Chester Walls Art Exhibition

For a few years in the mid seventies Annette exhibited her pictures for sale at a site by the Dee against Chester Walls on a Sunday afternoon. Looking at a Liverpool outdoor exhibition she found out about the Chester one which suited us much better. Following a successful Saturday exhibition site outside Bluecoat Gallery on their railings in Liverpool artist John Green persuaded Chester council to permit the exhibition. The arrangement was that he supervised and collected 10% commission for the council.

John Green was a former factory worker who had given up his job to become a full time artist. He was an amusing, larger than life character. The exhibition area outside was open to all although in practice there was a core of artists. On a nice summer Sunday it was a delightful area  by the river, bustling with people and traders..

John was busy selling his own work but he would spare the time to come and have a few cheery words. On one of our first visits Annette said she couldn’t decide how much to charge. John offered his own experience. The first time he said he brought 20 pictures priced from £1 to £20 in £1 increments. He then said he sold one at £11 so the next week he priced them all at £11. He then walked off chuckling. I never knew if he was serious.

John was a super salesman. I recall overhearing him with one hesitant customer. She was dithering between two possibilities unable to make up her mind. To break up the impasse John asked the colour of her wallpaper.

Martin was a little baby when we started .and my main job was to look after him taking him for a walk in his portable carry cot. This was no problem because it was a delight to walk along the bank of the Dee watching the crowd and the canoeists on the river. Just by our site was a shallow weir so there was no river traffic larger than a canoe. Just upstream there were boat trips.

The artists were predictably varied. We quite often pitched next to a young man of hippyish appearance. His work was rather strange, like illustrations of nightmares. He would say his ambition was to out Hieronymous Bosch, an 18^th century artist known for his bizarre work.

The artist who didn’t fit in at all was someone who produced colourful daubs, abstract sunsets and seascapes. He was also someone trying to make a living from his work and he came with a large volume priced very cheaply. The quality was abysmal. As I said the site was for a Sunday afternoon exhibition. The daub producer chose to ignore this and apparently turned up on a Saturday. Eventually the council spotted this and prosecuted. John was pleased but his scathing comment was “Should have done him for depositing litter”

Remembering the sixties                                                                                                             

I think it was David Frost who said if all the girls in London were laid end to end he wouldn’t be at all surprised.

Flylingdales Radar

While I was in Whitby I went to a Civic Society talk on the Fylingdales Ballistic Missile Early Warning System ( BMEWS) This is no ordinary radar but a gigantic one probing out 1500 miles in all directions upwards and outwards. It is situated on Fylingdales Moor about 5 miles inland from Whitby. The scan is roughly hemispherical centred on the radar as these days missiles might come from any direction.

The older reader will remember the giant golf ball shaped radomes of the first generation. This was an American system run by the RAF and part of a network of radars to give early warning of ballistic missile attack. At the time ( I guess the mid sixties ) there was a lot of comment about the 4 minutes warning it would give to the UK. This was actually beside the point which was during the Cold War to give 30 mins warning to USA to give time to launch a massive counter strike. This was the much derided “Mutually Assured Destruction”. While horrific it successfully kept the uneasy peace.

The BMEWS has been updated and now is a giant wedge shape.  Its function is threefold.; to provide early warning of attack, to track incoming  for possible future anti ballistic missiles, and to scan space in low earth orbit. The early warning part is essentially unchanged although now much supplemented by detection of missile launches by detecting the initial heat of rockets in the launch phase. This is done elsewhere. The tracking is an embryo function as there are no anti ballistic missile defences in the UK. Such defences against isolated attacks such as say by North Korea do exist with one of the latest being installed in South Korea at the present time. This is known as THAAD ( Theatre High Altitude Anti missile Defence ) Effective against smaller missiles this is not an answer to intercontinental ballistic missiles although development continues.

That there is interest in tracking objects in low earth orbit may come as a surprise. However space is getting somewhat crowded. At first this seems improbable but remember everything in orbit is travelling very fast, over 17,000 mph. At this speed any tiny fragment hits with such energy that it will knock out a satellite. Unfortunately there is a lot of debris in orbit as well as useful satellites. Regrettably some was put there deliberately by the Chinese testing an anti satellite missile. The Fylingdales radar can track objects bigger than a tennis ball, predict their orbit and warn satellite operators.

