The Lurker

They never used the slogan “ the future is Orange” there either

My previous employer moved headquarters from Luton to London in the late 90s. One employee rescued the very nice Persian rug that had been in reception from a skip. It was apparently rather high quality. A former chairman (allegedly) rescued the Lowry that the company owned. The company took or at least threatened legal action to recover it from him.

Happy Birthday BoD

thanks - that's one I've never knowingly seen before EDIT - and now I looked at the RSPB site at Wheatears it allowed me to identify another bird i had seen in profusion on the brambles when at Cuckmere Haven at the end of August - no photo but they were Whinchats, which must also have been passing through. The call recording helped too; the clicks in it were distinctive

Recently I had some Torres fried egg crisps: https://patatastorres.com/eng/huevo-frito.html They really did taste like fried eggs - you even got that same "mouthfeel" that you get from the oil that the egg has been fried in. It took me a while but I decided I did like them. Their jamon iberico crisps work too. PB should not look too closely at the prices...my only excuse was that I had spent some Majestic tokens on quite a lot of wine and so they seemed cheap in comparison!

I sometimes think that the thread should be renamed "Days when I get jealous of BeRTIe's latest set of photos" 😜 They're often of parts of the country I don't know well or at all and they generally do make me want to be there; thanks for posting them

I take a note of the time it thinks it will finish and then go and look when it gets to that time. The fear of Mrs Lurker means that I don't forget very often ;)

I’m reminded of the Talking Toaster in Red Dwarf. It wouldn’t stop talking about grilled bready parts; “It’s my raison d’etre. I grill, therefore I am.”

We saw no bears in Banff (AB) but did see them around Jasper (mother and cubs) and also near Whistler - there's a tour of the Olympic park you can do that has the main aim of seeing bears but also does things like take you to the top of the ski jump. We did also visit the grizzly bear refuge in Kicking Horse Mountain Resort (Golden) and the bears at the top of Grouse Mountain (Vancouver). As I say, Mrs Lurker is very keen on bears!

Mrs Lurker, who is very keen on bears, follows this closely. I think she'd follow it in person if she could

That’s exactly what Andretti will need to demonstrate to persuade the current teams to allow another snout in the trough. That, and to an extent, that they will be competitive/ although that is part and parcel of the first point; a competitive US team and driver attracts fans and therefore cash; a poor US team might do the opposite.

I do like the name though; "Whoosh" is a great name. Now we need a high performance car called a "Neeeeyow".

That was mainly a vague thought that it good be related to the promise symbolised by the rainbow and search on Reverend Google. I must have listened in Sunday School ;)

The implication of this is that GWR 10 wheelers were not more coal-hungry than their predecessors. Is that right? What was it about his designs that drove this? Was it the taper boilers, or superheat or something else? I guess superheat had a role to play - after all the LNWR were impressed by the coal consumption of a Marsh Atlantic tank (IIRC an I3) on the Sunny South Express, when it ran through to Rugby. EDIT - or does that reflect that the LNWR engines were excessively coal-hungry as per the rest of your post?

Christmas is definitely on the way. Not only have Morrisons had Christmas cake slices, stollen slices and mince pies for the best part of the month but I noticed at lunchtime that Waitrose had Lebkuchen. I bought a couple of packs. Younger Lurker really likes them so I may not see too many however! In other news, we managed to submit our UK corporation tax returns on time - the HMRC website was of course slow and the agents did not get the last confirmations until Saturday lunchtime that returns submitted up to 48 hours earlier had gone through the gateway. Still, the beauty of using an agent is that submission becomes an SEP once I have approved the returns... We're now of course into year end so I am preparing for an onslaught of auditors. It will keep me busy for a while, probably until Christmas. That's another reason I won't see too many lebkuchen.

Perhaps this? Genesis 8.22 New International Version “As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.” Part of God's promise following Noah's sacrifices after the flood (I think)

We even have a few in Bexley - Upper Collage Farm was an old gravel extraction site that had returned to agricultural set aside type land use and has had skylarks for a few years.

What is a trosh?

Happy Birthday to Mrs Baz and Mrs GDB. and I am a Seven Spotted Ladybird

The list missed Rob Knox who played the boy who ate lots of pudding at Slughorn’s dinner party. Sadly he was murdered outside the pub next to Sidcup Station, defending his brother from a random stranger.

Thanks - then it is the road I thought it was. I ran past the spot enough times for it to be instantly recognisable even though it’s the best part of 40 years since I ran down it! another one of our courses took us on the footbridge over Tonbridge West Yard!

When I saw this I immediately thought that this was Leigh (pronounced Lie) Road, a road which I used to plod along on some of the school cross country runs - although in 79 I was still in the first year and we weren't sent out that far from school - a course along the Medway itself being enough). But a check on street view suggests that the bridge is (now at least) different. So unless the bridge has been renewed since 1979, I don't quite know where this is. Do your notes say more, by any chance?

Simple, the other teams don’t want their earnings to be diluted by an 11th or even a 12th team. They don’t want Andretti either, and he called them out on it last year,

I'm on a bit of a darker 80's thing at the moment - must have been seeing the Sisters of Mercy last Friday that did it.... coming up on the current spotify playlist: She's In Parties - Bauhaus A Strange Day - the Cure Some Kind of Stranger - the Sisters of Mercy Dark Entries - Bauhaus Love Songs - New Model Army I see a Darkness - Johnny Cash OK OK, the last one doesn't really fit but I put it on that list!

House moves: we moved to Singapore and then back to the same house 15 months later when I was a kid. Then I went to Uni and moved once each year and then I moved to Northampton, moving again after a year. Since then I have move twice, once to Sidcup, and then once within Sidcup. But of those moves, only the last three have been full house moves (for me - the Singapore ones involved a lot of stuff but I was not involved per se)