Paul Brownjohn @Paulos_the_fog@social.cleverlibre.org

@ollybenson @magdelenehall

I was terribly impressed with the hand washing and disinfecting rigour in the hospitals over here in Luxembourg where I was a patient

@ollybenson @magdelenehall

From personal experience, from the perspective of a patient, I can say that I infinitely prefer the arrangements over here to those in the UK!

@ollybenson @magdelenehall

Yes I heard that the use of stainless steel door handles and the like was a very retrograde step as the old brass handles and door plates actually kill bacteria!

@ChrisMayLA6 @cstross

France has a law on the purity of bread: nothing other than flour, yeast, salt and water may go into French bread, by law! This is why is doesn't keep very well (no preservatives, or moisteners permitted) and why it is utterly delicious!

The Germans too have a purity law but theirs concerns not bread, but beer! Nothing but malted grains, hops, yeast and water may go into German beer, also by law!

I guess that says something about priorities in the countries in question!

It occurs to me that Russia is going to have a very major problem after this war is over. Its economy relies to a truly enormous extent on selling its reserves of natural gas and crude oil but the world is very rapidly turning away from the use of such fuels, and rightly. OK, Russia does have enormous reserves of timber. The virgin pine forests of Siberia contain billions of cubic metres of prime building timber but apart from that, Russia has never been a manufacturing powerhouse it has never produced anything that the world really wants, with the exception of armaments. Even its armaments industry is under threat due to its own stupid policies as the world has witnessed the poor design and poor quality of the Russian arsenal used against the Ukraine with their tanks exploding like jack-in-a-boxes and the relative lack of sophistication of its other arms compared to western counterparts.

@magdelenehall

I live in Luxembourg and have now needed surgery twice over here. The 'wards' here have a maximum of 2 beds in them but I believe they are still building hospitals in the UK with wards with 10 - 20 beds.

I should have thought that enhanced risk of cross infection between patients would have informed the designers choice of ward sizes in the UK but not so apparently!

@ben @cstross @ChrisMayLA6

I think that applies throughout France. However, the month of August used to be hell when I lived in Orléans, even so!

@cstross @ChrisMayLA6

Yes but the cretinous tory cünts who have been running the country for the last 14 years or so, just love getting rid of 'red-tape' on the basis that "the market runs everything better" which is OK if you pay businesses like pharmacies enough to make them viable but they are dependent on govt for their earnings and the tory filth never will pay them enough!

@ChrisMayLA6

I love the principle they have in France concerning bakeries. Bread is an indispensible staple in French cuisine and they take it's availability very seriously. If you own a bakery (most in France are run by owner/bakers), and you wish to retire or leave the trade, you cannot simply close up, you are obliged to sell the business on to someone else who wants to use it as bakery so that it's customer base is not inconvenienced by not have access to the indispensable freshly baked baguette morning, noon and night!

They have similar rules about pharmacies - you may not simply decide to open a pharmacy wherever you like. You need to get authorization and you won't get it if you are in close competition with an existing pharmacy. Likewise there are rules about closing down a pharmacy so in France, Boots would have a real fight on their hands with civil servants who have the absolute power to say no. Quite right too!

@TomaszSusul

An f4.5 maximum aperture - they didn't go for big light collectors back then, did they - having said that, I'm forgetting that this is medium format and that therefore f4.5 is not bad at all. What sort of age do you think it is? 1930s, 40s, 50s even?

I used to love working in medium format and larger (I had some 5x4 kit as well) as with 35mm it was so difficult to get rid of every speck of dust to get a perfect print - much less of a problem with bigger formats.

I was thinking of getting back into 'wet' photography as film cameras are so cheap these days (well 35mm ones are - less so medium format machines) although I don't think I could be bothered to set up a darkroom

How did you print it? Wet with an enlarger or did you scan the neg?

Interesting!