Castle Aching

[Northroader]

 

[Hroth]

2 hours ago, Edwardian said:

Well there's a moth in my wine glass, and I'm as p1ssed off as they come ....

 Waiter!  There's a moth in my wine glass!

 

I'm terribly sorry sir, but at least you spotted it in time.  The moth in the other tables wine glass (nods to the right), drank all the wine before they noticed....

[Nearholmer]

Ah, yes, the elephant's trunk hawk moth.

[wagonman]

"Waiter! What's this fly doing in my soup?"

"Looks like the breaststroke sir."

 

Ah the oldies are the besties...

 

 

 

[Regularity]

46 minutes ago, wagonman said:

Ah the oldies are the besties...

That is a matter for debate...

[Edwardian]

Here we go ....

 

 

And remember, boys and girls, always to wear a hard hat when standing next a static exhibit yo talk about it.

 

Safety first!

 

This one is rather more charismatic, showing her running in 1930 with sound ... 

 

 

Finally, no sound, but a little bit of nostalgia for Yours Truly, for somewhere in the crowd is a very Young Edwardian ...

 

 

 

[Hroth]

30 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

And remember, boys and girls, always to wear a hard hat when standing next a static exhibit yo talk about it.

 

The chimney might fall off, and then where would you be?

 

(I don't like the "Museum of Liverpool Life", its not as coherent as the "old" museum in Wm Brown St was, and you got a better impression of the exhibits too...)

 

The 1930s film was in Wavertree Playground, where the Lion effectively became a big roundy trainset!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavertree_Playground

 

 

33 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

for somewhere in the crowd is a very Young Edwardian ...

 

So the Rainhill Trials set you on your path in life?

 

Good lord, is that the TIME???

 

[Malcolm 0-6-0]

4 hours ago, Edwardian said:

Here we go ....

 

 

And remember, boys and girls, always to wear a hard hat when standing next a static exhibit yo talk about it.

 

Safety first!

 

This one is rather more charismatic, showing her running in 1930 with sound ... 

 

 

Finally, no sound, but a little bit of nostalgia for Yours Truly, for somewhere in the crowd is a very Young Edwardian ...

 

 

 

 

Wonderful and not a silly high viz vest or even sillier hard hat in sight. I really wish that someone, somewhere, would take all these H&S dweebs away where they can't further complicate our lives.

 

I'm a retired archaeologist and every time I see pics of digs these days there's all these people in hi viz vests and hard hats, come to think of it every time a I see a pic of someone doing anything, anywhere, it's nothing but silly hard hats and silly hi-viz vests. Never bothered in my day and we didn't come to any harm and I worked in some quite dangerous places. I suspect that H&S regulations are proof positive that the C pass students (the vocationally inclined cough...) have finally taken over the world and all those years of the human race striving for excellence by getting 1st class honours degrees and the ensuing higher degrees has been rendered socially unacceptable.

 

I know that as a caring society we have to find a place for the "vocationally" inclined but couldn't that be somewhere out of sight of the less intellectually challenged amongst us. 

 

Somewhere someone has made a financial killing (pun intended) by having a patent on this H&S paraphernalia. It's a pity it's of no use should you actually get run over by a train. 

[Edwardian]

Hope she filled in a Risk Assessment form in triplicate before removing that plastic sheeting.

 

'Elf an' Safety gorn mad' this week at a Leicestershire Hospice, which now rejects the WI's home-baked cakes. 

 

Clearly we do need H&S in our lives, but it has an unfortunate reputation as the ultimate clip-board way of doing things; ticking boxes as an alternative to the application of intelligence.  This is no doubt unfair, but the way H&S is sometimes used as an excuse not to do some things or over-price and over-complicate others can be frustrating and apparently unintelligently inflexible. This may be a partial, controversial and demeaning view, but sometimes it is hard to escape the conclusion that H&S was created to provide a career path for the Mediocre!  Yet beware of discounting it; look what happened to those left, when the Useless Third of the planet had been sent off into deep space!

 

Thinking about it, isn't 1930 an impressively early date for sound on such a film?  Hadn't the "Talkies" not long arrived? I do hope the sound is genuine, it seems to be, and I think it unlikely that they could or would have faked it at this period.  

 

 

 

Edited May 16, 2019 by Edwardian
spelling!

[Hroth]

2 hours ago, Edwardian said:

Hope she filled in a Risk Assessment form in triplicate before removing that plastic sheeting.

 

She wouldn't have performed a Risk Assessment, She's a Curator.  A minion would have completed the RA which she would have scanned through and signed as she's got more important things to do, like spouting overlong to the camera and faffing about with plastic sheeting...

 

2 hours ago, Edwardian said:

 

'Elf an' Safety gorn mad' this week at a Leicestershire Hospice, which now rejects the WI's home-baked cakes. 

 

Thats been going on for a while now. A lot of places now "ban" WI cakes and jams as they're generally produced in unregulated food preparation areas and don't carry the prescribed Ingredient and composition data. Its not just the produce that may contain nuts!

