Castle Aching

[Edwardian]

59 minutes ago, brianusa said:

Having left the UK in the lsd era .....

 

I had to take a trip back ....

 

 

[Donw]

3 hours ago, Hroth said:

 

When UKIP first emerged from the woodwork, they were campaigning to stop the UK from joining a mooted European currency which, if I remember rightly, was called the ECU (European Currency Unit).  My mother signed their petition on similar grounds...

 

In more modern times, this afternoon I discovered a piece of Conservative election literature wedged in the back gate, next to a sign advising visitors to go to the front door on the other side of the house to deliver things.  An identical piece of shiny rubbish had also been pushed through the front door letterbox...  A lack of joined-up thinking seems to permeate the organisation from the grass roots up!

 

 

Rather like the Liberal Democrat one that mentioned about climate change and use of resources but had a photo of the candiate on the front which made it non recyclable.

 

Don

 

[Malcolm 0-6-0]

On 29/11/2019 at 04:40, Donw said:

If you listen to any political programs on radio or TV you can see how woefully politicians can cope with questions where their well rehearsed political solgans are insufficient. However as Kevin points out what proportion of the tax income goes on what is not rocket science and if the top civil servants cannot give us the answers they do not deserve their high salaries. I believe it is more they  do not want to explain their choices. This is mushroom growing thinking, keep us in the dark and feed us with Bullsh*t.

Other parties are available but will most likely be equally as bad.

 

In my day job I deal with politicians and public servants. I have found over the years that it is essential to occasionally remind them that they are paid by us to do a job for us, not on us. 

 

This maxim especially applies to those of that ilk who seem to think that their career prospects are of more importance than their career achievements. The latter by definition implies that it is the people who employ them who get value for their money rather than the politicians and the public servants getting more money.

 

The basic problem in our similar systems of government is that we elect rank amateurs to govern us who then are forced to rely on the advise of blatantly career orientated public servants to carry out their duties. This encourages both the endemic corruption caused by the career enhancement mentality in the public service, and the general failure of politicians to implement what we, the governed, need. Thus we have a system which is detrimental to good governance, and is probably irreparable because any initiative to create a better system will be lost because of the amateurishness of elected representatives and the public servants' imperative to put their careers ahead of reform.  

[Annie]

What we used to call in the Health sector regarding the managers set above us, - the CARE model, - Cover A$$, Retain Employment.

[drmditch]

Having been ill recently, and then needing to catch up with many pages of this usually quirky, entertaining, and informative thread, I have been saddened by the influx of posts concerning the current 'political' (if that is the right word) events in the UK.

 

I quite liked the discussions regarding the current BBC 'WOTW' drama. There have been one or two other themes of interest as well, but please can I make the following appeal to the Ladies and Gentlemen of this thread:-

 

The mere fact of survival to an advanced age does not, of itself, make one's experience of living interesting or relevant to others. The 'arrogance of age' can be an ugly thing. Yes I am happy to share reminiscences of one's past lives, but please can we keep these light-hearted and whimsical. There are other places on the WWW for the posting of opinions, informed or not. May I suggest that we concern ourselves with the great and spacious days of the early 20th Century, which, to slightly misquote Mr A G Macdonell in his excellent work 'England their England' are fast becoming as great and spacious as the days of the late and very great Queen Elizabeth which are well known to have been the most spacious on record.

 

To those who are concerned about the state of our nation may I point out the dangers of political demagoguery. This Mr Dafyd Lloyd George appears to be doing a lot of rabble-rousing. Does any sensible person qualified to vote think that the payment of old-age-pensions to all irrespective of moral worth or criminal convictions would be a responsible thing to do? What about the corruption of our very language, when such words as 'democracy' are taken to represent a desirable goal?

 

Do we not have enough politicians like Mr Chamberlain who are prepared to break entire time-honoured political systems merely on the grounds of their own convictions?

 

Enough of this. Let us concentrate on the state of our railway system. Are not Mr Ivat's and Mr Worsdell's so-called 'Atlantics' far too gross and heavy for English railways. Does not this quest for size and speed remove the utility of 'cascading' older and smaller stock to secondary or more rural lines?

 

In my own home country of the North East do NER Consols continue to represent a safe investment?

 

Will our railway companies continue to provide sufficient first-class accommodation for persons of refined gentility such as myself?

