Malcolm 0-6-0

And here was I thinking that creating a physical landscape was difficult at times. Thanks for the explanation of how virtual modelling works Annie, it's all a bit of mystery to me. And i can see that you do have your work cut out for you.

I didn't finish high school and started work when I was 16 back in 1963. As with many young people who start work early, and are forced into a sort of what would be now considered premature adulthood, I was dreadfully conservative into my 20s. It was only later when I did finally start advancing my formal education in my 30s that I realised what a dreadful lot of BS we had been fed by the dominant conservatives who seemed to have a lease hold on government. As one of our more enlightened PMs once remarked about an up and coming young conservative politician (who went on to be PM for a couple of years until his own conservatives gave him the heave ho), he was a young fogey as were all of them. I watched with interest the national student strike to support climate action and my thoughts turned backed to the anti-Vietnam rallies of the late 60s and early 70s and was struck by how similar our current conservative politicians' reactions to the student strike was to those demonstrations nearly 50 years ago. History tells us that those people who opposed the Vietnam War were right and history, I'm afraid will eventually tell us, that the young climate activists will also be right, yet our conservative politicians refuse to learn despite the lessons of the past. A vast number of young people take to the streets in a united and praiseworthy endeavour and all these young fogeys can say is "Harummphh!! they should be in class studying". What a indictment of conservatives that nonsensical refusal to accept reality displays, and these intellectually constipated fools can't see it - look out the window idiots, those students are the vanguard of history passing you by. Now in my 70s I am glad that I have the certainty of knowing that I will not be alive when the conservatives' failure to act on this matter will have irreversible effects for us humans and I really pity those school kids because they are going to bear the consequences.

Well mono-myths they may be but the attack on the Death Star is a straight lift from the attack on the dams in the post war classic film The Dam Busters.

Our ticket inspectors have been accused of that sort of behaviour

Some academic attire can be so colourful.

Oh I don't know - plenty of politicians with swollen heads causing it all.

However "peas in our time" did lead indirectly to the Woolton pie which in a way shows that there may have been a grain of truth in it.

In North Queensland it's a choice between the crocs tearing people apart or Bob Katter tearing the language apart. BTW I've had personal experience of the big saltwater crocs in that part of Australia while doing archaeological surveys but on balance Katter tends to worry me more

As an Australian in my 70s I find it refreshing that over the last 25 years or so we have lost the cultural cringe that we had concerning our accent. Even into the 1970s our radio and TV announcers seemed to be trained to speak in a version of that received pronunciation developed in Britain as a sort of national standard. In Australia it was quite odd because the underlying Australian accent gave it a slightly strangulated higher pitch which made it sound obviously forced and unnatural. The post war Australia that I grew up in was a period of massive immigration so I grew up with all sorts of people speaking accented English and there are now pockets of locally accented English and odd word usage spoken by the children and grand children now of the post-war migrants from all over Europe and now Asia. It's actually a good thing as it more or less killed of the strangulated accent of our take on RP. Some years ago I worked with a chap who had migrated from N. Ireland and when I first worked with him I found that I could understand anything he said in his distinctive accent. In the field i was working it was not unusual for people to move around and some years later he and I were working together again and both of us had got older. I must admit that I began to find his accent then almost incomprehensible - either my hearing was changing or his accent had thickened as he got older. It was quite odd really, and a bit embarrassing because he was a very pleasant bloke and I was trying desperately not to offend him because at times I couldn't understand what he was saying. Accents are like that - to the speaker they are absolutely unnoticed and it's everyone else who speaks oddly.

Well it certainly has a more martial tone than the Tsarist Army's Womens Battalion of Tea Ladies.

That is good work - I hope you obtained the necessary permits to remove the archaeological remains

Excellent - the stone base to the steps on a wooden platform was a little improbable, mainly due to architectural concerns. Nicely done, will you add any supporting structure? BTW your bridge in the later post over the river is looking rather nice.

No disputing that - I was thinking more of the outline. I also was having difficulty visualising it in standard gauge.

Shades of https://preservedbritishsteamlocomotives.com/wren-0-4-0st-lyr-horwich-works-narrow-gauge/

As an Australian I think the whole Brexit idiocy was a prime example of the - What do we want? We don't know!!! When do we want it? Now!!!!!! syndrome.

Ahem ...... Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and c(h)aldron bubble. Macbeth

It was having an effect on curried sausage sales.

Or Darby and Joan.

Seems to me to be a perfectly rational use of a room. After all rooms were invented to put stuff in. And if people object then ask them to tidy it up - I once had a neighbour who complained that my nature strip (the grass verge between the road and the footpath outside most Australian homes) needed mowing because it was lowering the standard of the street. The idea that the street had a standard was new to me. I said "Well if you don't like it, you mow it" and damn me he did, and did I feel a twinge of guilt? of course not - P. T. Barnum had a wise saying about that.

At the risk of appearing a bit slow, what is this tidiness that is being bandied about. On the odd occasion that I have cleaned up my work bench it hasn't been through any sense of tidiness but pure desperation because I can't find something I put down 10 seconds before. I have then found that the act of tidying has made me lose complete track of where anything is. Accordingly I have developed a hypothesis which is that we humans always put something down within easy reach regardless of what we are putting it on, so that the apparently disordered pile is in fact actually quite orderly and everything therein is placed in the archaeological sense, which is stratigraphical thus providing a very neat self-ordering chronological indication of how long a job has taken and in what order each action was done. Now I feel a lot better for expressing that because I knew my advanced degrees in archaeology would eventually pay off. And, as an addendum, I must say that we should never forget dust - the modellers friend, which hides a lot of things that one has never quite got around to finishing due to the pressure of finding things on the work bench.

The porters were a rather motley lot in pre-grouping times.

What? Has the Prince of Wales created a new political party? Is this to be a rerun of the 45?

WC: I say LG!!! why did you pick the day I'd just bought a new topper to wear your new topper. LG: Because I know you are after my job young fellow!!

In some parts of the remoter Highland communities it was clear that the gene pool had become a little more mixed than was desirable.

Is that the rare Red Arsed Scottish Black Face sheep?