'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe

So, unexpected shenanigans.

There's a standing joke that whenever I visit Craig's I end up embroiled in some DIY project or other. Normally it's a smallish project and it's a useful way to fill a few spare hours. This time the DIY project was a bit more involved...

See, Craig has recently had solar panels installed (well, reinstalled - but that's another tale) along with a couple of his neighbours. After finding a birds nest underneath one set of panels they realised that they really needed bird netting on them (the birds can damage the panels). He and his neighbours made vague plans to install the netting at some point before the scaffolding was taken down... and then on last Thursday realised that the only possible time to do so was this weekend.

So I got to climb up on the scaffolding! I'd actually rate it as one of the least sketchy things I've done, as scaffolders know their stuff (e.g. even the ladder was Very Firmly anchored) - I've climbed up much sketchier ladders just to get into loft hatches and unlike scaffolding, lofts don't have any gates to stop you falling down the hatch. I did decide against climbing on the roof itself and left that to the others to do, and settled for helping out with wrangling the netting from the scaffold platform. Between the four of us I reckon we did a decent job of it, and we certainly got a lot faster as we learnt the best way to bend and anchor the netting. I'm still not planning to change jobs to a roofer though 😅

I didn't spend my entire weekend pretending to be a roofer - in the evening Craig and I headed to his church to take part in the Tearfund Big Quiz Night. Team To Be Confirmed came a respectable joint 7th out of 11, though there was more than one question where we were undecided between two answers and of course wrote the wrong one down!

(writing in November)

Random sign of the day: "Please feel free to distract us with any other questions whiles we work with extremely hot molten glass"

Saturday dawned somewhat grey and damp, and we all set off away from Cornwall (I did say it was a Cornwallish holiday!) to visit the House of Marbles! I'd heard of the brand before, but have never visited the actual museum/workshop (or even knew that it existed - I've no idea how we never discovered it on any of the many family trips to Cornwall over the years). And it is indeed a house of marbles (for certain values of house and/or marbles). There's a museum with a bit on the history of marbles and marble-making, many marbles:



a couple of elaborate marble machines, a glass-making workshop, a Hawkins Bazaar-esque shop... and down the far end of the shop is this behemoth:



That is a giant marble machine with snooker-ball-sized marbles taking up the entire end wall and more. I heard it clanking away from halfway across the shop!


Snooki 2000

Last day of the holiday! This weekend was the Saltash Regatta and today there was a Saltash Churches Together service being held on the waterfront. I've never been to this part of Saltash before, or twigged quite how hilly Saltash is - a few years back I did go through a stroll along the high street, but that and the Tamar Bridge is a fair height above sea level.

( Saltash photos )

I've yet to finish posting the last two Cornwall trips, but this one deserves uploading before I forget to. There was more spontaneousness than usual for myself and pleaseremove.

Time for another weekend trip to visit pleaseremove! The first day was taken up with train fail and little else, hence day 0. The train fail was an unexpected diversion via Bristol Temple Meads, due to my train from Westbury being cancelled (in fairness due to a fire alarm at Westbury signalling centre, so better than the usual excuse from British Rail). Since my train from Fareham was also delayed I missed a change at Bristol and didn't get into Plymouth until the evening. On the plus side, yay delay repay! Now I just need to convince GWR that I was delayed by an hour, not 15 minutes.

( Photos! )

These are being written up a couple of weeksmonths later due to laptop fail and procrastination - the posts are backdated to the actual dates.

Work's holiday year ends in August, and for various reasons I had a week or so of holiday that needed using up. So the idea was to find an interesting place and go there for the week. I wasn't actually thinking of Cornwall - if nothing else, I'd been there less than a month before to visit pleaseremove - but as part of searching for a holiday cottage or something I stuck the dates into the English Heritage site and the very first result was the Custodian's House, complete with 20% discount for last-minute booking! I should really find new places to visit... but I'm glad I went back, as I had a great time.

Unusually I also chose to drive down rather than get the train. The theory was that driving should be about an hour quicker, would allow me to stop off somewhere interesting on the way there, and let me visit places that are not really accessible by public transport. In practice... thanks to the A35 it took me 7 hours to get there instead of the 5 hours it should have. Seriously - the A35 was full of traffic jams, slow moving holiday traffic, tractors, people slowly overtaking said tractors, and then an accident somewhere on the approach to Honiton completely closed the road for several hours. I'd planned to stop off at Buckfast Abbey for lunch, but didn't managed to get there until 2:30pm. Fortunately they still had a few sandwiches left.

The Abbey brought back memories - on the family trips to Cornwall, we'd always set off before the crack of dawn and stop somewhere en route for a late breakfast. In earlier years this would be a Happy Eater somewhere-or-other (there were I think 2 different ones we used?), but later on the parents came across the Abbey and that became our breakfast stop. I remember one year we arrived before the restaurant officially opened, but the staff were kind enough to let us in early.

( Buckfast Abbey photos )

Anyway, after that mess the journey was much better and it was pretty much plain sailingdriving all the way up to and inside Pendennis Castle. I didn't expect that I'd actually be parking inside the castle grounds, but managed to squeeze the Alfa through the gateway without leaving any paint behind on the stonework! Then again, they do fit vans through the gateway (the drivers apparently tuck their wing mirrors in and then just gun it).

After unpacking I wandered down to the high street, partially in search of supper (fish and chips from what claimed to be "The Best Fish & Chips in Falmouth") and partially just to explore. It's fun seeing what's changed over the years and what's stayed the same.

