I lost my camera.
Yes, my DSLR camera which to be fair, would be about my most prized possession. How on earth did such a calamity occur? A momentary lapse in concentration when changing between tube trains at Stanmore I believe - I had the camera out of my camera rucksack on the seat, but simply forgot to pick it up when I left the train to change to the other tube train and my rucksack felt weighty enough that I didn't notice. It wasn't until I went change to the next train about 30mins later that I realised I didn't have the camera - but upon going back to Stanmore, the train cleaners hadn't seen it and no one hand handed it in to the station staff. It was lost - a Lost Item claim has been lodged with Transport for London, but it hasn't shown up yet.
Although one of the last things I could possibly ever want to happen, it is not as bad as it might seem. I only lost the camera itself, so the body, the lens attached to it, the battery in it and the SD card in it. The body is the Nikon D5000 I bought 5 1/2 years ago, and has seen a lot of use in that time - 117,370+ photos taken on it for a camera who's design life is 100,000 photos. The lens was a 2nd hand replacement 18-250mm to replace my broken, but still functional 18-250mm lens that suddenly gave problems during my first Germany trip. The battery turned out to be the one which came with the camera, and not the better 3rd party spare; but the SD card was my good 32Gb one, which I bought last year in a rush at Bletchley. On that SD card was the photos from the day's previous trip to Southampton, and what I'd taken so far that day - I've been pretty slack lately at uploading my photos from my camera, but Monday night I'd uploaded and cleared my cards of all the previous travels. Had I not done so, I would have lost all of my Belgium & Cambridge trip photos and probably more - so in that respect, a big disaster averted. While I have lost the Southampton and train photos, none of them were really outstanding so while a shame, I don't feel so bad for that. If someone's pinched it, they've ended up with a camera body beyond its design life and looking worse for wear, a 2nd hand lens and a SD card full of ship and train photos. Oh and no ability to charge it either.
I was pretty confident that they would be alright though, enough not to take Sasha's D650 along as well.
So the photographic flood shall continue in the interim, although my ability to sort through them and update the picture galleries online is still hampered. If my camera shows up? That will be great, and I'll have two - a "good" camera and one which can be thrown into more "risky" situations where it doesn't matter so much if it breaks etc. If not? sucks but not the end of the world and I'll pursue an insurance claim. Be warned though, this new D5000 is not a long term replacement - given my old camera was beyond its life expectancy, it had been in the back of my mind that it will break one day and what will I do then? what will I replace it with? more importantly, how will I afford it? The new D5000 buys some time in that regard, but with technology marching on over the 5-6 years since the D5000 was released there are much newer and better camera bodies out there, and I will at some time in the future make a jump to a new body probably with more advanced features. Of anything though, the broken 18-250mm lens will be the first bit of kit replaced in time - as functional as it is, a proper working lens would be far better...