Bills Posts

When I got up first thing to make a cup of tea, I noticed Mr Squirrel having breakfast. I don’t mind that at all. It was yesterdays food, and I would rather that the squirrel have it than it go to waste.

I think that the birds aren’t massively fond of peanuts as I seem to get a fair bit of residue. So for a while, I’m going to mix the ground up fatballs (which they really appear to like).

Looking at the picture, you can see the cable ties wrapped around. I put them there to stop the pigeons from grabbing the fresh food, which I would much prefer the small birds to get. Which they do

But then I thought, well the small birds have all disappeared so why not open the cable ties up so the pigeons at least get ago. I’d much rather the food get eaten as much as possible. Seems reasonable to me.

Starting to prepare for the video about Gosport in the civil war. There were definitively activities here, particularly the bombardment of Portsmouth from the Falklands Gardens (of course, it wasn’t called the Falklands Gardens in those days). But, be under no illusions, the events recorded in Gosport were by no means a significant part of the conflict.

There have been at least two ships called The Mary Rose, the most famous of course is Henry VIII’s ship that sank over one hundred years before the events that we are interested in today. That ship of course resides in a spectacular museum inside the naval base.

The Mary Rose of the civil war was a ship in the harbour the parliamentarians attempted to take over the ship to use it for their mission. Successful capture of the warship provided the parliamentarians with a powerful platform and enabled them to control the harbour.

Once again my mind is wandering through the forest of my interests and has found the dilapidated little cottage called Vlogging, and my brain is wondering what can be done to revitalise it into a viable place to visit, and I have to say not being massively successful.

My thoughts are running along the lines of if I can’t produce a video about some aspect of Gosport, why would I think that I would be anyh better in Dorset? Perhaps there’s a lack of people that may make it easier there, rather than the busy town that is Gosport?

There are a couple of areas where I am definitely interested, these are the civil war and D-Day. There’s a fair bit of material for each, I’ll have to draw up a shooting plan or something. The thing is to just get out there and do it. I’ve been here before.

I follow a lady on You Tube by the name of Kim Grant. She is a very good photographer. She produces a video a week about her experiences whilst out photographing, mostly in Scotland where she lives.

Kim covers a range of different types of photography from Landscape (although she seems to be going off that lately) through abstract & surreal to macro. I must admit she isn’t covering portrait (which I’m ok with) or street (which I’m not too disappointed with, but only because I have other sources for that topic).

About a year ago, I spent £200 on a new macro lens for my DSLR. I’ve used it twice. Neither time was particularly successful. It has got to the point where I actually went on to MBP (a very popular site for selling photographic equipment) and priced up how much I would get if selling my kit. Not as much as I thought. I didn’t sell.

Back to Kim, a few weeks ago she did a video on macro photography it was an exercise in patience. Quite simply, not hunting out photographic subjects. Instead she sat on the lawn and let the subjects come to her. I thought I’d try it.

Sat in a chair, camera on tripod within seconds, a butterfly settled on my thumb that was holding the camera. It came back two more times. I couldn’t photograph it, every time I moved, I disturbed it. The two bumblebees were a bit more successful, but I found it a bit of a nightmare aiming the camera I did get some pictures but they are so bad that I’m not going to share them.

Clearly, I need to practice more.

To walk the streets of Gosport is to walk steeped in history. Walking past the railway station, no longer in use for the railway, housing stylish flats and conference rooms for hire. This is from where Queen Victoria Queen Victoria and her Prince Albert continued their journey to their home of relaxation at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight.

In 1901 it saw her last departure back to London after her death. Many years, indeed centuries before then Gosport had played its role in the Civil War, being a royalist out post, it was coupled in with the Seine of Portsmouth. What is now the Falklands Gardens was turned into a firing platform from which to bombard Portsmouth.

Later, feeding the paranoid fear of invasion saw the construction of a line of forts, nearly all of which remain today, admittedly in various states of dilapidation from almost pristine to barely just a mound of earth.

I’ve talked in recent posts of Gosport’s extraordinary role in the preparations for, and the run up to D-Day, of which evidence of the real efforts still remain.

