Broithe

I had a proper job for twenty years, until it became a matter of what colour uniform was going to take me away. We had another of our annual clearouts and they asked for volunteers - I realised that, if they had asked for volunteers to stay, then I would not have applied - so I took the plunge. It was actually much easier to 'get by' than I imagined it would be - having a regular job has its costs, being free to set your own agenda lets you work far more efficiently. I still had thirteen years left on the mortgage at that time, but I got by OK - if I needed more money to give people, then it was a matter of getting it, and that was generally possible. That was 1993 - I'm weeks away from when I should have been a pensioner, of sorts, but the posh boys have added a further year to wait. It's not for everybody, but it is doable. As for retiring in the more normal manner, there is no best before date - do it, as soon as you can! For the first few years after my escape, people would often ask "Do you miss it at all?" - to which my standard answer was "Yes. First thing every morning".

That's a terrible-,looking pitch. The slope is bad enough, but the surface is dog rough and the grass is half-dead. Shocking.

I refurbished a village flagpole for a Parish Council on the Big Island a while ago. When I had reassembled it, it didn't have access to their flag, so I had to use what I had to hand. I run my own National Holidays in my house - this being the only one that anybody else seems to join in with. Tonight, it may be a bottle of Nigerian Guinness, in honour of one of the two other countries that St Patrick keeps an eye on. Montserrat being the other, of course.

Talk of Chinese manufacturing elsewhere has reminded me of this. We had noticeboards all over the place and many spoofs would appear on those. A regular poster was quite a good cartoonist. One of his, which I may still have a copy of, appeared as digital watches were starting to become popular. We were still using relays for control systems and were probably about thirty years behind the rest of the world by then. He put up a drawing of "The GEC Digital Watch". This was a chap struggling along with a wooden pallet tied to his left arm. This pallet had 100 watt bulbs arranged in a grid, to form the numbers as they lit up, as an LED watch did back then. With his right arm, he was pulling a fully laden hand-truck behind him - on this trailer were a couple of dozen car batteries to drive the bulbs and a grandfather clock with a nest of wires coming from the face and hands to control which ones were illuminated at the time.

I once made a vegetable plot for someone who wasn't the most agile person. I suggested that we could make a watering arrangement for it that would only require her to turn a tap on and off now and then. The idea was to use one of the oscillating sprinklers that will cover a rectangular area, thus we wouldn't waste water. The area can be adjusted by blocking nozzles for two sides and by adjusting the drive linkage from the turbine-driven gearbox for the other two sides. Subject to it not being too windy and the water pressure being fairly reliable, then the area watered could be quite accurately controlled. In those far-off days they were generally about £30, if you were lucky, and not widely available. I suggested that we keep an eye out for 'the right one' and we didn't need it straight away. The next week, she announced that she had bought one that she'd seen in a garden centre - "How much?", I asked, hoping that she had got the right sort, as she hadn't seemed to understand what I had in mind - "£2.99" was the answer. I admonished her for buying the wrong sort, imagining that she had got a cheapo rotary sprinkler, but, no, she had purchased a "Chinese copy" that was 99% as good as the European item that i had in mind. I doubt that we could have sent the empty box back to China for what she paid for the whole thing, even if we had flattened it. Each nozzle was an individual brass fitting, pressed into the main tube - and there was an attached tool supplied to deal with any blockages.

Releasing this sort of information on the first of the month is just going to get people checking their calendars...

I've not been paying a great deal of attention. What is this Brexit thing? Is there a vaccine for it yet?

Some really old stuff will even have flanges that hit the chairs on Code 100 track.

I'm off to Google that... ...and I'll be blaming you...

The Red Cross can get rather bizarrely awkward about their symbol - on the basis that it must remain exclusively theirs, or people may begin to reduce their acceptance of the reality that it expresses. Some years ago, they objected to the use of the red cross on the costume of a nurse in a pantomime performance. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-12135540 The cross was changed to green, as you will frequently see on first aid kits, etc.

There is a fairly widely available beer on the Big Island called 'Lancaster Bomber', when I first came across it, I was rather surprised to see that the roundel that they used to adorn the product and its associated peripheral items, beer-mats, etc, had the RAF colours reversed. This, of course, turned it into a French roundel - and France did have the odd Lancaster after the war, though mostly (perhaps all?) were naval aircraft, featuring an anchor superimposed on the roundel. I approached the brewery about why they had done this - a series of rather odd emails passed between us, before I gave up - the person involved in the replies was of the opinion, for some unfathomable reason, that the RAF roundel was 'copyright', but the French one was not... On the subject of model aircraft markings, there are rather more significant restrictions on, particularly, Revell aircraft of German WW2 prototypes. There will be no swastikas on the transfer sheets - and not even on the box artwork. I've never been in a model shop in Germany, but I wonder how they cope with models from foreign producers?

One of the buzzwords of the 1980s, from the Japanese Kanban organisational system. It's something that you really need to be "Japanese" to do properly, it was trendy in the UK to pretend to be doing it, but it mostly led to even more chaos. We normally referred to it as JTL, rather than JIT - Just Too Late, not Just In Time. This was a win-win situation, as the boss's initials were JTL, so it also annoyed him slightly more. It's one of those things that can be done, but only if you actually do it.

The people across the road told my father that were going away, so that he would be looking after their house. He asked them where they were going and was told they were flying to Venice. He suggested that he thought that was a bit extravagant and it would be a lot cheaper to go on the train, and it wouldn't take much longer. Anyway, they left the discussion at that... A few days later, we found out that he thought they were going to Ennis.

I spent ten minutes of a journey down from Heuston, about twenty years ago, coaching the ticket man on the pronunciations of the stations on the 'back line'. Being of African origin, he had really struggled with most of them - Cloughjordan presenting the most difficulty, you could hear the relief when his announcements got as far as Birdhill...

Having ascertained that the far end of the platform is 4,900 metres from my house arrest location, I ventured out to see what has been going on. Very little, really, the car parking issue has eased a bit for the present, of course, and there might be a bit of activity to increase the provision..? A special detail for those modelling in the very recent 'modern image'. The branch rails are looking rather unused. But the loop rails seem to get the odd run over still. New LED lighting has appeared. Some weathering detail on the Rawie. Just checking that the Outside World is still there, beyond the 5km radius...

Sometimes, frogs can be found at some distance from points.

Done.

A little extra detail for your track workers...