Dear diary - nothing happened today

I have not blogged for some weeks and feel I ought to post something, but nothing much has happened since Christmas, so I will just post some pictures I like. I say nothing much has happened; the most significant event has been my ancient Amaryllis has flowered once more. It is now well into its thirties and still going strong.

When we were in Cumbria I took this sunset photo of the wind farm out to sea off Walney.
 

 I recently posted this picture below on FaceBook for one of my cousins who was hoping for snow and who likes trains. It was taken by my late brother-in-law when he was in the USA, where he was on a train spotting tour.

 He went all over the world looking for steam and produced crates of photos on 35mm film. I have only kept a few of those that I particularly like.

 
This picture is one of his, of a rather unusual machine in South Africa. It seems to have been converted from a standard car to run on the rails. No doubt a kind of runabout for the railway company staff who need to get to a particular section of track without using a full sized engine.  If you look closely, the steering wheel is still there.  Something to hang on to I suppose.

Next are a few pictures of things in flight.

This dove is just coming into land on a roof at Snowshill Manor in Gloucestershire.

The GoodYear blimp often found at air shows and such in the 1970s/80s.  This picture was taken at the Rolls Royce airfield at Leavsden during an airshow.  The site is no longer an airfield, but one part now hosts the Warner Brother’s Harry Potter exhibition.

Some starlings preparing to roost for the night

 Some ancient history here.

An advert from 1965. 

 You could freely  advertise cigarettes then, even though it had been known since the 1930s that there was a link to cancer.

Going back a bit, this rather scratched negative shows the M1 motorway a few weeks after it opened in 1959.  Not too busy, only two lanes and no centre barrier.

World War  Two and they had Mars bars back then.  It must have been a winning idea to last so long.  The ad does not mention points, so this must have been before they started rationing.  The bar looks a lot more chunky than modern ones. Two and a half d is one penny in modern currency.

 Finally, a clue as to where I live.  A road junction that causes panic and fear to strangers trying to navigate  the streets of my home town.

It was originally named the County Road Roundabout, but due to popular usage, by the bewildered townsfolk, it was renamed to The Magic Roundabout. Once you know how to use it it is very easy to negotiate, but for first time users it is a nightmare.

Out with the old and in with the new.

Happy New Year everyone.  It is still new although I a bit am late with my greeting.
I am quite exited, I have recently upgraded my old six inch with a newer eight inch and I am very pleased with it. Once mounted, it knows exactly where to point and even talks to me. Should I want to look at Uranus, it simply whirls around and finds the exact location all by itself.

I hope no one got the wrong impression about what I am saying, it is of course a new Meade telescope with Light Switch technology. That means, it finds out exactly where it is by GPS and then finds a few stars it knows should be visible and quite quickly it is all set for me to do a bit of amateur astronomy. The only trouble is it has rained solidly ever since it arrived. Whatever happened to all those clear frosty January nights we once knew?
I bought my old six inch telescope over seventeen years ago and whilst it was a state of the art design of 1668, which is still used virtually unchanged to this day. That one was huge, being around four foot long with a massive support and counterbalance to keep it aligned. It came in a coffin sized wooden box, which took care of all the storage space in one of our built in wardrobes when not in use.

My new one is more compact being a much more modern Schmidt - Cassegrain design and whilst it has a larger optical mirror, it is much smaller in every other respect and will allow some clothes to be hung in the wardrobe as well as keeping the telescope out of the way when I am not using it. The old one required a lot of preparation and guesswork to find and view anything in the night sky, but was brilliant for looking at the moon in close detail. With my new one I hope to be able to see more deep space objects such as galaxies and so on. Obviously nothing I can afford to buy can compete with what is constantly being seen by modern professional observatories, but it is still awe inspiring to look at the sky through something a bit more powerful than a pair of binoculars.

Christmas Mistletoe

Mistletoe has been used for many different reasons over the centuries, from making magic potions to decorating the house at Christmas. Its history stretches back into the mists of time and many legends have grown up about it. Being a parasite, it must have puzzled our ancestors because it grew out of the branches of other trees and had no roots like any proper plant and could not grow in soil. It is also an evergreen, so when the leaves fall from its host plant, the mistletoe remains green throughout winter. These two features imbued it with mystic properties, the least of which is that you can steal kiss whilst under its branches at Christmas.

Essential for magic potions

Kisses must be plentiful around the county of Gloucestershire because that county has an abundance of the plant and you will find entire stands of trees filled with more mistletoe leaves than their own native leaves. It seems to thrive in this area more than any other part of Great Britain that I have visited. 

