The sun comes out ...

... and it seems that the sheep have got a double garage, mirrors and even a couple of birds.

 

 

 

 

 

Watch this space!

Sometime in the near future Peter will be attempting to move the oak gazebo from the paddock to somewhere else. Now that means getting through a gate - amongst other hazards! He was going to remove the gate, posts and things but I thought there might be a way of avoiding that. This could get interesting, Watch this ..er... space!

Just an illustration for some Picasa notes

This post is just something that I need to print to include in a presentation I'm making for a session on using Picasa.

HS2. Neither Here Nor There.

Only the cow seems to be in focus with HS2 Ltd

Lots of speeches and stuff about the new high speed rail link this week. It doesn't seem to be coming particularly close to here so my comments are not in the NIMBY category, just what I've been thinking over the last year or two generally.

Two things bother me: it's going to cost an extraordinary amount of money and take an extraordinarily long time to complete. It's being sold to us on some strange North | South lines, somehow making Northerners feel more connected to us Southerners. No way is some railway going to do that. Admittedly they may be better connected in 2030 or whenever but I can't see that making much of a difference to anyone's attitude either side of Rutland or wherever South becomes North.

The one good thing that the project could have going for it might be the large number of construction jobs that it would create, so removing a good few hundred thousand from the Job Seekers' queues and I suppose I might be a little more convinced if it were being mostly funded by the savings in welfare benefits but no-one's come up with those figures yet which tends to make me believe it won't be by any stretch of Treasury imagination. That's pretty long-term, too, and the vast majority of beneficiaries over the next few years, when we most need the jobs and something to boost the economy, would be lawyers, planners and people on both sides of all the inevitable negotiations promoting or denigrating this and that. Graphic designers, too, should do well as there'll be logos, leaflets and lots of lovely web sites to make. If you take a look at the current rambling and impenetrable bundle of text and PDFs that comprise the on-line information for all this you'll see why there'll need to be a lot of money spent on that!

So we're trying to pay off the huge debts inherited from Labour's crazy spending years and holding back everyone's pay, encouraging people to work longer and cutting back here, there and everywhere but feel it's OK to spend vast amounts on a railway line that's not going to produce any discernible benefit to the nation or most people or businesses until most current CEOs have long retired and moved to Spain or Switzerland or gone back to India? I can just about swallow tough times ahead if the debts do get cleared but if there is money to spend on a project or three then this is most definitely not one I can support.

Things are changing dramatically and will continue to do so apace. More people are now working from home. Firms don't need to be in cities anything like as much. The internet has developed to a point where communication and working on-line are just natural. The speed and reliability of internet services is such that it hardly matters where you live now and, once the providers really get their acts together, anyone anywhere will, before the tunnelling and flattening commences, be able to work efficiently wherever they happen to be, North, South, East and West. Even in the Midlands. Yes, there'll always be goods to transport from one place to another but I'm not so sure we shall be looking to transport people across vast distances or that there will be a particularly strong demand from those who do have to travel from London to Leeds to be able to do so that much more rapidly.

Wherever they start from and wherever they fall out of the new carriages, they'll still have that tricky problem of getting to a station in the first place and, unless every Yorkshire manufacturer is housed in some huge multi-storey factory next to New Leeds Station they'll need to travel along M, A and maybe even B roads and avoid sheep to reach their actual destination.

The reason why people don't travel around as much as they might is because the two ends can often be a pain. We don't need super links between the big cities. We need good, uncluttered links between all the little places and the big places. We're all scattered across the country - even those who think they live in big towns probably actually live on estates several miles out from the dot on the map that the town's name is attached to. Sort of under the P of Northampton.

If I want to go to Leeds or Manchester I get in my car and get to my destination near one or the other 2½ hours later. I have attended meetings galore where colleagues have taken far longer travelling from nearer points by public transport and who tend to start looking at their watches in the afternoon as they have to take this or that train at 4:56pm whereas I can just wander out, walk a few yards and drive away whenever the business is done. I have no problem with those who genuinely prefer the train or hate driving or even the few that actually like buses but I do get frustrated with those who try to tell me that it is more convenient or, worse, better for the environment. And it is, I believe, this annoying group of people who say that the train is the only way to take the strain, who seem to have won the day and influenced thinking behind this massive planned expenditure of our stretched resources.

