Old Friends

We have enjoyed a short visit by Mike and Jenny. They were the first friends we made after our marriage. As our first as a married couple they are of great sentimental value. Jenny taught with Annette at Prenton Girls High School in Birkenhead. Latterly our efforts to get together have been dogged by problems. Both Jenny and Mike have had periods of waiting for operations which has limited their ability to travel.  North Wales to the Midlands ( or now Whitby ) isn’t so far but enough to be a barrier.

When we first knew them we were still living in a flat at Parkgate on the Wirral. We met up a few times on the Wirral exploring the pubs alongside the Dee estuary. We also started on tentative plans to visit France along with some friends of theirs but these plans never quite worked out. Both Annette and Jenny were constrained to go in school holidays which was not good for anyone else.

Jenny taught English and Drama after a period overseas teaching English to foreign students. Mike was working as a buyer at the John Summers steel works on the Dee. In the massive steel industry shake up of the 70’s and 80’s steel making closed and the plant just did steel coating. Mike was made redundant and after a spell at Deeside Titanium finished up running a small café at Holywell. This was rather out of the way at a historic site. It was a tea room during the day and also catered for evening groups

Our time together at Whitby on the first day used the tour bus to take us around town and out to the abbey ruins. As it happened it was armed forces day complete with band. The highlight was definitely a Hurricane flypast. I was surprised again by how ragged the Merlin engine sounded. Usually the Battle of Britain memorial flight appears together and with Lancaster, Spitfire and Hurricane the six Merlin engines sound as one. I had noticed before that a single engine sounds quite different possibly because it is throttled back for its passes over the town. We also visited the Scarborough Arts Forum exhibition in the Pavilion. Annette was introduced to the organiser and will consider exhibiting there another time.

On our second day we went to the North Yorks Moors Centre at Danby. I discovered I was completely wrong in thinking it was a converted row of houses. We found out the whole is a converted shooting lodge. I can only say it is massive being at least 200 metres long but quite shallow. Sitting outside for lunch on a fine day I could see that one end is decidedly more opulent with a fine terraced garden. As the exhibition reminds us the main commercial activity on the moors is leisure with grouse shooting an essential part.

There are preliminary plans for big potash mine at the eastern end. A small mine exists at Boulby. The new plan by Sirius is immensely controversial although the visual impact will be small. The mine will be a kilometre deep and the plan is to carry the mined potash( a fertiliser ) by a conveyor in a tunnel some 36 miles to Teesport.

It seems clear that this is very important for the local economy. Tourism is the Whitby lifeblood and jobs for young people are hard to come by. There is a hope that Whitby will become the support base for the Dogger bank wind farm. This would be over 50 miles offshore and I imagine Whitby will face strong opposition from Teeside

I was amused to see an entry about cats, after all the Facebook comments and pictures, on a Whitby tourist web site. It read “ We like cats too. Lets exchange recipes”

Nature boy

Despite being brought up in the country I was never interested in nature as a boy. I lived in a group of three houses about a half mile from the nearest village. Although my mother made intermittent efforts to interest me in natural phenomena I just wasn’t very interested. I was far more interested in machines, cars, trucks, and planes. In that environment most particularly tractors

There was a huge variety of tractors but my favourite was the Fordson Major sitting proud in gleaming blue( it didn’t gleam for long ) Although a technological marvel the grey Ferguson was the most dowdy. My first choice of what to be when I grew up was to be a farmer, which I saw as tractor driving all day. Incidentally children then, particularly boys, always knew what they wanted to be when they grew up. I was to go through several choices as I grew up. I asked the children as the local primary school recently. Among the boys about half wanted to be footballers! ( mind for the pay it is not a bad ambition )

There were some things which drew my attention. I remember on a walk being fascinated by a rabbit warren in a field teeming with rabbits. I suppose this was pre disease when rabbits flourished and were major pests. My mother always said her favourite bird was the skylark for its wonderfully melodious song. I recall one summers day lying on my back in a meadow listening to a lark as it hovered and trilled its song.

