Catchup part… I’ve lost count… Back again to Summer 2013

Microlights and Helicopters 
For my birthday two years ago, my number two son bought me one of those experience presents which was for a flight in a microlight aircraft. When I went to redeem it, I discovered that there was a weight limit, which to my shame I exceeded and so was not able to take the flight. Instead I exchanged the voucher for a helicopter flight which was the same price, therefore both finding an acceptable alternative and discovering what my number two son spent on my present. This delayed the time for the flight by several months.

The helicopter flight I wanted was to take place from Mapledurham, an attractive private estate that is old enough to have been mentioned in the Domesday Book (1086 AD). It is on the river Thames, with a slightly less ancient water mill and grounds adjacent to the river. The estate hires the old cottages there for holiday lets. Many years ago we had spent a holiday there and so we knew how to find it and the flight was going to take me from there over to Highclere Castle, the place where a lot of the filming was done for the Downton Abbey TV series. This did not excite me so much as simply being in a helicopter, not being a follower of that series.
Kingsclere is a place I used to pass by on route to my work when my office had been moved to Basingstoke which is fairly close to Highclere so I knew the area quite well. During that time there had been a lot of road works going on around Newbury, the town I passed through before bypassing Kingsclere. A lot of disruption had occurred whilst they built the new bypass and in the process had to cope with Swampy, the professional protester, who made the process a lot longer, annoyed a lot of commuters and achieved nothing but notoriety for himself.

Swampy and co being evicted from their favourite tree

The road which was built despite protests

As a result of the constant problems with my route, I had explored a number of alternative routes in an attempt to avoid all the congestion and had even gone as far as Highclere to escape the jams, but mostly I had roughly followed the route that Hazel and Fiver took on their epic journey from the Sandleford burrow to their new home on Watership Down. Mind you, it only took me about ten minutes by road to get from the Sandleford Link to the road running past Watership down, where you could see the ‘iron tree’ mentioned in the story, but rabbits cannot drive so it took them much longer.

Meanwhile, back to the helicopter flight, like most of these experience flights, they only fly during certain months and if the weather conditions are right, so it took several more months to find a window where I was both in England and almost in time for my next birthday the flight was on. You have to phone the day of the flight and twice I had been informed it was cancelled until finally that July, it was all systems go. This is fairly rapid progress for this kind of thing, where people have been known to wait two years or more for a similar experience.
It was my first time in a helicopter and so another thing to take off my bucket list and it was brilliant. I got an upgrade so that I could sit next to the pilot in the front of the machine and had a really great view of the ground we were passing over. As we rose up from the farmer’s field being used as a temporary airfield, Mapledurham House became visible and we headed off towards Highclere.

Mapledurham.  The house is in the background and the water mill is almost dead centre.  
Click any picture to enlarge

The view below my feet

On the way we passed over Greenham Common, once an RAF and American airbase used by nuclear bombers. Greenham Common had a lot of press many years ago because of the protest marches and demonstrations the CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) had held there.  Most of the time they were quietly peaceful and were largely run by a group of women who were rightly alarmed by the current Cold War attitude towards nuclear weapons. However, on occasions the protest became newsworthy when they became closer to riots than protests. The protestors had created a big campsite close to the site, which they occupied for several years.

Peacful demonstrators being urged to allow the car through

Greenham Common at the height of the protests

Many years later when this had all died away, when I was commuting past Watership Down, my route also took me past this site. In the intervening years the airbase had closed down and the site had become a business park but to my amazement, two of the protestors were still living in a caravan outside the gates. They would write protest notices on bed sheets and hang them on the fence, with a new slogan every now and then. I am not sure why they hung on to the site, since nuclear weapons were long gone by the time I used that route. Eventually they had to go because the local council put in a big roundabout where the caravan had been and they finally moved on when there was no longer any room for their caravan.

My view of part of Greenham Common as we flew over these bunkers

 After passing over Greenham Common, we circled Higclere Castle several times allowing us to take pictures and then returned to Maple Durham.

Highclere Castle

The other side of Highclere Castle

Newbury Racecourse

 I enjoyed the trip and took reams of pictures and on the whole felt that a microlight trip would have been somewhat less comfortable. Still if I want to fly like that, it seems I must slim down a bit!