Incidentally the range of Fyligdales is far shorter than that necessary to track geostationary satellites which are about 24,000 miles out.

Almost by accident I have become embroiled in an awkward planning issue. My flat is in a Grade two star listed building. The owner of the basement flat has terraced the steep earth bank in front of the house. This has resulted in a retaining wall about 10 feet high. However he did this without planning permission resulting in Historic England being brought in to stop any further work. While he was wrong to do this the result is that the wall has had to be left unfinished and unsightly.

We look down on this terracing from above and regard it as a great improvement over the weedy rubbish strewn bank. However it has aroused a local furore. We are on fairly friendly terms with the basement flat holder and we sought to provide him with some sensible advice. While attending the civic society we talked with a neighbour who is leading the objectors.

March for Europe

Annette, Alison and Frances all went to London for the march for Europe. I have never known them so engaged with a political event, certainly never before on a march. It was the 60^th anniversary of the founding of the EU. It should be remembered the reason the EU was founded was so that there should never be another war in Europe after the horrors of WW1 and 11. This has been very successful.

Annette and the girls view the anti foreigner bigotry aroused in the referendum with disgust. For me economics matters more, although I would have attended the march except my lack of stamina ruled it out. This shambles of a government ignores the 48% who voted against leaving. The only reason they ride high in the polls is that Corbyn’s Labour Party is even worse.

Danby Moor

With Lindsey, Alex and Ellen we went to the Moors centre at Danby. This is in the North Yorkshire Moors. In the past there has been mining and quarrying in the Moors area. The centre was particularly celebrating the former mining of ironstone.

However the talk we attended was particularly about the former railway which is now the heritage North York Moors Railway ( NYMR ). Formerly this railway ran from Malton through Pickering and on to Whitby although the Malton to Pickering stretch has been removed. The stretch from Pickering actually runs to Grosmont before joining the national railway for the short distance into Whitby. Both Martin and Alex are volunteers on the NYMR.

While the children went to the play area we retired to the tea rooms. The centre was previously a row of houses now all connected together hosting various displays, meeting rooms,  gallery, café and of course a gift shop.

As I have observed before Whitby station is unique in that it is joint between NYMR and national rail. Beyond Grosmont the national rail runs east across the moor to Teesside This remaining line has a halt at Danby although the main destination is presumably Middlesbrough. Middlesbrough is about as far as the Tees river is navigable from the sea. Middlesbrough is famous for its transporter bridge which is still in use although a road bridge carries the bulk of the traffic across the river. Fans of “Auf wiedersehen, pet “ will recall that the transporter bridge was demolished by the crew in the last series to be re-erected in the USA. This was all done by TV fakery and the transporter bridge still exists.

The talk was specifically about the vast variety of industrial sidings between Malton and Whitby, all 42 of them and counting. This showed quite vividly that in the late 19^th and early 20^th century the default transport was by rail. The speaker talked of quite small loads travelling by rail.. By the thirties almost all the sidings were closed, certainly no new ones were constructed. Post war road quickly became the transport of choice as roads improved and trucks became larger and more efficient. The line ( as the NYMR ) is now just passengers.

There is a small amount of residual quarrying on the moors but the big possibility is polyhalite mining.This mineral in huge deposits at great depth below the moor is valuable as a fertiliser mainly as a source of potassium.. A new mine is very controversial with all the usual environmental objections. It is however very much needed in this economically depressed area. At the moment there is a small polyhalite mine at Boulby. The new project would be on a far larger scale. To further its development a new company Sirius has been established. They have an ambitious plan to transport the extracted mineral along a 30 plus mile tunnel to Teesport. This does minimise the environmental impact but sounds like a big technological and commercial challenge.

The present situation is than planning permission has been given but Sirius need to raise much more money before construction can begin. The deposits are a kilometre and a half below ground so a very deep shaft must be sunk; deeper than for coal mining.

