left it until today to dry and clean out.
I cleaned. I dried. I even got the aperture working again. I put everything back how it was.
Except, when mounting the penultimate lens, it jammed, and as I took it back out the lens slipped.
It fell.
It bounced.
It landed intact.
The final lens, the widest, narrowest one, the one it landed on, was split down right across the middle into two perfectly equal halves.

You can see why I wanted to cry.

I don't know where I can get a new one. I suspect I can't; the company who made it seem to have disappeared into thin air. I suspect any replacement will have hand machined. I suspect this probably costs more than the whole camera cost in the first place. I suspect repairing the lens is uneconomical. I suspect buying a new lens for an old camera is as well. But I can't really afford a new camera.

So unless anyone knows where I can affordably get a replacement bit of glass for a Nikon-adapted Kiron 62 mm dia., 28-70 mm zoom + macro lens, I suspect it's goodbye photography for at least a year.

I know I'm not very good at it, but I quite like it and I don't want to stop.

So what have I learnt from this?

Never go to Port Meirion.

Heck, why not make it the whole of Wales?

And the bloody neighbours have been doing karaoke since Wednesday. They are either a collection of supremely camp men with musical taste of eight-year-old girls, or a group of actual eight-year-old girls. From the voices I'm guessing the latter. And they've discovered the reverb setting. I think they must be working through the listing in alphabetic order as we've just had a quivered version of "I will survive" and now the pixelated chipmunk interpretation of "I'm a survivor". And either she doesn't know the words, despite the scrolling or bouncing ball, or she's following the part of the backing singers.

I know I've often said someone should strangle Britney Spears, but judging by this rendition of "Oops, I did it again", I'm not sure I could stand the soundtrack to her death.

How the hell do 8-year olds even hear Dolly Parton in the first place?

Anyhoo,

PS. How dispiriting. I was going to pick my best picture on Flickr to add as the image of this site, but of all the most popular images none are perfect. Some are massively flawed. Sometimes I just don't get people.