Almost any winter skyline around Gloucestershire contains trees covered in mistletoe

It will often cluster around certain areas, but it is surprisingly widespread around Gloucestershire.  Some streets in Cheltenham are lined with trees so full of mistletoe that they act like evergreens and still appear to be in full leaf  all winter.  In some rural places there are tree after tree filled with the characteristic spherical bunches of mistletoe.
Despite the sheer abundance of that part of the world, it is still sold in the local shops at high prices, when someone armed with long pruning shears, taking a short walk in the local wood,s would get them more than they could carry. I am not sure what the legal aspect of picking mistletoe is, most wild plants are protected in the UK and you are not allowed to pick them but mistletoe is hardly an endangered species. At leat not in Gloucestershire.

This is my Christmas post and so I wish all my blog followers a happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year.

The Last of its Kind

Last month we said goodbye to the old road tax disc that has been with us since 1920. Up until now it was an offence to drive a car with no tax disc, in all but one or two rare circumstances. Now we no longer have to display a paper disc in the windscreen of our cars to declare to the world, and traffic cops, that we have paid our dues. Mine expired in November and now there is an unfamiliar empty spot in my windscreen. In this digital age, the authorities can keep track of all your official documents from the MOT certificate, through insurance to road tax via a handheld computer. We still have to pay for all these things, but can do so on line, apart from the roadworthiness test, still fondly referred to as the MOT, which has to be carried out by a competent and authorised mechanic. This name, MOT is a legacy from a time when there was a Ministry of Transport. Now it is the Department for Transport, so this test should be a DFT test and so has probably been left unchanged, since many people would start calling the roadworthiness test a DAFT test.
 

Although the official government name is the Departmen For Transport, the signs often say of.  Maybe it should be the DOT test.

One thing that I found interesting with these discs was that if you simply slipped the new one into the little plastic holder over the top of the old ones, you slowly collected a record of how much the tax had increased year on year and it gave you a record of the rate of inflation. It seems to have increased at around five pounds per year over the last few years, but I recall on older ones it would jump ten pounds regularly.
 Many years ago in one of the many different kinds of work I have been employed in, I was required to drive a Crown vehicle. That was not for some company like Crown paints, but the kind of crown worn by a certain head of state of the UK. The Queen did not pay road tax on her vehicles, so Crown vehicles did not have a tax disc. This was replaced by a white disc with the royal crest in the centre in the form of a small black and white line drawing, so it did not show up well. To be able to drive said vehicles, you needed a special form which declared you were a fit and proper person to drive her majesty’s vehicles. In my case this was a perfectly ordinary Vauxhall Cavalier, although a rather powerful version, and I understand it could do slightly in excess of 130Mph if you were very naughty, which of course I never was. You had to carry this official piece of paper around with you at all times in case you were challenged and on a couple of occasions I was. Typically, I was parked in a busy area, quite legitimately and was just emerging from my car when a police officer would approach looking pleased with themselves and something like the ensuing conversation took place. “Excuse me sir.” “Yes constable?” “You do not seem to be displaying a current tax disc on your vehicle.” “No constable, I do not need one.” “I see sir,” said in a sceptical tone of voice, “may I ask why?” “Certainly.” And at this point I produced my piece of paper which explained I was driving a Crown vehicle. “Oh I see sir. - Sorry sir, is there anything you need sir?” This said indistinctly as the man was now bending over the front of my car and peering closely at the white disc, which he could now see plainly, although in rather small letters, that it was indeed a Crown vehicle. The kind of fawning that occurred after incidents like that was funny. I have no idea who they thought I was and I did not explain. Not too many years after that, the law was changed and all Crown vehicles not directly used by the Queen had to display a tax disc just like any other kind of vehicle and spoiled my fun. So it is the end of an era indeed.

Autumn Has Gone and it is Winter Already

The winter wheat is in

Not only has autumn come and gone but it is December already and Christmas is heading towards us like an express train. One of the things that you learn when retired is that work was not the most time consuming part of your life and once you do not have to go to work, your time is filled with so many other events that you wonder how you managed to fit in work at all. This year has been less busy than last year when we had to deal with the sudden death of my brother in law and sort out all his affairs, but we still seem to have had to put off, what was originally planned as a summer, trip to see my sister until the last week of November. She lives in Ipswich which is a port on the East of the UK and is just short of 200 miles from us. To get there we have to skirt around London, so you have to pick your times to avoid the M25 in rush hour. We had an easy journey there, despite the occasional moron trying to kill us with their thoughtless driving and arrived sometime after two o’clock in the afternoon after a brief stop at South Mimms Motorway Services for lunch.

