The woods are lovely, dark and deep

Walking in the woods by the light of a full moon brings a magical fantasy world to life.

It is some years since I have walked regularly in the dark evenings, but Dylan and I now walk the woods regularly. Tonight we enjoyed a clear sky and cold wind. The shadows thrown by the moon were long and clear and the light bathed the ground in a greyness of contrast. The path through the woods became less clear than the overcast nights we have been walking in and several times had me wondering the way I should go. Dylan guided me along the path with unerring and caring ability.

We heard voices. Youths. And they were on the path we were destined to follow. What would we find when we came to them? These teenage voices were laughing and joking as they celebrated the start of their weekend and as we neared them it became more apparent what my fear of them was. I braced myself and tightened Dylan's lead and hoped I was wrong and as we passed them, warily I found to my delight I was wrong and Dylan didn't jump and give them dirty footprints. He said hello to them and they to him, but he kept his dirty feet to himself.

Tomorrow there will be a pile of drinks cans and bottles in the wood where they met and on examination it will be found that 9 out of 10 are soft drinks cans. I wonder if they all know what they are all drinking or whether, under cover of dark, they drink what they want rather than what they think their mates expect them to?

Gatherings of young teenagers are all too frequently labelled as 'youths' when all they are are young people looking to socialise. Stick them in a youth club! That will curb their freedom and inhibit their socialising! We met and gathered outside such organisations and it didn't do us any harm and it annoys me that people brand these youngsters as criminals in the making. There will always be bad ones but most are just younger versions of ourselves and deserve the trust and respect we wanted.

It was a lovely evening and a lovely walk that left me thinking of wolves baying to the moon.

Sssshh - It's a secret!!

My daughter was expressing her levels of appalledness by a recent exercise they were asked to do at school and it does, in my opinion, make you start to question the intelligence of some people.

One of the things they were asked to do in this exercise was to write their secrets into their workbook. Horror was expressed by many of them in class, although the vocal ones seem to have been mostly girls. They challenged the teacher and refused to do it.

In my opinion this raises other questions, but what did the teacher expect? Girls seem to have more secrets than boys and I would expect the boys to have taken the approach I would have done. I would have made something up along the lines that I would expect my peers to have written. The fact that we all would have done the same thing invalidates the exercise anyway.

Girls are 'more honest'?

If we take this exercise logically it is one that cannot be done.

If the secret is written down then it is not a secret any more hence it no longer fulfils the requirements of the exercise!

It does bring to mind a management training exercise I was involved in some years ago. There were about 12-15 of my colleagues around a table and we were given the exercise. A group of visitors were trapped in a pothole and we were running the rescue team from a remote location. There were men, women and children in the trapped group which included some elderly and unfit. We had to decide the order to bring them up to safety as they could not all be saved and some would die.

I was appalled at this and said that I wouldn't be involved in this and that we, as a team should leave it to the chaps on the rescue team to make those decisions as they would have the greatest information and that we should support them with whatever resources they needed.

The reaction of the rest of the group was that I was wrong, the exercise said that we had to do this. I still refused - I was adamant that I would not even PLAY at being god and controlling who should live or who should die. One of my colleagues turned to the trainer and asked him to tell me to get involved properly. I remember that the trainer said nothing but shrugged his shoulders and turned to face the window. I suspect I had played right into his hands! Was this what the exercise was about? When people saw that there was another way they started to join my side and by the end of the exercise there was only the person who challenged the trainer left on that side of the table.

I wonder if the class missed the purpose of the secrets exercise?

Thoughts on Kindle

Before retiring I worked in the 'Security Printing Industry' and was heavily involved in the provision of software and other technologies for the distribution of 80% of the UK's gift vouchers. There have been and still are logistical problems of how these can be replaced by gift cards but they are being and will be replaced by gift cards. To ignore this fact is to try and stop the inevitable. It has happened through time immemorial that things get replaced by newer things. Sometimes we feel that it is being forced on us as consumers by the manufacturers and we kick hard against it.

Sheet music gave way to 78 rpm gramophone records. They in turn gave way to 33 1/3 and 45 rpm records and I am sure everyone was annoyed that they would have to replace their gramophones with record players, but eventually they did. In the early 80's the CD came along and I for one refused to get involved. The CD has stayed and reluctantly I do now use them but just as the order of the day becomes to download direct from the web.

As we know the publishers are now pushing Kindle. Why? Because they can cut out all that messy ink and paper, the wholesalers, the bookshops and become even more profitable.

But consider the download market today....  The Arctic Monkeys established a precedent. A successful popular hit and no record label involved! They cut out the recording company totally.