 

2 hours ago, Edwardian said:

Thinking about it, isn't 1930 an impressively early date for sound on such a film?  Hadn't the "Talkies" not long arrived? I do hope the sound is genuine, it seems to be, and I think it unlikely that they could or would have faked it at this period.

 

Better not go into the history of Film sound, suffice to say that the first big sound film was "The Jazz Singer" in 1927 using semi-synchronised sound-on-disk, properly synchronised sound-on film soon superceded this (See "Singing in the Rain", made only 25 years later, for a reasonable potted history of the development of sound).....  British Movietone might have sent a recorder up for the opening ceremony, I think they had Royalty in and may well have recorded the speeches.  The sound itself seems to be pretty thin, possibly recorded on a lo-fi acetate disk recorder, ok for speech but not much else, and later synced to the film as spot effects - in places the whistle doesn't quite coincide with the visual sounding of the whistle.

[martinT]

6 hours ago, Malcolm 0-6-0 said:

 

Wonderful and not a silly high viz vest or even sillier hard hat in sight. I really wish that someone, somewhere, would take all these H&S dweebs away where they can't further complicate our lives.

 

 

Who needs hi-vis when you have a glowing pipe? This is lunch-time on a Festiniog Bristol Group working party above Tan-y-Bwlch early in 1968 .

Martin

[Regularity]

2 hours ago, Edwardian said:

Clearly we do need H&S in our lives

I prefer the (possibly stereotypical) approach of the French: take reasonable precautions to protect your workforce, but ultimately if they want to do something stupid, that’s not your fault...

[RedGemAlchemist]

10 hours ago, Edwardian said:

Finally, no sound, but a little bit of nostalgia for Yours Truly, for somewhere in the crowd is a very Young Edwardian ...

You were at Rainhill 150? Nice. 

[Caley Jim]

Re. H&S, I was on a visit to Cruachan power station recently. The guide told us that it took 6 years to build, but nowadays the RA would take 6 years! 

 

Jim 

[Edwardian]

29 minutes ago, martinT said:

 

Who needs hi-vis when you have a glowing pipe? T

 

 

Excellent.  

 

Nothing of substance or value is actually achieved by filling in forms. 

 

And it's hard to stop and fill in a Risk Assessment when the Pathans are taking pot shots at you ... 

 

[wagonman]

It's easy to slag off H&S (not H&E James – that's something quite different) but remember that in part the risk aversion behind it is due to not wanted to get one's arse sued off by the more litigious minded. For that I blame the Americans. And the ambulance chasing lawyers.

 

PS: I do have hi-viz jackets because I sometimes have to drive through France but they are in the car and still sealed in their packets...

 

[Regularity]

2 minutes ago, wagonman said:

It's easy to slag off H&S (not H&E James – that's something quite different) but remember that in part the risk aversion behind it is due to not wanted to get one's arse sued off by the more litigious minded. For that I blame the Americans. And the ambulance chasing lawyers.

Easy to do that, but per head of population, there is more insurance-based litigation in the U.K. than the US.

In actual fact, there is nothing wrong with H&S, just as there is nothing wrong with PC.

Both are ways of changing societal attitudes for the better:sometimes it needs a legal framework to initially compel people to change their behaviour, with the attitudes and values changing later. 

Where it goes wrong, is when it goes too far, as in my experience last year where someone complained to a colleague because he heard me say the word “puff”. Granted, the fact is true, but the whole sentence was, “It is entirely correct that I can’t abuse by people by calling them a puff.”

Quote

PS: I do have hi-viz jackets because I sometimes have to drive through France but they are in the car and still sealed in their packets...

That is an example of sensible legislation. Attending to your broken-down car out on the road is incredibly dangerous, so getting people to wear a hi-vis jacket in such circumstances helps by alerting other drivers. A law to this effect means that if you aren’t wearing it, and someone drives into you, well, it’s your own stupid fault, isn’t it?

[Edwardian]

Health and Safety is like everything else, it can be a force for good or for the absurdly restrictive pettifogging asininity of the mediocrity, empowered relative to you but who who fears the consequences of applying a modicum of intelligence to any given situation. 

 

I only had two accidents in the army.  One was turning a corridor in an unlit building (to save energy) and tripping headlong over a H&S warning tripod left to mark a long departed wet patch on the floor. 

 

I'll tell you how fearfully moronic it became in the army; putting big bright yellow warning rectangles on the night sight covers of camouflaged armoured fighting vehicles (Combat Vehicle Reconnaissance (Tracked) (CVR(T))s, which are essentially little tanks (as Lt. Gruber would say)).  All hope of realism in training gone. May as well have painted the whole f-g thing bright pink.

 

Mind you, that could work in the desert, but that's another story ....   

[webbcompound]

Interesting.