I have never heard of anyone saying that they want to get from A to B more quickly by rail. But I have heard hundreds say they'd like to get from D, E F and G to H, I J and K via L, M N and O less stressfully and with a more reliable timing. If they're going by rail they'd like to be able to get to a station easily and park their car there at a reasonable cost and without walking miles. If they're going by car they'd like to avoid having to go through narrow town centres in long queues, lose shock absorbers from potholes or be stuck behind someone doing 62mph in the fast lane of a motorway. (He thinks he's doing 69¾mph but most speedos still tend to over-read by 10% - check your GPS speed one day!)

I have never heard of anyone going daily shopping by train, visiting relatives by just train or taking the kids to their friends parties by train on Sundays. This is Britain, not China or even France with their great tracts of land separating communities where high speed trains can really make a significant difference to journey times and whether they happen at all. Here we all live within a few hours of each other and knocking a bit off the middle bit of that journey time isn't going to make that much difference. We need nice roads that are well maintained, car parks, maybe more buses and links between out-of-town car parks and centres or even trains for that. Many would even appreciate the reopening of lots of little local train services between little places and some East-West lines too. But we don't need any particularly high speed, super tilting and whizzing bullet trains to make life more pleasant on our travels.

The anti-car brigade will already be shouting CO emission, of course, but great advances are being made in electric motors and I've always had doubts about the mass transfer to diesel. I find it hard to believe that all the soot that comes out of most diesel engines once their off the forecourt is that much better for my kids to breathe in. The diesel-lovers go on about economy but they have to do one hell of a big mileage to balance the extra initial cost, the higher fill-up costs and what can often be heavy servicing costs too on older models. Their cars also make horrible noises after a few months too. Give me the whoosh of a high speed train a few hundred yards away any day. So rather than moan about me driving a 2½ litre petrol car why doesn't the anti-car group join me in objecting to this high speed link thing and urge their buddies in Government departments to put the investment into expediting development of electric engines, other power devices and making roads smoother and car parks more friendly and all the things that would help us all get about more happily, less stressfully and more healthily too.

I have no idea how much could be achieved in improving normal rail services and facilities, roads and park-and-ride type things with the money being budgeted for the next 20 years on the High Speed Link but my guess is that not only would it be sufficient to make massive improvements right across the nation - even in Northumberland and Sussex and Cornwall who seem to get overlooked these days - in fact why not help Wales too - but it would also bring almost instantly lots of new jobs for a much wider range of people and proportionately far less top level planners and negotiators of the calibre the train thing will attract. By the end of 2013 we could all see a difference and some of us might even say Thank you, David and vote for him after all in 2015. 

Right place, right time

My daughter, Katie, gave us (but mainly Kirri and I!) a very smart telescope at Christmas. It's one of those big ones on a tripod with lots of knobs and dials and things. It's also quite solid and heavy which means once it's up it tends to stay where it is and it's been in my bedroom since then.

The window there has a cool view over the paddock and into the distance across trees and fields and, of course, the sky and stars at night. Every time Kirri's been here since, though, the sky has either been cloudy or the stars and, in particular the moon, have been out of sight somewhere and that's not out of sight in a cool 60s way but genuinely not visible out of that window.

Now, only half of the window actually opens and then only to 90º; so there's a pretty narrow chunk of sky that you can actually look at through the open window. I'm guessing it's about 1 or 2º. Tonight was just one extraordinary bit of luck: not only was the sky clear at about 6:30pm when Kirri just happened to look (having been dull grey all day before) but a pretty full-looking moon was there, right in the right place! Half an hour later and it was somewhere else that would have meant either looking through the glass of the other bit of the window or going outside which I think we agreed we'd think about when the temperature moved a bit higher than 0ºC.

So we got our first close up view of the moon which was brilliant. Kirri even managed to take a picture with his phone held up against the eyepiece which I'll put here when I get hold of it. I also may have managed to get some close-ups with the amazing zoom on my new camera if I discover that I managed to hold it from drooping on the tripod for long enough. I won't know about that until I get a new card reader, though, as my computer doesn't recognise the new type of card the camera uses. So, if they're any good, I'll add mine here too when I eventually get at them.

Best Photos of 2012 Entries

My camera's 8 years old and the children have more megapixels on their mobile phones but I'll have a go and put these, possibly my Best of 2012 in the Google+ competition.

mist

fence

toy

change

oh boy

splash

low cloud

old flame

let me in

raindrops

frost

Well, that was certainly the year that was

Snow arrived in January and stayed for a while. Big changes at work with the whole of my department getting redundancy notices. No heating in classrooms and managers tried to tell a colleague and I we should move from one very convenient office to another. We just moved the filing cabinets. My car managed most snow journeys but refused to budge on a gentle slope in Milton Keynes! Next time I went to pick up the children I parked somewhere else and only just made it back to the village in one of the worst blizzards I can recall driving in since 1981/2.