Yorkshire humour

A blunt middle aged Yorkshireman ( calls a spade a bloody shovel type ) is referee at the local rugby ground. In the middle of a match a funeral cortege goes past. The referee stops the game, gets the players in line heads bowed. After cortege passes the match resumes.

Afterwards the  home captain approaches the referee and says how pleased he was, albeit a bit surprised, at the respect shown to the funeral.

“Ah” the referee says” well I was married to her for 25 years “

Around England

Realising we have owned Beechcroft for 30 years made me reflect how much I moved around when younger. It hasn’t truly been 30 years for me as I lived away for 8 of those years. Since leaving home I lived in Loughborough ( 2 years  ) Leicester ( 2 years ), Merseyside ( in three separate places for 15 years ) Manchester ( 5 years ) rural Oxfordshire ( 1 year ) and  Oxford City ( ( 7 years )

In a way Loughborough doesn’t count as I was in Telford Hall at the University. Leicester was my first independent living. I lived in a one room bedsitter in Stoneygate. For the first year I travelled daily across town and for the second mostly to Loughborough. I suppose my time in Leicester is suffused in a rosy glow as I was near Annette. Very near for a year when she lived about 100 yards away although I was strictly forbidden to visit her lodgings.

After we married we lived on Merseyside, on the Wirral peninsula between the Mersey and the Dee. At first we rented a flat by the Dee at Parkgate. This wasn’t by the river except at exceptional tides. Mostly we looked out across an expanse of coarse grass to the main channel. We found out later that before the river silted up first Chester ( upstream ) and then Parkgate itself had been important ports. In the 18^th century Handel had sailed to Ireland to the first performance of the Messiah there.

There was a minor joke on the seafront in the form of a notice which said “ Next boat leaves Sat 3pm .“ The first day we arrived we thought we must be looking at the estuary at low tide so perhaps the boat left at high tide. It was a few days later the penny dropped that there was no boat just the expanse of grass seemingly all the way to Wales. In the summer ( at a true low tide ) we did walk out to the river channel which must have been a mile out and close to the Welsh bank.

We then moved across the peninsula to Bebington where we had two houses through the late sixties and seventies. We were ( in the second house ) by Port Sunlight village ( about 300 yards). This model village created by William Lever is a gem with varied Tudor style houses and complete ( in those days ) with post office, library, theatre, club rooms and a magnificent gallery. This latter, built to memorialise Lady Lever, holds much Pre Raphaelite work as well a lot besides. In keeping with William Levers taste all is natural with no abstracts and the contents generally date before the 1920’s. William wasn’t a man to waste money and several pictures he bought featured in advertisements much to the artists disgust.

For about 10 months, while on secondment to what was then Liverpool Polytechnic, ( now John Moores University) I was travelling into Liverpool every day. Almost never by car it was usually either train or ferry. I was surprised when first on Merseyside that there is an underground system. Much smaller than London but it reached under the Mersey and partway to where I lived. Infuriatingly one then had to change to normal overground rail to complete the journey. At the Liverpool end I got used to a walk from James Street station through a tunnel to emerge on a street which took me straight to college.

Slower but more fun was the ferry. Car to Birkenhead Pier Head, sit on the ferry waiting for the mirror image ferry to leave Liverpool Pier Head ( by the three graces, the Cunard Building, the Liver Building with Liver birds on top and the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board HQ ) The morning ferries deck would have all the City gents in their bowler hats solemnly walking around in circles, all the same way, taking their morning exercise. Liverpool was a minor commercial centre then, mostly disappeared now.

I was shocked that the ferry which cost 2 and 1/2p then but recently ( in the noughties ) goes on a Mersey cruise( a triangular run with two stops on the Wirral side ) and costs £8

From Merseyside we moved to Wilmslow nr Manchester. This is the fairly posh part of the city ( we lived in the poor quarter nr Handforth ) although not as posh as the Prestbury/ Alderley Edge area adjacent. We were very fortunate in our house which we bought cheaply because it had a large garden adjacent to a railway. Unfortunately I had an awful commute across via Stockport to Hyde.

