Broithe

It's not just us...

There are supposed to be drivers on the Big Island into double figures. On the marvellously interesting "Bombay Railway" programme, the driver they followed wasn't sure of his exact number, but he remembered when it had passed seventy...

From '95 to 2008-ish, I made regular boat/train crossings, initially to Dun Laoghaire, then later to the North Wall. The initial system was to use the DART to Tara Street, then the 90 to Heuston. After the change to the North Wall, there was a bus for foot passengers, which did a Connoly, Busaras, Tara Street , Heuston run. It was almost always the same driver, and the "regulars" got to know him. i used to bring all sorts of stuff, in my 'disposable suitcase' - a large cardboard box, strapped up for the journey, and which I didn't need to return with, empty. On one occasion, he began to think that he was being set up for some bizarre 'candid camera' caper. I had brought over a bundle of guttering for our sheds, to avoid using 'huge' stuff where it wasn't necessary, but I had omitted to bring the dimensions with me, so I had left it all in the supplied two metre lengths, which was a bit of a game to get into the bus, past the passengers, pushchairs, suitcases and giant rucksacks, etc. No soon had I managed to get in and sat down, with a few people prepared to cope with my pack of guttering on their shoulders, than another chap appeared from the carousel door - this time with a bundle of full-size house guttering - in four metre lengths. After we had convinced the driver that this wasn't a set-up and a telegraph pole was going to appear next, we managed to feed it in through the rear emergency exit and pass it over the heads of the lower floor passengers.... Will there be an accessory pack, containing a selection of guttering?

"Roadmap" is, obviously, a hint that we're going to see Hino trucks?

The Chinese run a turborprop conversion in Antarctica.

Nice! The Hunter was a civilised plane. Somewhere, I may still have a 'Restricted' document, that I once got arrested at bayonet-point for possessing*. It included some crash reports**. One involved some Jordanian Hunter pilots being trained to attack gun sites in Wales. The "attacks" were being filmed by two chaps in a pretend sandbagged enclosure just below a hilltop. They were also in radio communication with the "attacking" Hunters - the general technique was to fly directly at the gun site, so that your fire would '"suppress" the fire from the lads in the gun site. Most of the initial "attacks" broke off far too early. People were repeatedly advised to press home the attack until the last possible moment, to maintain the fire-suppression. The final pilot decided that he was going to be the best - but this ended up with him taking the top two rows of sandbags off, removing the cine camera and burying the two chaps, who had elected to lie down on the floor by this stage, under a deluge of sand. One of the statements to the board of enquiry was along the lines of "By this stage, I had ceased to directly observe the situation, as I was lying face-down in the bottom of the gun pit". * There were other potential offences at the time, but I was never actually charged. ** RAF crash reports of the 60s and 70s could be quite 'entertaining'.

Weathered?

The clue is in the 'water'. They're doing Ulysses. And in O Gauge, too.

A Hercules is going to lift nowhere near that weight, even if you could shut the door. I was thinking along C5 lines, but it seems there were no civilian operators of the Galaxy.

Seconding all the best wishes above. I was going to say "Best foot forward!",... ...but, I've decided not to.

Not rotating, but I presume this is a points indicator at Ballybrophy - in 2008 - all gone now. There was still a ground frame there then.

It always struck me as slightly 'odd' that they used a 'Soviet' aircraft, although it was a good PR stunt to get some positivity back from the delays. Being late was (is?) standard for British industry in my day. Both in terms of the initial product and in the responses to the subsequent failures. For many years, the British still had large 'captive' markets in the ex-empire, as well as at home, with organisations run by British managements. They could virtually rely on them to carry on putting up with the same sort of stuff, and there were often pseudo-commercial strings to the funding arrangements that made it very difficult to find the cash to go to other suppliers. Where I worked, we made some truly dreadful things, but we also made things that were almost perfect, but they were hugely expensive to buy and were really unsaleable in most of the market after 1970-ish, although they are still sitting out there now, working well, sixty years on - you would have spent a lot more money over that period buying, replacing and fixing the stuff we made later. People in Irish procurement were much more likely to look at the past, and a plausible projection into the future, and base decisions on that. You can still see it today in things like the Air Corps fleet and, dare I say it, Ryanair...

Sometimes with a bit of pomp and circumstance...

Exactly that! When I had a proper job, we were supplying capital equipment of a similar sort of nature. It was extremely difficult to get into the Irish market if you had any history of supplying less-than-perfect goods. The 'money people' in the state enterprises were much less short-sighted than British industry was used to dealing with. With fleets of hundreds, you can get away with problems that you can't with fleets of tens. Simplicity, reliability and, crucially, a reliable supply of spares and maintenance items will have had a much higher place in the thinking of the decision-makers than the British would have been used to dealing with. Irish procurers also had the very useful luxury of an "intelligence network" amongst most of the suppliers they were considering purchasing from. There was often more than just the initial failures that might sour the relationship, often the lackadaisical (and even deliberately bloody awkward) response to these failures was a more important cause.

OK, I have decided to admit now, that I spent ten minutes on Google Maps trying to decide what that was....

Saint Joseph - patron saint of carpenters and roofers.

It may not always be the case, but there can be copyright issues over such details as posters with trademarks on, etc., and it may just be easier to leave them off. However, the internet will often give you the means to replicate them yourself, almost exactly. You can then hone the adverts closer to your intended time period, too, than they might be, if provided by the building manufacturer.

The defibrillator the ambulance lads have looks a touch overscale...

You ain't seen nothing yet...

When I was at college, during the hot summers of the 1970s, a lot of the other lads on the course worked for the Coal Board. One of them mentioned that he was about to buy some new sunglasses. Another lad, who was very clever, but could be a bit naive, said "You won't need them down the pit!". This started a chain of events over a few days, which ended up with him believing that coal is actually brilliant white when it's first dug out, only oxidising to the familiar black colour over a few hours - and the blinding glare in a coal mine was quite a safety hazard. Every piece of evidence that he came up with for not believing this was shot down immediately. Miners are always pictured covered in black dust - this is because the dust has been on them for the whole shift, Bob. The reason they often have white rings round their eyes is because they've just taken their sunglasses off for the photo. Etc. The clincher was when a photo was produced, showing a roadway underground. This had just been "stonedusted" - where white stone dust was sprayed over all the surfaces, intended to mitigate the effects of any explosions. This sort of thing, but without the chap and the hose in the picture to give it away. I know that he still believed in the 'white coal' two years later - maybe he still does?

I went camping on an official site on a island in the Loire, at Amboise, in 1990. At that time, there was an electricity pylon right in the middle of the site, with absolutely no attempt at obstructing any climbers whatsoever. Here on the Big Island, you wouldn't have needed any street lighting in the area, the glow from the incinerated teenagers would have sufficed.

An 'interesting' feature of cartoon characters is that they usually have a thumb and three fingers, as four fingers just looks like 'too many'. A friend of mine has lost her ring finger to cancer, but it's hardly noticeable to the viewer.

I wonder if the glass was already gone, I don't see a hint of a reflection in any of the pictures.