runs as required

So ... not always lms forever. But surely B1s not A1s through Aylesbury ! By the time I was able to ride the GC London Extension it was boringly class 5s like everywhere else i was familiar with at the Manchester London Road end.

Missed it, sod it. So is it nightly like in the Med?

I think you just have ... I found the above while mis-remembering how to spell a Yorkshire COBLE fishing boat dh

This Heretical thread doesn't deserve this post (I cannot believe anyone can say FS 3 phase Crocodiles and Crosti 2-6-0s are anything other than the most desirable motive power ever to have ridden behind. They were still operational when we honeymooned across N Italy in 1961 - and only a dozen years ago I marvelled at a Croc still buzzing quietly through Cortona on a long long freight) This is what a kindly neighbour left on our door step this morning knowing that: we were in lockdown, wife likes her white wine and I like trains. Read what it purports to be on the back of the label, then examine the train more closely. I reckon it is lifted from some pop publication about Lenin in his sealed train en route in 1917 to the Finland station in Petrograd! Any explanations ? Or is it just bog Ugly ? dh The bottle is now empty but scheduled for preservation

An old friend from Liverpool Corpy days rang today to check whether we were still alive. So I asked him what the word was we used for buns "Baps" he said I am ashamed to admit I'd been trying to remember "tottie" which in Liverpudlian is wanting something quite different dh

I really meant to say that was a memorable aspect of WW II - the Self- Education that came out of the endless waiting around and boredom until there was a sudden violent action - over in minutes. I can remember my grandfather - a fire watcher at Mt Pleasant Post Office being an avid self-improvement reader of (German!) philosophy. The wartime Penguins are still expensive collectors items in Barter Books at Alnwick station - the origin of the only ‘Keep Calm and Carry on’ poster to ever survive!

... she might launch a thousand ships

'Morning rolls' I can remember as a legit excuse for being late in the CCE's office at Kings Cross early in the permissive 1960s Happy Days ! dh

looks like you'll have a quiet June

I have regularly used a hairspray fixative over a ink dot matrix printed card first (as you would over a water soluble crayon or a charcoal sketch or drawing) before spraying the card with a varnish (matt or gloss according to the intended use). dh

The first time I ever went to downtown Le Havre - an extraordinary rebuilt city after WWII - entirely in Precast concrete by French architect Auguste Perret - there used to be a Concrete Liberty ship moored symbolically in the basin before the Hotel de Ville, its steel net reinforcement slowly rusting away, exposed by salt water spalling the concrete. Very Poetic !

How Very Suspect You Gov proves to be! I agree cob is used now and again for a small inedibly hard bread roll in a posher restaurant*. But never for the more common Stottie which was being spread throughout the nation by Greggs of Gosforth till the Plague hit. dh There was also a Scouse word which I now forget that small boys in serge uniforms would fetch for you into Corpy offices at dinner time. edit *I remember now, I heard it last in the Urban Splash regenerated Midland Hotel on Morecambe promenade.

Does no one at all recall Ernst Schumacher and "Small is Beautiful"? I had the privilege of working with him in West Africa with his Intermediate Technology Development Group (ITDG - which spawned the AT Centre in Mid Wales at Machynlleth on the site of the Corris Railway). We worked on village soap plants, rural linked tourist artefact production for the US 'Roots' Back to Africa boom and vehicle repair, bicycle and simplified locally produced equipment for hospitals. Sadly I doubt whether much of this proved sustainable through half a century of coups, war, ebola and ISIS in WA. Only last week I was reminding an ICU Anaesthetist of the potential of IT ventilators with this collaboration we once made together "Is She Still Breathing ?" sculpture. It made whirring, clicking reassuringly regular BREATHING sounds as it alternately inflated and exhausted a rubber lung and ruffled the feather boa and undies on the hospital bed screens. Sadly we have mislaid the video loop.