The town of South Mimms is not too far from where I was born and is a part of the familiar territory of my childhood and it was not until I had grown up that I realised what a strange name it is. If there is a South Mimms, you may assume that there must be a Mimms somewhere, but you would be wrong. There is a North Mymms which is as you can see spelled differently although both are derived from the same source and were once spelled interchangably, but there is no Mimms or Mymms somewhere in between the north and south Mimms. But I digress. Still that reminds me… and to digress a little further, South Mimms Services once caught fire when I was having a coffee there. I must assume it was not my fault, since most places I visit do not as a rule burst into flames and I had visited South Mimms Services several times before without any similar incident. On that occasion, I was travelling with my two sons to visit my mother who lived on the East coast. A short time before anything went wrong, both my sons had decided to go to the toilet whilst I finished my coffee. When the alarms went off, at first, I wondered if it was just some kind of test or exercise and judging by the reaction of most of the customers there, that feeling was general. The staff obviously thought otherwise and started telling people to leave. I was a rather concerned about my two sons by then but I met the No 1 son just emerging from the loo and assumed the other would have had enough sense to go outside when the alarm went off. As we went past one of the food concessions, we could see a chip fryer blazing away and so began to realise it was not just something minor. Outside I was relieved to find that No 2 son had been sensible, and now all collected together, we went to the car park in order to leave. However, the best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft a-gley and we found that we could not even get close to the car park exit because it was jammed solid with cars fleeing the fire. Finding ourselves in the car park and well away from the blaze, and it being a nice day, we decided to forget trying to leave for a while and we stayed to watch what would happen. I was very impressed with whoever had built the place, because it was a good half hour before the fire spread significantly and there had been plenty of time to evacuate everyone there, even the most determined to finish their meals that they had paid for, fire or no fire. The fire brigade arrived with several appliances and after looking at the blaze, simply cleared an area around the buildings and let it burn. The fat fire by this time as so intense they could do nothing about it with any safety and so simply acted as policemen to keep people away. That was some time ago and a new buildings have replaced the old, but I always recall seeing the old one blazing away whenever I visit South Mimms Services.

Returning to my present trip to visit my sister, the next morning we decided to go shopping with my sister.  Her home town is a busy place and  we opted to use the local bus service, rather than drive in. We all have our pensioner’s bus passes so it is a cost effective means of travel. It was Friday and so happened to be what has become known as Black Friday. Something we have only recently imported from America. Since it seems to have boosted sales over there in the States, it must be a good idea here, seems to have been the thinking. It turned out to be just what the high street wanted, a demonstration of massed bad behaviour. The hunger for bargains at any cost, led to riots and bad language in many stores across the country, making the name Black Friday more apt. I cannot help but wonder why that name, after all Black days usually record a disaster of some kind. In Ipswich, there seemed to be nothing like the pandemonium seen elsewhere, but the shops were rather crowded.

The iconic statue in Giles Circus, commemorating the cartoonist Giles

My sister is not quite classed as disabled, but can only walk slowly and we have found that walking slowly is at least as tiring as walking normally, if not more so, which meant that we were all a bit tired by our outing. So after a morning’s shopping we returned home and relaxed for the rest of the afternoon and we helped my sister with her new ipad. Living away from family, an ipad is useful for keeping in touch with other members of the family via FaceTime. Technology and my sister do not mix well, so an ipad is probably the least likely to go wrong on her and we got her linked up to FaceTime. Her No 1 son and his family live in the next county, whilst her No 2 son lives in France, so FaceTime is a good means of keeping them in touch.

A market in central Ipswich with christmas decorations

On day two of our visit, we went to visit her No 1 son, my nephew, who lives on Mersey Island close to Colchester, the town where I went to college. To get to the island you have to drive across a short causeway. The causeway floods occasionally at certain tides, which is passable under normal circumstances, but occasionally can be high enough to cut them off from the mainland every now and then.

The causeway

Other than this occasional nuisance, it is great place to live, particularly if you like boats. When I was at college, I used to have a friend who lived there and we went canoeing and sailing around the surrounding rivers and estuaries together. When he got married, I bought one of his canoes and used it for a few more years closer to my home until it was stolen one day. Before intruding on my nephew and his wife, we spent a little time exploring Mersey Island and had lunch.

Mersey Island. The tide was out whnen we were there

Arriving a little earlier than planned, we came to their house and met their youngest child for the first time. My nephew and his wife now have two small children who are charming and although initially shy of their great aunt and great uncle were happy to play around us whilst we chatted. My nephew seems to have inherited his mother’s talent for art and has built the most intricately detailed railway layout (for his son of course) which requires a month or so to take in all the detail, it is so full of different landscapes.

