The War-Winning Huddersfield Bomber

For some reason my Wife and I were trying to name 10 British WWII planes yesterday. After I gave her the clue that lots of British planes seemed to be named after towns and having already got the Lancaster Bomber, she came up with the Huddersfield Bomber which sounds like it should be some saddo with a milk bottle, petrol and lots of (bad) attitude. There is one British Aircraft which always attracted interest when I was at school and that was the Boulton Paul Defiant. As you can see if you have clicked on the link, it had a four-gun turret mounted on the fuselage which seemed odd because such turrets were usually seen in the nose and tail of really big bombers. My uncle was a tail gunner in Wellington and Halifax bombers but I have never asked him about it. Come to think of it, I haven't actually seen him or my aunt for years. I saw him at my Grandfather's funeral about 12 years ago. The sad thing is I expect it will be another funeral before I see him again. We have to make the effort to get to see them some time.

This was just a stream of conciousness presentation by the unfriendly society. By the way, he told the draft board that he was allergic to Corned Beef, which would have worked I suppose. On to the Novelty Rock Emporium and the Warmington Cottage Hospital.

A 'Site' for sore eyes

Finally found and uploaded the photo out of this window.



As I said, all the people on the lawn have been removed and the old Merseybus building is gone.

In addition, another picture from Malvern.



This is from one of the paths which go up the British Camp. Our house from the previous photo was just at the bottom of the hills and just out of shot to the right. The trees just by the house at the side of the reservoir are mostly Chestnut though it has been years since we picked any to eat. If you follow the path alongside the house towards the dam on the right, you will go through some quite dense woodland with a very rocky path and end up at the top of Castlemorton Common which is unfortunately for ever associated with the rave from the early 90s. Not the right place for a rave at all. You would never know it had ever happened and I hope that it is not a challenge for anyone to hold another one. Just along from here, there is a very steep-sided hill which is used for hang-gliding, though contrary to what we always thought, that hill is not called Hangman's Hill. The next hill along is called Raggedstone Hill and as kids we always used to believe in what I thought was a myth about the Shadow of Raggedstone Hill, about a monk who was condemned to climb the hill on his knees, twice a day for years. He died near the peak and cursed the hill. We always believed that the curse applied to all in the shadow of the hill and were convinced that there were no houses in the shadow at sunset. There is no mention of this as regards the myth but if by any small chance you can confirm or deny this then please email me at rdeweyden@hotmail.com.

That mention of the email address reminds me of the way John Peel inserts the email address for Home Truths but of course John Peel can get away with it just by being John Peel. The most relaxing programme on the Radio and of course now we can get Radio 4 via the digital television box. All those who do not listen to Radio 4 think it is slightly boring and establishment but I think it has a very dangerous almost seditionary feeling. A real revolution in this country won't start with the crusties or the anarchists but in the audience of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue when Samantha is off sick or they can't get the Ostrich down from the rafters.

Question: How did Private Walker avoid the draft?

That's Streeb Greebling - I think

Very cold here today. It is like the old days from the eighties when it stayed below freezing for several days in a row and all the ponds were continuously frozen solid.

I found a picture I took from this very office on one of our open days. It was not taken at exactly where my desk is now but it show the building across the way and the skyline of the city which is the important bit. I tidied it up to remove all the people on the lawns and the old Mersybus maintenance building which was demolished recently. Of course I did all this editing and then forgot to upload the picture so you will have to wait.Meanwhile, please click here for something I found while looking for pictures of Liverpool to keep you happy. Serendipity - you couldn't wish for it could you?

A Philip Glass Exclusive

No! Not really. I haven't seen a programme about Philip Glass for years, actually not since the first programme I saw about him before I had even bought one record of his. I am afraid all the early pieces are the best ones. These are the ones my Wife hates (and my Aunt and probably my daughter as well) but they have a raw power which gets you just as much as any deep bass line.

Aren't cranes wonderful?

Chocolates anyone?



Eventually - a scan of the house. I have to admit to pushing the colour a little on this picture. The original is quite faded and it was actually overcast with one shaft of sunlight at the time. Strangely, the blue in the sky is actually the cloud and the white is the gap between the clouds. The small extension off to the side is where the boot room was but the second floor was inaccessible from the house; we had a door right up there and had to climb a ladder to get in. My brother and I used it for wargames though not proper full-scale ranks of red-coated soldier type games, just boring old lego castle and plastic 72nd scale stuff. There was a very cool original Bulgarian propaganda poster on the wall though and a very old electric record player on which we played very uncool records like collections of TV theme tunes and gee-whizz-isn't-stereo-wonderful demos. We did have The Great Gate at Kiev though which we blasted out across the common.



