Zero Gravitas

And if you were thinking of doing that, would you get Mike and the Mechanics to do it for you?

if it’s any consolation, mine arrived today - so they are gradually getting through…

I know it’s bad form to talk about the arrival of subscription copies, but nothing here in OX11, more than a week after it appeared in WHS in Didcot. Should I be worried yet?

FWIW, I was resigned to missing out on the W1 when Hattons cancelled my pre-order, and I couldn't get one anywhere else. Imagine my surprise therefore when a Hornby ad for the W1 appeared on my Facebook feed - I've ordered and received an R3979 double-chimney version. It appears to be fully intact, so it's now being put away as Mrs. ZG's Christmas present to me. She's delighted, normally she has no idea what to get me :-).

Ouch. That means that publicly anything other than charging at 7kW as a full member is now more expensive per mile than fuel for my diesel Skoda… (assuming the EV does 4 miles per kWH, and my Skoda does 60 mpg (which it actually does) at £8 per gallon)

A random musing, but I've always thought that if a 57xx Pannier and a USA Dock Tank decided that they loved each other very much, the 15xx is what their offspring would look like.

They’re not 🙂 - that makes sense, and thank you for the clarification. There is a fresh problem about what happens if you do want to charge the car whilst you are at work (for any reason) - Perhaps instead of valet parking, we’ll have valet charging, where someone is employed to moved the vehicles on and off the chargers whilst the driver are at work.

All perfectly true - but of little consolation to anyone who has come off the A34 to charge, only to discover that all the chargers are occupied by cars whose drivers have gone to work in Oxford and aren’t due back for 8 hours…

And it’s in completely the wrong place…. The whole point of the park and ride is that you park there and then go somewhere else for some time on the bus - perhaps all day if you work in Oxford. What’s the point of being able to charge the car very quickly under those circumstances - and what happens when a car is fully charged by 10:00, but the owner won’t be back to move it until 17:30? Yet another reason not to go to Oxford. From Didcot, Oxford is closer, but we prefer to shop in Reading or Newbury because they are easier to get to; and easier and cheaper to park in.

What a lot of bass players - and I’m another one. Possibly my most prized possession is my 1987 Wal Custom, purchased new from the Bass Centre when it was still in Wapping.

Postie delivered mine in Didcot this morning, so they are being released into the wild.

This is still bad form, but have you read Hornby’s description on their web site: “Supplying vital loads of cargo for many hundreds of steam locomotives, the Ferry Van Wagon is a practically universal feature of the railway, part of the scenery as surely as the sight of a station or a locomotive” which is interesting, to say the least...

To misquote Bananarama - it’s not what you say, it’s the way that you say it... There’s a big difference between “considering how they might have done things differently” and your original “are the RMWeb team taking any responsibility for the failure”. Language and how it is used really matters - particularly in difficult situations. In PRINCE2 project management, at the end of a project there’s an activity called “lessons learned”, where one reviews the things that went well, and should be done again; and the things that went less well, to think about what changes should be made for future projects. If it was called “the hunt for who got it wrong” it would be a considerably less useful experience for all concerned. And so it is here. Sometimes, sh*t happens - people react and a lot of hard work and late nights later things are getting back to normal. And you can be absolutely certain that there will be thinking about how to stop this from ever happening again.

That’s as maybe, but nobody should be promoting the use of illegal drugs on a railway modelling forum.

Ah - that makes sense. Thank you! And whilst I’m here - the way the NEM pocket can be removed completely is quite wonderful. Some day all manufacturers will do it this way.

Well, mine has just been delivered. It's very nice indeed. I'll add a couple of photos later, but in the meantime, there are two little rectangular grey bits in a plastic bag included. What are these and where do they do?...

As ever, another splendid issue. One question - are the laser-cut wagons in James Aitken's article 4mm or 7mm? I'm sort of guessing 7 mm, but it would be nice to have that confirmed. (and, as ever, it is entirely possible that the article does actually tell me and that I've missed it...)

What did you go for, if I might ask? Our Miele tumble dryer is now 20 years old, and I suspect it’s a major contributor to our energy costs...

Indeed not. In Didcot, Mrs. ZG’s birthday cards, posted in various parts of the country and post-marked 05 or 06 January, were all delivered together on 13 January...

To sort-of-quote Terry Pratchett “freedom includes the freedom to take the consequences” He’s perfectly at liberty not to take the vaccine. However, he shouldn’t be surprised when this prevents him from doing certain things because the choice he has made is at variance with the rules of where he is going. My employment involved me going to countries where certain vaccinations were mandatory for entry. If I didn’t have them, them they would not let me in. This is no different, and the fact he is an athlete is completely irrelevant. In fact, if he believes that the vaccine impairs performance, then he’s actually seeking to gain an unfair advantage over those athletes who have chosen to be vaccinated.

It’s not just about total volume - it’s how that volume is arranged. My wife is a wheelchair user. Her wheelchair fits comfortably folded and laid in the back of our Octavia estate. The back of the Enyaq isn’t long enough to do this, and whilst it is taller, it’s not tall enough the put the chair in upright. An electric Octavia estate would be perfect for us (notwithstanding the fact that it makes no economic sense at the moment - see previous posts...)

So the mums should sort out the rota before going home to do the housework and cook their husbands’ tea for when they get home from a hard day at work? I’m sorry, but I’d really like to hope that in 2022 we’ve moved beyond these outdated ideas of gender roles.

No one else has ever lived in this house - it was bought off the plans 24 years ago. And we’ve had plenty of items delivered in that time, and this is the first time anything like this has happened.

That's just strange - first you question the veracity of what I'd heard from a person actually working within the NHS, because there weren't any "statistics", and then you tell me that you agree with someone else who has just done exactly the same thing.... Anyway, here's a statistic to keep you happy. It's from BBC news: Covid: Workplaces told to plan for absences of up to 25% "Rising cases are also affecting the NHS, with 24,632 staff at hospital trusts ill with coronavirus or self-isolating on 26 December, up 31% on the previous week and nearly double the figure at the start of the month, according to NHS England." You'll probably be upset that it's from a "media source" - but I hope we can agree that BBC news is generally pretty reliable; and the point is that it backs up what I said in my original post - people working in the NHS are very worried about their ability to cope with the omicron spike due to increased staff absence.

Unfortunately, because you can’t quote “statistics”, Hobby won’t believe you and will dismiss what you are saying as hearsay. I, on the other hand, do believe you; as it tallies perfectly with what my friends who work in the NHS are telling me.