March 2007 Archives

I've been thinking a lot recently about the destruction of communities by the overuse of the automobile. To be honest I think that walkers are most in tune with their surroundings than any other mode of transport. Even cycling, whilst being much more environmentally friendly than the car (or even public transport possibly?), leads to people being eager to get from A to B without quite engaging with the people around. I draw the readers' attention to the fact that when I cycle I very rarely get asked if I can ‘spare some change’, whereas if I walk I will quite often be stopped and asked something.

What I'm trying to illustrate here is the fact that our communities have swung into a very non-communicative mode. It is a shame that when I walk that the majority of social interactions are of the less pleasant variety. Even though mobile phones and the Internet have enabled us a mechanism of creating what are now called “virtual communities”. There still is no substitute for a genuine face to face dialogue occasionally. I suspect that if more people walked there would be an increased number of people who knew each other passing the time of day. This would hopefully lead to a better balance of interaction between people in the communities in which we actually exist. Hopefully morale would be higher as peoples' impressions would not be that the place was just being overrun by scavvers!

Of course this is only true up to a point. Since taking up walking as a serious hobby, over ten years ago, I've noticed walker numbers increasing across the land. The interesting effect of this seems to have been that people are getting less friendly. In locations where walkers were rare it would be very poor form to pass someone without saying ‘hello’. With increased saturation of numbers walkers seem to actively try to ignore the presence of another person. The iPod generation walks blithely past without eye contact - presumably because they've come away from a big city and are sick to death with other people. I refer you back to previous comments about over-population in this nation of ours.

So, having strayed somewhat from the point I've reproduced here a very interesting sign from Cambridge. It says ‘cyclists have priority’, this is a good message, but drivers should not need reminding of this. It clearly states in the Highway Code that pedestrians have priority across side entrances. On this street, the exit from yet another development of flats, the cyclists are also in the road, so normal priorities should also be obvious. I wonder if this is yet another indication of the Nanny State? Will we have to have massive posters at every road feature listing the rules of conduct that are expected at that point? If so then it follows that these posters should also be translated into other languages, or even announced by some device so that people who cannot read can be made aware.

I'm overselling my point, but it is an interesting sign of the times don't you think?

For some reason or another I needed to do a walk from Hadleigh in Suffolk, and due to various circumstances I also couldn’t obtain a car for transport. I could have cycled to get one, but after discussing the various logistics I decided to opt for a car free, and slightly more adventurous approach to achieving this.

One of the many nofear.org projects we have on the go is the conversion of the Earl of Cambourne's bicycle into a fixed speed racer.

The bike has a certain emotional cache associated with it, it was the Earl's first proper bicycle - purchased as a birthday present when he was not actually tall enough to ride it! It was an impressive thing back then, having 12 speeds, and was ridden all around London during his heady batchelor days.

Having been stored away for more than 10 years it was decided that this machine should be reborn as a fixed speed bike. So over the next few weeks there'll be a minor photo journal about the redevelopment of this bicycle.

The frame has almost been stripped, as you can see in the blurry camera-phone picture (must learn how to hold the device more still). There was great relief when the crank arms finally came away from the tapered end of the bottom bracket. Using the old blowtorch on the arm gave it just enough freedom to be hammered off. Unsuprisingly the bearings we completely shot on one side of the bracket.

The next stage is to remove all the other bits and pieces and then measure up the frame prior to getting some nice new running gear on to it.

Even though the frame stickers claim that it is a "Triumph Tempest" I noticed that the frame actually was built by Raleigh, so more investigations into the nature of the frame may well have to be done.

Use this for darning thumb and finger-tips
of much-worn gloves: see how the rounded ends
fit snugly. Or take this glass cone for lips
to taste champagne from. Anything which mends
is welcome, and shakers that sprinkle sand
for blotting letters. Enclose a flower
between the sheets, or present it by hand.
An antique watch can stretch the scantest hour
and make it last. Quirkiest junk-shop finds
suggest that there is hope for life’s loners.
Cuff-links and buttons - one-offs of all kinds -
serendipity gives to new owners.
But who would give a rusting, creaky tool
once used to ring doves? Who’d be such a fool?

Lucy Lewis
2 March 2007

As a long time collector of junk (who else has a box of cola can sized 5000uF capacitors?) I was delighted this weekend to get my hands on some old mechanical typewriters, the kind of which I haven't used for absolutely years.

I was interested to note after doing a little research that Olivetti still makes mechanical typewriters, and such items are still commonly used in countries and areas where electricity is not available to power word processors and computers. As with so many things in the 21st century, they are also used by people who just like that 'retro' appeal -- probably the same kind of person that has one of the old grey Post Office telephones.

As a sign of how quickly things move these days, they were of course ubiquitous until the late 1980's, whereup they started to get replaced by computers. Do you for instance remember all those ladies with typewriters sitting in the background on BBC TV's grandstand? I even have a copy of some (very) old bank statements from Barclays bank that were manually produced on a typewriter.

One very quickly gets used to the difference required to press the keys on a mechnical typewriter compared to a modern keyboard (he says, hammering the keys on his Dell). Of course, the lack of a carriage return key is initially an impediment to continuing to the next line (it's actually a lever to the left of the platen), and the missing 1 key is quickly replaced with the lower case L.

Typewriters, whilst obsolete, provide us with many terms that have followed through to computing, the tab key (from the mechnical tabulator on early typewriters), carriage return, line feed, carbon copy and of course the QWERTY keyboard layout.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go clean my hands, they got a little dirty changing the ink ribbon.

In the meanwhile I leave you with Leroy Anderson's 'The Typewriter', as far as I know the only piece of music for Orchestra and uh, well, a typewriter.

Tonight as you may have noticed, we had a total eclipse of the moon. Not as spectacular as an eclipse of the sun, but pretty impressive nonetheless.

Braving the elements, your editor spent an evening in freezing cold wales snapping photos of the moon with his rusty old Nikon and despite not having a particularly good zoom,  (18-55 was never designed for taking photos of the solar system), or the ability to focus particularly well in the dark, still managed to produce some nifty photos.

No post processing was done, they are the colours that the moon actually was when they were taken, the first at approximately 20:00, and the second at 23:00.  I used a shutter speed of 0.2 seconds with an aperture of f8 for the full moon, and a shutter speed of 15 seconds for the eclipsed moon.  (If you're wondering, it took several 10's of photos and experimenting to get the correct settings).

Today we headed over to the Welney Wildfowl Reserve, one of several sites run by the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust. We were lucky to have a really nice day for it, warm sunshine and not too strong a wind considering we were in the depths of The Fens.

The visitors centre is an mazing building, built as a modern take on a fenland barn and fitted with solar panels it fits in well next to the banks of The One Hundred Foot Washes. Armed with camcorder (with flat battery - currently recharging), and also with stills camera we visited the main hide to capture the feed at 3.30pm. Before the feed took place there was a brief talk by an employee of the centre. She informed us that normally we would be able to walk across the washes to the Old Bedford River. The flood water contained in the washes was currently preventing various local towns from being drowned, the old system of waterways and washes is still working well apparently.

Feeding time transformed the water into a white-water frenzy. I took another few snaps. Here we see a mixture of Whooper and Mute Swans feeding with various ducks, plovers and mallards to name but two.

This seemed like a good place to come again, with binoculars. After the flooding has subsided this would enable a more interesting exploration of the wetlands.