Still catching up. Summer 2013, so long ago…

Over the last few months of 2013, I started to relate our adventures in Canada and the USA, where we went for our bi-annual trip to visit cousin Kaybee in Canada and The Son (TS) and family in the USA.  I had to do this retrospectively because once we returned home we were incredibly and unexpectedly busy and Blogging went out of the window for some months.   

We had arranged the timing of our trip to the states last year, so that it would bring us back home just in time to go on my old firm’s reunion and so the next weekend after arriving home, we were off to Bletchley Park where we had all booked into a nearby hotel.  Originally Bletchley Park was a private house in some large grounds in Buckinghamshire not too far from London, Oxford and Cambridge.   Because of its location it became the secret establishment for the codebreaking branch of British Intelligence in 1938.  During WWII the teams there broke the German and Axis force’s codes regularly from 1940 onwards. By 1944 there were about ten thousand staff working on the site and it is estimated that the war was shortened by approximately two years by their work. It is now a large museum of early technology related to codebreaking and computing.

The original house at Bletchley Park

Click on any picture to enlarge it

The Germans used a device known as an Enigma Machine and all their top security military communications were encoded via one of these machines. 

A three wheel Enigma Machine

To decode a message, you needed another Enigma Machine and the settings for the source machine.  Both code books and Enigma machines were kept in great secrecy by the Axis forces but eventually an Enigma machine was captured by the Polish Underground and brought to England. The codebreakers were now in a position to decode the German’s messages and only needed the key to the settings used by the Germans.  This was changed at midnight every night and so every day the codebreakers had to work out what the new settings were.   Since there are 158 trillion different possible settings, this was impractical to work through all of them, but using a machine built to run through a range of possibilities and a great deal of intuition, the team at Bletchley managed. The machine, called the Bombe, was designed by the mathematician Alan Turin and it is an impressive piece of electromechanical engineering.  It consists of a bank of drums that could be interchanged and set up to imitate the possible Enigma settings.   

The front of the Bombe, showing the interchangeable wheels. It is as tall as I am.

The operators then worked through enough different settings against a received message to eventually produce legible German text when the settings were put into a captured Enigma machine.  A working model of the Bombe still exists which, when operating, makes the most astounding din as the wheels and rotary connectors spin round.  It took about thirty minutes to produce a result, but not every result was correct, so the teams worked continuously until they obtained a result. 

The back of the Bombe, with the inspection panel open

Whilst there were Americans involved, and the Americans did eventually capture a German submarine complete with an Enigma machine and code book, unlike the implications of the movie Enigma. Most of the donkey work was done at Bletchley and the decoding of the Lorenz machine, an even more complex encoding system than the Enigma, that was used by the German high command including Hitler was done exclusively at Bletchley.  They did have some help from the Germans for this machine, since a German operator re-sent a message without changing the codes, giving them a great deal of help in identifying how the Lorenz code was set up.

The much more complex Lorenz Machine used by Hitler

Some of the best brains from members of the Allied nations caught up in the war, all worked on the means of decoding and analysing encrypted messages and the first digital computer systems were developed there to speed up the process.   In those days and for several decades after the war, in the UK, the Post Office was responsible for all telecommunications around Great Britain and overseas where both wireless and telecoms staff were at the leading edge of technology. This was borne out by the fact that Colossus, the first ever digital computer system, was built by Tommy Flowers, a Post office engineer.   The only comparable level of advanced technology around at the time was radar. The first electro-mechanical system was not fast enough to keep up with the data being read off teleprinter paper tape, so Tommy Flowers designed an electronic machine to do it.   It contained 1,500 thermionic valves (tubes in the USA).

The reproduction Colossus, complete with bored operator

Some of the 1,500 valves on a panel at the back of the machine

In terms of actual active components in the Colossus, whilst 1,500 was an unprecedented amount of valves at the time when a radio would usually have four. Colossus was the most complex electronic device of its time.  Today, your average smart phone will have several billion active devices, that is transistors, the modern replacement for the valve. Even a bog standard phone will have several hundred thousand transistors in it and both kinds of phone are small enough to fit in your pocket, so Colossus was not very complicated by today’s standards, but it was both the first and the fastest for the time and very impressive.  

