SECONDS after Usman Khan began his knife rampage near London Bridge, Gareth Evans found himself cradling one of the terrorist’s victims. He held charity worker Saskia Jones, 23, who had been stabbe…

Thigh fetishists (and lovers of beautiful men in general), I have a treat for you.

“VC10 - Does my tail look big in this? © Gareth Evans via Flickr.”

THE stars of the small screen celebrated their success at the TV Baftas on June 6, 2021. To fans’ delight, BBC’s I May Destroy You cleaned up, while Paul Mescal won Lead Actor. HereR…

I've been shooting in "posh" London recently. So to compensate this is back to gritty London in this housing estate near Clapham Junction. The 1960s "model" estate is scheduled for demolition and redevelopment Holga 120CPN Fomapan 100 Tmax Develope

While tidying up my parents found a couple of boxes of slides of a trip I took through the Balkans in 1989, just before the fall of the Berlin wall. I had thought the slides lost with only my fading prints to remember by. These were among the first things I posted on joining Flickr but the slides (on Fujichrome) have survived so much better and more vividly. So I am reposting this series from Mount Athos in Northern Greece. I had always wanted to visit Mount Athos, the autonomous mountainous home to 20 Eastern Orthodox Monasteries in northern Greece. Greeks commonly refer to Mount Athos as the "Holy Mountain" and it is heartbeat of the Orthdox church, where the traditions and conventions of the Church are rigorously upheld. It was (and no doubt still is) effectively a time capsule, still living to the rhythms of Byzantium. But it is a forbiddingly hard place to visit. Only males are allowed on the peninsula, which is called the Garden of the Virgin by the monks. This extends to domesticated animals.. Even for males Mount Athos is accessible only by a single boat, the St. Eshpigmenitis. The boat leaves from the port of Ouranopolis. No women are allowed past the tower in this picture www.flickr.com/photos/gaznaz/8262606342/in/photostream The daily number of visitors entering Mount Athos is restricted and all are required to obtain a special entrance permit valid for a limited period. Only 10 non-orthodox (“unorthodox”?) males are allowed to visit every day, for a max three nights. So it was that my friend and I presented ourselves for examination at the Ministry for Ecclesiastical Affairs in Athens. It was an adventure. We had to make a notarised declaration that we were either orthodox Christians, bona fide students of Byzantine history or “Men of Letters”. Having newly graduated we duly claimed to be men of letters and obtained our permits. The mountain practices the tradition of hospitality, you walk from monastery to monastery and are given food and lodging on arrival, in the guest quarters. You share food with the monks and have the freedom of the magnificent monasteries and their treasures (within reason). Our first stop after a three hour trek over the ridge of the peninsula, was the magnificent Iveron monastery …… www.flickr.com/photos/gaznaz/8265729066/in/photostream www.flickr.com/photos/gaznaz/8261544153/in/photostream www.flickr.com/photos/gaznaz/8261555395/in/photostream But we decided to move on and arrived at a turreted and fortified Monastery that did not appear on our map, called Karakalou. www.flickr.com/photos/gaznaz/8261559753/in/photostream www.flickr.com/photos/gaznaz/8261599867/in/photostream This we were told on entry was off the “beaten” track for British people - there hadn’t been any Brits there for ten years according to the visitor book. But after we settled down we were approached by a venerable and scholarly monk speaking perfect English, Father Eirene. He was delighted to see us. It turned out that he was a “White Russian” émigré to London in 1919. He had studied English in Oxford in the late 1920s before receiving a vocation to be a monk and retreating to his cell on Athos. He had been there since. As he left he asked us whether we would show these pictures (he would not permit a portrait to be taken) to Mrs xxxx in London, who had been a close friend. www.flickr.com/photos/gaznaz/8262668136/in/photostream www.flickr.com/photos/gaznaz/8261602873/in/photostream www.flickr.com/photos/gaznaz/8261663771/in/photostream www.flickr.com/photos/gaznaz/5694628448/in/photostream He understood that she had become orthodox and gave us some suggestions on how to find her. It took two years, but somehow or other I tracked her to her Kensington home. Mrss xxxx was astonishing. Sshe had joined the diplomatic service. She was appointed Charles de Gaulle’s personal assistant in the war and after the war moved to Moscow as translator to the British Ambassador, She showed me pictures of herself with Charles de Gaulle, Wintson Churchill and Eisenhower in London and told tales of meeting Stalin and Kruschev in Moscow. And then more - after retiring she undertook the standard translation of the works of Tolstoy for a major publishing house. The War and Peace and Anna Karenina that I had read had been translated by her. While Father Eirene retreated to an Athos cell this woman had participated in the most momentous events of the twentieth century. As we were leaving we were locked in the tower of the monastery by a sociopathic monk, who demanded a ransom of ten Deutsche Marks for our release. We were locked up just long enough to begin to worry that the reason Karakalou did not appear on the map is that no Briton had ever, er, emerged from there. After about twenty minutes Father Eirene appeared – “he does that to all our foreign guests” – so that was ok then. The rest of the time we stayed at the Great Lavra monastery, the greatest of the Athonite foundations, and at a tiny hermitage high in the mountain before catching the boat home