Having bought Beechcroft largely because of its garden I then left much to Annettes disgust to work near Reading ( actually at Pangbourne in the Thames Valley ) For a year I lived in Bucklebury ( now famous as Kate Middleton’s family home ). This was really in darkest Oxfordshire miles from anywhere. Then I bought a house in Oxford right on the southern fringe. I had a delightful commute, still about a half hour but the easiest drive imaginable along quiet roads with no traffic lights at all..

Brexit update

I don’t  know how to take the latest government statement that they have no idea of the cost of negotiation failure with the EU and reversion to the most basic world trade rules. With the government seemingly set on the hardest possible exit either this is shocking incompetence or, what I suspect, that they do know and the data is too bad to publish.  Either way Theresa May looks very foolish with her threat of no deal better than a bad deal. I know this is to placate the red top press but surely the truth is that no deal is the very worst deal.

Origin of life

The origin of life on earth is unknown. However evidence is accumulating. The broad outline of evolution is known. The earth was formed from an accretion of dust and gas orbiting the sun. Essentially it is thought that  gravity pulled particles together and they in turn attracted more until the earth was formed.

This formation occurred about 4.5 billion years ago. It is believed that early earth was intensely volcanic and was being bombarded by meteors. It was thought, when I was a lad ,that life started in some shallow pools irradiated by the sun and struck by lightning. From the mix of chemicals produced some organisation took place allowing the very simple single cell organism to reproduce and evolve.

All life is essentially closely similar using the same biochemistry. Although we see a huge variety of plants and animals now it is all, at an elementary chemical level ,the same. The ability to reproduce at a chemical level depends on the double helix of DNA. This can split, join a messenger chain and then form a new helix which is faithful copy of the original. A faithful copy which can change very slightly under the influence of various accidents. Most of these accidents prevent good reproduction and produce an inferior organism. Just occasionally the accident produces an organism better suited to its environment. This will then out breed the exiting less well fitted ones and gradually replace them. This is evolution.

Clearly this is a very, very slow process. However evolution has a great amount of time to work. Deep time is so vast that it is difficult to comprehend. The analogy I like is a length of wire stretched from London to Birmingham to represent the whole of time on earth. Then imagine an inch clipped off the end- this would represented the whole of recorded history.

It used to be thought that life was very fragile demanding a narrow range of temperature, pressure etc to live not to mention sunlight to provide energy and water to provide the medium in which the chemicals could interact. However as investigation has deepened so it is now appreciated life can exist under far more extreme conditions. This life is very simple but the so called extremophiles have been found is the most extraordinary of places.

The most extraordinary is around volcanic vents under the ocean. These vents are teeming with life but they are so deep as to be in total darkness. The organisms derive their energy from the hydrogen sulphide gas released at the vent. This is a departure from the energy of photosynthesis.  Increasingly scientists think the only condition for life is the presence of water. Although Mars is too cold for liquid water to exist now there is plenty of evidence that at one time liquid water was present so hence the huge interest in life on Mars. This will be very simple single cell remains but it may be there to find.

Above I mentioned the muddy irradiated pool as a possible origin of life. Certainly it was found years ago that simple chemicals under influence of heat and lightning produced a mix containing complex chemicals needed for life. Other possibilities exist for example meteors and comets contain complex chemicals which could be the source.

Recently some very intriguing evidence has emerged of possible elementary life which may have started around undersea vents. Certainly these are dated only a few hundred million years after earth formed and are the oldest candidates for the remains of early life. Much yet is still to be discovered.

Get ready to laugh at Denis Norden’s favourite military joke.

A Cockney soldier gets a short leave pass and rushes home. He returns soaking wet. “Blimey” says his mate is “it still raining in London?” The soldier replies” no, when I got home the wife was in the bath”.

Beechcroft

We are coming up to our 30^th anniversary of moving here. Our house search had taken us all over the district. Centred on Brownhills where I was working we ranged north past Rugeley and east  past Tamworth. We didn’t look to the west at all as this was deeper into the Birmingham conurbation or south where the higher prices around Sutton Coldfield were a barrier.

Strangely I did a lot of preliminary searching on my own as mother still lived at Polesworth and I had opportunity in the evenings. We were coming from a large house with a large garden at Wilmslow and I was anxious to find something similar. The Wilmslow house had been a bargain because of its problems and we had done a lot of upgrading so I wasn’t overly optimistic.