A selection of ancient valves

A short discourse here on language regarding the US use of the word Tube.  The Tube is something you ride in under the ground in London, also a tube is the thing a toilet roll is wound on; a valve is something that only allows something to flow one way.  A thermionic valve only allows electricity to flow one way…QED valve is the proper name for these thermionic devices.

The cylindrical red one on the left hand side is an EF50. After the war, these were sold off in their millions and for amateur radio enthusiasts they were a boon and were to be found in all sorts of equipment, both commercial and home made.  When a teenager, I managed to get hold of a box of around fifty or so and spent a happy few weeks using them as airgun targets.  They held together long after being riddled with pellets and so could be used time and again.  Glass valves, whilst exciting because they made a bang when you hit them as the vacuum imploded, only lasted for one hit.  

These made a great air gun target

Whilst Alan Turing was heralded as the brains behind the Bletchley team, and he was amongst other fields of endeavour, a brilliant mathematician, he was not the only smart cookie there and people like Tommy Flowers, Bill Tutte and Gordon Welchman, plus many others contributed to the overall success of the establishment.  Many were never acknowledged because of the intense secrecy surrounding the place. All staff, however humble their role, were sworn to secrecy on pain of death (literally).  It was not until after the 30 year rule lifted the secrecy from much of the work that took place there, that people were able to say what they had done during the war. Many were so ingrained in the spirit of secrecy that they never revealed what they did and took their secret to the grave.  One of the stories we were told by the guides taking us around was that they had two elderly visitors there once, who, when they saw the places where they had worked, only then discovered that both of them had been part of the Bletchley team during the war.  They had kept the secret even from each other during sixty years of marriage and it was a revelation to them both.

Another blast from the past for me, this was the kind of oscilloscope that we used in my college way back in the 1960s when I was studying electronics.   So heavy it had to be placed on a trolley

Altogether a very interesting place to visit, especially for geeks and technophiles like myself and my erstwhile colleagues and we lingered over the ancient technology much to the distress of TBH and the other wives, who soon discovered where the coffee and tea was served to rest their tired feet.

That evening we had a Chinese meal together.  The following day we had originally booked another night in the hotel in order to explore the neighbourhood.  Unfortunately we had a lot to do as a result of my late Brother in law’s death, so we cancelled the hotel room and returned home a day early to start sorting out his affairs.  This unexpected and unwanted task took care of the next six months.  

The world according to Snafu - Another curmudgeonly rant.

Sea salt.
 Recently a firm in the UK has gained the right to name their product as coming from their local strip of sea and anyone else now using that name will be breaking the trading rules of the EU. The seawater they use to make their product is subject to ocean currents and wind, and consequently is arriving from many other parts of the sea. So as long as it happens to pass by their inlet pipes, they can now claim it is their exclusive brand of sea salt. So why become so paranoid about other people using that location name for seas salt that comes from water which may have come from anywhere, what is so good about it?
Surely the main component sodium chloride is what makes it salt and any kind of salt must be largely that. But there seems to be a myth that sea salt is better for you than any other kind of salt. How? Any kind of salt is not good for you if you add too much to your diet no matter where it comes from. So what makes sea salt good for you? If it comes straight from the sea, then whatever is in sea water will presumably be present too, therefore sea salt may have other mysterious ingredients that make it good for you. So what is in the sea besides salt? Well apart from minute traces of minerals, like iron, copper, zinc and gold and so on, which are always present in sea water, there is all that pollution we keep hearing about which is killing off sea creatures. Therefore there must be that nasty stuff, plus all the dead sea creature corpses in various states of decay, to say nothing of the lightly processed effluent that is released into coastal waters and of course this particular sea salt manufacturer is not too far from a couple of nuclear power stations that release their coolant water into the sea further along the coast, possibly adding a trace of uranium and other isotopes into the mix. To remove all these extra pollutants and make it safe to consume, they must remove all the impurities and produce pure salt. Isn’t that what non sea salt consists of? So tell me again, why is sea salt good for you?

