I was a bit apprehensive about taking the ashes with me. I was flying via Bangkok, and both Thailand and Cambodia are very strict about hard drugs, so I felt uncomfortable taking a small jar of white powder with me! I took the cremation certificate with the ashes, so that I could try to explain them away if I got challenged, but in fact there wasn’t a problem at all.

An aside – at the Christmas Eve Gala Dinner I got talking to a couple from London who invited me to join them when they saw I was on my own. Over dinner, we got to discussing the state of the public toilets in the archaeological park, and how surprisingly clean they were. I said that I had been expecting much worse, and had taken the precaution of bringing a SheWee with me, in case the loos were totally disgusting. The man had never heard of one, and asked me what a SheWee was. I explained that it was an anatomically shaped funnel, designed to fix one of Nature’s major design flaws, and allow women to pee standing up without undressing. He looked fascinated, as well he might, and asked whether or not it worked. I had to confess that I hadn’t tried it – the loos on the trip had all been entirely adequate and I hadn’t needed it. So it was still unused in its case in my handbag, next to my husband’s ashes. They both looked at me in absolute horror at that, then burst out laughing!

I asked my guide for some advice on how to scatter the ashes in a culturally appropriate way. After all, I was a guest in a strange country and didn’t want to do anything that would greatly offend the locals. Somewhat to my surprise, he really entered into the spirit of the occasion, and gave me some very firm advice, nay instructions, on how to dispose of the ashes in accordance with local beliefs. They were to be scattered on the Monday (Boxing Day), as it was much more propitious to do so at the beginning of a week than the end. Furthermore, they needed to be scattered at the east side of a body of water, because east again was much more lucky than west. Finally, if at all possible they should be cast into water under a tree. I didn’t grasp why that was important, but having asked for his advice it would have been rude to question it.

Scattering the ashes at Angkor Wat

So on Monday we drove up to Angkor Wat, avoided the crowds of tourists entering the site from the south, and went to the much quieter east side of the moat surrounding the temple. There we found a suitable tree, and I cast Christopher’s ashes (or rather, just a few teaspoons of them) into the moat. I took the picture above just afterwards, and you can see what a lovely and tranquil spot it was.

Most of them were originally built as Hindu temples, and have intricate carvings telling various Hindu myths. Then the Khmer kings converted to Buddhism, but saw no point in wasting perfectly good architecture, so they were re-purposed as Buddhist temples. So they are a rather odd syncretism of Hindu and Buddhist traditions – both of which were new to me.

Angkor Wat reflected in its moat - shame about the scaffolding!

This is what all the fuss is about – Angkor Wat, the biggest of all the temples, built around 1120AD. It is surrounded by a moat, with a causeway leading to the temple itself, which has five towers – apparently in homage to the five peaks of the mountain that is the home of the Hindu gods. It was absolutely magnificent – and also pretty crowded.

Angkor Thom - detail of Bayon temple towers

Next to Angkor Wat, and even larger, is Angkor Thom, which was a royal city with temples of its own. One of these, called Bayon, had carvings of the Buddha on each of its many towers. There is a school of thought that the faces are that of King Jayavarman VII who was the ruler at the time the temple was built – if so, he was surely a meglomaniac and looks rather smug don’t you think?

Ta Prohm temple through the trees

The picture above gives an overall view of one of the smaller temples, this one either didn’t have a moat or (more likely I think) it had dried up over the centuries. This particular temple was used as part of the set for the Tomb Raider film, and the locals aren’t going to let you forget that in a hurry!

Ta Prohm temple being devoured by tree roots

This temple, unlike some of the others, had not been heavily restored, and was still surrounded by jungle which was slowly devouring it. In the picture above you can see tree roots strangling a colonnade. The person I’ve got in the frame gives a sense of scale – those roots are thicker than my torso!

Banteay Srei

Finally, this is a picture of part of one of the most beautifully carved temples, Banteay Srei. It was built from a reddish sandstone, which took deep bas-relief carving very well. It is about 40 minutes north of the main group of Angkor temples.  Three months ago, during the floods which affected Cambodia as well as neighbouring Thailand, the waters rose so quickly that the road leading back to Siem Reap became impassable very quickly, and a party of  tourists got stuck at Banteay Srei and had to be airlifted out in helicopters! I’m glad I wasn’t caught up in anything as dramatic as that – a near miss in a fire was quite bad enough!

So I was very surprised, about two weeks ago, when I got an email c/o his Flickr account asking him for permission to use one of his photos commercially (although unfortunately without any monetary compensation, just a copyright credit). The request came from an online web-magazine, MaltaInsideOut, and they wanted permission to use a photo Chris had taken of a Maltese hearse to illustrate an article for Halloween.

Christopher's photo of an old-style Maltese hearse

The photo was taken on a long weekend trip to Malta which turned out to be the last holiday that we had with my parents and sister. We were on an excursion to one of the local fishing villages, and I had a stinking migraine so spent the time sitting on a bench by the harbour. In the meantime a funeral was being held for one of the village dignitaries, a local politician by the look of it, and both Christopher and my father wandered around taking photos of the somewhat idiosyncratic hearse and funeral procession.