On my first visit to Beechcroft I mentioned my gardening interest and the then resident Cleaver family immediately said they would show the garden first. It was apparent the garden was large and had been a source of a lot of pleasure for them. However it was running down and the Cleavers, who were moderately elderly, were clearly no longer able to keep it up.

Beechcroft was a rather deceptive house. It looked quite large but was in fact quite small being wide but mostly just one room deep. The original had been built as a 3 bedroomed house in the twenties and then extended into the house we inspected. In fact we also inspected a neighbouring house the next weekend when Annette could accompany me but the gently sloping southward aspect of the garden easily persuaded me to favour Beechcroft.

We had a major hiccup in that our surveyor obviously confused his notes and his report stated the house had old fashioned solid walls. I was furious because I knew this wasn’t true. I had learned enough about construction techniques to know it had cavity walls and it must have been one of the first to be built this way. I refused to pay the full surveyors bill. As one of the first things we did was to install cavity wall insulation I felt fully vindicated.

We had sold our previous house, Annette and the children moved in with her parents and I camped in our new empty property. We had the house rewired and renewed the lounge fireplace with a back boiler installed connected through a balancing tank to the main central heating.

The dining and lounge areas had old style suspended floors. I was able to access the underfloor space and put in insulation between the joists. On a hot afternoon this was a sweaty and dusty job. This was before the consolidation of DIY stores and I recall buying the insulation at Great Mills in Brownhills, a name which has disappeared.

We discovered just how small the house was when we moved in. We had difficulty fitting things in particularly outside. I had the intention of keeping part of the garage for a car but that has long since been lost has we have packed the garage. To ease our storage problem I bought a shed . Arthur Cleaver had bequeathed a shed base along with well constructed paths. I learned he had “acquired” a lot of materials during his work.

Not so good was the large lean to greenhouse at the side of the house. This had obviously been magnificent at one time but it was now almost falling down. We patched it up for a while as useful storage but it is now the site of our first major extension. This houses my home office and a small lounge extension.

Rather later we added a large conservatory which has proven immensely useful. We also had a small extension to the master bedroom and incorporated an en suite toilet and shower

While we have preserved the general garden layout we have made a lot of lesser changes. In particular we eliminated the fussy lawns with rose beds from the lower terraces ( the whole garden being a series of shallow terraces, four in all )

Annette was not at all pleased when after about a year I decided to re-join Castrol near Reading. She soon said that the kids were established at their new schools, she had found a job and no way was she moving again so soon. Initially I rented a flat and then bought another house on the outskirts of Oxford. This was fairly convenient for weekend travel; Annette to me or vice versa. The person most disrupted was Frances who moved to Cheney school in Oxford. She was persuaded because it had two comic shops on her school route which had back copies of her favourites such as Deathless.

After I had a stroke we thought of selling Beechcroft. I’m very glad we didn’t.

This is a view of Beechcroft from the rear

Reading support

Until recently I was a volunteers reading supporter at out village primary school. The main object is to listen to children reading aloud helping them as necessary. At first I was with 7 and 8 year olds. As one might expect they varied enormously from fluent to halting. One problem I found after a year or two is that they tended to read from the same small selection of books. I became very bored with “Chicken Licken”.

When the headteacher enquired I mentioned this rather jokingly but she took me very seriously and transferred me to the upper school 10-11 year old children. Their reading choices were very diverse. The reading standard was quite high. I never missed an opportunity to emphasise how important reading is during adult life not to mention the pleasure from reading novels. Roald Dahl is clearly a favourite author and I was able to say I had visited his home and the garden shed where he wrote. The “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” series was another favourite. One issue with this is its American origin so naturally it is Americanised English. Mostly this wasn’t a problem but occasionally I was called upon. I had to explain that American English is slightly different while the school context is often much different.

As an aside I sometimes wonder if American English will slowly diverge or whether TV/film etc will bring us closer to American English. It seems likely America will take in more Spanish words as the Hispanic population increases ( despite Trump )

Roald Dahl posed a somewhat different issue. His jokes are just a bit sophisticated and seem to be lost on young children. Incidentally it is quite apparent from my grandchildren that their sense of humour changes. 5 year old Ben is fond of “knock-knock” jokes but completely misses the point and makes up his own surreal versions Jokes I find funny are completely wasted until at least 10..

