Castle Aching

[alastairq]

Aaah! Jenny Agutter....So there is a railway link, after all?

 

As an aside, I would dearly love to know the 'outcomes' of the most recent 'games' being played out by the  experts, at a military spot near Shrivenham?

[Edwardian]

55 minutes ago, alastairq said:

Aaah! Jenny Agutter....So there is a railway link, after all?

 

 

 

You doubt a railway link to all this?

 

The connections run deeper than you know ....

 

Thanks to Terry Pratchett (Marvel in the form of the MCU comes rather later with the idea) I've realised from the start that Castle Aching exists within the multiverse*.  This means that, somewhere, the WNR actually exists. Needless to say, the Isle of Eldernell & Mereport Rly also exists. Somewhere.

 

It also means that there are likely several iterations of West Norfolk, and the world, as we know it. In one such universe, Norfolk unfortunately suffered a localised Zombie outbreak on the Broads in 1909, as documented by an Honourable Member.

 

In another, the Martian Invasion of Surrey actually occurred and, blocking the line at Woking, played havoc with the LSWR's service to all the company's major destinations. Fortunately, very few passengers actually noticed any difference.

 

In yet another, in 1904, Imperial Germany staged an abortive invasion via The Wash, complete with a dash to seize the King at Sandringham to compel him to order the immediate surrender of Crown Forces. The King was saved and the invaders thwarted by the deliberate inundation of inland areas in their line of advance. This heroic episode was immortalised in the famous novel The Riddle of the Fens.    

 

Anyway, I have to go out now, just as soon as I've found my tin-foil-lined Bowler. 

 

* I'm perfectly prepared to allow maths to dictate reality where it provides a handy literary device. 

 

EDIT:

 

See also 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited May 19, 2022 by Edwardian

[Compound2632]

1 hour ago, Edwardian said:

Prussia, not without reason once described as not a State with an Army, but an Army with a State.

 

Having started out as a "religious" order with a state. The last Grand Master of the Teutonic Order, Albrecht of Hohenzollern, having turned Lutheran, converted the Order's lands into the Duchy of Prussia. In order to do so, he had to make feudal homage to his overlord, Zygmunt, the King of Poland, a point not lost on 19th century Polish nationalists:

 

 

Hołd pruski (The Prussian Homage), Jan Matejko, 1879-1882, oil on canvas, 8.75 m x 3,88 m (i.e. big), Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie (National Museum in Kraków) [Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons].

Edited May 19, 2022 by Compound2632

[Edwardian]

1 minute ago, Compound2632 said:

 

Having started out as a "religious" order with a state. The last Grand Master of the Teutonic Order, Albrecht of Hohenzollern, having turned Lutheran, converted the Order's lands into the Duchy of Prussia. In order to do so, he had to do feudal homage to his overlord, Zygmunt, the King of Poland, a point not lost on 19th century Polish nationalists:

 

 

Hołd pruski (The Prussian Homage), Jan Matejko, 1879-1882, oil on canvas, 8.75 m x 3,88 m (i.e. big), Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie (National Museum in Kraków) [Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons].

 

Much good it did them!

[monkeysarefun]

Speaking of invading hordes etc it's hard to believe it's 90 years ago this year that  we lost the Great Emu War.

https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/topics/wildlife/2016/10/on-this-day-the-emu-wars-begin/

 

Jennifer Agutter link - I first saw "An American Werewolf in London" at the  drive in near Emu Plains.

[Hroth]

13 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

I'm perfectly prepared to allow maths to dictate reality

 

One of todays newspapers (the Daily Star, need you ask) has proclaimed that the word "Maths" is too difficult for school children and should be replaced by "Numeracy"...

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-the-papers-61502869

 

I'd have thought "Arithmetic" would be more friendly than "Numeracy", and if that doesn't help, we go back to "Readin, Ritin and Rithemetic"!

 

A friend, who is a Teaching Assistant, has a fund of horror stories about the grasp a large proportion of primary age children have of all three subjects...

 

 

Nice to see the Wroxham Zombie Apocalypse of 1909 rearing its terrifying head once more!

 

[Edwardian]

10 minutes ago, Hroth said:

 

One of todays newspapers (the Daily Star, need you ask) has proclaimed that the word "Maths" is too difficult for school children and should be replaced by "Numeracy"...

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-the-papers-61502869

 

I'd have thought "Arithmetic" would be more friendly than "Numeracy", and if that doesn't help, we go back to "Readin, Ritin and Rithemetic"!