A section of my nephew's layout  (It is worth clicking on this image to enlarge it and see the  amazing detail.)

We spent some time trying to get my nephew’s ipad to link to his mother’s, but something went wrong with the verification, so we had to go before we got a result. I do not like driving in the dark and we had to leave early if I was not going to have to drive back to Ipswich in the dark.

Whilst we were visiting, because she has no room for guests in her tiny flat, we stayed at a nearby hotel as usual and for the first two mornings we got up and came to her for breakfast, on the last morning, we took breakfast in the hotel.  On entering the dining room of the hotel, we were greeted by a really odd sight. I think the circus must have been in town, because the dining room was full of the strangest looking people. There was a midget, with a fairly large wife and small baby, an exceptionally tall man with a shaved head except for a long topknot he had sticking up vertically and tied with a band. A man in largely African regalia and, remember this is November, a woman wearing the closest fitting short shorts that were unable to fully conceal her rather ample rear quarters. We were heading home directly from the hotel so had bid our farewells to My sister the night before. It was Sunday when we returned home and I was amazed at how much traffic there was on the road the whole time we were travelling. We were not held up for long by this traffic, which in our direction seemed to be moving fairly well, but some roads had queues miles long going the other way and I wonder were all those Sunday drivers were going. The morons were out in full strength as usual and we watched a number of near misses as they made unpredictable or simply foolhardy moves as they jostled to get a few seconds ahead of each other. Despite all the unpredictable and occasionally dangerous road users around us, we got home in a reasonable time and without mishap. Unfortunately I had shut off the dash cam for this journey, something I must never do when driving in Essex again. It would have been entertaining to watch. It seems to me that by far the majority of drivers on the road are good sensible people and they drive carefully. If that were not true, there would be more accidents because many a potentially dangerous situation was avoided by the good drivers being aware of what is happening around them and making sure they have ample time to avoid the idiots.
Bye for now, soon be Christmas.

Don't panic, I took this one last year.

So what’s all this about 4k TV then?

Early in the twenty tens, we all went digital and were forced to upgrade because the TV services could not be bothered to make it a dual service in the way they had during the introduction of colour. Then you could still use your old Black and White TV until you decided to change to colour in your own time. With the digital changeover, because they had greedily used up every single terrestrial TV channel available, they forced us to jump to their new system with no molly coddling. ‘Buy or don’t get TV sucker!’ they told us grinning evilly. ‘We are going to sell you digital TVs regardless of what you want.’ Whilst we were still reeling from this new system they decided to upgrade the signals to HD TV and although this was, thankfully, optional because they ran the HD service on a parallel channel, it was something else they wanted to get you to go out and buy. Now it is 4k TV.
4k TV, sounds good doesn’t it. Even clearer pictures in greater detail than ever and in close-up we will be able to count the embarrassing hairs on the news reader’s face, where they have not plucked them all. In crowd scenes we will be able to make out the guy right at the back giving the camera the finger and recognise all those people at the footy match who have signed in sick that day. Wonderful. But why so soon? Not only that but, where do you get 4k signals? You can buy a 4k player and some Blu-ray disks claim to be 4k, also you can stream 4k from the Internet if you have fibre but, we have not all changed from DVD to Blu-ray, or afford fibre and they cannot broadcast 4k signals, no room, all the available channels are in use with normal SD and HD TV… Uh Oh!
So, not so much a maybe as a when they shut down all those old SD channels and force us to buy another new and fully compatible 4k TV, fibre Internet, 4k player and upgrade all our movie media once again. So the question now is, how long it will be before the original digital SD service is switched off and we all have to go HD/4k? And it will be a another case of ‘Buy or don’t get TV sucker!’ for a second time. This seems all the more likely, because now, they are pushing 4k TV so damn hard. So what is 4k anyway?

Note; most of what follows is about the UK TV services.  There are a number of differences in other national standards.  In many countries the majority of viewers use cable unlike the UK wherer the majority use broadcast signals. 

Well a long time ago we had 405 line TV, which was better than the original 1920s Baird blur but not special, it just seemed it at the time. 