It is sad that the lark is so rarely heard these days. When we visited Bempton Cliffs RSPB reserve for the first time it was wonderful approaching the cliff side across a meadow with skylarks singing. The reserve is famous for its sea birds particularly gannets but I thought it sad to near the cliff where the raucous seabird cries drowned the larks singing.

I realise now that I was privileged to see phenomena that most will never see. I recall a bird luring me away from its nest by pretending to be injured and then flapping out of reach at the last minute. I was completely fooled at the time and only later did I find this is a known aspect of behaviour.

Annette is interested in nature especially birds. Some of this (a very little ) has rubbed off on me. When we took a holiday in Majorca it was interesting to go a little way out of town to an olive grove and sit waiting to hear the characteristic triple call of the hoopoe We never did see it but its call was rather magical. Periodically I have been involved in chasing down unusual species such as bitterns booming, and a special warbler on the south coast not to mention osprey nesting in southern Scotland.

At this time of year we watch Springwatch and Springwatch unsprung on TV. This series has gone from strength to strength and Chris Packham brings an unrivalled expertise to the programme. The fast moving “unsprung” is always interesting but I can have too much of going over to nestcams in Springwatch.

I don’t go on bird trips particularly since I disgraced myself on a Sutton RSPB trip to Lake Vyrnwy. As an RSPB party we had a RSPB guide around the local area. I dressed the part with binoculars slung around my neck. The only problem was that while the group were training their binos on something the guide had spotted I was looking in the opposite direction. My comeuppance happened when we came across a pied flycatcher. The group duly stopped and stared and oohed and aahed. Eventually the bird flew away and a group member seeking to include me in the group enquired if I had seen the pied. With the confidence born of ignorance I airily replied “ ah yes the pied wagtail” ( the only pied I had heard of). Pied wagtail are fairly common while the flycatcher is rare. The birder looked at me with a mixture of bemusement and horror and making no response re-joined the group. I’ve never been again.

Birmingham University Open Day

Strictly the “community day” which we attended mainly to see the new library and where Frances works. The events were a mixture of fairground type( inflatable castles, swing boats etc ), stalls ( mainly food ) and exhibits organised showing the work of the University.

The University demo which attracted most attention from me  was their mini interferometer which was built around their work as part of the international team on LIGO ( Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory). LIGO has gone through several iterations to enhance its sensitivity. Essentially the idea is to measure two distances at right angles to one another to detect their difference caused by ripples in space-time.

These ripples are a prediction of relativity but they are incredibly small so that until very recently their detection was not possible. Now however three events have been seen in the past 3 years. The detector splits a laser light beam in two sending them multiple times down a 4 kilometre vacuum tube then recombining them so that any change in the interference pattern enables very precise measurement of the two arms distance. The precision has to be absolutely phenomenal as we are talking a billion, billion, billionth of a metre or about a thousandth the diameter of a proton.

The mini rig displayed had arms of only a few 10’s of centimetres but even so it was incredibly sensitive. It was sitting on a steel table and just lightly pressing on the table resulted in a change seen clearly.

Gravitational waves are caused by very large mass disturbances such as black holes merging. All astronomical measurements up to now are by electromagnetic waves ( ie light and its relatives ) but in principle gravitational waves offer a new way of seeing the universe.

After a picnic on the patio outside the new library we were shown around by Frances. We were joined in our picnic by their friends Yen, Dave and their daughter Lil. Lil is about the same age as Alice. The library has about 50 kilometres of shelving about 80% full, or some 2.1 million volumes. As Frances said this just an estimate as who is counting. The whole building of 4 storeys around a central atrium has been well fitted out. It seemed almost luxurious to my eyes but times have changed. There is masses of study space all fitted with computers while portable computers for use in the library can be borrowed.

Frances is in a large open plan office with orthopaedic chairs and individual desks with all the IT resource one could imagine. There is a nice staff room with many facilities.. She is on the office side by large windows overlooking university square.

The library is effectively divided into two parts: the open access upper floors and the vast research archive in the basement. The basement is fitted with rollable storage racking which is much more compact than shelving. The books are arranged by Library of Congress classification.

When I worked in a research library fifty years ago we had a similar arrangement although our basement rollable stacking was more primitive and much smaller with only a dozen units compared with more than one hundred at Birmingham.