Elastic bands.
Some time ago there was a campaign in the UK to stop the Post office from using red elastic bands to keep their bundles of letters together, because the posties were simply dropping them in the street and they made an unsightly mess in our residential areas. This was the case and a friend of mine had a large elastic-band ball he had made by simply picking up the hundreds of red elastic bands he encountered when walking his daughter to school. The campaign worked and we no longer see red elastic bands in the street. Just brown ones…

Another New Year

So here we are another year has come around and it is 2014. When exactly did the New Year start?
We celebrate the start of the New Year at midnight when the date changes, but that is a moving target, being at different times around the world. Large territories are artificially put into time zones, so that in some places, you can celebrate New Year, walk a few yards and an hour later celebrate it all over again. Why do we herald in the New Year at night? Traditionally we measure a day by taking the time from when the sun is highest in the sky and measuring the hours until it reaches the highest point at noon the next day, showing the world rotates once every 24 hours. Curiously if you measure the time at night, midnight to midnight looking at a fixed star in the absence of the sun, you find midnights recur at intervals a little less than 24 hours apart. This is a real effect and is known as sidereal time. It is useful to astronomers but no one else as far as I know.

Many New Years ago I was a technician in a radio astronomy research station and we had several clocks on the wall, one set to GMT, one to East Coast USA time and one to sidereal time. We were working with Florida University, hence the USA time and we were astronomers, who mostly work at night. On that project, we were listening to Jupiter which broadcasts radio signals that sound like surf on gravel.   Follow the link to hear the sounds.  No one knew why then but it turned out Jupiter has a magnetic field and as the inner moons orbit, they generate these signals in their upper atmosphere.

Anyway I digress, here it is 2014 and another year is started and we all agree it started at midnight on the last day of December. This was not always the case, the old year ended on the last day of May and April the first used to be the first day of the new year, but this was changed some time ago. However, accountants and bankers do not seem to have caught that news and continue to start their financial year on April fool’s day. I suppose they call it April fool’s day since they all get a whopping bonus every year from our money. Once upon a time, knowing the exact time was not so important and everyone set their clock by looking at the sun and calling it midday when the shadows were shortest. In England this was never a problem, even though in the far west of Cornwall, they were setting their clocks about ten minutes later than those folks living in East Essex. It really did not matter, but as transport got faster and trains became able to traverse the country in less than a day, time tables had to be adhered to. If they were not using a standard ‘railway’ time, the eastbound train was going to collide with the westbound train because they would not be at the passing place at the right time. To make sure this never happened, well not too often anyway, the whole country started to use the same time as London. So now we all agree when midnight is and we all celebrate the New Year at the same time in the UK. Mind you, if you are not a night person, you could celebrate at any convenient time, by finding the right foreign radio or TV program on the Internet and go to bed an hour or maybe two hours early. Always useful if you are one of those unfortunates who have to work on New Year’s Day.  So a happy 2014 to you all and happy blogging.

PS if you are still wondering how sidereal time works, see if you can follow this diagram.

 Because we are moving around the sun day to day it is a little further around before it get overhead. The star at midnight still appears to be in the same direction because it is so far away the change in position over one day is infinitesimally small.

Christmas blog

Well, it is that time of the year again and in the shops and garden centres serried ranks of thousands of Christmas trees, lean against each other in their rows, sadly waiting to die slowly having been cruelly deprived of their roots. A time of year when people forget green and spend oodles of money on lights and kilowatts of electricity in order to impress the neighbours. Although to be fair, some do it for charities and collect money for good causes, but I can’t help thinking that like fireworks, our festive activities do rather blow the idea of the nation’s low carbon footprint out of the water.

At home, we do not go in for much show, but have a few decorations which you can only really see when inside the house. They are after all just for us to enjoy and any friends who happen by.

One thing that we have kept from an older tradition is this small Santa teddy. It was bought when the kids were small enough to find Christmas an exciting event and a fully decorated house was a must. Since they lost their mother one Christmas many years ago, it has taken the sense of joy a while to return and this year, teddy has once more come back from his long hibernation in the loft to celebrate Christmas once more. So here’s to absent friends… and to all you blogging types out there, a happy Christmas or Yule or whatever it is you celebrate in whatever name, have a good one.

Catchup Part 7 - Going Home

I still have not finished catching up with all my pending blogs and even though it was June when we came home, by my blog cronology, we are still in the USA.

The Son (TS) and family subscribe to The Kansas City Orchestra and they can get tickets for their performances at the Kauffman Centre of the Performing Arts in Kansas City. This concert hall is a spectacular piece of architecture and quite new.   

