It's the Fort that Counts

In 1871, following six years intense labour, a semi-circular armed battery called "Fort Picklecombe" was completed on the shoreline overlooking Plymouth Sound and set up with 42 nine inch and ten inch muzzle loading guns to protect our valuable naval harbour from invasion by the French. It was Lord Palmerston's idea and although dubbed a "Palmerston Folly" because not a single shot was fired in anger, it obviously did the trick as we weren't invaded and we have remained proudly free of all French influence ever since.

Anyway yesterday we said adieu to our pied-à-terre in Norfolk, got in our Citroen piled high with an à la carte selection of hors d'œuvre, prêt-à-manger and vin de tables, and set forth down here for our vacances.

Fort Picklecombe had lain dormant since 1920 apart from a period in the Second World War when  reactivated by the Coastal Artillery, and by 1970 was in a very sad state. The MOD was quite pleased to flog off this crumbling ruin to property developers who did a remarkable job of turning it into 103 residential flats with an underground car park. It is bordered behind by a passable imitation of Warwick Castle set in the beautiful Mount Edgcumbe Country Park.

After about six hours on the M5 and A38, during much of which it chucked it down, it was a wonderful feeling to turn off down the little winding lane and catch a glimpse of turquoise sea and a brightening sky, then the castellated granite towers of Fort Picklecombe. It felt like the opening chapter of a Poirot, Miss Marple or possibly Blyton's Famous Five. Charming Anglian antique-sleuth Roger Lovejoy needs all his deductive skills to solve the riddle of Big Nana's missing packet of Sainsburies chocolate eclairs with the assistance of Timmy the Tibetan Terrier.

As the Fort is built right up to the shoreline, each flat has enormous picture windows which give the impression of being on a floating cruise liner. (The floating ones are always the best I feel). It seems like we've succumbed to one of those "Viking River Cruises" targeted at the other young hipsters who watch ITV's Mystery Dramas,  only without all the raping and pillaging. And dysentry, seasickness and Brotherhood of Man tribute acts.

No, this is THE BEST place in England to have a few days away from the grindstone. Plus it has better wifi than at home. You can sit in front of the giant panorama of Plymouth Sound and the Channel and watch a continuous display of yachts, Naval frigates and Brittany Ferries plough back and forwards like a bobbing Diorama seascape. I've downloaded an app for my phone which lets me identify each passing vessel, and a tide table app to check the exact status of the tides at every point of the day. I think I may have turned into one of the most tedious arses in the Country. Pot Pourri.

The Deerhunter

The other day I returned from the auction with two large deer that I'd got for my Mother in Law. It seemed like a reasonable swap.

Seriously (!) I'd been commissioned to purchase this small deer duo by Big Nana who is keen to place them in her rockery with Lucy the bronze rabbit possibly as some sort of Gormley style display. I'd been unsuccessful on the previous two occasions these items had appeared in the auction and had dropped out of the intense bidding war shaking my head and making my well aired "too dear" joke to mass hysterical laughter but this time time I stuck to my guns and secured them for less doe. As I carried them out someone said "Look at that bloke with two old deers". It was hilarious.

When the weather is fine we will deliver these beauties by herding them up the M6. However, there is a small problem regarding our temporary storage of the two animals in the form of a small Tibetan who has taken on the mantle of "Head of Security" around here. They must look as frightening as this did to Lily at the weekend.

Anyway, here is Holly's first garden encounter:

As one Window Closes...

The nice thing about running an eBay or Amazon shop is the facility to turn it off and on at the click of a mouse. High Street businesses would dream of being able to switch themselves and their overheads off without notice whenever they felt like it. Mary Portas would be delighted.  I well remember the trauma of salaried holidays - the ignominy of trying to book a few days off with a boss who used holidays as a power trip and the dread of returning from a break to find out what political mayhem had been engineered in your absence.

None of that in our business - I turned our shop back on as we drove home on the A14 last Tuesday and by Wednesday we had about 10 orders all ready to ship around the Globe. Marvellous.

