Bills Posts

I was reading a set of minutes of the regulatory board, the one that deals with planning permissions. It detailed what was going happen one of the buildings on the high street.

It’s going to be demolished and replaced by a block of flats, although it will include at least one commercial unit. If I’m going to keep a track of this one, I will have to adjust my morning path slightly. Not difficult to do.

There is a meeting of the board next week. Do I go? I think the public can attend.

They are preparing the ground for the bus shelter. The concrete busway must be nearly matured which means the will be able to bring the shelter in on a lorry. I reckon another three weeks will see the new bus place being used.

I started the survey of the north side of the high street. Easier this time, just take a picture of the shop frontage. I’ll have to re-do the southside.

The rest of the walk was ok, nothing exciting happened except The Contentin came in and over the cockle ponds an egret had seriously angered a gull. There was much screaming and shouting as the chased the egret.

Somebody has thrown a bicycle into the cockle pond. Amazing. Why do they do this?

I attended a full council meeting tonight. It was quite interesting. It’s clear that there are two factions at least with no love for each other. It will be interesting to read the minutes when they are published.

When I left the house for my morning walk, there was water in the air, like the remnants of a thick mist, not rain. I had put a cardigan on as a buffer against the slight breeze, but the water made me suspicious. I went back inside and swapped the cardi for a raincoat. Good job I did. As well.

I was about 200 yards down the road when the drizzle started, I stopped, paused, thought “I don’t want to get wet” turned round and headed for home. Just a few yards and the drizzle stopped. I stopped paused and thought “ I really want to do the high street, plus I’m wearing a rain coat”. I turned round again and returned to my morning walk.

I’m not happy with my efforts on the high street. For one, it started raining again. My notebook was getting wet. For two, it’s very frustrating not every place has a street number, I was only doing the southside today, and with the lack of street numbers a n the rain, it wasn’t easy. In the end, I took a picture of every shop that east of one of the big chain shops.

Rather than my notebook, I might as well just take pictures. More tomorrow.

I should add, but for the raincoat I would have been absolutely drenched.

If it isn’t raining in the morning, and I am able to get up for my walk, I am going to go down the high street counting shops. I’m pretty sure someone will have done this before, but I am repeating that work, purely for my own satisfaction.

I shall be counting shops by type, it should be an interesting exercise. I have a list of the shops from 2019 as produced by the council I know that some of them have closed down, so it will be interesting to compare. I’ll let you know how it goes.

On my walk the other morning, I once again came across a shopping trolley that had been thrown in to the cockle ponds. I would really like to understand why people do this, because it confuses the heck out of me.

The apology; I wrote and posted a brief piece last night. After a short while, I re-read and thought that it was just a little bit too personal, so I deleted it. By then, it was closer to midnight, I was in bed, so I pretty much fell asleep very soon after the removal. Some people may have woken up to a link to a non-existent article, and I am sorry for that.

Hopefully, tonights post will still be there in the morning.

It has been well over a week since I got up for an early morning walk, the routine is back to normal, but I have a bit of a mission. To catalogue the high street, luckily I have a spreadsheet populated with the number and names of all of the shops in the high street, admittedly it is from 2019, so I know it isn’t 100% accurate, I’m going to use it as my starting point and work out which shops have changed hands or closed down completely, and which are still very active.

In theory, it should be good to have a reason to get up. Let’s see how things go,

The Keep of Portchester Castle from inside the castle walls. Of course, absolutely nothing to do with garden railways.

I had a conversation with Elayne today. To be honest, I was surprised she’s almost enthusiastic about it. I really can’t see it happening though, so I might as well give up on it. Weeelll, not quite but mostly.

I got my windows computer working today, for the first time in several months. I would quite like to programme one of my radios with some of the scanner frequencies of the local area, I’ve actually started thinking about radios again. For some reason I can’t fathom, I am still very worried about it though. I might even turn the radio on at some point. All this stems from the last year.

When I came back from Cambridgeshire earlier this week, I had to buy a ferry ticket for the trip to Gosport. Ferry tickets are always a return so I was left with a journey that really wasn’t much use to me.

I had been reading my Plantagenets book, and it mentioned Portchester Castle. In 1205 King John was planning a return to France to regain his Normandy Territories, he was trying to build his army of invasion and needed support from his aristocracy. William Marshall had an almighty row with the King and wouldn’t support his attempts to return to Normandy.

I thought it would be interesting to go an have a Quick Look at it, so I used the ticket to go to Portsmouth and then my bus pass to go to the castle. I didn’t pay the £11.50 to go inside where you could go to the top if the keep, but it was a lovely day so I walked around the outside of the castle, and then went back up to Portchester and caught the bus to Fareham, and then on back to Gosport.

I thought the contrails made the tower look like it was blowing its top.

It was a deliberate break in posting, but it’s good to be back. Of course I’ve lost the day count completely, and actually, the serial number in the heading is purely sequential and has, for quite a long time, born no resemblance to the number of days of postings but remains a valid count of the number of posts.

I went for a bit of a walk this morning, just slightly longer than usual, it was early in the day, but later than when I normally get out. Made a bit of a change shops were open, and a lot more people about.

The Star Care, a reefer container ship was being escorted out by two tugs, nice to see. It looked like the Model Yachting Club was being opened up and a session being run. Didn’t see any models out.

My brother-in-law has put some effort in to convincing me that I need a garden railway. I have had thoughts about where it could go, and a very rough idea about what it may look like. But, how much effort will it take? Elayne didn’t seem totally opposed, at least that is until she sees how it could affect the garden. Personally, I’m not convinced.

My apologies for not posting over the last couple of days. Having a bit of an interlude. All will be explained. Please bear with me.

A rather dramatic sky over the cockle ponds. A poor worker always blames his tools. Mine are mainly a clumsy microphone, yes that’s it my mic is clumsy. The frustrating thing is that if you use a cabled microphone, you obviously have a long cable to deal with. A wireless microphone on the other hand is whole other order of inconvenience because you can’t just Bluetooth or wirelessly connect your mic to your phone, it has to connect via a receiver, which means a wire in some cases.

I’ve used the small lavaliere mics before, and they do work well, but the clips can be flimsy, and the last one I had I lost the receiver. It fell through the gap between the boardwalk planks of the Haslar Marina Pier wall.

I’ve got a better mic now, the receiver (and the transmitter, the actual mic) are too big for that to happen again.

All I need to do, is get out there and use it.