jonny777

Bright and breezy here in North Somerset, but dry. So, have put my washing on and hope for a dry afternoon. However, cruel news has emerged. My brother rang to say Dad has taken a turn for the worse, although I was unaware it was possible to get much worse. Apart from the possible imminent upset of losing my father, I would also change from power of attorney for financial affairs, to executor of his will. I'm not sure how this affects a house sale where contracts have been exchanged but the completion date has not arrived. His accounts would be frozen presumably until probate has been agreed, but maybe that does not happen until the banks are informed officially of his passing, otherwise the money transfer can't happen. After 21 months of trying to sell the property through three lockdowns and two buyers pulling out at the last minute, I would prefer to get this over and done with. I realise this may seem callous prioritising financial transactions over severe health matters, but everything seems pre-ordained to b*gg*r things up. I am well past the age where I can just sail calmly through unpredictable rough waters. Oh well. What will be will be, I suppose.

Dressage? Isn't that cruel to horses? I don't see them walking like that in open fields.

Same here. I used to watch it, and try my best to be amused; but most of it seemed completely puerile to me. Ministry of silly walks? Well I could do a silly walk, especially after breaking my leg; but no one laughed at me. My grandkids do silly walks when they have had too much sugar, but they get told off for being stupid.

It's not had the domino headcode treatment, so might have been U/S for a while.

Yes, I am well aware of this, but my point was that nowadays instead of dumping fruit at the various companies' expense, they are dumping it on the customs completely unripe and think they are clever by labelling the fruit 'ripen at home'. All I know is that nectarines bought in UK shops used to be sweet and juicy with very few duds. Now mine seem to be 90% dud and only a few taste like nectarines should. It is almost as if the customer now bears the loss, because the growers, wholesalers and retailers are certainly not going to. The bottom line is all that matters to them.

Yes, we had a Physics teacher who had previously worked at Woomera rocket ranges, and was great for A Level as he knew most of the stuff off by heart. He managed to persuade the school to purchase a second hand cloud chamber from somewhere, so we could actually see radioactive decay taking place. This was in the late 1960s.

Dull and siling down here in North Somerset. 18mm since midnight, to go with the 10mm we had yesterday in showers. This appears to be maintaining the weather sequence of flood, drought, flood, drought which the West Country seems to have been given as its new climate. Another 18 hours of Olympic recordings to fast forward through but, given the conditions outside, will be about the only activity permitted. No milk delivery this morning, and presumably the milkman has had to self-isolate. No apples or nectarines from Ocado on Tuesday, although with the nectarines I have now found that the practice of picking them unripe from the trees and then refrigerating them until they get to the supermarket shelves where ripening is a lottery, has produced some of the most rubbish fruit I can remember. So, I am not too disappointed in not having any. What these maximise profit at all costs companies seem not to realise, is that fruit will taste far better when allowed to ripen in the sun and turn the bland carbohydrates into tasty sugars. However, I suppose their idea is that better the fruit rot in peoples' kitchens, rather than on the shelves unpaid for.

It has been that kind of a day. I have just driven home after the scream-fest which was my granddaughter's birthday party. During the journey there were three separate places where the roads were completely awash, and two others where they were bone dry; and that was in ten miles.

Yes, Pinky and Perky were a bit cringeworthy. And they released records, which meant they were played to death on The Light Programme, which my mother used to listen to. Fortunately for me, I could make unlikely excuses such as "I'm just going to do some homework" and vanish to my bedroom where I could get Radio Caroline on my transistor radio.

The least funny 'comedian' in my long list of them (including Tommy Cooper) was Arthur Askey. "Hello playmates"

Cloudy and damp in North Somerset. I was woken at 0340 by a rumble of thunder, which then means I stay awake thinking 'how far away was that?' 'can I hear any more?' "is it getting closer?' 'is it raining?' A couple more rumbles and I must have drifted off again. I also have trouble with shoes, because I have one foot bigger than the other; in fact one leg bigger than the other. This is due to breaking my left leg aged 8, both bones compound fracture. I was in plaster from mid-May to end-Aug and presumably this coincided with a spurt of growth from the right leg. Anyhow, I get by with a little inconvenience. Now to fast forward through most of the Olympics I have recorded overnight. I record both BBC and Eurosport from 2300 to 0800, then fast forward through the not-interested sports (I don't watch violent sports such as boxing and head kicking), plus the surfing seems about as interesting as paint drying. No tennis, table tennis or badminton, either. In fact I am really only looking for archery, shooting, rowing/canoeing, sailing or swimming - unless something else takes my fancy. (Not beach volleyball, as it seems to be full of posers who spend more time high-fiving each other than they do playing the game). As I have 18 hours to look through, I may be some time; and I have to be at granddaughters birthday party later.

Those 'mirrors' really do show up well on that photo. I might reconsider my decision not to add them after looking at your excellent effort.

I don't know about transfers, but I just painted mine (4mm scale). When I re-assembled the first one and looked through the windows from a 'distance' (maybe 4-6 inches) I found that the detail of my painting was not particularly noticeable anyway. However, mine were corridor coaches and so it depended on which way round the coaches were on the track. Therefore I just made sure I had a decent representation of the internal colours and was happy with that. I had thought about adding representations of mirrors or photos above the seat backs, but I decided that (for me, anyway) it was hardly worth it.

There is a short clip of milk tanks being shunted by a Jinty at about 6min into the Marsden Rail video Carlisle (volume 3). Unfortunately it is rather underexposed, but he does say that the tanks had come from Appleby and the Borders region, and were shunted into full trains at Carlisle. A class 40 is seen heading south from the station with a full train. Of course this was the early 1960s, but I doubt operations had changed too much.