The programme commenced with Mozart’s 40th Symphony, followed by Richard Strauss’ Alpine Symphony.  This was The Grandson’s (TG’s) introduction to a full classical orchestra and was not a good programme for a novice. Unfortunately TS and The Daughter In Law (TDIL) did not have much choice, because this was the only programme we could attend on their concession tickets during our stay.  Mozart, whilst a wonderful composer, is not always beginner’s stuff and the particular symphony only had one recognisable piece that he may have heard before whilst the rest was pure intellectual Mozart.  The contrast to that and Strauss was marked.   Although I was blown away by Strauss’s Alpine Symphony, which is a very powerful piece to listen to live and the performance was first class, TG was less than impressed.  He obviously felt the whole thing went on far too long and it has probably put him off that kind of thing for a while.   I am not sure if I would have been very receptive at his age, but I grew into classics in my teenage years and anyway, I tend to prefer more modern composers to Mozart. However, I do like some in particular his requiem. 

After all the travelling we had done the final two weeks in Kansas seemed quiet and uneventful, until I had an email from my sister.  Her older son had come across one of those stories you hear from time to time about a man who lived alone and had been found dead by his neighbours. My nephew thought it may be his uncle from my first marriage.  Although he had had regular contact with me and his aunt for many years whilst she was alive, he had not had a great deal of contact with his uncle who lived a distance way from all our family, working in different places around England, so he was not sure if it really was him.  Having been alerted I found the article about him on the Internet and sure enough it was my erstwhile brother in law.  Since his sister had died, I had only had occasional contact with him and I had lost contact with him almost completely over the last few years.   He had never married and had always lived alone, his work taking him all over the country he had finally settled in a small town in Wiltshire.  It turned out he had died just before, or about the time we set off for Canada.  

The vivid and intense nightmare I had experienced soon after we arrived in Kansas, where I had dreamed one of my relations had died, suddenly took on more significance. 

I contacted the British authorities and made arrangements to take on the responsibility for his affairs, the funeral and so on and so on that sad note we prepared to fly home.

Unlike our last visit, our flight home was uneventful and on time and we duly arrived back home jet lagged and unprepared for the task ahead. 

Catchup Part Six – Goin’ to Kansas City

Unlike us lazy Europeans, who can have from three weeks to up to five weeks annual leave, most US citizens only have a couple of weeks holiday (vacation) and so once back from our Washington trip, the Son (TS) and the Daughter in Law (TDIL) had to return to work almost as soon as we arrived back and we returned to grandson sitting duties for that week. The next week end on the Saturday, we went to Kansas City to visit the Arabia Steamboat Museum.

This is a fascinating place owned and run by a family of treasure hunters who managed to find a horde of lost treasure - two hundred tons of it as it happens.

In the early days of pioneering America, before the railroads were built, major rivers like the Ohio, Mississippi and the Missouri were the trunk roads of the land. 
The old paddle steamers carrying huge cargoes of goods needed by the settlers and pioneers were plying the rivers. Over the years, these have been romanticised by Hollywood as floating gambling dens, populated by suave neatly dressed men, with black hats and armed with tiny but deadly derringers and high scoring cards for poker secreted about their person. In reality, these vessels were cargo carrying work boats, plying a dangerous trade in treacherous waters.

The steamboat Arabia, typically loaded almost to the waterline

Samuel Clemens, writing as Mark Twain wrote a lot of fictional and factual works about them, having worked on steamboats on the Mississippi, where his descriptions of conditions are more realistic than Hollywood.

It is well known that Clemens took his nom de plume Mark Twain, from the cry of the man sounding the depth of the river to test when the water became dangerously shallow. The term 'mark twain' was called when the sounding line showed two marks on the rope and it meant the river was still deep enough, but only just.  It sounds like a proper name, but in some circles at that time it was an insult, since a Mark Twain was a shallow person.  It is possible that Clemens was gently taking the rise from his own writings by adopting the name.   It happens, maybe you should look up the meaning of my Blog's name.

Apart from the dangers of boiler explosions, which were commonplace, the rivers themselves produced their own dangers.   The Missouri River was one of the more dangerous since it is shallow and changes course daily, leaving sandbanks at random all along its course and most dangerously of all, the erosion of the banks sweep trees into the river to produce what are known as ‘snags’. A snag is a partially submerged tree trunk which will easily knock a hole in the hull of a wooden steamer if not spotted and avoided.

