Bills Posts

The one thing that stays with me on my morning walks all year round is my gadget stick – in reality, my photo tripod, christened gadget stick by G6RTE Joly. I invariably take it with me on my morning walks. However, tomorrow will be an exception. I won’t be carrying it tomorrow.

The tripod has a ball head with a quick release plate. The problem is that the QRP is coming loose. I had noticed it a couple of days ago but it has steadily got worse to the point that I released my phone from the bracket earlier than I would normally because I was worried about falling off smashing the phone.

The QRP is held in place by what hope is a screw, and not a rivet. If it is a rivet, that means a new ball head. If it is a screw that can be tightened then we are good to go. two problems came to light; the screw / bolt has the same fitting as the ring doorbell, it’s a strange star shaped arrangement. Unfortunately, the ring screwdriver is just a bit too small.

I’ve ordered a set of what I now know (courtesy of 2E1PHW Pete) to called torq fittings not hugely expensive. They are due to arrive tomorrow, so I am hoping that the gadget stick will be back in operation Thursday morning.

Towards the beginning of April we were in Chichester for the day. As usual, my focus of interest were Waterstones and Kim’s. Kim’s is a second hand bookshop. It’s a really nice place over four floors it is absolutely a brilliant place.

I’d spent a good bit of time having a browse around. I done the science fiction, transport, astronomy and writing sections and was about to leave the shop and just by the counter is the section dealing with the counties of England. I found a book entitled Dorset by H.O.Lock. Turns out that Mr. Lock was a Major in the British Army. I haven’t been able to find out anything more about him.

I picked the book up and read a random page from near the front of the book. I really liked the style off Lock’s writing. I don’t know if he was from Dorset, but he wrote very respectfully. Of course, I bought the book and am now reading it. It’s a very nice read.

I’m making the odd note. One thing I found was the Dorset Natural History & Antiquarian Field Club there are references to the club on the net, and copies of clubs records can be bought for £7. I might buy one.

That led me to a huge range of resources at the Dorchester museum,, and then I found a website Tess of the Vale. Now, here is a lady who clearly loves the county. I shall spend some time exploring this website (surprised nothing on YouTube. She is on Twitter.

In the sense that I am going to go on a bit about topic that I have been on this week. Paul & Rebecca’s YouTube channel is absolutely fascinating. I found a similar channel, here are links to both of them;

https://www.youtube.com/@pwhitewick

https://www.youtube.com/@DaveFord

The Dave Ford channel is another new discovery, only found yesterday. He and his dog Logan go on walks. Nice relaxing, informative stuff. Well worth a watch.

There’s almost no point in my attempting to copy what they’ve done, repeating the same walks. I say almost, because what could be done is to focus on a different aspect. Perhaps going a bit deeper in to the history, or talking more about how people might have lived then – getting personal so to speak.

For example today I have been reading about King Edward the eldest son Of King Edgar, who had died but three years before. King Edward, soon to be known as Edward the Martyr was murdered at Corfe Castle apparently on the instruction of his step-mother who believed that her son, not the son of Edgar’s first wife should be king.

Fascinating stuff, but goes to show the research necessary before embarking on a walk, and making sure that you have interesting stuff to talk about.

Oh, and this is making me think about drones as well. Dave Ford doesn’t use one. But The whitewicks do and their footage is to be honest glorious.

I got to spend a bit of time in the Fareham Waterstones today. It’s always pleasant to have a browse. I know the layout of the shop quite well, with the latest non-fiction books displayed just inside the entrance.

One of the first books I picked up to have a quick browse through was Remainders of the day by Shaun Bythel. I’ve read one of Shaun’s books before. Of course, as soon as I started reading it, I knew that I would enjoy it. It’s the people that make it entertaining of course. I didn’t buy the book today. But I know that I’m going to get it in the future.

I had a walk up and down the high street. Fareham has an oxfam bookshop which is quite2 good, but it’s quite a way down the street. Anyhow, it was closed which was frustrating.

I caught the bus back to Gosport. I used my bus pass for the first time, which was good.

From my perspective, the USA dominates YouTube and their videos tend to come in three flavours; very political, very business oriented or entertainment. There are doubtless others, perhaps I’m using the wrong searches, well doubtless I am.

Pretty much all of the US videos I watch are very professionally produced especially the business ones. They put a lot of effort in to production. I sometimes find myself thinking that they are so determined to get as much out of their production as they can, which is absolutely reasonable. But, it can and does leave me breathless. The impression is they don’t take a breath. They aren’t all like that of course, but most of the ones I watch are.

On then to British YouTubers. From what I can tell there are by proportion not a lot. I only really follow very few perhaps five. Over the last few days I have found another husband and wife (uk) team; Paul and Rebecca Whitewick. It helps that a lot of their videos are focussed on the south of England, including Dorset. The most recent one I watched was about an aqueduct the Romans built when the occupied Maiden castle just outside Dorchester. Who would have known that Roman villas with mosaic floors were nearby (well, obviously, a lot of people, but I didn’t).

What I like about their videos are they are relaxed, and they aren’t worried about breathlessly cramming in information and thay also aren’t worried about the cameras they used being in view (carried) when they aren’t actively recording. It’s a kind of “untidiness” that I don’t see elsewhere. This really, seriously does not detract from the enjoyment I get from their programmes, which are well made and entertaining.

I look forward to watching more of them.

I was just looking through the news on my iPad, when I realised that last nights post wasn’t showing up in the list. When I went into the app I realised that it was still down as a draft, it hadn’t been published.

The most annoying thing about that is that the day count is reset to zero, so I’ve started again. I think the most I’ve ever got to is 120. Do I need to make it so that something is posted everyday, even if it is only one word. I really don’t want to do that.

