The Lurker

They’re certainly advertised on the telly though I can’t say I have seen one on the road yet. Mind you, there is a certain sameness to the looks of a lot of electric cars that makes Teslas, Polestars, etc indistinguishable at a glance to the untrained eye.

Greetings from the Boring Borough where today the neighbours moved out after being next door since 1987. They have moved to Chestfield near Whitstable. This week has been a long one. FiL was buried in Spennymoor on Monday and we were up there for a few days before, visiting old haunts like South Shields. Inspired by DaveF I took a few snaps of the beach but sadly for Neil, none of the little railway. They had an 0-4-0 running -smelled like a real steamer.

Yes and yes, sometimes. Explorer was the default on the work pc for many years. It then moved on to Edge, although Chrome is also used a lot. Recently they introduced their own “secure” browser which is basically chrome adapted by group IT.

And the place that first solved how to run Cable Cars (a la San Francisco) round corners IIRC.

Here Comes The War - New Model Army

Catchy name!

It soon leads on to a Biggenden Road. Wikipedia tells me Biggenden is named after a native word for Stringy Bark Tree. However, the "den" village name is typical of Kent and Sussex, particularly the Weald. Halfway up the hill to the village next to one I grew up in is Biggenden Oast https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/4489062 So now you know we had stringy bark in Kent...

Managed to fit in a walk through Foots Cray Meadows yesterday after dropping the car off for Mrs Lurker. The frost had started to clear and the Cray was running higher than I expected. Five Arches Bridge in the shots below.

I too remember the rag’n’bone man into the early 80’s at home. and didn’t Whitbread retain horses for central London deliveries from their Chiswell Street brewery until they closed it? I seem to recall that was probably the 90’s but I could be making the date up! Edit / and they rested / retired them at the hop farm at Beltring

Greetings all from a part of the Boring Borough which is still cold and cloudy but which has been snow free. WFH this week as we are between offices which means I seem to have done more ferrying of others while trying to work! Oh and answering the door to deliveries- three calls in a row interrupted today! there was talk of pharmacies earlier - we seem lucky here in that there are two independents on the high street plus a Boots, another on the way down to the station and another down in Foots Cray. And given that I am about 90 seconds Walt from the High Street, that’s pretty good. The High Street itself is the usual mix of charity shops, nail bars and takeaways although the Chinese medicine shops seem to have gone.

When we first moved to Singapore, I was six. We frightened a small lizard in the house so that it left its tail behind (classic defence behaviour). The tail continued to wiggle and I wanted it to take it to school show my new classmates. It was put in a matchbox for me but of course by the morning it had long since stopped wiggling. I assume it went in the bin!

Sorry to hear of the accident Phil, but glad there are no injuries ( although keep an eye on unexpected aches and pains over the next few weeks). The bloke who drove into me a while back claimed both that his car was not on the road and that he’d suffered whiplash; go figure! It still look the insurance people 19 months to sort it out, for reasons I won’t bore you with.

The BIBO ships we part owned have now been scrapped- they became unviable when they needed substantial repairs. We’d only owned 50%. The vast majority of raw and white sugar is shipped in bulk. Although I work in the murky world of tax, I like the fact that the commodities we deal with are familiar and relatively commonplace.

Well today was my last day in the old office before we move to a new (temporary) office near Southwark tube. It’s already starting to look empty. I did manage to take a photo of one of the ship models for JJB and anyone else who likes ships. Unfortunately it’s not a great pic. it shows a now scrapped BIBO ship (bulk in bags out). They were loaded with white sugar and bagged it onboard while chugging round the Med, discharging at various ports. I think there were smaller barges on the Rhine that operated in a similar way at one stage.

The politicians are accountable for the policies- the civil service are responsible for seeing that the policies are implemented and as such can have great influence in how they are implemented- Yes Minister was a comedy but it worked because there were grains of truth in it. Michael Gove is well known for wanting grammar to be taught at school again. Now it is taught to the nth degree at primary schools and in such detail that kids spend so long getting the required grammatical constructs in that they forget to write a good story. Fronted adverbials anyone? I am convinced it is the education establishment’s attempt to make the teaching of grammar so frustrating that it is quietly dropped from the curriculum and we can go back to 70’s when grammar was not taught (at least not to me)

I am not sure it was “only a few years “. There was significant overlap in some areas and even evidence of Neanderthals replacing local archaic sapiens (in the Levant and IIRC in parts of Western Europe). Lastly there is significant DNA evidence of interbreeding- excluding sub-Saharan Africans, modern humans have up to 4% of Neanderthal DNA. having said that the theory may well have weight and have led to local extinction events for isolated groups- and I can’t help feeling isolation was a frequent factor given the difficulties of travel at various stages.

Or is it that the local delivery drivers have been warned what might happen if they fail to deliver with suitable politeness to GDB?

Well I suppose Man United are in a similar place, having started life as Newton Heath Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway

It’s been a strange Christmas and New Year. FiL has been ill for some years and got far worse about a month ago, and Mrs Lurker rushed up north before Christmas. He survived being moved to a hospice and she was back home for Christmas. We went up at New Year but returned as mentioned before, leaving Mrs Lurker with her Mum. FiL finally died at 10.30, peacefully. I am holding the fort here with the boys while Mrs Lurker is helping her Mum.

I used google maps / street extensively when preparing for our US and Canadian trips in the past few years. I found it very useful for picturing in advance where we’d be going.

language evolves all the time. We don’t speak Middle English- we don’t speak Victorian English either. Different to or different from don’t alter the meaning to the average speaker of English. I do probably tend to use “from” naturally. From my ambivalent response, youcan tell I am a bit younger than Peter; I was not really taught English grammar at school although I did have apostrophe s drummed into me - and that does change the meaning of the phrase. ironically I went to a grammar school! on the other hand, different than is meaningless to me.

As a child I was given Railways in the Years of Pre-Eminence by OS Nock. IThe Golsdorf "masterpiece" was always one of my favourites in it.

It wasn’t just me then!

Paddock Wood where I grew up had that too - I moved away in 85 - but I am not aware of a local gasworks or electricity station that might have led to a lights off time; I’d always assumed it was a function of being a (semi) rural place.

Greetings all from a windy Sidcup. Been up north to the in-laws; but FiL is seriously ill and so I and the boys came away a day early leaving Mrs Lurker with MiL. went in to the toon one day and the Tyne was amazingly still - some shots below of the reflections.