Gwiwer

You would be lucky to travel through Slough now at 25mph. More like 2.5mph on the times I have had to go through

Did they perchance sound like Nigerian royalty? 🤣 In other news a good watch was had today. Bright mostly sunny conditions, a warmth in the breeze and with people around. The totals were 2 dolphins, 2 seals, 2 fishing vessels, 9 commercial vessels, 12 walkers (all in pairs and most of whom dropped in for a chat) plus 110 geology students! All those yellow helmets climbing the Cape looked like some sort of snake. 50 years ago I had been one of them. Charles de Gaulle enjoyed his bath in the silvery sea And a little later the car roof provided a different view offering reflection as the sun went down.

20002 seemed to be the one which gave the greater number of problems if one goes by internet comments. Derailing was one of those. This may be a welcome boost (pun intended) to the ranks but might also be a make-good if manufacturing issues have been identified. Either way it gives more of us the chance to own one of these locos. As they seem to have sold well there might yet also be new issues yet to be announced. The BR green / yellow end livery has been mentioned here before.

The poor server does have almost 13,000 pages to open every time it is asked to access this topic. How it all works in the back end is a mystery to me but it strikes me that if pages 1 - 10,000 could be archived things might accelerate a little.

Hopeful signs. Captain Slackbladder has been absent of late since the last lot of antibiotics dealt with a short-term problem. I can sometimes manage the night uninterrupted though have for most of my life made one nocturnal visit - that's always been my normal. I did seek medical support when once became four times and I was lucky to get an hour's kip in between. My own version of Arthur Itis - the dreaded gout - must be a bout due to pay a return visit as he too has been absent for over two months now. Cherry juice and privately-purchased medication* (correctly dispensed, I might add, with reference to my GP, but not available on the NHS) are ready and waiting. * Indometacin 50mg. NHS will only prescribe 25mg which isn't strong enough and, frankly, Iboprofen does a better job. I had the 50mg in Australia where they are available through Medicare and can get them here via an online pharmacy at a small cost. 50mg means sit tight for 3 hours or so until the "fuzzies" wear off but they deal with the pain quite nicely.

It’s been very slow and uncertain for a while now. I suspect our esteemed Mr York is on overtime again trying to sort things out. It’s been so slow that many attempts at posting or reading have timed out, it has also produced strange effects such as random duplication and “condensed” type where several lines of text appear to be overtyped across others. And there’s the banner about the classifieds being out of order. How long until the next Great Outage, I wonder? Hopefully without loss of content this time.

Oh yes. The Cornish National Hole-digging Championships are in full swing. Likely winners are those who can dig the smallest hole, close the longest length of road, erect four-way traffic lights and then b****r off for ten days over Easter. Leaving no work in progress, no kit on site and miles of stationary traffic fuming about pointless closures. Highly Commended goes to the recent set of lights just outside town which caused chaos through our narrow main street. Vehicles cannot pass so the inbound traffic met the outbound queue and couldn’t move thereby blocking the single lane through the lights. Those lights, incidentally, were for works off on a side road and had no business ever being on the main road. A potential winner goes to the ten-week duration of four-way lights at a minor crossroads on the main road. This was to allow the installation of a bus stop. It took that long for them to install five metres of kerb and erect a pole. Not only that but the bus stop has been sited right on the junction (where the Highway Code tells us we must not stop) meaning that if ever a bus stopped there it would block the entire junction. Why fit a bus stop now? Thus is a rural location with just one house nearby. The next is over a mile away. And for good measure the bus route being withdrawn next week …..

Recent work to have Porthgarrow fit for show next month has included refreshing all the vegetation and adding new trees. The original printed sky backscene had become damaged and marked. Rather than try to fit another of the same sheets around all the fixed scenery I instead over-painted it. Using chalk paints and acrylics mixed I now have a sky which includes some cloud and even a few showers. The lighting will not be functional by next month. It was all fitted, wired and tested but the current proved too much and blew out the nanoLEDs after a few seconds. I had it stepped down to 3V but clearly that wasn’t enough despite the LEDs being quoted as 12V ones. So dummy lighting it shall be. For now at least. The station sign has been repainted in bolder colours but is still part-repainted into WR brown.

Spring has arrived. The triffids are growing at a rate of knots

Passenger emu

Not these days but there used to be. I have - in my school days - had one or two of these and become frustrated at not being able to "cop" more than a handful of vessels. I now know that the same few vessels always worked the same "runs" so it was normal to see the Winchesterbrook or the Ian M multiple times a year whereas a trip into town might mean I could see a different "Western" or "Warship" almost every time.