This picture was in the same album and is of a boat in Trefor Harbour. This is a village on which Llareggub must have been based. A colleague of mine came from the village and in return for me driving him and his mates around North Wales he fitted my Car Alarm and Radio. Walking to the pub in the village one night, I stopped and thought (only to myself) how much like "Under Milk Wood" the whole place actually was. The phrase 'Bible Black' comes to mind every time I think of it running down the street with a finger in my mouth (not my own).

I got distracted in my search for some Dylan Thomas stuff on the web. There are some kooks out there. Superstitious idiots. Men kill men! Not prophecies! Who is right in all this?

Grey and Greyer

This only refers to the view out of the window rather than any state of the world though it could so easily do so. It is one of those 'no-weather' days - not too cold, not too hot, no sun, no wind and no rain. Not November though as The Art of Noise put it. Many CDs bought over the last week. They are :-

ABC Music - Stereolab
Come Away with me - Norah Jones
Travelogue - The Human League
Version 2.0 - Garbage
Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots - The Flaming Lips

Just for an excuse to get a few links in place.

Someone told me that The Flaming Lips released a four CD set which requires that all 4 CDs are played simultaneously - here is the gen on that - lets have a guess at how many people have actually set that up - I think I may have enough fingers without troubling any of my colleagues for extras. The Stereolab is the best album though.

All this music talk has reminded me of a bit of a change of allegiance. I have been considering not buying 'Q' magazine for sometime and the 200th issue has tipped me over the edge. That this descision also coincides with a new magazine comming out seems very lucky. Mark Ellen who launched Q has started up a magazine for which he claims no market research has been done. It is called 'Word' (not THE word) just Word. I got the first issue on Wednesday and I have read almost every bit of writing in it - lets just hope that this is not just all the good stuff in one issue. I have also dumped BBC History magazine in favour of The Wire, so maybe watch out for some change of direction.

No more time. Lunchtime is History and so is History (BBC).

Clangers and Pogles and Yaffle

I saw my first Liverpool Fox this morning, at about 06:10. It was running slyly as foxes do, directly across the main road into Liverpool from the North, in the midst of all the dock-side industrial estates. I suspect that foxes are actually quite common here but I have never seen one. They were quite often around when I lived in Bristol. One used to sit right by the wrought iron gates to the garage where my landlord kept his car and his large Pyrenean Mountain Dog. The fox would sit just back from the gates while the dog barked manically at it from the other side. Of course Bristol is where the BBC Wildlife film unit is based and they did several programmes on Urban Foxes.

I have just looked for details of that programme and I have found that the Urban Foxes are being hunted by marksmen as they have started to be a nuisance in some cities and towns. I can't imagine that they are that much of a nuisance. It sounds like A quote from the BBC article :-

But others complain that foxes are digging up their gardens, fouling their lawns, attacking their pets and ripping open their garbage bags.

Sounds like what cats do and you would never shoot a cat would you? And I wouldn't let a man with a gun loose in any city. I will here admit that I have shot an animal and killed several others by other means. At least once I used my Dad's airgun to shoot the rabbits which were eating our vegetables in the garden of the very house you see in the picture from the previous post. Just in case you think I am a 'fluffy bunny' type. Having said that I am also not a 'Rupert-bag-anything-that-moves'. That name actually sounds like it could exist. Hiya Rupe!

I didn't get any scans done. Apologies. I did look at the album and I remembered going through it for pictures to blog and not finding any. This time, I found loads and could have scanned in the lot. It's just like the poems; sometimes they seem wonderful and other times they are just dross. Looking at the pictures of the old house made me realise that I have almost forgotten what the house was like inside. My Wife asked me about something visible in the picture and I could not answer because ther internal layout is nothing more that a fuzzy memory. We had two living rooms one of which had a beamed ceiling; I can't work out how one ceiling had to beamed and the other didn't. Maybe it was because the beamed room had a big inglenook fire place which had been blocked off and connected to a bread oven. The structure of the house might not have stood having the beams being taken away.

