Early Risers.

[kernowtim]

A few years ago I tried to explain to the young waitress in a fancy cafe somewhere in Norfolk, Holt possibly,  that they shouldn't really be advertising Home made (on the premises) Cornish pasties....

Bought a lovely steak and Stilton pasty from Philps in Praze-an-beeble the other day, cost over £4 though 🙄.

 

[TheQ]

Evening Awl,

 

We have Hornish pasties in Horning,. The local semi deli semi cafe makes them, in a variety of flavours. Very nice too, but they don't try to imitate the Cornish product. The other cafe in the village does a very nice beef and stilton pie. It don't cost £4 though...

 

At the radar museum https://www.radarmuseum.co.uk/ this lunch time, ran into two lady members of the sailing club, seemingly they volunteer on Thursdays, but had come today to sort out reception which has had new carpets fitted.

 

Had a dusting of sna / soft white ball bearings this afternoon followed by rain, more rain this evening as well.

 

Back from the MRC and for once no deer dodging. Just acting as a fencing contractor or a painter and decorator.

 

Just had to reset this machine as the screen started doing what it wanted, not what I was typing..

 

Muggachoccy gone

Good night Awl..

 

[Ozexpatriate]

21 minutes ago, TheQ said:

soft white ball bearings

Graupel?

 

Edited March 14, 2023 by Ozexpatriate
link

[BSW01]

Good evening everyone 

 

Well the weather today has been very mixed, it started of lovely and sunny but that didn’t last long. When I got to the workshop, I initially left the door open, to let in some fresh air. At about 11:00 there was a short hail shower, so I shut the door. About 30 minutes later, it started again, but much heavier, and I was glad I was inside, as it would definitely have hurt me if I’d been out in that! In fact, the hail was so thick on the ground, that it looked as though it had snowed! 

 

Anyway, despite the weather, I’ve had quite a productive day finally getting the gearbox finished, by the time I’d knocked off for the day, the following list of tasks had been completed. 

 

Sherman gearbox cleaned and rebuilt ✔️ 

Gearbox and motors tested ✔️

Sherman gearbox refitted into the chassis ✔️ 

Main driver sprockets fitted onto the gearbox ✔️

Read idler brackets refitted to Sherman chassis ✔️

New wiring for the motors ✔️ 

 

Below are a few photos the finished gearbox. 
 

Front view of the drive end of the gearbox.

Back view, showing the new additions.

Side view, showing the new additions.

 

Despite the additional gears and framework, the new arrangement of the gearbox is now about 40mm shorter than it was before, so I’ll have more room for some extra electronics, for speed control and steering. 

 

 

Edited March 14, 2023 by BSW01

[BSW01]

Goodnight all 

[PhilJ W]

Goodnight all.

[BR60103]

16 hours ago, Coombe Barton said:

Salt and pepper on the table - I was wondering when this started, and found by wikipedia that shakers of same were developed in teh 1920s. Wonder what happened before then and why it was considered necessary in the first place.

My grandmother had little (1" around?) crystal dishes with glass (?) shovels that held the salt. I think there was one for every place. (I'm going back almost 65 years now)   I never found out what happened to them.

ed: Tony_S beat me to it.

Edited March 15, 2023 by BR60103

[AndyID]

7 minutes ago, BR60103 said:

My grandmother had little (1" around?) crystal dishes with glass (?) shovels that held the salt. I think there was one for every place. (I'm going back almost 65 years now)   I never found out what happened to them.

ed: Tony_S beat me to it.

 

I seem to remember something lined with cobalt blue glass but perhaps it was for mustard.

[The Johnster]

58 minutes ago, AndyID said:

 

I seem to remember something lined with cobalt blue glass but perhaps it was for mustard.

 

Ah, now the cobalt blue glass triggers memories, and if the triggered memories are accurate, they did indeed hold salt!  Mustard IIRC was contained in a little willow-pattern glazed pottery bowl with a lid and a gap for the spoon, matching willow-pattern ceramic. 

These peices of high culture were features of visits to 'Auntie' Barbara, a relative (younger sister I think) of Alfred Noyce, the poet ('The Highwayman').  She lived in a retirement home in Sketty, Swansea, and we called if we were going down Gower for a daytrip.  I have no idea whatsoever what her connection to the Richards Clan was.

 

She was, as you'd expect, a rather refined white haired lady of impeccable manners dressed as if it was still the 1920s, in her dotage and confined to a walking stick lifestyle by this time (late 50s early 60s), which failed completely to hide her innate sense of fun and enjoyment of life.  She set herself the task of exposing me to Good Literature, and xmas and birthdays would bring a Dickens, RL Stevenson, or similar; she gave me Treasure Island, and nothing I have read since has equalled the descriptive brilliance, or terror, of Blind Pugh approaching the Admiral Benbow in the storm, tap, tap, tap...  She was certainly in part responsible for my later bookishness and enthusiastic raiding of the school library, and I am grateful to her.  But the visits to the retirement home usually featured 'high tea' with all the fancy accoutrements.