The snow was still around in early February and there was this heavy mist that made the world seem much smaller. Nothing much really happened at all this month.

By March things were finally warming up and I was keen to get a photo of a bird on this nest which I passed at least twice every day.

April sunshine was nice and quite a relief but the skies did keep turning very strange colours throughout the year. A voluntary redundancy option was put on the cards at work and my colleague and I decided to investigate the possibilities. 

In May it really did start getting quite hot. Leaves were growing fast on the tree with the nest too.

More weird weather in June but enough dry Sundays to play cricket in the paddock. I was also celebrating being free from Further Education and comparatively solvent again.

My birthday party in July started with a massive downpour but, strangely, an hour or so later and everyone was playing cricket, rolling around in the paddock and it was hot again.

One of the few dry days in August for Paddock Party 8. One day we'll get soaked but every year we have been so lucky so far! Lights on the other side of the pond added a touch of class to the otherwise nicely rustic event.

Friends and I played with The Prisoner's car - well, a modern day version, - in September. Again, this was one of the rare sunny and dry days.

Wonderful skies in October...

and in November when my Mum passed away just after her 96th birthday. I got a ridiculously short hair cut and spent hours on photos, service planning and poems for the funeral where my brother and I met lots of people we hadn't seen for years and years which all went really well.

December started so cold and frosty but then the rains came and, now, at the end of the year, they're still coming, with the stream where I live more like a small river and I can't remember when I last washed the car!

 Christmas was amusing. I visited a friend from my school days and just about everything that I dislike about Christmas happened: soap operas continuously invading the living room on a huge screen almost as big as the wall, lights on a tree that flashed and seemed to interfere with my brain, the goose was well over-cooked and tough, the vegetables pallid and the roast potatoes were just shells with goo inside, a Christmas pudding that was microwaved for about twice as long as it should have been and was more like dark brown toffee on arrival but... and this is the nice bit... it didn't matter at all because Brian is such a cheery and decent chap that I was laughing practically all the time and genuinely enjoyed the afternoon and evening! In fact, I was giggling to myself as I went to bed that night. 

My daughter Katie has a nice house in Letcombe Regis, just over the hill from where I once lived in Woodland St Mary, and Bryony, Kirri, Matti and I visited on the day after the day after Boxing Day. We got a massive telescope as a present which looks really cool and that should enable us to get some good pictures next year of whatever we can see out of the window or, with a bit of luck, there'll be enough dry weekends to take it out to the paddock and catch some stars.

Highlights:

Sony Xperia P phone with Android ICS

Finally getting into Middlesex University's PAFIS payment system

Nice new tyres on my car instead of the cheap ones I'd had last year which I'm sure had turned oval.

An LSIS contract to bring web tools to the Third Sector.

Bryony's GCSE grades

Leaving College

Discovering that my old office chair did recline after all.

Weekly lunches with Adrian until he got a new job and monthly lunches with Bernard

Thorpe Park with Kirri and friends

My Birthday Party

Getting in the Top 20 on Google+ for UK following

Google+ Photowalk

Zero spend when wandering around virtually every clothes shop in MK Centre with Marta

Attending strange but amusing Hypnotherapy Conference as a VIP guest with Judy

Getting my own internet and landline - ah, being able to make phone calls in the warm!

Getting lost with Adrian when returning the Prisoner car to Caterham in Leicestershire

Gingerly steering around ice-bound roads somewhere in the wilds of Buckinghamshire to collect Bryony from parties in the early hours in the late autumn

First clients for my Staff ICT Skills Audit.

Chromebook and a new TV

Matti passing his 11+ so he can go to the same school as Bryony & Kirri

Flooded back roads and gushing stream here in the village

Rupert and I suffering from pretty bad wind after lunch in Doddington.

Longest ever pee in lay-by on return from Mum's funeral

Inability to solve wooden and metal puzzles at Maggie & Graeme's on Boxing Day

Sherlock, Dr Who, Homeland, X Factor USA, The Killing, Borgen, The Thick of It, Secret State The Hour and I am sure there were others that I'll have to add later.