Bills Posts

I enjoyed writing the last two posts. I think it is becasue I had a clear topic in mind, I had a reasonable plan for what I wanted to write. As a result the words kind of flowed. If only I could do that every time.

I think part of the problem I have is that I don’t really have a consistent theme for the blog. I am writing on the fly for the most part. I’m not doing enough research to follow up on things that I haven’t yet found that I want to do research. Oh dear this sounds quite pitiful. I have plans for when we get to Dorset. I don’t have plans in Hampshire.

Just ooccasionally, like the construction project, like yesterday or a story of the day, like the day before develops to inspire me. Not does here. I think I m ay have lost the mojo a bit with Gosport. I must admit that there was a point where I was quite inspired. Certainly there is plenty of history in the town. I think I may spend an hour in the library this weekend. One thing I haven’t done is look at the naval history books. I wonder how many of them mention Gosport?

This is an early stage in a fairly major construction project so where do I start? I think it’s the bus station. It’s going to be pulled down. I don’t know what’s going to be built in it’s place, I just hope it includes a space where the public can take advantage of the of the waterfront.

Gosport won’t have a main bus station. It’ll have a stop or a halt I guess. it’s going to be where the taxi rank and stop off area is. Now, there are a couple of things about this part of the plan that I don’t like;

• The loss of the parking slots for the ferry. I’ve not seen anything to say that their equivalents will be built elsewhere. That doesn’t mean they won’t be, just that I’m not aware of it.
• The busses will pull in to the new halt, and then revers out onto the road into the flowing traffic – I’d say that’s a bit hazardous, but I don’t know what measures they are going to put in place.

Now the building site in the picture is happening at the point roughly halfway down the high street at at the north and south cross streets, and will go across the pedestrian precinct that is the high street. Why is that?

It’s because they are going to turn that area into a road to take the traffics away from the ferry end of the high street so presumably only access will be permitted. For a while this area of town is going to look very different.

I shall keep track of this, and perhaps give a weekly report.

I bought two radios during a mad phase. The only justification I’ll give is that they were quite cheap. They both turned up in the middle of last week and had languished, boxed, on my desk until yesterday apart from the batteries which I had charged. Yesterday, I bit the bullet and got on with setting them up.

There are two ways of setting hand held two way radios; programming them manually, which is slow and fiddly – I want to say cumbersome. For no other reason than it’s really nice to have multiple adjectives to emphasise how seriously annoying and frustrating doing it that way can be. But ’m not sure if cumbersome doesn’t have the same connotation as fiddly and is therefore a waste of effort. The other way is by plugging them into a computer which can create its own entirely different set of frustrations. I’m not really selling this am I?

Anyhow, as you might guess yesterdays efforts, where I started thinking it would be easy to programme them on the computer had me very close to throwing them out the window. It didn’t work, at all. Not one little bit. Nope. The prospect of them becoming UFOs was becoming increasingly more attractive. At the point of where they and the computer were in danger of taking flight I decided to have a go manually. What a wise decision that was most emphatically not. I won’t go into the detail of my dismal failure but successful it most assuredly did not come knocking at the door. I went to bed.

Tonight, I came back, sat at the computer, fired up the programme, plugged the radio in, clicked the upload button and off it went, doing exactly what it did not do last night. It was the same for both of them. They both did I it. Now, it was a little bit more intricate than that, but that is essentially what happened. So I can go out with a new radio tomorrow, and give it a go. See, wasn’t that easy?

Nothing catastrophic I hasten to add. All very minor stuff, but frustrating.

It started when I set up the app I use to measure my walks for my quick trip to Morrisons for the salad stuff for todays first BBQ of the year. I’d been saying for a couple of weeks that I’d quite like one, so today we were going to do it come what May. Anyhow, back to strava. The crucial statement being I thought I had set it up correctly. I’ll continue this saga in a minute.

So I walked to Morrisons, got everything we needed for the BBQ, and was walking back. I was around a hundred yards from home when I remembered what I had forgot – breakfast cereals. We were completely out, my having had the last of the granola earlier on. Mildly annoying, but I took the opportunity to get home, empty the bags, and then set out once more to go to Morrisons. At least I would be getting double the steps.

The second trip was fine, I didn’t forget anything, and got home in good time. Excellent. This is where I went to strava to end the walk only to find that according to the app I hadn’t started the first trip, let alone the second. It was waiting for another button, one that I don’t normally have to touch. Most frustrating, but at least the betterpoints app recorded it.

As it was first use of the BBQ after winter, it needed a good clean off. I got it all set up, brushed it down, fired it up. And let it build up heat. I think the spiders that had taken up residence all vacated the premises fairly rapidly, I saw one particularly big one dropping down on a thread. I’m glad it got away. Even though I don’t like them, I don’t wish them any harm. Cleaning all done, I shut it down to let it cool so that I could brush off the carbon off the griddle. At least that went ok.

A couple of hours later I fired up the BBQ again, this time to cook. All was going well, the chilli sausages were pretty much done, the burgers and the chicken was going well, and then there was a bit of a pop from one of the burners, it had gone out. The sizzling was easing off. Hang on a sec, what’s going on here I thought? And then I realised – the gas had run out! In twenty years plus of BBQing I have never had that happen before. I was convinced there was enough gas. But there wasn’t. Luckily, we were able to finish the cooking off in the oven.