 

I note that on my journeyings today, with clear sunlight (and a surprising absence of industrial smoke) illuminating the County Durham landscape there has been a sad decline in railway facilities. Not only did the locomotive not display a polished brass smoke-box ring, but the locomotive and the entire train was not just dirty but completely absent! Indeed the very rails seem to have been taken up and somehow disposed of!

 

Let us please avoid distractions, and concentrate on the essentials of existence.

What shall I build next, a GER covered van, or should I get on with another snowplough?

I also ought to construct an NER Central Division signal cabin, not to mention quite a lot of signals!

Edited November 30, 2019 by drmditch

[Annie]

[monkeysarefun]

Built in 1887 when the trip from Central station to Campbelltown was 4 minutes faster than it is today..

 

 

 

[Compound2632]

14 minutes ago, monkeysarefun said:

Built in 1887 when the trip from Central station to Campbelltown was 4 minutes faster than it is today..

 

 

 

 

Before I saw the photo, I thought I was going to be shown a photo of some Caledonian 4-4-0 on a Clyde Coast express, off to connect with one of McBrayne's paddle steamers!

 

The train engine appears to be a Beyer Peacock, what's the pilot?

[monkeysarefun]

49 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

 

Before I saw the photo, I thought I was going to be shown a photo of some Caledonian 4-4-0 on a Clyde Coast express, off to connect with one of McBrayne's paddle steamers!

 

The train engine appears to be a Beyer Peacock, what's the pilot?

 

Its a z17 built by the Vulcan Foundry in Lancashire for the NSWGR. 12 were ordered, once they arrived here they were tested  in a drag race across the Blue mountains against a locomotive supplied by the Baldwin loco works of the US and came second which in the land of Mad Max is a death knell. . These days we'd have shoe-horned a  Holden V8 in it and had it  wheels up at the first corner.

Edited November 30, 2019 by monkeysarefun

[Edwardian]

7 hours ago, drmditch said:

Having been ill recently, and then needing to catch up with many pages of this usually quirky, entertaining, and informative thread, I have been saddened by the influx of posts concerning the current 'political' (if that is the right word) events in the UK.

 

I quite liked the discussions regarding the current BBC 'WOTW' drama. There have been one or two other themes of interest as well, but please can I make the following appeal to the Ladies and Gentlemen of this thread:-

 

The mere fact of survival to an advanced age does not, of itself, make one's experience of living interesting or relevant to others. The 'arrogance of age' can be an ugly thing. Yes I am happy to share reminiscences of one's past lives, but please can we keep these light-hearted and whimsical. There are other places on the WWW for the posting of opinions, informed or not. May I suggest that we concern ourselves with the great and spacious days of the early 20th Century, which, to slightly misquote Mr A G Macdonell in his excellent work 'England their England' are fast becoming as great and spacious as the days of the late and very great Queen Elizabeth which are well known to have been the most spacious on record.

 

To those who are concerned about the state of our nation may I point out the dangers of political demagoguery. This Mr Dafyd Lloyd George appears to be doing a lot of rabble-rousing. Does any sensible person qualified to vote think that the payment of old-age-pensions to all irrespective of moral worth or criminal convictions would be a responsible thing to do? What about the corruption of our very language, when such words as 'democracy' are taken to represent a desirable goal?

 

Do we not have enough politicians like Mr Chamberlain who are prepared to break entire time-honoured political systems merely on the grounds of their own convictions?

 

Enough of this. Let us concentrate on the state of our railway system. Are not Mr Ivat's and Mr Worsdell's so-called 'Atlantics' far too gross and heavy for English railways. Does not this quest for size and speed remove the utility of 'cascading' older and smaller stock to secondary or more rural lines?

 

In my own home country of the North East do NER Consols continue to represent a safe investment?

 

Will our railway companies continue to provide sufficient first-class accommodation for persons of refined gentility such as myself?

 

I note that on my journeyings today, with clear sunlight (and a surprising absence of industrial smoke) illuminating the County Durham landscape there has been a sad decline in railway facilities. Not only did the locomotive not display a polished brass smoke-box ring, but the locomotive and the entire train was not just dirty but completely absent! Indeed the very rails seem to have been taken up and somehow disposed of!

 

Let us please avoid distractions, and concentrate on the essentials of existence.

What shall I build next, a GER covered van, or should I get on with another snowplough?

I also ought to construct an NER Central Division signal cabin, not to mention quite a lot of signals!

 

It's all my fault.  For which I apologise.