The research archive is better used because academics are partly judged by the papers they publish which for many outside science will involve archive investigation. In contrast when I was an Information Scientist for Unilever the archive was rarely used; I guess I only accessed it a half dozen times.

Although the library is massive,  with thirty thousand students and many hundreds of staff the University makes full use of it.

A party trick is the returned book arrangement. A robotic sorter takes the return and deposits it in an appropriate bin ready for reshelving. Frances “borrowed” a book to show us the automated system. I had assumed that the automatic borrowing facilities relied on barcodes and I solemnly scan each individual code at Whitby library. I learn that many now use radio tags ( RFID ) as Whitby which make barcodes obsolete.

Election 2017

I know we are all rather fed up with politics but I feel I must give my initial reaction to the results. The poor showing of the May government must be down  to the dogged insistence on a hard Brexit and clamp on immigration. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the John Redmond interview when he tried to maintain we are all in agreement on a hard Brexit. This is so obviously not the case.

I have supported More United in their efforts although sadly they only supported one Conservative in Anna Soubry  It is worrying that the loony hard left will be emboldened by the result as already some Labourites are trying to interpret the result as an endorsement of the spend more and nationalise agenda. Labour MP’s need to reassert a sane policy. The still huge deficit seems to have disappeared from view. The idea that austerity is just a policy choice is false until the deficit is reduced by a lot

Clearly Conservative MP’s need to  assert themselves. The anti EU fanatics have had far too much say in a tragic policy.   I don’t trust the negotiating team to recognise the problem which is that we made a thoroughly bad decision in the referendum which leaves us in a very weak position now.

I fear a relapse into the kind of protectionist policy which would be a complete disaster. I thought that Trump, who is at heart a little America protectionist, would be a very weak reed on which to rest hopes of a free trade deal.

Packwood House

 We met up with Frances and Ben at this National Trust property just south of Birmingham. Strangely we had never been before. I thought we had visited all the Trust properties within a fifty mile radius when we were members but somehow we overlooked this. 

The property is a Tudor house extensively rebuilt and renovated between the wars. The owner, a single man, entertained there but lost interest during WW11 and handed the property to the National Trust. We met up with Frances

We met up in the new café and had a snack. Matt and Alice were at a games fair in Birmingham and Frances, who is very busy most of the time, had a little leisure to meet up with us. Ben who has now done nearly a year at school is much as one would expect of a 5 year old. He was obviously a bit bored by the house but enjoyed racing along a narrow spiral path in the garden.

His boredom in the house was alleviated by a “spot the china Dalmatian” feature in the house. Nine in all, they were usually easy to find although one or two were a bit difficult. I was so busy trying to spot them I felt I didn’t do the house justice. The room volunteers were always ready to give a clue.

A feature of the house is its gardens. These included a walled ornamentals garden and a smaller walled kitchen garden.  The larger walled garden was perhaps the most impressive I have seen with mini buildings at each corner. Always elevated these were far more than gardeners weather shelters. A notable feature of one was a fireplace built against the wall in a sort of cellar. A notice explained the fire was used to warm the wall to protect plants against from slight frosts. I wouldn’t have thought the wall would conduct heat well enough but it was presumably just enough to make all the difference between frost damage and not.

Unfortunately it started to rain while we toured the grounds. The lake was very low. An interesting feature are the “follies” which include a miniature house built from parts of furniture and a giant four poster bed. These were built recently by the trust inspired by the original follies from the pre war period. The owner apparently enjoyed extravagant parties around the originals.

One nice touch was the garden games placed by the trust;  bowls, giant Connect 4 and others. The rain prevented us from enjoying them which disappointed Ben. While he had the solace of an ice cream we all retired again to the café. Amidst the crowded area I initially had to share a table.

 Now I’m rather elderly I find it easy, indeed natural, to strike up a conversation which I did with a middle aged couple who live nearby Packwood and are frequent visitors. I was never naturally gregarious when younger but I’m now like my father who also took to initiating a casual conversation with people in his later years. The irony was that as he grew older still deafness limited and eventually prevented this. I’m hoping that this won’t repeat with me. It became so severe with my father that when he was hospitalised once the doctor called on me to translate. When he eventually went into a home his deafness cut him off from fellow inmates. Hearing aids were much more primitive and he never got used to one.