Incidentally I was told the following scatological joke by a pupil.

Q What do you call a wizard with diarrhoea?

A Harry Plopper

Ahem!

Over the course of several years I found it necessary to keep a notebook. Who read, name etc. Easily the most charming was Jashan, a Sikh girl, who was so enthusiastic that she positively pestered me so she could read more. She was also very talkative and I seemed to have a full family history over our sessions.

Although not a representative cross section when I enquired what they wanted to do when they left education about half the boys wanted to be footballers. Many of the rest wanted to do something a favourite adult did with many seeking to follow in father’s footsteps. There did seem to be a science and technology thread. The outlier was a boy who claimed he wanted to be an all-in wrestler. The girls had a much more mature approach with medicine ( nurse, doctor) the top choice with teaching second..

For both sexes there was a clear wish to go into tertiary education. In an age where nearly 50% go to university this is a realistic ambition. It was good to see that academic attainment matters even at this age.

The fabric guild

I’m conscious that I’ve been dwelling on the past. My life has become rather humdrum and I suppose I’ve indulged in memories of the years ago . Well we old folks do.

Perhaps expressed in this poem  by Arthur Osborne

Away, away!
Into the sky I dance
Bending, swaying, lightfoot leaping
Tireless staying, rhythm keeping
Up in the air!
The rhythm and sway
Now here, now there!
Swift and smooth as a maiden’s glance
I sway and I glide
And nimbly I ride
With never a care
As inly I throb to the cosmic tide
No outer step, no body stride
Thus the rhythm keeps its track
In a stiff old body with arthritic back

I was always a rubbish dancer even when young so I don’t have happy memories more embarrassing ones.

I think I may have mentioned the Fabric Guild before. Essentially it is a cut price warehouse ( Kisko company ) of quilting and sewing goods but set up so it is nominally a club of hobbyists. Only once have I seen them asking for membership cards. I rather think it was set up this way to get around Sunday Trading laws which have long since been abolished. Formerly in a warehouse in central Leicester it has just moved to Oadby in south Leicester.

We have been making trips every few months for quite a few years now. Annette buys a lot of her sewing bits plus fabric from them. Having looked on the website we set off on Sunday. Now I lived in Leicester for two years and Annette for four so we fancy we know our way around.

The problem is our knowledge is 50 years old and things have changed. And how they have changed!  Getting to Leicester cross country is no problem following a route we used long ago- it hasn’t changed much. The problem came around the city. Taking the easy option I followed the outer ring to the A6 and then headed south. I have never used satnav much as I can never get it to stick to the car windscreen but it proved a god sent help on this occasion. Oadby is big place and anyway I have grave doubts the guild is actually in Oadby, certainly we travelled  through back streets to an industrial park.which seemed to be in Wigston. Perhaps Wigston is a part of Oadby as in turn Oadby is part of Leicester. Anyway very confusing.

The disembodied voice proudly announced we had reached our destination. We looked around to see no sign except a couple of ladies walking around also searching. Eventually after walking around we found it. Only the tiniest of notices announced the name although we should have guessed from all the cars parked outside.

Although it has one large room it is now mostly a warren of smaller rooms on two floors. The Guild have only just moved and everything was still rather disorganised ( not that it was ever very organised )

One nice feature is a sitting area with free drinks dispenser and biscuits. I notice some long suffering menfolk reading their newspapers while their partners explore. Needless to say the customers are almost all middle aged to elderly women.

There is no such sophistication as a till. Mike sorts out the goods having memorised all the prices. He then adds them up on a sheet of paper. The only modern item at the checkout is the credit card machine.

We are trying to match fabric for a bedspread. All my ( helpful! ) suggestions are rejected and I end up standing around while Annette chooses the first one she had examined hours ( seemingly ) before.

Returning we became thoroughly puzzled and ended up on the MI. Fortunately I’m familiar with the junction by Coalville  So although an unnecessarily long distance at least it was home in time for lunch.