[iL Dottore]

7 hours ago, Gwiwer said:

What ever the truth if they aren't made in Cornwall now (nor since 2011) they cannot be called Cornish Pasties under protected food names legislation (PGI).  They can be called pasties or Cornish-style pasties.  Beware of imitations.  

https://www.gov.uk/protected-food-drink-names/cornish-pasty

Which sort of raises an awkward question: under the 2011 legislation, would you now be classified as a Cornish railwayman or a Cornish-style railway man?

[iL Dottore]

Dead Bodies.

 

Obviously, in my line of work, I’ve seen more than my fair share of dead bodies – including at a number of murder scenes. And what I do recall about many of the murder scenes was the mind numbingly boring waiting, as we stood around, awaiting the coroner to turn up and release the body.

 

Fortunately, I haven’t had to deal with too many “messed up“ bodies; the worst was that of a young teenage boy who – drunk – decided to walk down the railway track and into a long and very heavy freight train. As this was when I was a paramedic in the US, the train was very heavy and very long. By the time the locomotives had come to a halt, the body of the boy was already about 20 cars back from the front of the train. Getting the body out from under the train was awkward, but fortunately these particular freight cars had quite a high clearance from the rails.

 

The saddest sudden death I encountered was that of a young woman, who, upon consummating her relationship with her new boyfriend, had a severe and fatal anaphylactic reaction to the young man’s “bodily fluids“ (to be slightly euphemistic). This sort of anaphylactic reaction is very, very, very rare – but it happens.

 

One thing you do learn is that sometimes death comes as a thief, sometimes death is the enemy, and often death comes as a friend.

Edited March 15, 2023 by iL Dottore

[jjb1970]

On pasties, they call them puffs over here. The puff pastry style are a bit hit and miss as I find the pastry tends to be too buttery, but the fried short crust type are terrific. My favourites are these beef rendang puffs from the aptly names Tip Top. Tip Top calls them nyonya rendang puffs, nyonya is an odd word, it refers to a foreign marriage and is used to describe matriarchs in peranakan culture. The peranakans are descendants of the old Chinese settlers in South East Asia, who mingled with the local Malay/Indonesian cultures. The food style is a fusion of Chinese and SE Asian, it's very distinct from Chinese and in today's world it tends to be considered as one of the native food cultures of the region. Something often misunderstood about SE Asia (and indeed East Asia to an extent) is that they are seen by Westerners as a patriarchal societies. That was (is?) true of the world outside the home, but within the home they tend to be matriarchal, the joke here is that husbands are 'foreign ministers', allowed to pretend they're the boss outside.

[iL Dottore]

Returning to the topic of salt (whether plain old iodised, NaCl or fancy NaCl plus), it’s fascinating to contemplate the role salt has played over the centuries.

 

Roman legionnaires were paid in salt (from which we get the term of Latin origin “salary”). It was a valuable commodity with the finer (or more refined) salt being particularly prized (and expensive). In early mediaeval times, when the entire household often dined with the Lord of the Manor at the same table, the salt container (often very ornate and made of precious materials) stood in the middle of the long table, demarcating a division between “the menials” and the more exalted of the household (hence the archaic expression “below the salt”).

 

Not only did the use of salt give rise to many expressions, but it also gave rise to a number of - to our eyes today – some bizarre customs. Probably the most common and notable one being that of throwing a pinch of salt over your left shoulder if you spill the salt cellar/container at the table. It is assumed by some that this is a reference to The Last Supper, when Judas (supposedly) spilt the salt at the table. Spilt salt thus being a harbinger of bad luck and throwing a pinch of salt over your shoulder was to blind the Demons ready to bring you that bad luck (there are many variations on the whys and wherefores of this particular custom).

 

I’m old enough to remember a number of British customs that were still being practised when I was a young boy, but now seem to have fallen into abeyance. Of course culture and society move on, but sometimes it is a pity to lose some of the “old ways”

[jjb1970]

Does anyone remember the old custom of keeping the front room of a house immaculately, nicely furnished and with the family heirlooms on display, but which was only used to recieve special guests (not the riff raff like normal friends and family)? Or was that a Carlisle thing. I remember growing up in the 70's and 80's my grandparents and all the grandparents of my friends maintained their front rooms as a showcase, the custom was dying out in my parents generation.

[Gwiwer]

39 minutes ago, iL Dottore said:

Which sort of raises an awkward question: under the 2011 legislation, would you now be classified as a Cornish railwayman or a Cornish-style railway man?

At my age I’m crimped all over. Your call 🤣

[Gwiwer]

2 minutes ago, jjb1970 said:

I remember growing up in the 70's and 80's my grandparents and all the grandparents of my friends maintained their front rooms as a showcase,

My grandparents did in the 50s and 60s. My parents sort of did for a time but gave it up. 