 

A friend, who is a Teaching Assistant, has a fund of horror stories about the grasp a large proportion of primary age children have of all three subjects...

 

 

Nice to see the Wroxham Zombie Apocalypse of 1909 rearing its terrifying head once more!

 

 

I thought Numerancy was the forbidden magic of raising the dead.

 

Speaking of which, I love your idea of the 1909 Wroxham Zombie Apocalypse too much to let it go!

 

 

 

Edited May 19, 2022 by Edwardian

[Edwardian]

21 minutes ago, monkeysarefun said:

Speaking of invading hordes etc it's hard to believe it's 90 years ago this year that  we lost the Great Emu War.

https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/topics/wildlife/2016/10/on-this-day-the-emu-wars-begin/

 

 

 

Better than anything we could make up.

 

Humiliating as it was, at least in the Cod War Britain was not defeated by the actual cod.

 

[Edwardian]

Meanwhile, plans for the weekend include .....

 

CAD review of the latest WNR coach

 

 

 

Commencing work upon these little beauties

 

 

And approving plans for my new office.

 

If you want to see the true face of megalomania, it's:

 

 

 

 

 

[Hroth]

24 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

......

And approving plans for my new office.

 

If you want to see the true face of megalomania, it's:

 

 

Most elegant!

 

Just make sure the shelf-supporting adjustable pins are up to it with regards to weight-bearing. Just try picking up a shelf length of magazines or hardback books...

 

I'm assuming that there are restrictions on what you can do to walls, my preference is for steel shelf supports with equivalent brackets that can be adjusted to accommodate varying heights of book, and faced shelving, screwed to load-bearing walls. Strong, but utilitarian! 

 

This sort of stuff

 

 

24 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

 

 

 

 

 

Edited May 19, 2022 by Hroth
No idea where the empty hiccup came from!

[Edwardian]

5 minutes ago, Hroth said:

 

Most elegant!

 

Just make sure the shelf-supporting adjustable pins are up to it with regards to weight-bearing. Just try picking up a shelf length of magazines or hardback books...

 

I'm assuming that there are restrictions on what you can do to walls, my preference is for steel shelf supports with equivalent brackets that can be adjusted to accommodate varying heights of book, and faced shelving, screwed to load-bearing walls. Strong, but utilitarian! 

 

This sort of stuff

 

 

 

 

 

Has to be freestanding and removable

[ianathompson]

1 hour ago, Edwardian said:

Speaking of which, I love your idea of the 1909 Wroxham Zombie Apocalypse too much to let it go!

 

 Not too sure that some of their offspring are not still wandering the West Norfolk fens, to this very day.

 

Ian T

[alastairq]

12 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

 

Has to be freestanding and removable

 A fact-of-renting, I find?   Most of my furniture has bits of expanded polystyrene taped to the rear, to prevent damage to the walls.....Also,  plywood pieces under the bases, to prevent permanently 'marking' the landlord's carpet.

 

An old Model Railroader magazine  once carried an article by a modeller in the US, who had come up with a solution to the issue of securing baseboards to the walls in a rented abode.....By constructing a series of  floor-to-ceiling supports , which had screw adjustment to make them secure, and which carried adjustable shelving fixtures to enable baseboards to be secured around the walls...without actually marking the walls themselves. They ''leaned'' against the walls themselves...[padded I think?] but also sorted the problem of how to secure shelving systems to plasterboard walls...

Something that would need to be remembered by those of us who rent their homes?

 

edit...as Hroth has mentioned...but for also supporting baseboards.

Edited May 19, 2022 by alastairq
just spotted a previous post

[rocor]

20 hours ago, Regularity said:

True, but I think that a tenuous grip on reality is quite possibly a sign of high intelligence - and sense enough to hide here away from the “real” outside world.

 

I do not think any of us confuse miniature railways and what is real.

 

 

[Compound2632]

58 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

If you want to see the true face of megalomania, it's:

 

I've long fancied an octagonal library. But for sheer biblothequerie one can't beat the Strahov Monastery:

 

[rocor]

26 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

 

Has to be freestanding and removable

 

Structurally, it should work, as the case on the far wall should act as a spreader to keep the side cases from toppling over.

[St Enodoc]

11 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

 

I've long fancied an octagonal library. But for sheer biblothequerie one can't beat the Strahov Monastery:

 

Not much of a library without leather wing chairs.

[Compound2632]

1 minute ago, St Enodoc said:

Not much of a library without leather wing chairs.

 

It's a monastic library. Leather wing chairs would constitute a breach of the vows.