Totally OT in this fierce thread, but here goes: At the end of a long contract in Ghana in the mid 1970s with a young family, a still presentable VW Baywindow Dormobile (with its steering wheel the wrong side), and nowhere to stay except in the van, wife and I took the BA overnight airfare and used it to buy deck space for the van and 'as long as it takes' accommodation on a Black Star Line timber ship from Takoradi into the northern hemisphere . The piled up cargo of hardwood logs had not yet found a buyer when we sailed; but they assured us economics were against ending up in Northern America but anywhere in Europe and into the Black Sea or the Baltic was possible. It took 3 months, the engine's cylinders nd piston rings were changed drifting in a flat calm sea off Cape Verde and we sailed slowly past possible options (like into the Med) until things got really serious after rounding Ushant. The Captain sobered up and appeared in his full uniform and concentrated hard through the channel with stuff zapping around us in terrifying 'close calls'. After dinner that night he announced to his dozen passengers with great ceremony that he had finally heard we would be docking in Rotterdam in the morning. We woke up to find we were an hour down the canal into Amsterdam. "Rotterdam or Amsterdam it is all the same to me" he roared "We shall be at sea again in just as long as it takes to turn around". dh

It always happened to me in double German on a Friday afternoon - under the nose of the teacher dh

A lot of the UK domestic bickering about ppe supplies seems to be whether it involves NHS England (as the baddy) or the other Scottish and Welsh versions (I'm not sure about N Ireland). At other times they just say NHS UK. Can anyone clarify the chain of command ? By far the most impressive communicator was the Major General on the Today programme this morning who explained in the simplest terms the logistics of setting up a 4000 bed 'Field Hospital' in London Docklands (apparently on the lines of the one at the Warley Exhibition site some years ago!) 2 Good to hear the return of "Plus or Minus" on R4 at a new time of 0900h this morning - all about Covid-19

Ah! Takes me back to the old pack with a pic of the sparkling white factory alongside the ECML at Welwyn and the wartime slogan "Britons Make It - It Makes Britons"

This the wiki on the Betuweroute A much greater project is the Chinese "Silk Road" railway - with politico/economic Imperilist overtones. I think I read the first container train had reached Lisbon from Quango sometime last autumn. dh

Son came over yesterday, brought a list of things we'd run out of and picked up this month's repeat prescriptions for the OFs. He left it all in the garage with shouted contacts with us through the kitchen door. He'd failed to locate any paracetamol on sale either at his end or ours. But in our local pharmacy a guy kept breaking the 2M rule and nudging him. When outside, the guy arrived at his passenger window, dangled a bag and gesticulated for son to lower the window. He tossed in a paper bag full of 500mg paracetamol styrene push-out sheets saying "A mate had given him loads more than need" and walked off !

These recent posts about limits on road distribution reminds me of the late 1940s early 1950s. If you can remember, it was one the greatest reasons why a whole lot of interests (including a substantial aspirational blue collar/working class vote) turned against the post war Atlee government and brought back Churchill in the 1952 election. The destruction of the 1951 Festival of Britain and the construction of the Shell Centre tower symbolised that in the capital. National integrated transportation potential died with that election. It gave a lorry driver the chance to raise a bank loan to acquire a Bedford Diesel and within 5 years he would own half a dozen. Such a lorry driver might own a Champion First Division football team like Derby County within a decade! dh

Will working from home reduce face to face meetings and decentralise life? Justify the NHS once and for all? Save the BBC ?

Lovely pics, thank you Annie. I've always thought of Bunburying as being associated with Oscar Wilde (and how I've always imagined 'Edwardian' James to be from his debonaire rear view in his hat - strutting into the Brighton side of Victoria station for a naughty afternoon out in the Sussex countryside ) dh

From accent to syntax: a telling Grammatical distinction -the difference between "I was sitting" and "I was sat" ? The latter was used by the Health Secretary when referring to being next to Nadine Doris on the Commons benches today. One time English teacher wife was quick to suggest that the past participle rather than the imperfect tense inferred that Dominic Cummins someone had directed him to sit next to Nadine Doris after she had returned having recovered from the Covid-19 virus. dh

Down in our eighties we need to lean on one another more than ever before. (interesting how the words of the wedding service are so beautifully anticipatory of the stages through life - speaking as an Agnostic) But J needs her own bathroom and i have also taken to sleeping in guest room because i keep her awake at night with alternately snoring and insomnia! Old men are a whole lot more disgusting than ‘fragrant’ old ladies.

There is nothing beats a bit of 'bush clearance' to feel better. Haven't been down this end of the wilderness since it stopped raining. Grape ivy and holly goes up like its been torched!