I used to live here



From Pictures of England

That is my old house just to the right of the tree in the centre of the picture. I need to dig out some of my pictures and put them up so you can see what the house looks like close up.

Blind for the morning

It struck me last night that the compression which takes place for digital television is very like the idea that Human conciousness only processes the relevant parts of its sensory input. Certain TV compressions only transmit what moves between frames rather than the whole frame again. The brain only remembers what is relevant at the time, and for a lot of the time that is a very focussed sub-set of what the mind could actually record. Even when a full strech I suspect that the brain performs a great deal of filtering to save having to remember too much. Could we not tap straight into the lines from the sensory apparatus and send only what would be needed to provide us with the best image and sound? This reminds me of the entry from a few weeks ago when I said that within ten years I expect there to be a fully navigable virtual globe. Well I am not saying that it is actually here to the extent that I suggested, but there is a piece of software which claims to have all the terrain of the earth mapped to 1cm accuracy. It is called Eingana. Of course the blurb on the website does not show you the acres of boring terrain but it seems to suggest that all the detail of the planet is mapped. Ten years! See what is available then.

Where did that come from?

Sorry about the previous entry. It is a very old poem from 1994 and not even I am certain about the origin of much of it. Well, it scans in a way so in it goes.

I finished 'The Hound of the Baskervilles' yesterday. An Excellent book. It is sad that it took a TV version, albeit a very good one, to get me to pick up a Sherlock Holmes book. I do hope that the BBC carry on and produce more SH/DW books with the same actors. The BBC seems to have dragged itself up from the mire of Holby City/Eastenders and produced at least two very good programmes in the last month. The other one I am thinking of is 'The lost Prince' about Prince John, the son of George V who was epileptic and thought to have what now would be termed as either autism or learning difficulties. Of course it is very difficult to tell how much of the drama is true to the reality but what mattered here was its believability. The attention to detail was astounding and that gave it an air of credibility often absent from Royal dramas these days. As you have probably worked out, I am not an ardent royalist (neither am I a fervent republican except when very wound up) and I don't usually expect to be captivated by such dramas. Of course when the writing or directing is so good, I will watch anything - Mrs Brown - The Madness of George III, but this was special beyond almost anything I have seen before. The early shot of the Russian Princesses (Tsarinas?) walking along a sunny south-coast beach was just breath-taking (over-fulsome praise is no praise at all - rein in this purple prose) and reminded me of some paintings I have seen. Maybe Steven Poliakoff is using the same devices as Peter Greenaway used in Drowning by Numbers.

What are the daughters of a Tsar called?

On to Wuthering Heights. Maybe next weekend if the weather is good.

Tokyo Rose

From your apartment nothing can be hidden,
the flat-iron lunatic, this liner captain,
shirks his duties and descends to you,
through many stairways and leaves the cat to steer.
It's light and Sunday though you forget
the world is you and friends,
and so you live unconcious.
The ground is opening, has opened sometime
and all the city lives below in steam.
You own the world, creating everyone.
You are Siwa, Dewi-Sri, the flying God of rice,
alone with geysers falling from the Battery
to Central Park.

The giant country falls away from you,
like relativity and you a torch beam,
bend the city, shorten time and nothing hides,
your light shines everywhere.

Here we find you and you asleep
between the fruit that whispers.
It used to wake you, leaving you with flashing green,
the evil numbers high and missing you, the last insomniac,
a sleeping whiteness, still tiny like a table doll,
an immigrant, a Catholic, God-daughter of the spaceman.

Thanksgiving marker pulled through Christmas
into New Year's Day, an acid ending
to your slacker magic.,
your foreign money, your democrat tycoon,
so new so bright.

The Planet's end has fallen with your city
tilting into newer seasons,
careeing through your early disk,
for Penguin dreams and stranger things.,
the life of Gods, Oh these city gods,
the blackness in your face this evening.
You have a blank, bright neon face,
a white room, clean but still blank.

Counting to Seven

I thought the teletext was playing "on this day in history". I really was quite annoyed that they were playing this story in the main headlines and that someone might take it as real like "War of the Worlds". It was horrible to realise that it was true. Yet another bit of eminently repeatable film of destruction for the news organisations. No thought about the fact that there were seven people in that new constellation.