 

I realise that I am devoted to the idea of the rule of law to my core and, regardless of the political issues, I was rather outraged by the chicanery of those playing fast and loose with our constitutional conventions. Now, I tried to find an outlet through a certain amount of satire (I think we can all agree that the last 3 years have been nothing if not absurd) and the odd historical parallel.

 

In doing so, I did open something of a Pandora's Box, but, I have found that we have remained both civilised and self-regulating; comments like yours tend to be respected and the topic soon proves self-correcting. So, I'm certainly not going to mention the words "manifesto" and "Institute for Fiscal Studies", as that would be clearly inappropriate! 

 

This collective calm is a reflection of what a decent bunch that sail together in the sheltered waters of the Pre-Grouping section of the site, which can get a bit choppy once you head for open waters. 

 

So, my suggestion is to pack a flask and some sandwiches (and a fully stocked portable hen house, the need for which will become clear) and head for a bench Hopewood on Sea Pier to watch the ships sail by.   

[Northroader]

Just look out for the chickens.

[Compound2632]

7 hours ago, drmditch said:

 

In my own home country of the North East do NER Consols continue to represent a safe investment?

 

 

Sell now. I hear the Great Northern, Eastern, and Central are plotting to pool traffic receipts and share working expenses. They'll be bound to want to drag the North Eastern down with them.

 

Somewhere in one of his novels that self-taught Nottinghamshire lad is going to refer to the "steady decline of Home Rails". Or is that in Mr Forster's Howards End?

[drmditch]

2 hours ago, Edwardian said:

In doing so, I did open something of a Pandora's Box, but, I have found that we have remained both civilised and self-regulating; comments like yours tend to be respected and the topic soon proves self-correcting. So, I'm certainly not going to mention the words "manifesto" and "Institute for Fiscal Studies", as that would be clearly inappropriate! 

 

 

Thank you, and of course you don't need to apologise! I share your horror of some of the recent attempts to denigrate constitutional balance. (Although probably some of the same things were being said about the Budget crisis of 1910!)

Thank you for the link to Annie's thread. I will study it more later. As a sometime sailor - and indeed a winter sailor - I am quite happy to stay warm inside today, trying to avoid coughing and sneezing and recovering my voice!

 

Back to my workbench!

[drmditch]

2 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

 

Sell now. I hear the Great Northern, Eastern, and Central are plotting to pool traffic receipts and share working expenses. They'll be bound to want to drag the North Eastern down with them.

 

Don't worry - I doubt Parliament will let them!

[Edwardian]

Watched the final episode of the BBC's Bore of the Worlds.

 

I gave the series the benefit of the doubt until the last, to see if any of the odd changes and clunky writing would resolve itself into something worthwhile in the end.

 

IMHO, it didn't.

 

It was moronic.

 

The protagonist, George, became increasingly insipid and irritating. The story bogged down.  The depressing 'post apocalyptic' scenes petered out with the revelation that red weed is allergic to salmonella typhi (typhoid). So. if enough people contract this fatal disease and bleed all over the ground, eventually, we'll be fine.  It was colossal b0ll0cks.

 

What several people have picked up on is the scene in which the survivors are being stalked through a building by a rather more violent and fleet-of-claw alien than Wells imagined. George chooses this point to launch into some self-flagellational nonsense about how it's all our own fault because of the British Empire.    

 

Rather than listen to this guff, I'd have followed the brother, Frederick.  Frederick understood that, when you are being hunted by blood sucking aliens, what you don't do is pause to wring your hands over a clunky analogy. George was, all in all, a bit of a berk.

 

Strangely, that does seem to mirror the book to at least to some extent.  The narrator is largely passive and reactive. The brother (younger in the case of the book) is pluckier and more proactive. 

 

Was the 'Empire speech' justified, would Wells have agreed?  

 

Wells was a socialist, well, a Fabian, and anti-rascist and anti-nationalist, but he was probably restricted in terms of how explicit he could be in print.

 

The text of WotW certainly takes swipes at the Hobbit-like parochialism and complacency of the English of his day.  He notes their ignorance, xenophobia and unthinking racism, illustrated in the assumption that the Martians (despite travelling across the gulf of space) are an inferior species. Wells's English are rather like Betjeman's casually racist supplicant in Westminster Abbey.  There are some possessed by greed, which might be taken as a swipe at the rapacious side of capitalism, and an instance of religious delusion. Most are just ignorant, and don't know any better (though perhaps they should). 