Software will become available and standards published that will enable anyone to publish their own book on the web without resort to a publisher. Arguably this can be done in PDF format today and could have been done over the last so many years, but Kindle offers bookmarking and pagination management techniques that make ebooks more manageable to the reader. Also small portable readers are becoming available.

Is this a good thing and what would be the impact?

Well first is the disappearance of the paper book but publishers are already pushing for that.

Second will be there will be no editorial control over accuracy of non fiction material which could be a serious issue.

Thirdly violence, sex, racism etc in fiction could go on uncontrolled, but in reality agencies could be set up to watch for this and shut it down within guidelines that could be as draconian as was deemed relevant.

But another important impact would be in spelling.  Yes, spelling. We all read typos in publications and wonder how they got through but that's after proof readers have found many, many more and had them corrected. Self published books would leave errors that would be read and believed to be the correct spelling. That thought is abhorrent. But think on this....  Books that are self published and have plots and story telling techniques that are hugely popular! How will the publishers look on Kindle then? But if the books are written entirely in text speak - what will that do to the printed/published word? Books in text speak WILL happen and that fact alone will aid their popularity.

I can make several cases FOR Kindle. Travellers can take all the books they want on holiday abroad. Positive? Yes.  Short sighted people, like my 90 year old father in law, could have readers that vary the contrast and brightness as well as variable sized fonts.

But the down sides are far more and they are being gathered together in 'Dusty Old Books' http://jamesmayhew-dustyoldbooks.blogspot.com/ so I won't go into them here.

Ebooks, of which Kindle is one emergent standard, are bad I believe and we should resist them. I will, but I know the tide will come in and the spot in which I stand to make my defence will get covered by that tide. I also believe that the tide will move slower than Kindle and the publishers want because the 20 year old generation is not 100% behind it and they need to be before the 30, 40 etc generation will become convinced.

Let's hope that paper books remain with us for the next 50 years or more and let's try to perpetuate them.

1976 - A Marvelous year.

Christmas eve 1976. The end of a year with a very long hot summer. The year I had left home after seeing all my brothers leave and then return. I had always resolved that when I left home that was it, no going back. I had joined the TA and enjoyed the weekends enormously. The year I had passed my driving test and got a battered old ex-taxi - a Cortina 1600E with a sports carb. A car I got to know intimately and spent many happy hours underneath tickling her bits to keep her going. A truly magnificent year.

I had locked the car in the company car park as I had determined I was not going to use it until after Christmas. Work closed early and on leaving the building I asked one of the girls if she was going to the pub for a Christmas drink with everyone. Although I had spoken with this girl a few times, we didn't work together and the only real conversations had been to criticise my appalling French. She had shopping to do for her Grandmother so couldn't. I persuaded her one quick drink. We went for that drink. We danced - to what I have no idea - and then she had to leave to get her shopping done. I left the pub with her amid questioning looks from some of the girls I worked with. We did that shopping and I decided that I was not letting things end there, and they would have, so I took the car from the car park - I had had about 6 vodkas at this point - and I took her home. We agreed I would pick her up for a drink later and we went down Nottingham. At the end of the evening we made another date between Christmas and New Year and sometime around the 7th January we informally got engaged. In February we broke the news to her parents and left it until March 1978 to get married.

She was and is my first serious girl friend and after 33 years and 2 lovely daughters I still believe Christmas eve to be a more special day for me on the calendar than our anniversary - 4th March.  Thank you Mary and I still love you lots.

Current Projects

It has been a manic time for me. You too? Well, of course it has because it has been the run up to Christmas. But I have been busy and started to put my bookcase together. Here we see it unglued just put together to check everything works and it seems to, although the backboards have yet to be cut to size.

All the wood involved is reclaimed wood from different people so it is of different colours and finishes. the first this is to sand off the old finishes and then we will stain it up. I would like to wax it and leave it mostly in it's original colour, but where we want it we need it to be a teaky colour, so stained it will be. Once complete it will be able to house some of my Christmas presents from kind publishers!

While I have been working on this I have also been doing a paid job of work again although only for 7 days. I was surprised at how much fun it is now. I was a little anxious having not 'worked' for 15 months and I 'retired' because it was no longer the hobby it had been. But after a 15 month break it was good and fun to be back at it and I am grateful to friends for the chance.

I now have a happy Christmas planned after which I will resume the bookcase and move on to trying to renovate a carburettor for a friend.

Life is good, don't let anyone say otherwise.

