Bills Posts

Let’s see;

• Black & White Photography
• Country Walking
• The Railway observer (RTCS)
• Dorset Life

These are the magazines that I subscribe to. Currently, I am reading the Railway Observer from the Railway Transport & Communication Society and Dorset Life.

With some degree of bias, I am happy to say that Dorset is a beautiful County, and I like to keep up with what is going on there. Ken Ayres is a regular contributor to the magazine. He is a very talented photographer. He and I used to be members of the same camera club, back in the 70’s. Apparently he still asks after me. The thing about the magazine is that it contains some seriously lovely pictures. I also especially like that in the front of each edition is a small map that marks each place mentioned in the magazine.

This months edition mentions places that I know very well. It’s really nice to be able to read about and see pictures of places that you know, but haven’t visited for quite a while. Some places I see several times a year, others I haven’t been to in literally decades.

This months issue in particular talks about Creech Barrow. I’ve lived pretty much in the shadow of this hill for many years. It always made me think of a volcano, of course it is isn’t. I think when I next go back, and I have the time, I would like to go up there again. One fact mentioned is around the clay that I knew was mined from under the hill, I hadn’t appreciated that the mining had caused the summit to drop by 4 metres.

The magazine also introduces me to new places and sights that I haven’t seen before. Some of them I most definitely want to visit.

OK, so I did this with as free iPhone app called Snapseed. It is Brilliant, I’ve been wanting yo do this for ages. OK it’s not perfect and it is a little bit fiddley, but I am very pleased with the result.

Tuesday Morning, I wake up, the heating hasn’t kicked in yet, so it’s quite cold in the room, but having put the winter quilt on the bed, that is very snug. Looking at the clock I have about 5 minutes before I normally get up for a walk, not really enough time to look at the news, it’s just a matter of laying there and watching the minutes flick across, and then it is 0535, at this point I usually have a little bit of an internal struggle, between my body, which really wants to stay in bed, and my brain which is quite keen to go for a walk. By now I’ve been able to hear if it’s been raining, so I am running out of excuses and i decide to get up.

Stepping out the front door, it’s the coldest it’s been for quite a while, but I look up, and have a beautiful view of Orion, that sets me off. It’s a bit of a brisk walk, and probably about 3/4 of a mile to the high street by the route I take, I have a look at my watch there to see how I’m doing time-wise. Getting on to the street any time between 0600 and 0605 is good, I don’t think I’ve ever done it before 0600, but that isn’t a problem. Unless I pause somewhere looking for photo opportunities, it probably takes me 7-10 minutes to get down to the waterfront. I’ll loiter here for a bit, there are usually two or three people whom I see on a regular basis and say good morning, and sometimes stop for a chat. Occasionally soembody will stop and ask me what I’m doing – I like that.

From there I will walk past Trinity Church up to the Cockle ponds, I pause there sometimes for a picture – the header picture was taken very near there. Usually there is some wildlife along these bits, typically squirrels. I’m waiting to see if the jelly fish come back to the ponds, but I don’t think that will be until spring.

Heading up South Street, I turn on to Stokes Road and start heading back towards home. All in, it’s a distance of about 3 miles, and is usually a very nice start to the day.

It’s a lovely blue sky in the picture isn’t it? Even the water looks. Relatively calm. Actually, it was quite breezy, the closest flag doesn’t look like it’s not that windy, but the flags a bit further down a really flying.

Yesterday, it was windy with heavy rain, it was really rough. I really love watching it rain and the wind blow. Sometimes, if it is not too bad, I even like to go for a walk in the rough weather, as mad as it seems.

Of course, it’s easy to sit back and enjoy the rough weather, forgetting that it doesn’t mean the same thing to other people. It appears that yesterday was one of those special days. Watching the forecast the forecaster gave a quick review of yesterday’s weather. We had our very own Tornado Alley. A wide corridor running north north east-ish of, for the UK, extreme weather. Looking at the map, the eastern edge of the bad weather corridor (and it must haves been bad, we were miles away, and it was rough here) is very close to my friend, another radio amateur.

90 mile an hour winds were recorded. This was sufficient to demolish Dave’s antenna setup. Now, that is something that we all dread, but to actually have it happen is very distressing. I just hope he is able to get it fixed quickly.

