You'd Think There'd be an ATM at Least.

(Stereo Double - Needs Crossed Eyes rather than "Magic" Eyes)

We got to Jodrell Bank at last on Saturday and it is still impressive. Of course for my daughter it is where The Fourth Doctor fell off and turned into that nice vet though I think the overwhelming presence of The Lovell Telescope got to her as well. I'm still excited by the whispering dishes which allow you to whisper a greeting across 100 metres of space using two aligned dishes. Standing in the middle of them surrounds you with disembodied voices from the people at either end; maybe the sound analogy of those strange dished which create real images of objects placed within them. And then to add value to the day, there is an arboretum which I imagine is populated with cerebral astrophysicists, though I get the feeling that all the data is actually worked on remotely with the whole gantry swinging away to commands beamed in from various labs all over the country. As the Lovell Telescope is part of at least two synchronised radio telescope arrays, it is possible to think of the massive apparatus as part of a dance team with all the other telescopes turning at the same time to target the same object in the sky. We went right up close to the giant railway bogies which handle the yaw of the dish and could see the wheels moving gradually to keep the whole think targeted allowing for the rotation of The Earth. All very impressive.

All we have to walk around at lunchtime is a pond hewn out of a gravel pit. Actually "hewn" probably suggests a bit too much organisation; it was probably just the result of moving earth around when the business park and it being allowed to flood. Oh well!