Then in 1964, it got better when we upgraded to 625 lines and 1969 to colour. With the introduction of digital in the 2010s the basic service, SD TV, became 576 lines, which sounds as if it is a little less than the old 625 line system. Actually on that old analogue system you only had a little over 300 lines in practice so SD looks sharper than the old analogue signal. Almost immediately they introduced HDTV. HD comes in two flavours, 720 lines and 1080 lines. There is also the option for interlace, i or p, which is not worth worrying about here. 720 HDTV is the kind of picture you get on an ‘HD ready’ TV and is a kind of poor man’s HDTV, whilst 1080 lines is full HD and only displayed properly on a full HD TV, but will show 576, or 720 pictures if that is all it gets. So, if full HDTV is 1080 lines, just over one thousand, then you may assume that 4k TV is going to have four thousand lines. Wrong.
If you look at the full HD picture, it is one thousand and eighty lines down the screen. You could count them if you have a magnifying glass. HD televisions have a wide screen, making the width of the picture wider than the height. This means that on a picture that has 1080 lines down, there is room for approximately two thousand image picture elements (pixels or dots if you prefer) across the screen and so 1080 HD could be called 2k. Now I bet you have guessed it! 4k is not four times the definition of full HD, it is only twice as good and has around two thousand vertical lines and four thousand pixels across, hence the deliberately misleading 4k. What a disappointment, I bet you won’t be rushing out to get a new 4k TV after all.

Autumn again

I do like see the trees change colour in autumn and try to get some pictures but, this year they all went autumnal very late and quite suddenly for just a few days and then a gale took off most of the leaves before I could get any good pictures.

 As usual, we spent Halloween with The Granddaughter (TG) and carved some pumpkins. For some reason, some weeks before, The Son In Law (TSIL) had bought a medical teaching skeleton, which he has named Bob, as a kind of macabre ornament for the house. 
Bob sits on the settee in their living room and looks quite relaxed there, but is not a great conversationalist.

I wish he would not keep doing that

For Halloween, TSIL wanted Bob to sit it in a chair just inside the doorway, but there was only room for him to stand on his support in their narrow hallway.

The kids that arrived begging for treats with threats and menaces were not at all concerned that a full sized skeleton, wearing a hat was revealed when the door opened, being brought up on video games that are much more horrific. The Daughter (TD) and TSIL usually grow their own crop of pumpkins, but this year they only had two which were both very small, kind of pigmy pumpkinetts. They had bought two big ones and I am usually invited to carve at least one and so I created a rather sad looking pumpkin with the intention of making it look as if it had been sick, but thought better of making a mess with its erstwhile innards and just left it as it was. TD had a slight accident with hers and its lower set of teeth got cut off during carving, making it look more like it had a moustache than vampire teeth as intended. The tiny ones were to be left, but in an idle moment I hollowed them out and made a standard scary face on one, whilst TG carved ‘lol’ on the other. TG went out with her mother and The Better Half (TBH) and came back with a bucket of obesity fodder, which got reduced a bit by a concerned mother.

Barrow is set in some wonderful country and although it is dominated by the shipyards, you do not have to go far to get out into real countryside.

The shipyard towers over most buildings

On the other side of the water the proper countryside begins

The weather was not brilliant most days so we did not go out much other than to visit the original Lakeland store at Windermere, where we bought a few items we needed for the kitchen and of course we took our traditional visit to the zoo. The South Lakes Wild Animal Park is growing and there are new enclosures being built for more kinds of animals. This wildlife park is strongly focused on maintaining species and has been responsible for returning more than one species to the wild which may otherwise have died out. They also take animals that have been mistreated and give them as good a life as can be provided inside an enclosure.

Of the new animals there were some wolves. These have a large area to range in and seemed quite at home compared to some I have seen in captivity that are obviously distressed and constantly pacing. These seemed right at home and at one time they set up a chorus of howls, which was amazing. This is another sign they are feeling at home, because unlike a domestic dog that howls when distressed, wolves declare their territory this way.
In the aviary, there was a cockatoo that was strolling up and down one of the walkway hand rails asking to be stroked under its wings. It tended to peck threateningly at children if they tried to touch it with an extended finger. Considering they can take the end off an adult’s finger if angry, they were simply a warning to them to keep away. No doubt it had had children poking it none too gently in the past. If you offered it the back of your hand, it would then raise a wing and let you stroke it or scratch it gently underneath.

Once you had done this for a short while, it decided you were a real pal, it would then try to follow you along the railing wanting more petting. Naturally several people petted it during the time we were there. Some of the birds there had some very exotic plumage and this one made me think of an old fashioned Mexican bandit from 1930s Hollywood.

The bandit

On the roof of the aviary, a pair of storks had made a nest

The one above sees all

I feel sure Johnny Morris would have been able to caption this one

Cute

I know it is not a hampster but, why does this make me think of the movie Bolt?

We stayed until the Monday morning to see TG off to school and then drove home. The journey home was unremarkable other than the fact that we were a good half hour shorter than the usual six hours it generally takes. On practically any trip to or from Cumbria you can guarantee a holdup somewhere along the M6 and sure enough we had one at J18, but despite this we were home much sooner than usual.

Finally a puzzle.  Can you spot the two leopards?