Quite a change

Yesterday ended up a bit pressured which was very much a shame really. I have been spending a few days helping out with a server re-installation after a virus severely damaged a DC server running SBS and left it at the point where correction of the corruption was not practically possible. I had spent 4 days on it last week where 1 day had been severely curtailed because of a power cut. I had spent a little time setting up a wifi router and licking my wounds while assessing everything I could think of that needed to be done to finish up over the weekend and REALLY hoped to get finished in 1 more day. Things started well and it looked like things were going to be fine but then the XP client I had been rebuilding after it's problems with viruses took longer to patch itself than I had bargained for as well as the new Vista client we were installing taking too long to patch.

At 2:00 pm I still hoped to get everything done in time to get away for about 3-3:30. I then found a 12 page document for 1 product I had to install and things didn't look so good.

Come 3:45 I really had to leave because, having only one car now, I had to get home in order to get SOC to Pony Club at 6:00.  The traffic was much lighter than I expected but still only had just about enough time and the end of day rush sort of marred the job, which was a shame as I was working with a very nice group of people and generally things went quite well.

SOC did enjoy Pony Club though in which they covered road safety while I sat in the car licking my wounds still and assessing what I had left undone.

I now have a fair few jobs at home I need to get finished this week Although one job I am not going to find time for this week is building my bookcase. Having cut most of the wood and routed the edges I now have to finish it all off by hand with cleaning, sanding and smoothing before assembly. To be so close but not finished is a little irritating but we have to take the rough with the smooth.  I will get to the gym today though and after Sunday's personal best of 27'57" for 5k on the treadmill I look forward to repeating that (if not bettering!).

It has been a fun few days in which I like to think we have helped them out and get them to a more robust state than they were before.

An interesting discussion

Grandma's birthday Tuesday and as that's a gym (for SOC) and school day we decided to invite them for tea on Saturday instead. We showed them the photos we took in Wales recently on the PC and Granddad comment on my wallpaper picture. We knew it to be Mary's Granddad on his engine (No 6) and Mary and I had debated where the photo was taken because of the background. I had suggested the Beggarlee yard at Moorgreen, where my brother had worked as a fitter when a young man.

We asked Grandma who said she had no idea but a lively discussion ensued. By having scanned the photo quite deeply a remarkable amount of detail can be found but very little was recognised. First thing is there is a crossing in the bottom right. We debated this but little ensued. Second, but more obvious really, is the engine is cold. It takes a long time to get an engine cold and it is close to that crossing where you wouldn't park an engine, so it must have been shunted from it's shed to this point for the photo. If you zoom into the original down by the front bump stops you can see buildings in an elevated position, but their outline meant nothing to us. Where were there engine sheds? It was quickly agreed that Granddad's engine was believed to have always lived at Langley Mill Sheds but it could have been moved to Begrarlee, but did that answer it and why was Granddad wearing a tie? But this was not discussed before a heated debate on where the sheds actually were.

"You go down the lane and turned left over the style. Don't you remember?" says Grandma.

"No, I have never know that area as it was covered by the pit tip and I have only ever known the pit tip as being there." says Mary.

"You do" says Grandma.

"Of course she doesn't" says Grandad.

And

"No" says Granddad "The bakery was there before the mushroom farm."

"Well I'm sure they were by the Northern at the back of the canal basin" says Grandma.

These debates went on and became quite heated at time.

The footplate was a hot place to work, why would an engine driver wear a tie? We now entered a debate into Why the photo was taken. Perhaps that could be answered with When it was taken? The picture is clearly posed as the engine must have been shunted and Granddad is wearing a tie. Why would that be? "5 years service? No nothing like that was ever awarded in those days Granddad assures us. New engine in the yard? Well the connecting rods on the wheels don't look clean and if you were posing a new engine you would clean every inch of the engine.  Don't get me wrong, the engine is clean, and they were kept clean. Cleaning kept dirt away from joints and knuckles where it could become an abrasive and accelerate wear and it also helped you find wear before it became critical. (Don't even think about BR where pride in the engines was discouraged and repair rather than maintenance became the norm). So why would you pose the engine. Perhaps the answer is in the tie. He was promoted to become Traffic Manager where he would have to wear a tie. So perhaps one last photo of proud driver and loco? How old was he when he retired from driving? Was it before the war?

"Wasn't it after he gave his motorcycle jacket to so-and-so?"

"No he gave it to some Londoner"

"No he gave it to so-and-so"

"Did he?"

"The point is When did he give his jacket away?"

"Wasn't that before the war?"

"Don't know."

In the end I think we concluded, after further lively discussion about his age in the photo and age at becoming traffic manager that the photo of Engine No 6 of The Barber Walker Collieries & Co. was taken at Langley Mill Sheds with Eastwood in the background on the occasion of the promotion from engine driving  of Mr William Lacey shortly before the second world war in 1939. He died at the age of 62 in 1955 before Mary's birth and so she never knew him.