Bills Posts

I went out for a walk this morning. Now, I’m not telling you that because I am expecting be heaped with praise, it’s just the opening gambit for tonight’s post.

The thing is about the walk was that it was unexciting. Note that I’m not saying boring, because it wasn’t, I wouldn’t have enjoyed it if it were, there was nothing special about it, it was quite routine. There, I’ve got that out of the way.

I followed my usual route, with just a couple of minor variations (walking up to the Argos junction with Clarence Road rather than the cross ways,, and at towards the end of walk heading towards Asda’s where I needed to do a little bit of shopping.

There’s a quite biting easterly wind at the moment, so I was grateful for my nice thick jacket.

Apart from the Gosport Ferry, and a few small boats, the only unusual activity in the harbour were the group of five or six kayakers that came into. They seemed to be enjoying themselves, so we’re protected against the cold.

Not an exciting or boring walk, but enjoyable, so there you go. Actually, I was going to publish at that point, but it seemed a bit too dismissive. I should write a little bit about yesterday. Gosport Model Railway Club had an exhibition in the St Mary’s Community Hall. Not a big one, there were only five layouts on display but they were all good, and interesting and fun.

What was surprising was the most interesting display wasn’t American, or N-Gauge (the main focus of GMRC) and was entirely second hand. The young chap was very enthusiastic and keen to explain his set up, which he’d put a lot of effort into, with jokey things, like a couple of Daleks, and a car that had crashed into a tree, and a forklift truck that had picked up a police car, and a bank robbery. It was excellent, and he is clearly having a lot of fun with it.

There, that seems like a much better place to end.

I do like to keep an eye on the high street. I’m very concerned for its health, which really doesn’t seem very good. There are many closed shopping units, the market is really not very good. I don’t know what the footfall is like both at market time and in general.

I went in to town today, I’ve started compiling a list of what shops there are, what units are empty, and through various contacts the council , the web, speaking to people. I like to try and find out what’s going on.

I have no idea what could be done to improve things.

It’s the Whitonia – another of the bunkering ships. Haven’t seen her for a while.

Don’t worry I’m not thinking of leaving Locality Stories, it’s only for this post. I took a day off work today. Yes, because it’s Valentines Day, we didn’t do anything special, just had a bit of time together, and of course, car, flowers, meal out – in a pub we’d passed a number times, and said we must try it. I’m glad we did, because the food was delicious.

This morning Elayne went for coffee with friends in town, I took the opportunity to have a bit of a wander around town, something I don’t normally get a chance to do during the week..

I looked on how the bearing work was getting on, and what the state of the specsavers hole was, but none of that will anything to you unless you also read my Facebook posts, which is where my dilemma embodied in the title of today’s post comes from. Because I had every intention of doing a facebook post today, just didn’t get around to it.

I still want to do the FB post, but I don’t think I’ll do it typing in the morning and the evening is OK, doing both in the evening is a bit too much, so I’ll do one tomorrow. So not really a dilemma, just laziness on my part.

I passed my Amateur Radio Foundation Licence in 2016. That immediately gave me access to a number of facilities available to “Radio Hams” or just Hams. I bought a walky talky, actually a Baofeng – a Chinese built radio, for those “not in the know” these radios look more expensive than they really are, I’ve had people suggest £250, whereas in reality they are in the £15-£30 bracket depending on where and when you buy them. I’ve even had a friend give me one.

Going out for my morning walk back in 2016, I quickly found the Breakfast Club, this was a group of 4 or 5 regulars who were having a chat between 0615 – 0700 ish. At first, I was too shy to call in to the net, but it took only a few days for me to overcome that and introduce myself. I was made to feel very welcome and soon became a regular. I had my own little quirks, mainly the weather report from the end of the Haslar Marina Pier Wall and reporting on life and conditions in and around the Cockle Ponds.

The Breakfast Club ran very successfully from before the time I joined until around mid to late 2023. Unfortunately a few technical events caused the Breakfast Club to fold. But, Radio Amateurs are a determined and inventive bunch, and there is a good prospect of the club being reinvigorated, which would be very nice, and recent chats have shown that there are some exciting events that could come to fruition. That would be very nice.

Last night I finished Queen Elizabeths bedfellows. Naturally, the final moments of the book were around her death in 1603, and what happened. The description of the events were a tad off-putting, but are a matter of record, very detailed record.

I should now be moving on to King James (VI of Scotland, I of England) but I’ve not found the right book yet, or even made the decision to go straight to Charles I. This is the period that I have mainly been interested in, although I don’t think I’ll stop there with Pepys & Cromwell on the horizon.