 

My understanding of the development of railways is that they were a prime example of how attention to improving health and safety regs could improve (and lengthen) the lives of your workforce and passengers.

 

As a retired archaeologist I know that in London in the seventies there were lots of deaths on construction sites, and we came close ourselves on several occasions as we worked on those sites. I also have severe tinnitus and jack hammering out the concrete slab in deep basements without being provided with ear protection won't have helped. As H&S improvements took place through the 80s the number of construction industry deaths drastically reduced. Maybe you don't need high vis and helmets on a shallow site out in an open field. But if you have heavy machinery on site that high-vis helps the machine driver notice you before they accidentally squash you.

 

just to be difficult, but technically pre-grouping, when I was supervising on Great War battlefield sites my team used to change into black high-vis, which we referred to as Mess Dress, for lunch breaks. The guys from 11EOD Regiment that we worked with thought this was jolly good form. Also to confuse people they were quite happy to wear camo AND high-vis at the same time. And generally H&S was quite useful when we could (and would) be dealing with chlorine, phosgene, white star, and general high explosives every day

 

[Hroth]

1 hour ago, martinT said:

Who needs hi-vis when you have a glowing pipe?

 

You note the chap is also wearing a sensible jacket and stout shoes too!

 

1 hour ago, wagonman said:

not H&E James – that's something quite different

 

Quite, large beach balls aren't visible at all....

 

27 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

May as well have painted the whole f-g thing bright pink.

 

Mind you, that could work in the desert, but that's another story ....   

 

Surely "desert pink" is a more dusky sort of colour, compared with 7-year-old-girl PINK.

 

 

 

[Nearholmer]

"....... I suspect that H&S regulations are proof positive that the C pass students (the vocationally inclined cough...) have finally taken over the world......"

 

A D-Class misunderstanding of the whole matter, if I may be equally rude. 

 

The Regulations are largely pretty sound (there have been one or two very poorly drafted sets over the years, notably the first iteration of the "Pressure Vessels & Transportable Gas Containers", but they've been fairly swiftly revised), and largely commonsensical.

 

Where things occasionally go wrong is that some of the people applying them fail to understand properly what they actually say, and err on the side of going completely OTT. 

 

Where things very consistently go wrong is people who don't know their A from their E on the topic, notably lazy journalists, promulgating ignorant, but catchy, nonsense.

[Edwardian]

It's all about how a thing is applied.

 

This week, commenting on events in the Alabama legislature (which tended to remind me of the Tom Lehrer lines "We'll try to stay serene and calm / When Alabama gets the Bomb"), my son dismissed religion wholesale as productive of nothing but harm.

 

Well, whether one has religious faith or not, I would advance the proposition that religious belief is not in itself a bad thing.  Generally most mainstream religious beliefs and ethics are above reproach. The question is how those religious beliefs are applied. For religion to go bad, you only need it to be organised by people! Religion can, and has, had good effects for humanity over the centuries. It can, however, be very, very badly applied. 

 

If you want a secular analogy, the French Constitution of 1793 was a model of democratic rationality. As, I'm sure, in theory, was Robespierre. 

 

I tend to tolerate the inanity of H&S because, taken as a whole, H&S policies have proved necessary and helpful.  Their application should not be above criticism, however, and, like that other Unthinking Man's excuse for idiocy, "data protection", H&S can be productive of frustration and absurdity. Precisely because I see the importance of regulation in this sphere, I'd rather poke fun at the inanities of the clip-board wielders than cavalierly breach safety standards. 

 

As I type, Kevin has said something not far off my conclusion; sound regulations unintelligently applied can be the bane of daily lives.  Satirising them, rather than breaking them, is, in my view, a useful safety valve!

[petethemole]

Yet another retired archaeologist here, which must say something about H&S. It wasn't just about PPE in its various forms, which itself has saved limbs and lives (I remember people digging barefoot in the early '70s) but about safe working practices, for example shoring of excavations. Trench collapses killed several archaeologists and injured a lot more, as well as many construction workers. I had to dig someone out of a collapse in 1970, she was only buried up to the waist but her foot came out back to front.

[Edwardian]

18 minutes ago, Hroth said:

 

 

Surely "desert pink" is a more dusky sort of colour, compared with 7-year-old-girl PINK.

 

 

 

 

Yes, a soft, dusty, pink, really.  Still, it would show up on the North German Plain!

 

An old SAS hand once told me of how they used the Lady Be Good for desert navigation exercises.  Apparently, unless your navigation was spot on, you'd never see her, as her pink colour made her disappear at any distance.

[Regularity]

6 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

 

Yes, a soft, dusty, pink, really.  Still, it would show up on the North German Plain!

 

An old SAS hand once told me of how they used the Lady Be Good for desert navigation exercises.  Apparently, unless your navigation was spot on, you'd never see her, as her pink colour made her disappear at any distance.

Wasn’t there a WWI ship or two which were painted a greyish pink, and were very difficult to see at dusk/dawn?