Or it would have been had we not discovered a significant disadvantage in working the Internet economy. Our PC blew up on Wednesday.

Yes we have a laptop and can also run the sales stuff from our phones but the main business records, printing and all our photography now lay entombed in a frozen hard disk/doorstop. But then you discover that  hardware is not the real problem.

We ordered a new PC and monitor from PC World's "refurbished" department for under £300 and it arrived at the front door by 9.30am next morning preceded by a helpful text from Gav at the 'sortation facility'. Marvellous. Just need to plug in, restore a few files from back up disks and we will be rocking and rolling!

Er, not quite.

I hadn't bargained for Mr Gates at Microsoft beavering away over the last few years and turning faithful old Windows Vista into something called Windows 8. It was like a bad dream in which I walk into the local pub only to find it has been taken over and transformed overnight into an 18-22 dance club with flashing blue lights and flashing green drinks. Where are the two wizened old chaps with the duelling guitars?

I've always prided myself on being quite computer savvy having possessed most versions of Windows from 3.1 to Vista, but Windows 8 has left me completely "glazed" and struggling like the old bloke at the front of the Sainsburies self checkout shouting back at the voices. "What do you mean, 'unexpected item'? They're your bloody muffins!".

Apart from the touch screen interface (which is probably OK if you have an, er,  touch screen), the random behaviour of the email 'app' and the invisibility of basic controls (like switching off), my beloved ancient  Photoshop doesn't work on it and I've had to buy (and start learning) the latest Photoshop Elements to process the hundreds of product pictures a month we rely on.

Here's a graphical representation of me in the last few days:

At least we aren't alone in being stretched mentally - Lily and Holly started agility classes on Thursday evening.

Roses grow on you

This weekend I cycled the first third of the "Way of the Roses" and back again - about 110 miles with hills all the way.

It absolutely chucked it down on my way back (into the wind) and I even managed to get lost. And fall off. It wasn't pretty but having done a coast-to-coast for the previous 3 years and escaped serious weather I suppose the odds were stacked against. 

You don't need to see pics of an old bloke's suffering so here's a few snaps I took on the first day.

Tiny tunnel in the lune valley. The look of croons before the crook of lune.

Bluebells and silver birches on the first climb out of the Lune Valley. Lovely year for the bluebell.

The distinctive flat topped peak of Ingleberrow is visible for miles and miles of the early route.

Stand of trees and a dry stone wall. Last sign of "dryness" for a while.

Anyway I'm back and have spent the afternoon Karchering a Patio. Anyone over 60 will know what I'm talking about. 

Waterways in the Skies

Our recent minibreaks seem to have developed a Canal theme.

Last month we were in Wales and I finally got to see the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct near Llangollen. Built by Thomas Telford and William Jessop between 1795 and 1808, it remains today the worlds highest navigable aquaduct and now deservedly part of a UNESCO world heritage site. 

My vertigo precluded a picture from the centre so we scrambled down to the river level for this view:

The quality and tenacious problem-solving engineering required to suspend this canal 126ft in the air is all the more remarkable in that it crosses not a dry valley but the raging torrent of the River Dee.

This week we are in Cheshire and today visited the Anderton Boat Lift near Northwich, another remarkable feat of making water go where it doesn't want to.

This amazing construction was built in 1875 to take narrow boats 50 feet from the Trent & Mersey Canal directly into the  River Weaver below. It was in daily use until 1983 when corrosion closed it down but it was restored and re-opened in 2002 as a demonstration visitor centre. £7 million had been raised to make the lift work under hydraulic power again (it had been converted to electric power in 1908).

It was most noticeable in the last few miles of the drive to Anderton how much of the route was lined with the decaying empty husks of 19th and 20th Century industrial buildings. The visible signs of long term recession were everywhere and a shock to a Southerner whose concept of recession was seeing a pub closed or a card shop become a charity shop.

Of course we now have 21st Century transport infrastructure to admire - the Eurostar for example is I suppose the best example. Crossrail is a marvel of technology underway as will be the HS2 if it can find its way through Nimbyshire.

