Broithe

I took a short cut just now and nearly got caught out... ... luckily, though, I was turning left at the end.

No, a circuit breaker in this sort of style. I was sitting on the ground at the bottom and it was dropped by a chap standing on the scaffolding above the top.

On my list for this year is a visit to Mt Brandon, via the site of the Focke Wulf Condor crash, which brought the first Germans into internment during the Emergency. It was a fairly gentle affair, as plane crashes go, resulting in one broken ankle between the lot of them. One of them married in Ireland and lived here afterwards. His son became an Aer Lingus pilot. Anyway, I like to imagine the son taking off from Shannon, turning west for the USA and announcing "If you look out of the windows on the left side, half-way up the mountain, you will see the mark my father made when he first landed in Ireland, and some bits of the plane" - this would be followed by a very quiet cabin for the next six hours...

Last year, during the hot spell that everybody has forgotten now, I was discussing the shading of a greenhouse with an old boy up the road. I mentioned that I have a camouflage net that would be about right for the job, but I added the caveat that I haven't seen it for a few years now. About five seconds later, we both got the unintended joke at the same moment.

Lovely stuff! But, I won't be the only one who had a little gasp when seeing the thumbnail in the Latest Posts and thinking it said that there was some progress on @leslie10646's bodywork...

We used aluminium 'quick' scaffolding in the factory, as it was up and down all the time. The Safety Officer started insisting on toe boards, etc, and we went along with it, even though the platforms sagged so much that tools could get kicked off just as easily as without them, except at the ends, etc. One day, I found that there was another new problem. We had a truly giant bloke, who normally worked on site, but was in the factory during a quiet period. I was showing him an odd thing that he would be needing to deal with in the future. We were about fifteen feet up and when that was done, he left the scene, whilst I carried on with the last bit. I found that I was unable to leave the scene - my safety shoe was trapped by the rebound of the platform, when the toe board pinched it just behind the toecap. No matter what I did, I couldn't get loose. Rather than go for help with one shoe on, I shouted at a couple of chaps to come up and act as ballast to 'sag' the platform enough for me to get out. The cause of all this was, a few days later, banned from the aluminium scaffolding as, when torqueing up a bolt, standing in the middle, he bent the platform to an alarming degree! I also still have a CEGB helmet that I was wearing when I heard something small hit it. I looked around to see what it was and found a Swann Morton scalpel that had been dropped from twenty feet above...

We do have a general tendency to just believe in (completed) floors, but I lost that belief in the late 1990s, not in a factory event, but in doing some voluntary work for a wildlife trust. Their headquarters was in a 300-year-old three storey ex-farmhouse. There was no electricity on the top floor, but they want to turn an old storeroom up there into an office. I was roped into providing sockets and lighting up there. The whole building was very delicate, but the components was generally big and it all seemed OK, if you were careful. Someone had been under the floor before me and had created a loose board, which was very handy - this had been to get at the wiring for the light in the office below, where a solicitor's wife was performing her secretarial duties. I was particularly keen to avoid damage to the ceiling - a delicate lath and plaster structure, on separate beams from the floor (a good idea, as flexing of the floor does not flex the ceiling). I made a point of doing all the work under the floor first and getting the lifted board back in place, so that I wouldn't put my foot through the ceiling. "Phew, I'm safe now!" At this point, it became clear that the ceiling in the 'new office' was not up to holding anything more than itself, so it was agreed to put the lights on the walls, which were a bit better. This involved going up and down two steps on a step ladder repeatedly. Stepping down from one task, I didn't stop as usual and the eruption of debris, plus the odd position of my leg, told me I had gone through the floor, but, even from where I was lying, I could see the 'loose board' really was in place. By the time that people from below arrived, I had managed to extricate myself and could see down through the hole to observe the state the solicitor's wife was in below. I had stepped onto the centre of the span of one board and, not being tongue-and-grooved, that single board had given way. The wood looked beautiful, polished by three hundred years of use, but it was like a photograph of some wood, stuck onto an inch thick digestive biscuit. Having ascertained that I was uncut underneath all the debris, I went downstairs to see the result, a yard-wide hole in the ceiling and the solicitor's wife totally submerged in the debris of three centuries storage above - one of my great regrets is not having the presence of mind at the time to record the imprint of my boot in the pile on top of her head. We took two binfuls of debris out of her office and the hole was plated over. The rest of the floor above was found to be in a similar state - I even managed a Jackie Chan test on another part of the floor and punched through it with my bare hand - so, be warned! The beams were found to be OK and the floor was boarded over. I now have a permanently-running 'soft floor detection programme', whenever I am above ground level - or a cellar.