There was nothing "posh" about the Waitrose in Twickenham. We used it a few times. It could, however, be described as "push". It seemed to be the proving-ground for everyone intent on competing in the antisocial Olympics. Once you had got inside, which wasn't always as simple as walking through the doors, if you dared to stop at a shelf you were jostled or rammed out of the way by elbows, bodyweight or someone else's trolley. or any combination of the above. We never enjoyed the experience. Latterly Dr. SWMBO decided to try a newly-opened Lidl in Fulwell. Much the same there, we found, except the prices were cheaper and some of the food was simply awful in quality. A busy watch this morning with everything wanting to transit the shipping lanes. Far more trawlers than usual were out fishing, there was the usual assortment of freighters, ROROs / Anglo-European ferries and a tanker, the first crossing of the year for Scillonian III and the first two yachts of the year. Apparently racing each other from Brittany to Ireland but not engaged in racing anyone else. Good luck to them - that's not my idea of fun at all.

Oh I dunno. It’s always been a pat-test when I was single enough to indulge in such things. Now it’s a pat-test for His Furship on demand. Including at 3am.

Morning all. ER here. I’m on watch in a few minutes if I can see anything. As usual it’s foggy, dribbly and not very nice outside. It could be a morning of gazing at the radar and ship-scanner apps.

In other news ..... ..... the pdf file of the book has gone off to my proof-readers right on time. I now await a deluge of "corrections". Which is one reason the text is proof-read in the first place.

Maybe so but the sausages resemble toads with a little imagination and they sit in a hole in the batter. But Shepherd’s Pie / Cottage Pie are not made from shepherds or cottages.

Lost bread? But I found it in the bread-bin exactly where it should have been, Sir. Yes indeed the French call French Toast "pain perdu" for reasons all their own

Which is one reason Aussies are allowed to keep up to six chooks in their backyards but no roosters. When one of ours hatched a clutch of eggs brought in from a neighbour's farm we were ready and waiting to take her up on the "rooster-return policy". A baby chook for every baby rooster so long as one was available. And sure enough one started to stretch its neck and squeeze out a squeaky "ca-doodle-do" after a few weeks. Rule 1 : No Cockeroosterdoodling in the backyard!!!

Er, you might want to re-phrase that......😯 It's just his tripe-writer having a fantasy all of its own 🤦‍♂️

We are neither "monied" nor "posh" but we did indulge in both brunch and afternoon tea yesterday. In fairness we also did not indulge in either breakfast nor lunch but did "do" dinner later on. We planned our day around the afternoon tea with friends in order to not over-eat nor try to stretch intervals between meals to more than we normally do. Therefore brunch was enjoyed mid-morning and comprised of French Toast (or eggy-bread if you're not being posh!) with bacon and maple syrup. Dinner was roast cluckbird with veggies. And mid-afternoon four of us enjoyed Dr. SWMBO's home-made scones with jam (first), clotted cream (on top) and tea as we sat and talked around the table. All very fine and enjoyable. Today it is back to "work" in order to submit the book for proofreading by tonight. Dr. SWMBO has to make the weekly trek to London and on this occasion will be inconvenienced by the Orange Army interfering with something or another and enforcing a coach trip between Plymouth and Tiverton. Muggertea the First has been consumed. It is almost time for the second. I'll do a bit more tidying of the text first.

Yup. Every last one of them. Mother swore that nothing was cooked unless cremated or too soft to lift with a fork. Toast - brittle and black. Potatoes (boiled) - floury and almost self-mashing. Coffee - always made with boiling milk so it had a skin on by the time the cup was presented to you.

Added to which everything which should be concrete, castings and all, were painted using a mix of Railmatch "Concrete" and very fine sand from a Peco weathering kit to give the required texture.

Sadly a lot of the earlier images were lost in a re-hosting of the site some time ago although I always hold my originals here. Yes, Dart Castings legs are used. I found a need to drill out the holes with a 0.5mm pin-vice bit before threading piano wire through. The top holes, which is where tubular steel would go rather than wire on the real thing, are reamed out to 0.8mm very carefully as there is nothing spare and brass rod used for the thicker top rail. A LOT of fine drilling is required to seat those castings into the baseboard. Patience, persistence and accurate measurement are your friends. I glued the two parts together first with Superglue rather than attempt to get the posts perfectly upright and then add the bearers. There is a little "give" in the cast material and if a bond does break another dab of superglue fixes the problem. Glue them into the baseboard holes as well! The platform deck is card scribed into "slabs" then painted in Railmatch "Concrete", weathered with powders including a touch of green along the scribed paver edges and a white lining pen used for the warning line along the edges. I tried with foam-board but it wouldn't lie flat. The card took a while to settle down too but superglued to the castings and with a heavy flat steel ruler rested along it the bond was made and the surface has remained flat enough for credibility.

I would never seek to copy the work of another directly but were I to build a model of somewhere I already knew to have been modelled then I see that as absolutely ok. I did respectfully back away from using a fictitious name I had chosen upon learning that it was already in use for another layout. I could still have gone ahead because the name itself was not subject to any form of legal protection. All it cost me to effect the change was a still-unused sheet of stick-on signs. Not a problem at all.

Not overdone though thanks! Medium rare is enough. On a fire that big maybe a minute either side? I was taught by a chef friend how check how far cooked a steak is. Place your thumb-tip against the lower knuckle of the index finger and press the soft tissue around its base to gauge the texture - that's rare; the middle finger - that's medium rare; the ring finger - that's medium and the little finger is overdone!