When we moved to Gosport, there was an excellent model shop on Stokes Road. It catered for every flavour of modeller that you might care to list. Sadly, it closed down a couple of years ago.

There is another model shop on Stokes Road, this owner doesn’t give the same impression as the first shop. That was brightly lit and well laid out and very well stocked.

The second shop is different, I have to admit that I have avoided the shop on the assumption that it was a gamers shop, and that there would be little of interest to me. The shop has a run down look to its window display second hand models, scratched and in poor condition.

Yesterday, I went in to the shop. I reckon I spent about twenty minutes browsing. I think a lot of it is second hand – that doesn’t bother me at all. I will go back. He has three boxes of matchbox toys (see the header picture), he’s selling them for 50p each. I could easily have spent a couple of pounds on each at Amazon, I bought a few of them – it was an easy win as far as I am concerned. Now the photo above isn’t veery good, there’s no context to the model. I need to build a diorama, it can be part of the railway layout. That is as work in progress. I have the N-Gauge figures I’m going see if they fit in.

This picture was taken from a part of Gosport that I have never visited before. I knew it was there but had just never managed to get around to visiting it.

Back in the 1800’s this used to be a very posh part of the city, it was very cultivated with lovely pathways for people to go for an afternoon stroll. Nowadays, it’s a very large open field nowadays with a couple of rugby fields and a play area, and is very popular with dog walkers and runners,

This is just around the corner from the park. I do know these and walk past these, they always strike me as being very Scandinavian in design, and a little bit unusual for the area.

Not a lot happening at the water front. Not even many people on the promenade. Still at just under five miles it was a very pleasant walk.

When I started doing the 366 exercise, things went OK for a bit, but I realised that I needed a routine for the writing. I’ve become very aware over the last couple of weeks that some of writings are quite meandering, and really not that good (well, worse than usual).

After 366, I said that I wanted to get to 500, not quite there yet, not far really. I’m thinking that I need to regenerate that habit. I know I laid out quite a few topics that I wanted to write about, and I’ve even added a couple, but I am only very loosely following it. I need to find that commitment again. I’m gong to put a bit of effort in to that over the weekend.

I didn’t go for a walk this morning. It was chucking it down. I didn’t feel guilty, and it was very pleasant to be able to get up a casual time and make a cup of tea. I did manage to get out at lunchtime I had a job I needed to do, and managed it so that was good. Luckily, as I was passing the ferry port I could see that there was a ship coming in, which at first I thought might have been the Commodore Clipper, but was mildly confused by the orange stripe over the bridge. This is where Marine Traffic would normally become useful, but strangely enough she wasn’t beaconing on AIS (it’s worth doing an article on AIS). Turns out to be the Arrow.

Now, I had originally got the Arrow down as a Reefer, turns out I should have looked at Marine Traffic a bit closer. It’s a Roll-on, Roll-off cargo ferry.

I have a bit of a dilemma, the Forton Bridge work should have finished by now, so I can start walking that way again. I could find out if the bridge is raised at specific times. I’d like to see it open. But, I also like waking along the waterfront in daylight, which my morning walks aren’t at this time of year. I shall take in turns.

I’ve just been looking back through my diary for 2021. It’s an A5 Day per page. I didn’t start it until later on in January, and initially I was putting a lot of information in it about the book that I was reading at the time, this was because during the 366 times I was fairly rigid in what I was going to write on any particular day, Books I am reading were written about on Mondays, making notes about what I’ve read.

This enthusiasm didn’t last long. By the middle of April things had tailed off significantly, and I was using the diary mainly to record my daily mileage for the walk1000. On the 19th of May, I recorded that wee had bought an electric car. Probably about a month ago now, we got the charge point installed, and today it was the turn of the smart meter. So, we are fully set up and running.

I’ve bought another A5 diary, I’ll probably carry on recording the mileage in the same way. It would probably be less wasteful to use a spreadsheet, I’ve done that before and it worked very well. I could do it again, I still have the spreadsheet, I could continue using it. But, I like the book form.

We went to a firework show tonight. It was busy. I dropped the family off so they could get in, and I parked the car. I arrived at the display just in time to see it end. I did have a good view of most of the fireworks in the air. It was amusing.