( Falmouth photos )

Random film time! Today's film is... "BJ010859", and it's an old one with photos from several holidays and trips, including Christmas in Falmouth. It's no newer than 1999 and probably quite a bit older than that based on what size elemnar is in the photos! Back then I was using a point'n'shoot 35mm camera - a Canon Snappy LXII.

It's another Boots film, this time with a DX code of 018494 which reveals it to actually be an Agfa Perutz SC 400-2 Color film. Hmm... let's try preset Agfacolor XRG/XRS 400 with 3% white/black points (it's not like I'm doing this for archive purposes and trying for a perfect scan).

( Photos! )

Today was spent wandering around Falmouth and visiting the National Maritime Museum. It is a fascinating place, and well worth a visit - or indeed several. At the moment they had an exhibition on lighthouses, covering both the structures themselves and the people who lived and worked in them. There's an interesting collection of artefacts there as well - one that particularly stands out is a pair of solid bronze doors. Or rather, a pair of very dented and partially missing solid bronze doors, that lost in a fight against a storm.

They also had a section covering the use of lighthouses in various media. Apparently St Anthony lighthouse was used in the show Fraggle Rock. Slightly more recent (and one I remember well) was the Australian show Round the Twist, wherein the Twist family live in a lighthouse. They also have this absolute gem of an advert based around the urban myth of the US aircraft carrier discovering that no, a lighthouse will not divert course to avoid a collision. And finally, there's this absolutely hilarious smith and Jones sketch.

That exhibition is being changed soon - instead they'll have one on search and rescue. Somehow they're going to fit a Sea King SAR helicopter into the exhibition space!

So here I am, once again in a holiday cottage (the same one as last time) in Falmouth, Cornwall. This time it's only 3 years since I was last here.

The biggest thing that's struck me about being here is just how quiet it is. Growing up in Horsham there was always the distant sound of traffic on the A24. In Brighton there was more traffic, and in Fareham I live next to both a major road junction and a train line (though it's amazing how good the brain is at filtering it all out). Here, it's almost completely silent. There's just the whirr of the laptop hard disk, some gentle Jazz on the radio, and the odd ping from the heaters. If I turned that lot off then all that's left would be the faint noise of the wind (unlike last time it's not stormy, merely damp).

Let's go slightly off-topic for a moment here (it'll make sense). Some of you may know that I have a grand plan: to get a Master's and a PhD. The reason for doing so is largely "because", but I consider that a sufficiently good reason for a grand plan. Actually, there's a bit more to it than that - I did enjoy the time I spent at university and the people there, and would love to go back to it. The plan's also come on a bit since it originally came into being five years ago. I recently looked at doing a masters via the open university, and decided that it actually wasn't what I wanted. Almost all the modules I already know to some extent, and the ones I didn't I looked at and went "is that actually any use to me?". I think what I really want to do is a research degree rather than a taught one, something where I can come out at the end with having actually done something. I've got enough ideas for potentially cool things (some practical, some less so) that I'm sure there's something I could do a research project on.

Besides, actually working for a few years gives you a better work ethic and I'd probably do a lot better with the project this time (there's something to be said for doing a course with a sandwich year - while university gives you the knowledge and skills, it doesn't really prepare you for the world of work). Then again as my grandfather always says if you got a first or a third you spent too much or too little time studying, so I think I did quite well with my 2:1. Certainly it was good enough for the job I got straight out of university.

Anyway, back on topic: the reason I'm writing about my grand plan is I've decided I now have a second grand plan: to live in Falmouth (though I'll settle for seaside Cornwall in general). Of course it's completely impractical due to a total lack of software jobs in the area, but no-one ever said grand plans have to be practical. Merely that they should be possible. Then again in this day and age all you actually need for a software business is good connectivity. The people behind World of Goo, for example, describe their office as being whichever coffee shop with free Wi-Fi they're in today.

Neither of these plans is going to happen tomorrow - they're several years away at least. The first plan has been in a perpetual state of "in a couple of years" ever since leaving Sussex due to the money required for a Master's/PhD constantly increasing. The second plan has only just come into being as an actual plan rather than a vague answer to the "if you could live anywhere where would it be" question. But in five years time, who knows?

This was actually written a few days later, because I was lazy and didn't write it on the actual day. Post time adjusted to appear correctly in the archives.

( Long ramblings ahoy! )

Good juju today: getting the St Mawes ferry just before it left the pier.

Bad juju today: oversleeping so that it was too late to go anywhere further afield, and discovering that St Mawes castle is only open Friday to Monday. That is not a typo.

Ah well, I had a nice random walk up around the headland and then made my way back down through the town, discovering a Holy well in the process that I never knew existed. This stay has been full of finding oddities that I never found in previous years.

The ferry crossing had its share of fun as well. At St Mawes, the entire harbour is drained at low tide which results in the ferry having to tie up right at the end of the pier. Today was a spring tide, and the tide was low enough that they had problems getting close enough to the pier (hence the quote from the captain)! In the end we all went to the back of the ferry to try and balance it as the captain drove it up onto the sand a bit.

I also found a set of old postcards in the post office - they were old enough to be genuine sepia prints!

Anyway, after getting back to Falmouth I then went for an evening stroll around Pendennis Point. I do like being out walking at night - everything is just so different to during the day, and you seem to hear the surrounding environment more at night. The waves breaking over the rocks sound louder, and since almost everyone else is at home there's less noise of people and cars (though as well as dog walkers I saw a photographer and a pair of joggers running in the dark). I walked right the way down to Little Dennis (a small fort built right at the tip of the point, as a stop-gap while the main castle was being constructed) and experiment with some night-time photography. The stone wall made for a nice stable platform, and it's amazing how much detail a digital camera can pick out in the dark. The 16-second exposures did help, though...