 

Wells uses the Martians to force the complacent English to face a number of their less attractive assumptions and beliefs. It's not that he portrays them as particularly bad, but rather as guilty of lazy thinking.  They are presented as victims of their complacency, not judged on their Empire. His analogy is that of the Dodo.  Their extinction is not a judgment in the moral sense.  Rather, they are victims of complacency and the obvious analogy with Empire is that the stronger will always prey on the weaker. It has more to do with Darwinian inevitability than with moral condemnation and receipt of the wages of sin. Wells leaves the latter to the Curate, who is clearly mad, and, thus, the whole concept of the Martians as a moral judgment is rejected by Wells.  The BBC steals the idea back and places it on its head; their priest is equally delusional, but the nature of his delusion is that the defeat of the Martians is evidence of divine approbation.

 

Thus, I conclude that the BBC's mawkish wallowing in post-colonial guilt is bound to strike a false note, quite apart from being an absurd digression for the characters at the point of the story at which it occurs. 

 

According to Wiki, Wells stated in his autobiography that from 1900 onward (two years after writing WotW) he considered a World State inevitable. He envisaged the state to be a planned society that would advance science, end nationalism, and allow people to progress by merit rather than birth. Wells's 1928 book The Open Conspiracy argued that groups of campaigners should begin advocating for a "world commonwealth", governed by a scientific elite, that would work to eliminate problems such as poverty and warfare.

 

All this sounds rather like the United Federation of Planets in the Star Trek universe.  As to whether that will ever come to pass .....

 

[Compound2632]

Here's a photo of Chalk Farm station (later called Primrose Hill) at about the time Wells was writing The War of the Worlds:

 

 

[J.E. Connor collection, from the Disused Stations website.]

[Hroth]

By 2259, England* will be pleading with the Scots to allow England back into the Great European Project, because the Scots (who returned soon after Independence) will be vetoing the application each time it comes round.

 

Sooooo.....

 

How would all these shenannigans down Lunnon way have affected the West Norfolk?

 

* Assuming the country hasn't fragmented further into Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex.

[martinT]

21 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

Watched the final episode of the BBC's Bore of the Worlds.

 

I gave the series the benefit of the doubt until the last, to see if any of the odd changes and clunky writing would resolve itself into something worthwhile in the end.

 

IMHO, it didn't.

 

It was moronic.

 

..... etc

 

 

Ah - that's what it was all about so thanks James! I must admit to rather losing the will to live after a few minutes of it so turned to a Sudoku. I kept half an eye on it in case they returned to Great Budworth, where I had a flat above a tea shop almost 50 years ago, but they didn't, so I didn't even get a burst of nostalgia.

Martin

[Annie]

Well it looks like someone else made a right mess up of it earlier so I guess the BBC must've been following in their footsteps.

 

 

[Annie]

Much better.  It would have been so much simpler to stick to the original story.

 

Edited December 2, 2019 by Annie
Edited picture

[Compound2632]

That's one seriously anxious-looking tripod. I find myself empathising with a Martian machine.

[Annie]

It looks like it was caught by surprise while gathering welks poor thing.

[Allegheny1600]

Thanks for the summary of the most recent WotW, Edwardian - I can only watch a certain amount of broadcast TV and that is currently filled with scd and "His Dark Materials"! The wife loves scd, don't you know!!

It strikes me that the beeb has been doing a lot of navel gazing in that series (WotW), maybe they feel guilty for attempting to brainwash the rest of us with their election propaganda? 

I presume that's still going on, I avoid it like the plague.

[Allegheny1600]

2 minutes ago, Annie said:

It looks like it was caught by surprise while gathering welks poor thing.

Surprised by the mighty ironclad, perhaps?

[Donw]

I find it interesting that those who dislike Brexit portray the UK as taking an isolationist view. To a large extent the EU sees itself as a bloc and the rest of the world as outsiders. The EU is hardly democratic the plaliarment has little say the main descision appear to be btween the Bureaucracy and the council of ministers. The minister all have one vote as far as know but the number of people voting for each of the ministers is not the same. Add to that and the fact that very little attention is paid to EU issues when voting the leader of a country (well in the UK at least) so I do not believe the EU to be very democratic.

That does not change the argument whether we should stay in or leave but do please not try to raise the issue to be more than it is. Whether in or out we can still be an outward looking country with a world view, particularly with theimportance of climate change where leading by example is probably the only way to get the big nations to follow. 

 

Don