Time to get back on track? There were other Tippex liveries...

Perhaps you've lost a bit of padding over Lent..?

I was going to mention the white stripes, but I didn't want to end up being corrected...

Put the kettle on before you click this...

Wandering back from the pub in Rathdowney, I would often glance northwards and wonder why there was one red light in the middle of a few sodium lamps at Donaghmore. This bemused me for many years. Last winter, I suddenly realised that I was actually seeing the lamp two miles further on, on the top of the mast at Ballybrophy. Things just happened to line up from my viewpoint. One very small problem solved.

Cold air balloons would be the safest method, if only they would fly. When I had a proper job, we used sulphur hexafluoride gas, both as an insulator and as a blast to control and extinguish arcs as a circuit breaker opened. It is a truly weird substance, chemically inert (before it's had a good bit of arcing to degenerate it), but extremely dense, about six times that of air. A balloon filled with it was a strange thing, it would just fall straight down and stay there, not even bouncing. There are a few videos of demonstrations on You Tube, where a tinfoil boat is floated on a fish tank filled with SF6, appearing to just float on nothing. Being chemically inert did mean that you never knew it was there, although it would affect your voice, in a reverse way to the often seen 'helium effect' - but this had its hazards, as it was quite possible to drown in it, without any sensation of drowning, as your lungs barely noticed the physical difference from air. This made entering vessels that had been filled with it a practice that required your full attention, even if they had been pumped out. My practice was to drop a vacuum cleaner pipe in to the bottom and run it for half an hour.

10:50pm? Probably just caught him checking his phone whilst waiting for a pint to settle...

I would need a general anaesthetic.

The ultimate city air terminal - no need for a rail link, just a lift.

I came across this earlier today. The short-term airship terminal in Glasnevin, before the airport really got going properly.

I remember seeing Heuston in those days and being amazed at the sheer quality of the place, compared to the semi-derelict stuff I was used to on the Big Island at that time.

It came from here :- https://www.cie.ie/ga-ie/Who-we-are/History-of-CIE/History-Carousel

I have a 'memory' of them at Heuston - and, yet, this picture is 1973. I would have been there a couple of times in the late 60's, though. I might be remembering the ones at Crewe...

Puts me in mind of the "farmers v meat factories" dispute of a few years ago. At the local picket line, they became aware of a visit to the factory by a Chinese deputation and, so that they wouldn't be confused as to the technicalities of the issues under dispute, somebody had the superb idea of getting the lads in the nearby take-away to translate the placards properly.

He's hoping for a retrospective discount - as "shop soiled"..?

Ah, I noticed this sign at the hotel car park entrance today. https://www.google.com/maps/@52.9075934,-7.3528357,3a,15y,164.98h,88.15t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sIwP4AZGTZTHIR5TNybt5zw!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DIwP4AZGTZTHIR5TNybt5zw%26cb_client%3Dsearch.revgeo_and_fetch.gps%26w%3D96%26h%3D64%26yaw%3D29.58199%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu Also 'in context' with the historical location, but I doubt there was ever a level crossing there. I would presume that, with the closure being 60+ years ago, the current 'flat route' of the road' adjacent to the old bridge, would have been implemented after that point, as the practicalities became easier and the bridge became a bit 'tight' for the level of traffic at the time.

Ah, you're too hard on yourself - and it'll be OK once you've weathered the whole thing.