Like I said all fairly minor stuff. At least the food was nice.

I have four books that address the history of Gosport. Three of those books address fairly recent history because they use photography a lot. So they aren’t going to pre-date the 20th century by many years. The fourth book is a bit different. Yes it does have a few plates, but they are not the focus of the book which is what I think of as being more akin to being a serious history book.

This made me think about how would you going about researching the history of a specific topic. In this case Gosport, but it could be any location, especially as I am very likely to change the focus of my locality project in the future.

I’ve been doing a little bit of research. I thought I would start with the courts, they have records which must be public in some if not all cases. The Hampshire archives have records going back to the 1600’s. I’m kind of hoping these records are digitally stored and therefore searchable and more importantly translated from the English of that time, which I think is quite difficult to understand because of the writing and the spelling.

The trouble is that I don’t think that is the case. Material from 1655 must be in the original format. I’m going to have to explore this.

Sorry, this is going to be a short post. I hadn’t realised the time. It’s twenty five to midnight and we have been binge watching season four of The Bay it’s quite gripping.

Having just looked at my watch and realised the time, I don’t want to lose the day count in WordPress, so this is a bit rushed.

I watched a YouTube video today by Paul and Rebecca white wick, about abandoned canals and railways in Dorset. Production and editing were pretty good what I’d call borderline professional. But there were things about the production which made me think they were more interested in content than having a really professional production. One good example of this was that when Paul’s wife was filming you could see the camera that he was using.

There’s a kind of lack of attention to detail but very smooth presentation. I liked that. Perhaps not as short a post as I thought.

I got my amateur radio licence almost seven years ago now. That seems unbelievable. I am by no means very technical, but I very much enjoy being part of an extremely friendly community.

Living where I do, I am fairly close to the Isle of Wight. This whole area is a hot bed of licensed amateurs, there are lots of us in the area. One of the reasons why I know such a large number of them is, I think down to a remarkable facility that is available to us amateurs.

It’s called a repeater, and it has its own callsign; GB3IW. When an amateur transmits, the repeater receives the signal, amplifies and re-broadcasts it. It is very well positioned and maintained and as result. It has a remarkable reach. Easily from Brighton to Taunton, and inland to Winchester and Liphook. That’s quite a large area. It is a most impressive piece of kit.

Sadly, the owner of GB3IW wishes to retire. It takes a fair bit of effort on his part to maintain the repeater he quite often spends a fair bit of many of his weekends maintaining the repeater. So it is entirely understandable that at some point he would want at some point to stop it. It appears that we will reach that point in May.

Now, steps are being taken to ensure continuity of the repeater. But it may not work. So we talking about alternatives. But, it’s fun. The repeater is fun. I will be very sad to see it go, and I sincerely hope that it gets sorted.

When I was out for my morning walk I thought I felt a couple of drops of rain. Literally two. It came to nothing and I got home dry. I had one of those days where I wasn’t able to get out for my lunchtime walk. A tad frustrating, but there you are. And then, by late afternoon the rain came. Big galloping drops hammering Down. I’ve just checked and apparently rain drops fall at about 14mph.

I quite like the idea of walking in the rain, but only if I’m well wrapped up. I don’t know why there’s just something about it. But now, I am about to contradict my self and say that if it’s raining in the morning I shan’t get up and go for my morning walk. I’d rather stay in bed.

I can wake up any time after three AM and I usually have difficulty getting back to sleep. Part of it (incredibly ridiculously) is getting a bit stressed about getting up. There are times when I would really rather just stay in bed but then I feel guilty for not going for a walk and getting that little bit of exercise. Silly isn’t it?

I take a lot of photos. A good ten to fifteen a day on most days, let’s say it averages out to 10 a day to make the maths easy; 3650 per year. Over the course of that year, perhaps three or four I might think are really good. Some, like todays header picture are ok, but not brilliant. Why do I persist?

I don’t know how to answer that question. It both is and isn’t a case of recording what I see. It’s there what is in front of me. Very little originality. I must have walked this part of Gosport hundreds of times, I am willing to bet that I’ve missed hundreds of good pictures, because I just can’t see them.

Just in case you think I am writing this out of sadness, your are wrong. A bit of frustration yes. Of course I sometimes think that if I had a proper camera I would be able to take some decent pictures, but a poor worker always blames their tools.

With this post I am just over a month away from recording my one thousandth post. And that is only ninety five posts from covering three years of postings, or there about – taking in to account the few nights I’ve missed. Like photos. Some of the posts have been of a reasonable quality but an awful lot of them really aren’t very good at all. Writing nearly one thousand posts doesn’t make you a writer. K

I shall keep going though.

I haven’t done any Vlogging. I have thought about it a little bit but not seriously. I still very much want to do it but I haven’t felt able to commit any time to it That’s not the only reason. I haven’t been able to think of subject matter.

Most days Monday to Friday, I do a Facebook post in the morning, and this post in the evening. The Facebook post is limited to those people whom I agree to allow to follow me. It is therefore a little bit more private. Unlike here, of course. Anyone can read this.

The thought occurs to me that I could just blog my diary. Just for practice I could do a summary of the week. It would easily last about 5 minutes once a week. It wouldn’t be either interesting or exciting, but it would be good practice.