My reply to MaltaInsideOut perhaps could have been phrased more tactfully, but showed how surprised I was to get their email:

You sent Chris Booth a question about a picture of a hearse for your magazine. Unfortunately, that is probably more appropriate than you knew, since Chris is dead. Very dead in fact – he died over a year ago. So he can’t give permission for anything any more. I am his widow and I suppose that all the rights to his photos etc have devolved to me, so in principle I could help.  I remember the occasion well and the hearse was certainly interesting! What do you actually need? Do you just need an email giving you permission to use that photo as is? Or you want me to look through his computers to try to find the original image?

We agreed that what they actually wanted was a non-exclusive royalty-free licence to use the picture on their website. And thankfully they could download it off Flickr, so I didn’t have to go rummaging through his hard drive, which was not something I wanted to do. So I was pleased to give them that permission, and the resulting article is here: The Grateful Dead.

Christopher would have been so pleased. One of the things he really wanted to do when he got made redundant was to find a way to get his photographs published, and this would have been a start. The editor emailed me back to thank me, saying “I can imagine Chris perhaps giving us a knowing wink at using his photo now”, and I heartily concur that he would have been both pleased and amused at the irony.

Nearly nine inches of snow had fallen, meaning that we were once again snowed in. The difference between this time and the last was that I was able to do a good deal of the snow clearing myself. Gillian had cleared the slope up into the drive, and a narrow path to allow us to walk out of the front door, but new snow had covered that. I started by clearing the slope, and was quickly joined by Will with his own snow scoop. He is — naturally — a lot fitter and stronger than me, so between us we managed to clear enough snow to make the drive passable in about one and a quarter hours. It’s the most exercise I have taken for months. I was extremely pleased to have been able to help with this chore, so much so indeed that it was more of a joy than a chore for all the effort it took.

Through the Arched Window

After clearing the snow I started to look at it properly. First I looked at it from the warmth of the living room, and took this photo. It’s a sort of companion to my previous snow photograph, but this time it’s a straight image,  with no manipulation other than a slight exposure and levels tweak. Click the image to see a larger version.

I was very taken with the contrast between the shaded and sunlit trees. The bush nearest us is in our garden, which wasn’t seeing much sun, unlike the trees in the wood on the other side of the road. I was really taken with the contrast between the light on the wood, and the shaded bush. “Bush” is horribly unfair. It is a small evergreen tree that is planted in one of the columns of the front wall of our garden.

Light and Shade

Then Gillian pointed out that the sun was catching the snow crystals and making them sparkle. How could I resist trying to capture the effect? I also liked the way the sun revealed the texture of the snow. You can see in the shaded part at the bottom that there is virtually no structure. To see this difference gave me a truly visceral understanding of why the skiers at the Olympics prefer some sun on their downhill runs. It may be a bit hard to see the sparkles, but if you click the image you’ll see a larger version where they should be more evident. What you can’t really see, even in the full sized image, is that the sparkles were coloured. Each sparkle was essentially a single-pixel rainbow. Not very bow-shaped, but they were certainly colourful.

Sparkles!

What a difference from the last snow fall! Not only was I able to clear the snow, but I had enough energy left over to try to capture some of the loveliness of the scene. I’m sure we’ll get fed up with the inconvenience soon enough, but it was good to be able to appreciate something beautiful when it appeared.

Here is my little sister, Sophie, with Sally. Sophie’s hair is still blonde, but not quite as fair as it was then.

Here is the whole family, my father Alan, then me, then Sally and Sophie. I do remember the dog’s name, but it’s the answer to a security question, so I shall keep it private.

Finally, here I am siting on my mother’s lap. It looks as though she was reading to me while we were having tea. I think the plasters on my knee were new, so I may have been in need of some comfort. I’m afraid I don’t remember the ayah’s name, much to my shame, but I was less than five years old when we left Kenya.

I wish I could remember more about what Sally liked about Kenya. I’ve already mentioned the warmth. I also know that she enjoyed playing tennis, and I inherited her Dunlop racket when I started playing tennis when I was eleven.

When I was very young, and we were back in the UK, I can remember that she played the piano a great deal. I remember a lot of Beethoven sonatas. Later, after she contracted multiple sclerosis, she found that her fingers wouldn’t do what she wanted to, which meant that she played a lot less. She would still accompany both Sophie and me as we played the violin and cello respectively, or when I sang. Sally was always very proud of our (Sophie’s and mine) accomplishments. I particularly remember one evening when I was nearly nineteen years old. I had sat the Oxford entrance exam, then left school to take up a gap year job 150 miles from home. The letter was sent home, so my mother sat waiting for me to get home from work and phoned me at one minute past six. Her voice was trembling when she told me what she was holding. “Go on, then,” I said, “open it.” She did, and whooped, as the letter started with “I am pleased…” I am certain she was happier than I was that evening, and I know that the achievement was celebrated with some earnestness that evening. It still makes me smile to think about how happy she was that day.

If you have happy memories of my mother to share, please write about one of them in a comment. I’d love to know how you think of her.