Curiously he was very good with Stan, a friend who suffered. I recall Stan saying to me once that he liked to talk to my father because he spoke loudly and clearly with him. Stan was the husband of one of his great nieces although because of the way the generations worked they were more like his nieces with Stan his nephew in law. Stan and his wife Joan had children just a little younger than me and we used to go on little expeditions, the two families, when I was young.

Frances is now wearing braces on her teeth to correct problems we should have had fixed as a young person. I can only say that the proposed treatment then seemed far more drastic and involved the deliberate breaking of her jaw.

Diesel engines

I’m increasingly concerned at the demonization of diesel engines. I’m afraid there is a certain fashionable view that diesel engines are harmful, even dangerous. Like many technology stories while there is an element of fact these facts are distorted out of recognition.

Diesel engines like all internal combustion engines ( eg petrol engines ) produce potentially harmful emissions. It is only quite recently that the harm done by fine particles of soot was recognised. For at least 5 years it has been mandatory to fit diesel engines with particulate filters. More recently the danger of nitrogen dioxide emission has been countered by the addition of a urea solution ( often called Adblue ) to the exhaust gas. This has only been compulsory for a few years.

Public attention was called to the nitrogen dioxide problem because some car manufacturers, notably the Volkswagen group, were cheating emissions tests so that harmful engines appeared to meet recent requirements. It is a scandal that the tough enforcement taken in the US has not happened in Europe.

What the anti diesel claque forget is that diesel engines are both more efficient, and hence good for the user, but are also good for the environment producing less greenhouse gases.

Working as a dairyman

Even while I was at school I was chronically short of money. Coming from a poor family I had no pocket money. So in school holidays I had to find a part time job, my evening paper round was quite insufficient. After a few abortive tries I got a job with the Co-op dairy in Tamworth.

The dairy secretary was taking holidays in August and the idea was that I would fill in for this absence and work mainly in the dairy meantime. A major part of the job was unloading lorries bringing in bottled milk from the Fole bottling plant. The only bottling done on site was a third pint orange squash bottles. This was done by a long time employee and I wasn’t allowed anywhere near.

Essentially two types of milk were supplied. Pasteurised milk ( not homogenised in those days ) which was stored in a massive cold room, and sterilised ( which was homogenised ) with crimp on caps stored at ambient temperature. Pasteurised milk was subdivided into Channel Isles ( ie from Jersey or Guernsey cows ) and the rest( usually about ten times volume of the CI milk ). There was no reduced fat variant and the “top of the milk” with its high fat was considered a luxury.

There was a simple knack to this unloading procedure. The lorries had flat metal floors with milk in crates stacked five high with twenty bottles in each. The driver would break a bottle to spill on the lorry floor giving lubrication which enabled the stacks to be slid around pulled by a hooked handle. The total stack was then lifted by a sort of sack truck with prongs which engaged the bottom crate, and trundled to the cold store or warehouse. Each stack weighed about 135 pounds but was surprisingly easy to move. I wasn’t strong but had no problems unless I allowed the stack to topple.

Because moving the milk was fairly easy I became overconfident. I was detached to take a stack to the nearby milk bar. This required crossing a road which was on a slight slope. Stupidly I tried to cross at right angles; the slope wasn’t large but the stack started to topple over and it was far too heavy for me to stop it. Consequently the bottles fell out, smashed and milk ran down the gutter. I had to shamefacedly admit my accident. The dairy manager was very good about it; he had a reserve stock built up over many years so it was replaced with only a mild telling off for me.

I had no experience of working with a very disparate group and I was a bit concerned about how I would get along. I was accepted with some degree of amusement. I think I came over as a bit of an eager beaver and certainly being seen to be very willing to do my full share of work went down well. As far as I knew it was the first time a schoolboy ( albeit a 17 year old ) had worked in the dairy as a summer job and I reckon I must have been at least acceptable as I went back for a second summer.