This is actually the Kansas River, which joins the Missouri at Kansas City. It looks peaceful enough here, but it has much the same nature

A few yards downstream there are some snags marked with orange buoys, so it is still just as dangerous today.

Over the ten years between 1850 and 1860, it has been estimated that between 290 to 400 riverboats were sunk in the Missouri alone. No one knows the true figure, but even at its lowest, that is a lot of wrecks in just ten years. Since most were sunk with cargo, there have been a lot of treasure hunters looking for them. However, the Missouri has a few tricks up its sleeve yet and over the years has changed its course by more than a mile in some places and much of its old course is now under farmland. As a result, if you want to find a steamboat, you may need to look in a cornfield.
Apart from the historic interest and the antiques to be found, one of the attractions to treasure hunters is the tale of cargoes of gold, silver coins and whiskey, any of which are a strong incentive to search for certain steamboats. Many wrecks were either known about precisely or have been found, but not all of them could be excavated for a variety of reasons. One of the known wrecks was the steamboat Arabia known to be buried in a farmer’s field in Kansas, where it had sunk when the Missouri River ran across that part of what is now Kansas.  The state border is the river, so the states of Kansas and Missouri change position now and then as the river changes course and the Arabia sank in the state of Missouri, but is now buried in Kansas.

Changes in the course of the river and the present position of the Arabia

The Arabia was rumoured to contain a cargo of Kentucky whiskey, which by now would be well matured and attempts to excavate the site failed consistently due to it being deep below the water table and in wet sand. If you have ever made sandcastles on a beach, then you will know that any water will make sand collapse and flow, which will rapidly fill in any excavations, but in 1988, the Hawley family were able to devise a means of excavating this vessel and have since extracted most of its cargo.

This aerial picture shows the scale of the job they had, from the size of the trucks and tractors compared to the outline of the sunken vessel.

Unfortunately the whiskey was not found, even if it did exist, it would have been washed away during the wreck, since it would have been stacked on the upper decks. What they did find was quite sufficient to stock the present museum with an impressive collection, which includes the engine and some of the ship’s hull. The Arabia sank in 1856 and so had on board a number of pre American Civil war artefacts, some of which had never been seen before in the present day. In the UK, 1856 does not sound so ancient, since we live in what is rapidly becoming a giant museum with preserved buildings, structures and artefacts dating back several thousand years, but to Americans the Civil War was a watershed in their history where much was destroyed and lost forever. So the treasures from the Arabia are in many cases very scarce and, in one case, completely unknown to exist at that time. A number of vulcanised rubber buggy whips and shoe soles were found made by Goodyear. This was a surprise because the accepted wisdom was that the method of vulcanising rubber did not start until after the Civil War and even the manufacturers themselves were unaware their company had introduced the process so early.

The snag that sunk her was still imbedded in the bow

The items on display in the Steamboat Museum range from the exotic to the mundane, but come from an almost inaccessible past. There were several kinds of bottled and pickled foodstuffs which are still preserved. The largest quantity of the finds consist of boots, clothes, hats, weapons, buggy whips, cutlery, jewels, buttons, toys, barrels of nails, timber tools, pots, pans and so many things it would be very boring of me to list them all.  Amongst these well preserved items was a considerable amount of Wegwood china, imported from England.  Wedgwood of that vintaage is much sought after and very few people in the world will have such a large collection.

Some of the china and pots and pans

Much of the cargo was heading for frontier general stores and so there are entire inventories for stocking up all the day to day items you would expect to need when creating a home from scratch and the sheer quantity is mind blowing.

Frontier hardware.  The curved things at the top are weighing scales, in case you are wondering

All these things have been carefully and painstakingly restored and presented, sometimes en mass, in the museum. The overall effect is stunning and the work that must have been put in to both the excavation and the restoration, which is still on-going is legendary. Really it is a most memorable place to visit and I would recommend it to anyone.
Apologies to the museum for making use of some of your pictures, but I did buy your book, Treasure in a Cornfield, and I hope this has generated some interest and readers of my blog, who will maybe  follow the link to...  The museum website.