About

We are Lucy and Stephen – you’ll note that if you combine the first part of Lucy and the second part of Stephen, you get Luphen, as shown in our site’s logo. (Stephen Lucas appears to have had a similar thought for obvious reasons, though his website is more out of date than ours was; where BASF’s polyurethane products get their name is unknown to us.)

Our old site died, or at least stagnated, by the end of 2014, hence this replacement being Luphen Reborn.

After we first borrowed a digital camera in 2001 for our trip to Zimbabwe and South Africa, we published most of our photos on our website. This was an attempt to replicate (or improve on) in digital form the physical photo albums that will be familiar to the older generation but perhaps unknown to the young. Facebook was unknown, Instagram undreamed of, and though blogging was starting to develop, it wasn’t particularly commonplace.

As a photo album, the primary audience was always us, and the secondary was family and a few friends who might be interested.

We were pleased that a few others also liked some of the photos and it’s fun to share with people who are appreciative – but if you weren’t appreciative, that was fine too, as you weren’t the intended audience anyway.

But with other means of sharing photos growing in prominence, our photos increasingly being taken on phones rather than dedicated cameras heightening the immediacy of publishing rather than updating the website being a curated task of an evening, the habit of updating our site waned during 2014 and eventually ground to a halt. The original site was created in Microsoft FrontPage, software which while it still functioned as an HTML editor had stopped being supported in any form many years before, and failed to take advantage of newer web standards. It was clear that the format of the site, and the mechanism for updating it, were now very old-fashioned and a dead-end, even if they still worked for the time being.

But I still missed having the photos out there under our control, and others told me that they did too. After a long delay and some wondering about whether it was worthwhile, I decided that a restart in a WordPress blog was a reasonable approach, and so here we are. This new site was started in late September 2019, and since that start, posts for 2015 and for 2017 onwards are effectively complete, but with 2016 still having some significant gaps to be filled.

I also aim at migrating at least some of the content from the old website to this new one, particularly where it can create a coherent whole – our schooner sailing holidays on Trinovante and my walks on the South West Coast Path have already received that treatment, and I hope to do so for other themes including multi-stage walks that would otherwise be split across the two sites – I’ve put in redirects from the relevant pages on the old site so there shouldn’t be broken links even if there is sometimes discontinuity of experience.

In the meantime you can access the previous site for the older stuff.