[Edwardian]

11 minutes ago, rocor said:

 

Structurally, it should work, as the case on the far wall should act as a spreader to keep the side cases from toppling over.

 

Well, the designer evidently thinks it will work!

[rocor]

4 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

 

Well, the designer evidently thinks it will work!

 

I did not read the note on the bottom of the plan and assumed that the sketch was drawn by you. Oh!, that does not come across very well either, does it?

[Northroader]

It is quite possible to have bookshelves delivered where the gap between the shelves is narrower than the height of your favourite books. Just saying...

Now returning to Stephens “Prussian Homage”, are we sure it’s Poland? There’s a person in the lower RH corner dressed as a Red Indian Native American.

[Hroth]

11 minutes ago, Northroader said:

Now returning to Stephens “Prussian Homage”, are we sure it’s Poland? There’s a person in the lower RH corner dressed as a Red Indian Native American.

 

Perhaps its a Viking influence?  They got to North America too....

 

5 minutes ago, AVS1998 said:

I dream of having a vast library, where I can actually have all my books out on display rather than perpetually in storage, as they are now. 

 

But above all, I must be able to have, what I call, the 'Belle' moment;

 

The Beast appears to have a small library in terms of actual books, there's more spaces than works of literature on his shelves! And is that a powered shelf ladder?

 

Of course, the shelf accessing mechanism in Deaths biography library is to die for!!!

 

[Compound2632]

29 minutes ago, Northroader said:

Now returning to Stephens “Prussian Homage”, are we sure it’s Poland? There’s a person in the lower RH corner dressed as a Red Indian Native American.

 

Topical. He is Przecław Lanckoroński, Hetman or commander of the Ukranian Cossaks in the service of the Polish Crown - at this period the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (incorporating Ukraine) were in personal union, much as England and Scotland were under the Stuarts.

[Edwardian]

18 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

 

Topical. He is Przecław Lanckoroński, Hetman or commander of the Ukranian Cossaks in the service of the Polish Crown - at this period the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (incorporating Ukraine) were in personal union, much as England and Scotland were under the Stuarts.

 

The history of Ukraine has always been of a nation that wanted to be a nation, but never quite managed a sustained period as a sovereign state. 

 

In the period between Partition in the Eighteenth Century and the founding of the post-War Polish state, the history of the Poles has been similar, but at least they had their sustained and prolonged place in the sun with the Kingdom of Poland and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, conglomerations that included much of modern Ukraine.

 

The Hetmanate was a brief period of semi-autonomy, but essentially every time Ukrainians played for independence by trying to set Poland-Lithuania against Muscovy (later Russia), with the Ottomans sometimes making up a third (the Crimea was a Tartar vassal of the Ottomans), they got stuffed.

 

Essentially the Ukrainians had been putting up with not having a sovereign state since the 1240s, the point when the Mongols rode over the Kievan Rus, so you can quite see why, now they have an independent Ukraine, they are not minded to give it up.     

 

Slava Ukraini!

[Donw]

7 hours ago, Edwardian said:

 

No, I assure you, she's real

 

 

Or, not to beat about the Bush, have you answered the wrong topic?

 

 

 

I don't think anyone sensible would take issue with that, Don.

 

For CA purposes, I was picking up on Hroth's point and sticking to a pre-Grouping analogy. Clearly Putin's strategy and modus operandi have greater and striking similarities with Hitler's and both are/were tyrants.  Further, for years the West allowed itself to be complacent about Putin and its ability to accommodate this funny little man into our rules-based system, just as we did with Hitler.  Indeed, in some quarters he and Mussolini were positively admired for the way they tackled the problems facing all nations, seemingly with more success than the broken democracies of the West; see the Daily Mail and its support for Fascism here and abroad in the 1930s and Donald Trump's admiration for Putin. Finally and decisively, the failure to discourage the tyrant sooner is a common factor: Rhineland, Anschluss, Czechoslovakia or Georgia, Syria, Crimea, Donbas ....

 

But I think the wider consideration of Putin's war and it's parallels with Hitler's is best conducted on the Proceedings topic.  Here I was interested in the point Hroth made about Edwardian Britain's perception of and reaction to the threat posed by the Kaiser's Germany.  Besides, I have a bit of a 'thing' for the 'invasion literature' of the day.  

 

 

 

Agreed lets stick to the Edwardian era. Here I am amazed at the military experts who declared the war would be over by Christmas when it turned out to be a different Christmas than everyone thought. 

 

Don