OK, I know the header picture isn’t a sparrow. It’s the same starling that visited us when we were sat at Pebbles. It was so close to us, and completely untroubled. Lovely.

We have plenty of food in the garden, I know this because there is food left at the end of the day. It looks like we have both tree and house sparrows visiting us. There were at least a dozen lined up on the fence today, with more in the bushes. But, they are both nervous and foolhardy. It seems to take them a long time to head for the bird table and the feeders. But when they do it’s as a hoard.

We now have three feeders in place, that can each accommodate two birds. They have no hesitation in pushing each other off the perch. They seem to always come in to the garden from the same direction, the east. I wonder if they move from feeding point to point. They are sometimes coordinated with the Starlings. I think it’s them which always clear out the mealworms. Since I put the anti-pigeon measure in place, that seems to have stopped them. They are still picking up the spilled food off the ground. I don’t mind them having that.

We occasionally get visited by a couple of magpies. They seem to spend most of their time strutting around, with the occasional dash to the table, they don’t say long though.

We went through quite a long period of not having birds visiting us. It’s difficult to say how much pleasure we get now. I am determined to do what I can to keep them coming to us.

This is the Bell Tower of Trinity Church in Gosport. Trinity Church has an organ that was played by Handel, in 1747, the church bought the organ for £300, as best as I can make it that’s not far short of £50,000 in todays money. This brief snippet is totally unrelated to the rest of today’s post.

You will know, as a regular reader of this blog that I have a bit of a thing about having a model railway. I am going to start very small, learning how to do things, and will hopefully get the skills to do what I want. I have all sorts of ideas as to how I want to do things. I’d love a mechanical signalling layout, I really do like the old semaphore signals, I think mechanical linkages from the switch to the signal would probably be too much, but I would definitely like to have a panel with the layout printed on to it with the signals and points represented by switches or buttons. Since I was a kid, I wanted a panel with switches and buttons – at the time, I really didn’t care if the buttons or switches actually did anything, but that was what I wanted. Now however I see a way of having that, and it being useful.

My first layout, as I’ve said is going to be very basic, a proof of concept, but I have greater ambitions. In 2016, I laid out in one of my journals an L shaped layout, where at one end I would have a functioning port, with ships at berth, container cranes that would be able to pick up containers of the ship and drop them on the train. The train would start off and the middle part of the layout would be a country scene and at the other end would be an industrial/urban scene.

Now, here’s the other reason why I want to do this, and this is the secret; not an earth shattering one, but I don’t think I have ever talked about this; I want to photograph it. I’ve been practicing;

Now, I do have a problem; I want to work in N-Gauge. Do you know how small the figures are for N-Gauge? They are SMALL;

Now, they are going to be way to small to be practically useful, and devilishly awkward to focus in. Now, I did buy some figures that were for a much bigger gauge, this one gives you a comparison;

I must admit, that I felt a bit embarrassed about admitting this, but a recent search on google brought up a whole bunch of other people who are heavily involved in this, have a look at these as an example;

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=toy+photography&client=safari&hl=en-gb&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiykaSm9ejzAhUTecAKHTt0A1cQ_AUoAXoECAEQAw&biw=1121&bih=1473&dpr=2#imgrc=jA0CQd0PJ1V1FM

Now, I’m not doing this (I don’t think), but I have this thought of telling stories using the railway figures. Once again, I can’t explain why, it’s just one of those things I want to do.

I no longer have a secret!

In the days of film (yes, I know you can still shoot film, but unless you are a really serious devotee, why would you?) one of the biggest disappointments was getting your pictures or slides back and the image you really wanted is, for whatever reason blurred and in your eyes wasted and unusable.

It seems therefore, slightly unusual to deliberately introduce blurring in to your pictures. I haven’t really searched for abstract film photographers, but I bet they are there.

I think this is one area where digital really comes in to it’s own. You can play as much as you want without having to worry about cost.

Of course, you could go full abstract. This is a longer exposure with some more random movement. Actually, whilst this one is OK, I think I prefer the straight ICM pictures.

All of these pictures were taken in the area of the cockle ponds. Perhaps I should try some on the waterfront.