A full album of photos containing more images and higher quality images can be found on Flickr: Pompey Legends vs Lee Rigby Select XI.

A decent crowd turned up in pretty good conditions. Photos from the warm-up and coming out onto the pitch for the start of the game.

At half time the Rangers/Lee Rigby Select XI keeper Wayne Shaw posed for photos with the crowd. Two bands walked around the field playing competing tunes.

The match itself was a clean game, needing very little officiating. Pompey took the lead but went into the break at 1-1. Shortly after the restart they were losing but a hat trick from Hermann Hreidarsson saw them run out 4-2 winners.

The keeper famous for his pie-eating didn’t disappoint the fans at the end of game.

Congratulations to the winning Pompey team and well done to everyone involved for such a worthy cause.

We typically start with a circuit outside the walls of the castle. This affords views northwards to the chalk face of Portsdown Hill, then moving clockwise to views of Port Solent, then Portsmouth and the Spinnaker Tower, and finally down towards Gosport.

Heading inside there is a large, open, grass area where many people hold picnics. In one corner of the inner walls of the castle is a church. Strangely enough, in all the years we’ve been visiting Portchester Castle we’ve never once set foot in the church.

We don’t always venture into the castle keep but as the weather was nice on this visit in 2013 we did so and the photographs below are evidence of that. Not that you’ve any cause to disbelieve me.

If you’re going in the castle keep then you’re clearly going to want to climb to the top if it allows it and as luck would have it Portchester Castle does allow it. It can get very windy on the battlements as the castle is very close to the shoreline but the views across Portsmouth, Fareham, and Gosport as well as the overview of the castle’s layout and fortifications is definitely worth it.

In World War 2 Farlington Marshes was a designated Starfish Site, acting successfully as a decoy for bombing raids on a number of occasions. A couple of the decoy control points are still standing in the marshes.

The last photo is a rarity in my picture-taking: a hand-held, three-exposure, HDR photograph taken into the sun. Saturation levels are probably higher than my current taste in photo processing goes for but I think the shot is a pleasant enough one.

The festival was called Love Albert Road and it was the first of two that would be held on consecutive years before rising policing costs closed it down. As you can see from my photographs of the street event there was no sign of any police and we didn’t witness any trouble there at all during either year that we visited. Read into that what you will.

Part of the festivities along Albert Road included a parade celebrating Thailand and its culture. It’s interesting to note many years later that this was quite likely my first encounter with any Thai people at all and only a month and half after this event I would be visiting Bangkok as part of my honeymoon.

We spent about an hour in Albert Road walking along the length of the closed-off street three or four times, enjoying the different bands performing music along the pavements and getting some good Portsmouth and Southsea people-watching done too. We had a pleasant enough time that we’d go back the following year too.

• I took the photos in JPG mode, not RAW, and I probably took them with automatic settings. These days I’ll only shoot RAW photos, typically deliberately underexposed by 2/3, typically in aperture priority mode to control depth of field. That’s the sort of thing that comes from experience and style choice.
• Sensor dirt! Sensor dirt is the bane of my life and since upgrading to the Canon 5D Mark II several years back I assumed that sensor dirt was worse with the newer camera and not something that ever affected my first one; that turns out to be very wrong. From looking back at these old photos of mine I’m finding just as many dust marks on the pictures so it seems that possibly a combination of a more sensitive sensor on the newer model plus my gained experience at spotting sensor dirt is what’s really taken place.

The photos below showing off Southsea, the pier, the beach, the castle, and outside the D-Day Museum are not processed in any way other than to spot heal the sensor dirt.

Some of the maps and imagery as they related to nuclear fallout in the event of the cold war heating up were quite unnerving. I’m not entirely sure how effective a base the bunker would have been; its size didn’t seem to suggest it could be used for long periods. Nevertheless, the old military equipment and cold war feel from the place were excellent.

We’d arranged parking with CPS and this was pretty painless. Friendly staff, a half hour wait to move our car into position for someone to take the keys off us, then we walked into the terminal, were handed a fast track ticket as we were almost bang on our due slot, and were through the check in process and on board about ten minutes later.

Southampton’s not the most attractive place in the world and it doesn’t even have the benefit of any real impressive dock architecture so pictures are few and far between. We were in the Ocean Cruise Terminal (the first time for us) and with the ship facing inland and our state room (B327) on the starboard side (which is our preferred side for reasons of trying to stay consistent and not confusing my wife’s poor sense of direction) we had a view from our balcony to the east and southeast which included the only building of interest, the brutalist design of the grain terminal behind the Queen Elizabeth II cruise terminal.

We, and many others on the balconies, did spend quite a bit of time looking at some container stacking taking place on the dock beside the ship; it was actually quite fascinating but for some reason I didn’t take any photos.

With it being late in the year after we’d had our muster (held in the Glass House for us and which was thankfully not quite as excruciatingly long as on our previous cruise with P&O) and the ship had finally started to depart Southampton we were afforded views of a setting sun and I did remember to take some pictures this time.

I decided not to take many photos on board Azura for this trip as it had only been seven months since our last visit on her and very little had changed. For pictures of the public areas of the cruise ship taken on our first trip please click here: P&O Azura. For the pictures we took on this second trip please click here: On Azura.