Bills Posts

This is another picture form yesterday’s walk. Going over the milenium bridge that covers the gap between Priddy’s Hard where the Explosion Museum sits and Weevil Lane next to Clarence Yard. Took this picture, and when I looked at on the big screen I thought “Elephant’s tusks”. These are the arms that support the bridge when it is raised. I’d like to see that – I think they post opening times (which I believe isn’t very often). I’ll have to look into that.

I’m not fully sure who the Durotriges were; a collective group of tribes that lived in Dorset and else where in this part of the world (including, I believe, The Isle of Wight as has been recently discovered). There’s the Durotriges Project being run by Bournemouth University I’m following them on Twitter, and haven’t got the scope of it yet. I’ll find out a bit more about it.

The Beakers were a Bronze Age culture that left their mark by including in graves their characteristic bell beaker, properly known as the bell beaker culture, evidence of their presence in Dorset has been found in the hill fort Maiden Castle, near Dorchester.

Lots of interesting stuff here.

It was another walk, an afternoon one as I am off today. Plus it’s a walk that I haven’t done for quite a while. Down the side of St Vincents College, over Grove Road Rec and. Priddy’s Hard through the explosion museum and over the bridge.

The light was quite stark but that made me think that the shadows were quite stark and I thought it might make a good picture, but whilst IO find it a bit. Interesting, I don’t think it has worked in the way I wanted it to. It is though, the best picture I have from today.

It was the longest walk I’ve done for quite a while, it was a bit breezy, but it wasn’t cold. A very pleasant walk.

When I was out for my walk yesterday, I was quite taken by the light – I was walking toward the town and waterfront, the sun was low on the horizon, and for quite a while, straight in to my eyes. Really, quite uncomfortable.

This point from where I took this pictures was one few areas where I had some respite and I was quite taken by the light. As is quite often the case, I just grabed this picture.

When I got home and looked at it on the bigger screen I was really quite taken by it. I also think that the person on the other side of the read adds to the image, both their positioning and shadow.

It’s just one of those pictures which purely by luck I really like.

I managed to get out this morning. It was a bit chilly, but I had a very pleasant hour and a bit.

I must admit that I got to the harbour expecting to find it empty, but I was greeted by the arrival of the Brittany Ferry Contentin, which was nice. Looking at the ferry it strikes me that its primary customer base is commercial traffic – lorries. There might be a few cars, but they will not be the primary.

I noticed the strange craft that I have seen quite frequently around the harbour; it’s difficult to describe a platform, with an engine a small crane and a cabin perhaps big enough for two people. It looked like there were two blokes on board.

I had moved down to the Haslar Marina Pier Wall and gone out to the end of it, as that would get me as close to the small vessel so that I could try and work out what it was doing. Once in position, I could see that they were lifting the small mooring buoys and it looked like they were checking the state of the anchor chain and possibly cleaning the buoy. I saw them lift one out, and the bottom half was caked with seaweed & possibly mussels.

I took a walk over to the cockle ponds. It’s been quite a while since I walked around them. I have to say that the water looked very clean. Like I said at the top, a very pleasant hour and a bit.

It’s going to be another bad post, I literally cannot think of anything to write about. In the past I’ve said that when I suffer from writers block, write about the fact.

I’m sat at the desk, pondering various topics, but really nothing is registering at the moment, so it’s going to be another short post I’m afraid. Sorry about this.

This paragraph is written a good 30 minutes after the original post was published. I have been lamenting the lack of posts relating to Ley lines. I had forgotten about Google Scholar where upon doing a search produced a cornucopia of material, much of it freely available.

Too late to start exploring tonight, but tomorrow promises to be interesting.

Sorry, I did start a post but then got distracted. So just a place-holder tonight. Sorry about that.

I have enough space on the wall in my office to put up a personalised Ordnance Survey. I have two at the moment, one for the area where I live now, and one for a part of Dorset that I do know, but want to become even more familiar with.

That’s the problem; enough space for one, and two maps that I want to change around. This has been frustrating me a lot recently. Yesterday, I had a bit of a flash and came up with a potential solution to my problem. Within a few minutes, I had ordered a cork display board that was I thought quite cheap.

Lo and behold, the board turned up today. I have to confess that I was a bit daunted by how big it was, but it is the right size, so there it goes. I haven’t mounted the map yet, but will do so tomorrow. Quite reasonably, you could ask why?

Well, it feeds into my current obsession with Ley Lines. I said it before, but just in case you think I am mad, I fully accept that Ley lines are fiction, but I kind of think wouldn’t it be nice if they weren’t? It doesn’t stop me from exploring the concept, and I haven’t forgotten my book idea (a kind of science Fiction / Fantasy).

I’ve also commented before; when you examine a map of Dorset, definitely in the countryside there are very few grid squares that don’t contain some prehistoric feature such as a barrow (tumuli), stones or stone circles or something else. I would love to explore some of those. I have found very few videos on YouTube. I want to explore this and at the same time practice my vlogging.