It’s a motivation to ensure that my daily post is something relevant. I really do need to have a focus for my blog. I can’t write about the book at the moment for reasons I don’t want to explain.

I enjoyed writing the last two posts. I think it is becasue I had a clear topic in mind, I had a reasonable plan for what I wanted to write. As a result the words kind of flowed. If only I could do that every time.

I think part of the problem I have is that I don’t really have a consistent theme for the blog. I am writing on the fly for the most part. I’m not doing enough research to follow up on things that I haven’t yet found that I want to do research. Oh dear this sounds quite pitiful. I have plans for when we get to Dorset. I don’t have plans in Hampshire.

Just ooccasionally, like the construction project, like yesterday or a story of the day, like the day before develops to inspire me. Not does here. I think I m ay have lost the mojo a bit with Gosport. I must admit that there was a point where I was quite inspired. Certainly there is plenty of history in the town. I think I may spend an hour in the library this weekend. One thing I haven’t done is look at the naval history books. I wonder how many of them mention Gosport?

This is an early stage in a fairly major construction project so where do I start? I think it’s the bus station. It’s going to be pulled down. I don’t know what’s going to be built in it’s place, I just hope it includes a space where the public can take advantage of the of the waterfront.

Gosport won’t have a main bus station. It’ll have a stop or a halt I guess. it’s going to be where the taxi rank and stop off area is. Now, there are a couple of things about this part of the plan that I don’t like;

• The loss of the parking slots for the ferry. I’ve not seen anything to say that their equivalents will be built elsewhere. That doesn’t mean they won’t be, just that I’m not aware of it.
• The busses will pull in to the new halt, and then revers out onto the road into the flowing traffic – I’d say that’s a bit hazardous, but I don’t know what measures they are going to put in place.

Now the building site in the picture is happening at the point roughly halfway down the high street at at the north and south cross streets, and will go across the pedestrian precinct that is the high street. Why is that?

It’s because they are going to turn that area into a road to take the traffics away from the ferry end of the high street so presumably only access will be permitted. For a while this area of town is going to look very different.

I shall keep track of this, and perhaps give a weekly report.

I bought two radios during a mad phase. The only justification I’ll give is that they were quite cheap. They both turned up in the middle of last week and had languished, boxed, on my desk until yesterday apart from the batteries which I had charged. Yesterday, I bit the bullet and got on with setting them up.

There are two ways of setting hand held two way radios; programming them manually, which is slow and fiddly – I want to say cumbersome. For no other reason than it’s really nice to have multiple adjectives to emphasise how seriously annoying and frustrating doing it that way can be. But ’m not sure if cumbersome doesn’t have the same connotation as fiddly and is therefore a waste of effort. The other way is by plugging them into a computer which can create its own entirely different set of frustrations. I’m not really selling this am I?

Anyhow, as you might guess yesterdays efforts, where I started thinking it would be easy to programme them on the computer had me very close to throwing them out the window. It didn’t work, at all. Not one little bit. Nope. The prospect of them becoming UFOs was becoming increasingly more attractive. At the point of where they and the computer were in danger of taking flight I decided to have a go manually. What a wise decision that was most emphatically not. I won’t go into the detail of my dismal failure but successful it most assuredly did not come knocking at the door. I went to bed.

Tonight, I came back, sat at the computer, fired up the programme, plugged the radio in, clicked the upload button and off it went, doing exactly what it did not do last night. It was the same for both of them. They both did I it. Now, it was a little bit more intricate than that, but that is essentially what happened. So I can go out with a new radio tomorrow, and give it a go. See, wasn’t that easy?

Nothing catastrophic I hasten to add. All very minor stuff, but frustrating.

It started when I set up the app I use to measure my walks for my quick trip to Morrisons for the salad stuff for todays first BBQ of the year. I’d been saying for a couple of weeks that I’d quite like one, so today we were going to do it come what May. Anyhow, back to strava. The crucial statement being I thought I had set it up correctly. I’ll continue this saga in a minute.

So I walked to Morrisons, got everything we needed for the BBQ, and was walking back. I was around a hundred yards from home when I remembered what I had forgot – breakfast cereals. We were completely out, my having had the last of the granola earlier on. Mildly annoying, but I took the opportunity to get home, empty the bags, and then set out once more to go to Morrisons. At least I would be getting double the steps.

The second trip was fine, I didn’t forget anything, and got home in good time. Excellent. This is where I went to strava to end the walk only to find that according to the app I hadn’t started the first trip, let alone the second. It was waiting for another button, one that I don’t normally have to touch. Most frustrating, but at least the betterpoints app recorded it.

As it was first use of the BBQ after winter, it needed a good clean off. I got it all set up, brushed it down, fired it up. And let it build up heat. I think the spiders that had taken up residence all vacated the premises fairly rapidly, I saw one particularly big one dropping down on a thread. I’m glad it got away. Even though I don’t like them, I don’t wish them any harm. Cleaning all done, I shut it down to let it cool so that I could brush off the carbon off the griddle. At least that went ok.

A couple of hours later I fired up the BBQ again, this time to cook. All was going well, the chilli sausages were pretty much done, the burgers and the chicken was going well, and then there was a bit of a pop from one of the burners, it had gone out. The sizzling was easing off. Hang on a sec, what’s going on here I thought? And then I realised – the gas had run out! In twenty years plus of BBQing I have never had that happen before. I was convinced there was enough gas. But there wasn’t. Luckily, we were able to finish the cooking off in the oven.

Like I said all fairly minor stuff. At least the food was nice.