In the meantime. I’ve moved forward a ways in time and have decided to read a book that I’ve been chomping at the bit to get at; Joshua Howgego’s The Meteorite Hunters. Actually, hunting for meteorites is quite easy, especially as there’s a pretty good chance you have some in your back garden (assuming you have one – the flat roof of a block of flats is even better). It’s finding the little so-and-so’s that’s the problem, think small (0.3mm would be quite big).

I’ve quite fancied doing some meteorite hunting myself. The main tool is a powerful magnet, and they are quite reasonably priced on Amazon. Shall we go hunting meteorites?

This is a photo that I wanted to put into the next competition as a print. Looking at the photo, I think it’s quite a good portrait, but my eyes are immediately drawn to the person in the red coat to the left of the Samba Leader.

What I spent an hour trying to do is remove the person in the red coat. Do you think I can do it? Nope. Tried loads of different things, looked up how to remove backgrounds in youtube, I can delete the whole background, but that removes the context and makes it clearly photoshopped.

I gave up. I can still use the image in the PDI competition that’s coming up, but I will still have the same problem – unless I can learn how to do this. Deep, Deep frustration!

I wrote the above last night, and didn’t post it. That’s not what I’m writing about. Tonight we went to the camera club. It was just a bar night, so a social occasion not a club activity. Colin, one of the members had brought his laptop loaded with photoshop.

He very kindly took us through several procedures including removal of the red coat and the fence line, which I have to say hadn’t registered with me. He made it look very easy, and he was using a 2020 version of photoshop. Since we have the 2025 version, it should be a lot easier.

With a bit of luck, I may still be able to put a couple of prints in to the competition.

It’s not very often I mention work in my blogs, but I’m going to today, but only in the context that I do work. My job is mostly a 9-5 thing, with extensions beyond that when needed, and extensions into the weekend on very extreme cases.

Why am I telliing you this? Well, it’s partly an excuse. Especially at this time of year, when there is no evening light. It means that weekends are the only times available for me to do things like visiting historic places. Even if those places are within the immediate locality of Gosport, given that I might want to record some video, the lack of light precludes evening visits – unless I’m after a certain kind of atmosphere, which doesn’t happen often, but may increasingly so in the future.

It is very easy when we reach the weekend to make the decision to not do anything. This kind of bites you when you’ve been going on about how much you want to get out and visit these sites.

One thing I can do, is spend a bit of time during these dark evenings researching a particular site, in preparation for a weekend visit. If I want to do this, I really need to get on with it.

I’m only a few pages away from finishing the Queen Elizabeth I book that I’m reading. I’m about to encounter the Stewarts, and am wondering which would be the best book to read.. There’s one that sounds quite interesting, All His Spies: The secret world of Robert Cecil – perhaps the 16th Century ‘M’ The Spy Master of the Time.

Last week, I wrote about my trip over to Portsmouth for breakfast with my Amateur Radio friends, and then went on to Waterstones for a browse. I bought a book The Meteorite Hunters. I read about the first 20 pages on the bus, on the way home. It is, quite gripping and at the top of my reading list – except for the fax that my real reading list are the books that I am reading on the historical time line from The Plantagenets to Oliver Cromwell.

My next book should be about James (VI of Scotland, The First of England). But my dilemma is I really want to read the Meteorite Hunters. What to do? As I’m sat writing this, the Meteorite Hunters is next to my keyboard calling out to me. I really enjoyed the first 20 pages, and that just makes it worse.

So, which to read? Well, The Meteorite Hunters is here, on my desk and the next history book is to be identified and ordered, whereas The Meteorite Hunters is here. I think I’ve made my decision.

I should have gone for a walk this morning. There’s no particular reason as to why I didn’t, just being lazy I guess. The previous four mornings were fine, almost fun in some respects. I had done face book posts as well.

The facebook posts can be a bit more personal than here. I’ve been looking at what was happening in the high street. One thing I did last year during the last week of June was to take a walk along the high street noting shops or other commercial units that were out of business.

The mini survey I did showed that there were 112 such units on the high street, of which 11 were shuttered up. The mistake I made was not noting the street numbers of the closed units. Not really much use then.

Why did I do it? And what did I expect to get out of it. To be honest, I think I just wanted to find out what the situation was with the high street, which I feel is not in very good health. I’m going to re do the survey and this time take a bit care over it. As I say, this is all just curiosity.

If the book is correct, the last time I sat as controller on the net was 30 Nov 25, well I did it again tonight. Dave wasn’t able to do the net, and I couldn’t stop myself from offering.

My thought was that if Dave couldn’t do it and nobody else offered (and I’m sure somebody would, I just got there first. I couldn’t offer a topic upfront though, although a couple did suggest themselves.

Then of course, there was the technical problem, but we got over that – nothing to do with my radio, it was at the repeater end.

There is the possibility that I won’t be going for a walk in the morning. There’s a rain warning out for the area. We’ll have to see what it’s like in the morning.