Bills Posts

I have four books that address the history of Gosport. Three of those books address fairly recent history because they use photography a lot. So they aren’t going to pre-date the 20th century by many years. The fourth book is a bit different. Yes it does have a few plates, but they are not the focus of the book which is what I think of as being more akin to being a serious history book.

This made me think about how would you going about researching the history of a specific topic. In this case Gosport, but it could be any location, especially as I am very likely to change the focus of my locality project in the future.

I’ve been doing a little bit of research. I thought I would start with the courts, they have records which must be public in some if not all cases. The Hampshire archives have records going back to the 1600’s. I’m kind of hoping these records are digitally stored and therefore searchable and more importantly translated from the English of that time, which I think is quite difficult to understand because of the writing and the spelling.

The trouble is that I don’t think that is the case. Material from 1655 must be in the original format. I’m going to have to explore this.

Sorry, this is going to be a short post. I hadn’t realised the time. It’s twenty five to midnight and we have been binge watching season four of The Bay it’s quite gripping.

Having just looked at my watch and realised the time, I don’t want to lose the day count in WordPress, so this is a bit rushed.

I watched a YouTube video today by Paul and Rebecca white wick, about abandoned canals and railways in Dorset. Production and editing were pretty good what I’d call borderline professional. But there were things about the production which made me think they were more interested in content than having a really professional production. One good example of this was that when Paul’s wife was filming you could see the camera that he was using.

There’s a kind of lack of attention to detail but very smooth presentation. I liked that. Perhaps not as short a post as I thought.

I got my amateur radio licence almost seven years ago now. That seems unbelievable. I am by no means very technical, but I very much enjoy being part of an extremely friendly community.

Living where I do, I am fairly close to the Isle of Wight. This whole area is a hot bed of licensed amateurs, there are lots of us in the area. One of the reasons why I know such a large number of them is, I think down to a remarkable facility that is available to us amateurs.

It’s called a repeater, and it has its own callsign; GB3IW. When an amateur transmits, the repeater receives the signal, amplifies and re-broadcasts it. It is very well positioned and maintained and as result. It has a remarkable reach. Easily from Brighton to Taunton, and inland to Winchester and Liphook. That’s quite a large area. It is a most impressive piece of kit.

Sadly, the owner of GB3IW wishes to retire. It takes a fair bit of effort on his part to maintain the repeater he quite often spends a fair bit of many of his weekends maintaining the repeater. So it is entirely understandable that at some point he would want at some point to stop it. It appears that we will reach that point in May.

Now, steps are being taken to ensure continuity of the repeater. But it may not work. So we talking about alternatives. But, it’s fun. The repeater is fun. I will be very sad to see it go, and I sincerely hope that it gets sorted.

When I was out for my morning walk I thought I felt a couple of drops of rain. Literally two. It came to nothing and I got home dry. I had one of those days where I wasn’t able to get out for my lunchtime walk. A tad frustrating, but there you are. And then, by late afternoon the rain came. Big galloping drops hammering Down. I’ve just checked and apparently rain drops fall at about 14mph.

I quite like the idea of walking in the rain, but only if I’m well wrapped up. I don’t know why there’s just something about it. But now, I am about to contradict my self and say that if it’s raining in the morning I shan’t get up and go for my morning walk. I’d rather stay in bed.

I can wake up any time after three AM and I usually have difficulty getting back to sleep. Part of it (incredibly ridiculously) is getting a bit stressed about getting up. There are times when I would really rather just stay in bed but then I feel guilty for not going for a walk and getting that little bit of exercise. Silly isn’t it?

I take a lot of photos. A good ten to fifteen a day on most days, let’s say it averages out to 10 a day to make the maths easy; 3650 per year. Over the course of that year, perhaps three or four I might think are really good. Some, like todays header picture are ok, but not brilliant. Why do I persist?

I don’t know how to answer that question. It both is and isn’t a case of recording what I see. It’s there what is in front of me. Very little originality. I must have walked this part of Gosport hundreds of times, I am willing to bet that I’ve missed hundreds of good pictures, because I just can’t see them.