I can't  help feeling that these projects don't have the human scale of the pioneering canal projects which were bold, extravagant yet technically fathomable by the public. Just like nobody can service their own car these days.  If it ever gets finished, one wonders if the carriages of the High Speed rail link will be filled with bankers, tax accountants and curators of  the past. We seem to be better at  "curating" the past than managing the present.

Broken Britain

The other evening we watched the Channel 4 Despatches programme "Secrets of your missing Mail" in which covert filming of the UKMail Courier depot in Bournemouth showed staff throwing parcels around, kicking them and boasting that they could dish out the contents of partially broken wine shipments.

Apart from the smug attitude of the presenter, the programme was rather more annoying than shocking as its entire evidence comprised about 3 minutes of filming which was endlessly repeated and it carried an implication that this is what private couriers are like whereas the Royal Mail are not. I'm fairly sure that any parcel sorting depot in the Country, particularly staffed by un-managed people on minimum wage, could exhibit examples of similar rough treatment and suppliers have to use bomb-proof packaging to counter it. Other Countries are even worse (never send parcels to Russia, is my tip).

I'm 100% against the proposed sell-off of Royal Mail and Parcelforce but let us not pretend that their service is in some way vastly superior to independent courier companies.

It reminded me of an evening about 20 years ago when I was running a small lighting business. We had a team of 6 packers in the warehouse packing small parcels of lightbulbs and flourescent tubes  to be collected each evening by a Parcelforce lorry. These parcels were all carefully and solidly stacked inside 6ft tall wooden trolleys called "Mates" which were duly wheeled onto the back of the lorry and taken off to the new state-of-the-art sorting depot in Peterborough. All very efficient.

Some of the staff (and me) were quite interested in seeing the new depot so one evening we arranged a minibus to take us on an official tour.

The manager of the depot welcomed us through the main receiving doors and proudly demonstrated the first stage of the automated sorting systems where the "Mates" are taken off the lorries and wheeled up to a large caged contraption.

"This is the Mate-tipping machine", he beamed. We watched in open-jawed horror as each Mate was hooked onto the device and jerked to a height of 10 feet and through 180 degrees to spew the entire contents onto a metal floor below.

Grauniad News

I'm grateful to the Guardian for two recent stories.

1. The first is a fascinating confirmation of a conclusion that I came to a few years ago : News is Bad for you. Here's an extract:

News is toxic to your body. It constantly triggers the limbic system. Panicky stories spur the release of cascades of glucocorticoid (cortisol). This deregulates your immune system and inhibits the release of growth hormones. In other words, your body finds itself in a state of chronic stress. High glucocorticoid levels cause impaired digestion, lack of growth (cell, hair, bone), nervousness and susceptibility to infections. The other potential side-effects include fear, aggression, tunnel-vision and desensitisation.


News, the article explains, makes us passive and uncreative. It misleads, inhibits thinking and creativity and we'd all be better off if we didn't succumb to the daily "fixes" of the drug of news.

I'm very much in agreement with this analysis by Mr Rolf Dobelli and have withdrawn from the habit of putting the 6pm, 9pm or 10pm News on, then going to bed to listen to The World Tonight before waking up to John Humphies grumping at some wretched politician. Actually this is not entirely unconnected with the feelings of a certain Mrs Rine, who threw the bedside radio out the window some years ago.  I now get most of my news via the prism of Private Eye and The News Quiz, both of which are analytical and funny. It's highly recommended.

2. The second Guardian insight was from their new "Guardian Witness" section which is designed to make Citizen Journalists of us all by crowd sourcing news and opinions. In a section on the Impact of Austerity Britain, readers were requested to submit stories about the way in which the fierce cutbacks of the Tory scum and their Libdem running dogs has changed our way of life.

This poor Islington woman's story had me flapping my hands at my face in that way you do to stop yourself breaking down in tears. It is, I warn you, gut-wrenchingly sad so please turn away now if you are likely to be emotionally choked by this sharp image of the deprivation that this poor wretch has had thrust upon her.