When I took on the dairy secretary’s job the first day was a Sunday. The practice was that on a Sunday as soon as essential work was finished we all went home. I was faced with totalling up the sales and returns at the end of deliveries. I had a calculator to use but I wasn’t familiar with it and so was slow. The deputy manager lost patience waiting for me, took the paperwork, did the additions in his head very quickly ( and he was absolutely right ), gave me the totals and we all went home, me rather red faced.

Another aspect of the job was the telephone. Few people had telephones at home ( my family certainly didn’t ) but in this business environment it was essential. I soon became used to using a phone through necessity. I was occasionally afterwards accused of being a “phoneaholic “. At Castrol my boss used to grumble I always had a phone stuck in my ear ( a gross exaggeration )

I only went on deliveries a few times. I discovered the roundsmen had great memories and worked at an intense pace. With commission they were comparatively  well paid. However this pay was a contrast to a warehouseman. I had a young married man as colleague who with two children found it difficult to make ends meet.

The rounds made planned stops; there were tea breaks at selected houses when we could briefly relax. These were houses where the roundsman made regular breaks and we were always made very welcome.

I worked at the dairy for two summers and it was a rewarding experience. In the second summer Annette worked in the main Co-op pottery department and would be sent to the dairy for tea break milk. I was delighted to see her despite some gentle ribbing from my colleagues.

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Entertaining Brenda

We were delighted to have Brenda come to stay with us in Whitby. She is George’s widow so she is my cousin-in-law. Not that the precise family relationship is important as we have been friends for at least 20 years.

Brenda came by train. Travelling via Newcastle and Middlesbrough she came direct to Whitby. The only national rail service for Whitby is from Middlesbrough. Travelling along Eskdale the line traverses the North York Moors National Park which extends to just outside Whitby.

One of our trips was to the Moors centre at Danby. The centre is made up of a series of former cottages now mainly interlinked internally. There are the usual facilities of a moorland exhibition, an art and craft exhibition and of course a small shop. I took the opportunity to buy a large scale road map of Yorkshire roads. I hoped to find an alternative route around York, as the main road, towards Scarborough and Hull is a bottleneck, but nothing obvious emerges.

We had a snack in the café. I had easily the biggest bacon roll I’ve seen which with a large salad was an excellent value for £3. The café has also a pleasant ambience in the end house of the moorside centre row. With traditional fish and chips for evening it was too much and we had to put some chips aside for reheating.

Brenda’s son John and his wife have bought from Whitby Art Centre which is actually a smallish shop. We searched it out. It is in two parts with an originals exhibition and a print shop. The two are not linked internally and it wasn’t obvious they were connected. We also took the opportunity to visit two larger art shops, one of which is very confusingly called the Reading Room.

To me this brought out another facet of Whitby shops. On one hand there are a tremendous number of charity shops ( I would think every major national charity is represented ) and on the other a number of very high end and expensive shops selling jewellery, art and collectables..

After Brenda had returned home we took a long riverside walk inland to the village of Ruswarp- Russup in local jargon. We took the opportunity to visit the village pub. This was further than I intended and I was very glad to get a bus back which took us almost to our flat.

We had our first block meeting. It wasn’t a complete success as the owner of three ( of the six total )  flats didn’t turn up giving a slightly lame last minute excuse. There were a number of urgent matters not least the filing of some information at Companies House which was overdue and the subject of a warning letter.

Trump and Comey

There is an irony at the centre of the Comey affair. As head of the FBI Comey threw the US election to Trump by resurrecting a previously cleared allegation against Clinton and then dropping it just before polls opened for lack of evidence. This highly partisan behaviour has been rewarded by being fired by Trump. It seems amply clear that the motivation was partly that the FBI were investigating Republican Russian links and partly that Comey didn’t somehow manipulate the Clinton charges more. The appointment of a special prosecutor appears amply justified and perhaps eventually more facts will emerge.

It is already clear that Trump will claim everyone is against him- he believes in getting his retaliation in first. Sadly it is the case that US media is very polarised with some sections supporting Trump with wild “facts”- Alt-truth is very much alive and well among Trump supporters.