I’d like to at least be confident about speaking to camera before I start exploring Dorset. My thought was to use the Gosport map to look for alignments – I’m going to make these up, for example by drawing a line between two important features and seeing what falls that line and then film a video about it. It’ll give me an excuse (not that I need one) to explore the town even more, and you never know what I might find. Either way, it’ll be a bit of fun, and my confidence will hopefully grow, as will my video skills.

It’s Saturday, and we didn’t really want to do very much, but we did want to get out of the house for a bit. Elayne suggested that we go to a local Cafe, Dolly’s for Breakfast which was very nice. I think the Full English is probably my favourite meal. It pretty much lasted me until dinner time, so that was good.

We stopped off at the services Charity Shop and Elayne bought a couple of things and so, as we were close to home I went back to drop them off. On my way back into town to catch up with Elayne, I stopped to watch a cute cat that was absolutely determined to get into the rubbish Wheelie-bin of one of the houses I pass, it managed to get the lid up, and looked as though it was about to jump down into it. I confess I was concerned that if it did jump down it would get stuck, but I saw no point in interfering, as I knew it would come back as soon as I walked off, which I did.

From Dolly’s which is on Stoke Road, we walked into the town, Elayne met up with some of her WI friends and I had a chat with some of the blokes from the Gosport Men’s Shed. I told them about the Astronomy chair that I want, a weatherproof reclining chair that rotates and has a bracket that can hold a pair of binoculars. They were quite surprised about the idea of naked-eye or binocular observing.

We walked over to Trinity Church and along the side. As we were walking between the church and the Millennium Sundial, I was reminded by the straight line in the middle of the path about how I wanted to see if I could create a straight line in Gosport, that I could use to practice my vlogging and some research for the book.

Elayne sat down for a bit whilst I walked out to the end of the Haslar Marina Pier Wall, where I took today’s photo, and as I started walking back, it began to rain fairly heavily. I really appreciated my new waterproof coat, which I had bought in Dorchester earlier in the week. We sat for a few minutes under the umbrella, just enjoying being out and dry, sheltered from what was a really quite chilly wind.

We walked along the prom, and popped into the Tourist Information office to ask about Gosport Ferry Trips, we’ve done a few of these and they are usually quite good fun (although we sometimes get a bit bored with the “Grand Harbour Tour” they always have at the end. It seems there are only nine scheduled this year, we will have to see where we are with that.

We went to Cafe One, for a drink and a small piece of Tiffin, both of which were very nice. and then took a slow walk up the high street. I popped into CEX, I was looking at the videos, and found a copy of Fifth Element – I’ve seen it before, but wanted to watch it again, it was only £2.50, and I thought that was reasonable enough. I would also have had a look for Bridge of Spies, as I like that film as well, but couldn’t find it.

I was very surprised to see that the Charity Shop for the British Heart Foundation had closed down. This was a pity as for all of the charity shops in town, it had by far the best book section. Frustrating.

We carried on up to the Discovery Centre where Elayne had decided she had done enough walking so I left her in the cafe, and went home to get the car. As I was passing the house where I had earlier seen the cat trying to get into the wheelie-bit, I went and knocked on their door, and when they answered explained what I had seen and my concern, the lady was very pleasant and understanding and said it wasn’t her cat, but it had got into the bin before, and had been able to get out, but we checked anyway and of course, it was empty, so I did feel a bit of a fool, but the lady put some bricks on top to stop it trying again, so I was able to walk away comforted. I picked Elayne up and we wnt home.

I have to say it was a very pleasant few hours.

I was being very lazy, just sitting here browsing through my YouTube subscriptions looking to see if I wanted to watch anything in particular, and increasingly thinking that something was missing, but not really sure what.

Anyhow, I just happened to look at my watch, and seeing that it is getting very close to midnight, I realised that I hadn’t done a blog entry. So, here it is.

I apologise that it is a short one, but I did want to do something just to keep the count going.

I will try and do better tomorrow.

A few posts ago, I wrote about the Louisiana Purchase. The first time I came across this expression was when I was doing my Fantasy Holiday Mon Facebook in 2021.

I had started it all in 2020, just before the Covid Lockdowns we were preparing to go on the trip of a life time, the culmination of which would have been to see the Terracotta Army in China.

That came to a crashing halt, and we were stuck at home. So I thought what the heck, I’ll write about the holiday I’d really like to do. So, I did.

The thing was, that I enjoyed it so much that when I finished it, I wanted to do something else, so I wrote about something else that I would really like to do, a tour of all the mainland states of the USA.

I bought a book a short history of the USA, it was during this that I encountered the term The Louisiana Purchase – of course no idea what it was so I did a bit of research. It turns out that sometime in the 1800’s The thirteen states that were The United States bought a huge chunk of land that was in the centre of Continental North America massively increasing the size of the USA as it was then.

The thing is, that there is something about the phrase that appeals to me, but I can’t explain what – it’s just the phrase, not its meaning. Can you explain that? Because I can’t.