Dry and sunny here in North Somerset. Not much to do today, but I might find something useful out in the G. I had a length of plastic spikes in the garage. This was left over from my installation of them on the biggest water butt, where there is also a 'ground' bird feeder covered in a mesh 'cage' (old freezer basket placed upside-down). Unfortunately, wood pigeons decided this was a great place to stand for hours hoping that the pigeon god would magic some bird food from inside the cage, because they could only stretch their necks so far between the bars. Result? No smaller birds dared go near the food tray until the wood pigeons were not there, which seemed to be about 2 minutes every hour. I glued and taped long strips of spikes around the mesh cage and the pigeons couldn't land nearby, but what they could do was land on top of the feeder pole and then fly at any small bird which dared go near their private food non-supply; and so they did. Yesterday, I cut the spare spike into four equal lengths and secured them to the tops of the four curved seed feeder pole with wire. It looks a bit Heath-Robinson (as does every botch job I dream up), but it seems to have worked so far. I understand the old retail business of ripping off customers and poor quality produce, which the supermarkets put paid to; but I am worried that we are now in danger of going too far the other way. Instead of rosy cheeked butchers, greengrocers and bakers raking in the profits from overcharging customers, we are going to have global multinationals doing the same in the future. Anyway, I'm rambling - and had better do something of my own choosing before SWMBO finds me something that she has chosen.

Exactly, but it is the legitimate USA business model. When the competition becomes awkward and refuses to die, the multinationals get their rich mates in a private equity fund to buy out the opposition with borrowed money, transfer the loans to the company they have just bought, and then sell off the well known brand names for millions and get out asap. Either the government (ie taxpayer) picks up the pieces, or thousands are made redundant, but the multinationals will be long gone. Amazon had designs on Ocado, mainly for the distribution network - but this was rebuffed. Now the private equity revenge is going to take place in order to bankrupt the opposition while the UK sleepwalks into a US take over. At the moment it is Morrisons which is about to be asset stripped. Asda has already been done. Tesco is probably too big, and so I suspect Sainsbury will be next. Once that is complete, then Amazon will probably team up with more private equity to buy up Tesco, complete with their delivery network and the (almost) private monopoly will be complete. UK people love cheap food, and there will be no shortage of that in the future (as long as you turn a blind eye to the added growth hormones, regular antibiotic injections, inhumane animal rearing conditions, and filthy bacteria infested slaughterhouses); plus cakes and pastries filled with palm oil and cane sugar from cleared rainforests. We may not suffer too much, but our grandchildren will.

The point of Amazon is not to make a profit on anything for decades, but to pay no tax in as many countries as they can declare a loss in. The point of Amazon is to bankrupt all the competition, and then they will be able to charge as much as they like.

I don't eat much cake, so LDC is not on my menu - but I have made lemon ice cream, which is lovely and keeps my insides cool (that is my excuse). Two cans of condensed milk, 600ml double cream, half a jar of lemon curd, two tablespoons of lemon juice, four tablespoons of Limoncello. Should make almost two litres. Pour all that in a bowl, whisk vigorously for a few minutes. Tip into a 2 litre tub, put lid on tub and deep freeze for about 24 hours. Yum.....

Dull and damp in North Somerset, but pleasantly cool. My experiences with my Dad's care home are very similar to Mike Bellamy's post above, except that any lateral flow test can be done at home, and as long as there is a negative result which can be sent to the NHS, then the home will accept a negative result NHS email for each person visiting. I have to wear a care home provided mask, gloves and apron which must be put on in the small foyer outside of reception, before being allowed in the building. All visits must be pre-booked, and so there is no chance of turning up at any time and expecting to be allowed in. The home has lost 25 residents to Covid so far, which is a very sobering thought.

Micheldever apparently. The unit arrived at Horwich on 12 Sep 1980.

No, the Giraffe Car was a light hearted imaginary creation; unlike the Battlespace Turbo Car, and Turbo Launchers - which were based on real vehicles stored in Box Tunnel, but never mentioned due to high classification under the Official Secrets Act. For some reason, there seems to be a black helicopter hovering over my garden...... Sorry, but I have to go now.

Cloudy and damp here in North Somerset. Thunderstorm at 0400 brought 9mm of rain and has saved me a job for a couple of days. Temperature outside is a gloriously cool 15C, something we have not seen the likes of since the 16th. I now have the excuse to watch hours and hours of 'live' Olympic rowing coverage which my box has been dutifully recording during the nights. As for brothers visiting, mine managed not to between 1985 and 2014, although we went there to see him on a regular basis. When this was mentioned after about 25 years, the excuse was 'we have never had an invite'. I had never had an invite from them, either. The unwritten rule was that we just enquired if everything would be ok to come, they said yes, and we went.

Hot and sunny in North Somerset, but lots of lightning and thunder over the Bay Of Biscay heading this way. Yesterday afternoon when the hot, windless 30C peace was shattered by the sound of a nearby chainsaw, SWMBO asked "Why is it that on one of the hottest days of the year, certain men love to go outside and start using power tools"? My reply was that those kind of men use noisy power tools in order to cover up the inadequacy of any other tool they possess. She seemed rather knowingly satisfied with this explanation.

All of them.

Hot and sunny in North Somerset. I am thoroughly sick of this. Outside it drops to 20C overnight and rises to 30C during the day. Inside it drops to 27C overnight and rises to 31C during the day, even with all the windows open and fans on. There is a fraction more wind outside today, and hopefully more cloud tomorrow, but I have no way of escaping from the constant heat. A stomach bug doesn't help, unless it is just another symptom of heat exhaustion. I could go to the sea, but the car would be like an oven; the roads will be jammed; the car parks will be full; and the beach is no place for someone with fair skin which burns after 15 minutes even with factor 50. Sorry. I will go and melt quietly in the corner.