[jjb1970]

On bodies, mercifully I have had very limited exposure to actual bodies, but a former employer provided services to a range of government maritime departments around the world for technical accident investigation (very few can afford to maintain the expertise needed, and even those could afford to often don't anymore as maritime departments have become increasingly a haven of bureaucrats). I used to do cases of machinery failure, some including horrific injuries and fatalities (burns are not nice), after so many hours looking at pictures which would not be allowed to be shown by the British press, and which is every case were easily preventable, it has given me a very different attitude to 'elf n'safety' to many others. Yes, some H&S stuff is silly, but fundamentally a work place should be safe and people should leave in one piece free of injury at the end of their shift.

[Gwiwer]

11 hours ago, Ozexpatriate said:

I don't know about the pellets but the whole cage does smell if not cleaned frequently. 

As do all of our cages 

[AndyID]

11 minutes ago, jjb1970 said:

Does anyone remember the old custom of keeping the front room of a house immaculately, nicely furnished and with the family heirlooms on display, but which was only used to recieve special guests (not the riff raff like normal friends and family)? Or was that a Carlisle thing. I remember growing up in the 70's and 80's my grandparents and all the grandparents of my friends maintained their front rooms as a showcase, the custom was dying out in my parents generation.

 

Oh yes, there was the "front room" a bit further North in Paisley. But looking back my parents were really quite progressive. Oldest brother was allowed to use it for his "trad jazz" band practice (there was nice piano) and later I was able to record the Top Twenty from the FM radiogram for the scout hall disco.

[TheQ]

Mooring Awl,

4.5 hour sleep, 2.5 hours sleep, good for me.

 

I arrived down stairs and turned on the TV just in time for the weather forecast as recorded last night.

It shows we are in a calm area no wind... I can hear the wind howling round the house and the sea pounding on the beach half a mile away...

Also the forecast mentions Boulmer as in RAF Boulmer our last station, as it dropped 9C from one day to the next.

 

Down in Wiltshire In both my grandparents and parents cases there was always a posh front room until they moved to houses with out that room. SWMBO has ambitions to have such a room, but since we've moved here it's just been a store room. The imminent arrival of her brother's property will delay that further.

 

We're on flood alert again, even though it's coming up to neap tides, good job its not spring tides or there would be flooding.

 

While typing this the wind has eased a bit.

 

Plans for today,

If the wind stays down boat work after searching for three documents, SWMBO decided to tidy up yesterday, and my "to be processed pile" disappeared. Discretion means I wait till she's gone out to her art group this morning...

 

 

 

 

[iL Dottore]

1 minute ago, AndyID said:

….and later I was able to record the Top Twenty from the FM radiogram for the scout hall disco.

Gosh, I remember those days; although in my case it was putting a friend’s record on the record player (one invariably had friends with better record collections than oneself), hold the microphone of a cheap cassette recorder (remember those?) to the loudspeaker and hope you could get one side of the LP recorded onto one side of the cassette without the cassette getting itself tangled up, running out or the batteries in the cassette recorder giving out.

 

I don’t know about you and your mates Andy, but a real object of teenage lustful desire for me and my chums was the Revox A77 Reel-To-Reel Tape Recorder (we’d congregate in front of the shops selling high end HiFi gear and basically drool). Way beyond unaffordable for us.

 

The kids nowadays don’t know how lucky they are with their instant downloads and mp3 players, we had to work hard for our music….

[Hroth]

We were in similar awe of the B-77!

 

One of my friends actually got one...

 

[BoD]

1 hour ago, iL Dottore said:

the most common and notable one being that of throwing a pinch of salt over your left shoulder if you spill the salt cellar/container at the table.

I was once given the cane at junior school for doing just that.  It was something that we did at home but at school they thought I was just larking about and making a mess. 

[AndyID]

13 minutes ago, iL Dottore said:

Gosh, I remember those days; although in my case it was putting a friend’s record on the record player (one invariably had friends with better record collections than oneself), hold the microphone of a cheap cassette recorder (remember those?) to the loudspeaker and hope you could get one side of the LP recorded onto one side of the cassette without the cassette getting itself tangled up, running out or the batteries in the cassette recorder giving out.

 

I don’t know about you and your mates Andy, but a real object of teenage lustful desire for me and my chums was the Revox A77 Reel-To-Reel Tape Recorder (we’d congregate in front of the shops selling high end HiFi gear and basically drool). Way beyond unaffordable for us.

 

The kids nowadays don’t know how lucky they are with their instant downloads and mp3 players, we had to work hard for our music….

 

I have no recollection of how I did it now but I must have tapped into the receiver section of the radiogram and delivered it to the Grundig recorder. Seemed pretty obvious at the time 😄. Anyway, the recordings were reasonably Hi-Fi but only mono,

[polybear]

25 minutes ago, iL Dottore said:

I don’t know about you and your mates Andy, but a real object of teenage lustful desire for me and my chums was the Revox A77 Reel-To-Reel Tape Recorder (we’d congregate in front of the shops selling high end HiFi gear and basically drool). Way beyond unaffordable for us.

 

 

Plenty on the 'bay now......

 

Bear here.....

Gave up zeddin' at 05-20.  Oh well.

Today sees yet more wielding by the Bear - the plan is to get the brakes finished today.

Other than that it's MIUABGAD....

Bear gone.