Just in case you think I am writing this out of sadness, your are wrong. A bit of frustration yes. Of course I sometimes think that if I had a proper camera I would be able to take some decent pictures, but a poor worker always blames their tools.

With this post I am just over a month away from recording my one thousandth post. And that is only ninety five posts from covering three years of postings, or there about – taking in to account the few nights I’ve missed. Like photos. Some of the posts have been of a reasonable quality but an awful lot of them really aren’t very good at all. Writing nearly one thousand posts doesn’t make you a writer. K

I shall keep going though.

I haven’t done any Vlogging. I have thought about it a little bit but not seriously. I still very much want to do it but I haven’t felt able to commit any time to it That’s not the only reason. I haven’t been able to think of subject matter.

Most days Monday to Friday, I do a Facebook post in the morning, and this post in the evening. The Facebook post is limited to those people whom I agree to allow to follow me. It is therefore a little bit more private. Unlike here, of course. Anyone can read this.

The thought occurs to me that I could just blog my diary. Just for practice I could do a summary of the week. It would easily last about 5 minutes once a week. It wouldn’t be either interesting or exciting, but it would be good practice.

Until today, I had never heard of the Solent Protection Society until today. A picture of a plaque erected by the SPS was posted on the 365 project website.

As soon as I saw the picture of the plaque, I got quite excited. Does the society still exist? A quick check of the WWW shows that it not only exists but is very active.

The frustrating thing is that from my initial look at the society it covers the area with what I had defined as the current version of my hobby project “Locality” which you might have guessed from the SPS’s name, the Solent from west to east.

Why is something which clearly aligns with my interests and only costs £20 per year frustrating? Because by the end of the year I expect to be redefining the parameters of locality.

Nonetheless, I may join the society anyway. It also makes me wonder what societies there are in the area that we are moving to. Some research is warranted I think.

The weather over the last couple of days has been glorious. Brilliant pretty much cloud free. We spent a bit of time working on the garden and the front of the house. The front has come up nicely. Not perfectly, but not bad.

It’s two days now, where I had the opportunity to take a walk but didn’t. I may not have time to go tomorrow as we have a family thing on. So I’m hoping to be able to. Get out on Monday, my last day off.

What a glorious day it has been. Barely a cloud in sky, brilliant sunshine and t-shirt weather. We spent a good part of the day in the garden both working and being very lazy..

Whilst we were being lazy, I watched the birds. I’d put the food on the table, and we took up residence on the garden seats. Luckily, the seats are far enough away from the bird table that the starlings are only slightly more paranoid than normal. Pigeons? Pigeons don’t give a fudge where we sit, they just want food. It didn’t take either set of birds long to arrive. Sadly, I hadn’t seen the sparrows for a while. I wonder if it’s the food I’m putting in the hangers.

The first starling arrived. Turns out it was just a tad possessive and didn’t want anybody else to partake. It ran continuous battle with any bird that dared to land on the table. Of course, where it was off fighting with the latest intruder that allowed the other twenty birds to dive in and gorge themselves on mashed peanut, mealworm and mixed no-grow seed.

The great thing is that the birds come and go several times during the course of the morning, which tapers off. Then comes the time of the pigeon. at one time, I counted twelve of them on the roof. I don’t know why they didn’t come down.

The crows were very entertaining, being very brash and noisy on nearby roofs. They’d fly around very fast shouting at each other. Then there was the thing.

I noticed two birds calling and wheeling around the sky. It took a few seconds to realise that one was a crow, and the other a sparrow hawk. The crow was really having go at the hawk, wheeling around the sky. It was most impressive to watch. The crow was very persistent. I think the hawk must have been getting very fed up with the hounding. I gave up watching when they disappeared out of view. That’s the header picture.

This is the Contentin. It’s the first time I’ve seen this one.

Nearly every morning that I do my morning walk, and end up at the waterfront I end up seeing one of the Brittany Ferries. Regulars that I am quite familiar with are the Normandie and the Mon St Michel, they are the real regulars.

Other ships that I have seen include the Bretagne and I know of the Galicia, which I think I may havce caught the stern of, but haven’t seenm in full. The main route from Portsmouth is to Caen, which we have done, there are other routes from ports such as Poole, not sure the destinations.