I have by no means exhausted the stories that can be told of this town. Much remains to be explored.

Quite a while ago, I bought 150 fat balls at a very reasonable price. The only problem is that the little darlings (I mean all of them, not just the starlings) wouldn’t touch them. Well, they would but with great reluctance. So, I thought of a wheeze which I thought would fool them, the little darlings that is.

What did I do? I mash them up and put them on the bird table. Now I have another problem. It seems like the birds (and this time, it is mostly the starlings) May prefer ground-up fat balls to the other main staple I put on the bird table, peanuts – ground up of course. if I start the week with a clean table, by the end I have a table with a layer of residue that is mostly peanut. Time for another experiment.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

We wanted a bit of a relax so we went to Lee on Solent for an ice cream. We parked in the main sea-front car park and went for a stroll. We stopped off at the newly refurbished National Coastwatch Institute (NCI) coastal watch station. NCI would have been a prime choice to volunteer if I hadn’t gone with RAYNET. Unfortunately the move to Dorset means that NCI is out of scope and I’m not sure about RAYNET anymore. That though is a separate conversation.

We had a very nice ice-cream. We were leaving the car park when we saw a large puddle, with a flock of starlings around it. There were about a dozen of them all lined up taking a bath. They were fluttering away splashing themselves. It really was quite beautiful to watch.

Luckily, there were no cars behind us, so we weren’t holding everybody up as we paused to watch. I would have loved to take a few more photos or a video, but I really didn’t want to disturb them. I just really relished watching them.

The picture is of the birthday cake at the party we went to today. The cake was a Victoria sponge with icing and haribo types sweets all over it. To be honest it looked both disgusting and fascinating and an absolute sugar nightmare. I would have had a second slice if there were enough left, it was delicious!

The birthday party was in Hampton, south london. We thought it would be easier if we took Alex’s car, it would give it a run plus we wouldn’t. Have to worry about charging. Only problem is, it’s a manual gearbox, and I haven’t driven manual for quite a while. I needed to drive as Alex wanted to have a drink – not at all unreasonable.

An automatic car really is the lazy drivers vehicle, there is so much you don’t have to think about, in fact I’m not even sure if electric cars have traditional automatic gear boxes, because the motors drive the wheels directly, but it behaves like an automatic, mostly.

Actually once behind the wheel, and having got used to the brakes, it didn’t take long for me to get back into using a manual car. I didn’t stall it, or forget to change gears, or forget that it didn’t auto-brake when you lifted your foot off the accelerator, I managed through all of those, and actually, I enjoyed it.

Going back to the automatic after having manually driven over 100 miles over the course of the day, getting back in to the automatic felt stranger. It was a lighter car, and I kept looking for gearstick, wanting to change gear. Also, 60mph in our car, really feels like 40 in Alex’s Again it took a couple of minutes to re-adjust, but once there I was absolutely fine.

I forgot to do a post last night the immediate and most annoying effect is that the day count has gone to zero.

Particularly frustrating as I had been trying to keep it going. Oh well, back to the beginning. So I’ve been posting recently about historic locations in the town.

I don’t have one prepared for this evening, my best bet is to try and compile a list so that I have something to hand.

There is a bridge crossing the workhouse lake. Standing on the bridge facing south puts you facing a modern house built in a slightly strange style. It turns out that the site of the house used to. Be Gosport’s workhouse, and the new buildings frontage has been built in the style of the gatehouse to the workhouse.

When we were in Dorchester on Saturday, at a new area Brewery Square, there was a very interesting shop. Called “The Jedi Archives” it had several games laid out on at board.

One of the layouts featured spaceships from Star Wars. I asked if it was ok to take pictures and they said definitely, go for it. This one took a bit of manipulation in Snapseed to get the support, and it has almost worked.

Dorchester itself is quite a nice area for a shop-browse. For me there are a couple of book shops, including a quite reasonable Waterstones, which was very nice to have a browse around. In the 2nd hand bookshop, they had a number publications from the Dorset Natural History and Archeological Society.

I bought the proceedings from 1982. It was volume No. 104. So the society has been going for quite a while. The society runs the Dorset Museum. I had assumed it was defunct, it most definitely is not.