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

(writing in November)

Random event of the day: seeing a brown sign for "Otter Nurseries", somewhere on the A30.

I never did manage a trip to pleaseremove in 2020 - we got as far as making plans to make plans, and then one lockdown or another happened and scuppered them. That said, Craig did manage a couple of flying visits where we just sat and nattered outside (on fortunately sunny days) for a while before he had to continue on his way. This year however I managed an actual trip that went further than just the next county!

Of course, the weekend we picked happened to be after the week where the entire country decided to stockpile up on fuel... there was a very real concern that I wouldn't have enough petrol to get there (normally if I'm just heading up for the weekend I'd take the train, but that seemed like a non-ideal mode of transport in these plague days...). During the week I did manage to stick £30 in at the local Asda which was about the only petrol station with any fuel in a 15-mile radius, though this then gave the more hilarious problem that while I had enough to get to Cornwall, I didn't necessarily have enough to get back! As it happened everything sorted itself out fuel-wise - while all the local places were empty (and the M27 signs contained blatant lies as to what the services did and didn't have), the further I got from Fareham the shorter the queues were and finally on the A31 past Ringwood I spotted a station on the other side of the road with a very short queue - and immediately after, a convenient roundabout to double back. So that was sorted then!

Other than petrol station malarkey it was a rather civilised drive down - the queues were a lot less shorter than last time I drove, no-one had done something silly to close the road, and even the Tamar Bridge roadworks weren't that bad (I've had worse queues just driving back from work). The train's still nicer for the longer journeys as I can just watch Once Upon A Time on my laptop, but the Mito's does eat up the miles nicely.

Anyway, now at Craig's we ended up trying to plan where to go. As well as picking the weekend of the fuel crisis, we'd also picked the first properly wet weekend of autumn so the usual ideas of interesting National Trust places were out the window, as was a potential boat trip - so no spontaneous warship this weekend. But we managed to plan a couple of ideas for the weekend...

Day 1, and the real reason for posting before I forget to.

A friend of pleaseremove's had promised a boat trip, so today we headed over to Plymouth for it! The plan was to motor out and moor up upriver somewhere for a picnic lunch, but we scratched that plan as we realised we'd have had to set off much earlier for any chance of a mooring. So instead we motored out to our usual favourite spot at Cawsand Bay... only to realise when we arrived that the wind was in entirely the wrong direction for this to be a decent anchorage. On to plan C, and across the sound to Jennycliff - not our usual anchorage, but a good spot when the wind is wrong for Cawsands.

( Boat trip photos with spontaneous warship )

So on Sunday I got back from a week-long holiday in Cornwall, wherein I managed to see and do quite a bit. It's amazing how many places one can visit if one actually gets up early enough :)


Win:

Shiny new smartphone! The battery life on Mercury (a Nokia 6210 Navigator) and lack of performance reached the point where I was sufficiently annoyed to Just Upgrade It, and on the Saturday before leaving I went and got a shiny new Sony Xperia XZ1 (which I've named Theia - I tend towards Greek mythology for naming my computers)! It proved its worth almost immediately when an accident closed the A35 and I used Google Maps to find an alternative route - while I could have achieved that with the mapping on Mercury, or with a paper map, just being able to plonk a destination into the phone was incredibly convenient. I'm not a complete convert to satnav - Google Maps doesn't quite get double-mini-roundabouts and seems to delight in picking awkward back roads to save maybe 30 seconds - but it's telling that I did the rest of the trip on satnav despite having printed out routes beforehand.

Staying in a castle! Yes, I stayed at the Custodian's House at Pendennis Castle again, because why wouldn't you when you get your very own key to the gatehouse! On the one hand I should search for new places, but on the other hand the first entry in the current guest book did begin "this is our 4th visit..."

The weather - it held for pretty much the entire week, apart from Friday which was blustery and Sunday which was just wet.

All the places I did visit - Falmouth, Pendennis, St Mawes, Trelissick, Glendurgan, Tintagel, Saltash, Cawsand.


Fail:

Hemera (my laptop) finally failing hard (terminal GPU failure), on the first day. Hence why there were no on-holiday blogs, because I'd have to write them up on Theia and I much prefer having a real keyboard for long-form blogging. This was doubly annoying as I also intended to use the laptop to copy photos off of the camera, but fortunately I'd brought a large enough memory card that that didn't really matter.

All the places I didn't visit - Truro, St. Ives, Porthcurno, Eden Project to name a few. Despite having the car I stayed fairly local to Falmouth, though I did achieve a trip out to Tintagel on the way to pleaseremove's.


Meh:

Driving. On the one hand having a car was very handy for a couple of trips that I couldn't have done with public transport... on the other hand the journey up was horrendous, and the journey back just long. Train does have an enormous advantage in that I can just disappear into a book/film/3DS/whatever and not have to continuously pay attention (and there's the view from the Dawlish sea wall as well). That said the MiTo turns out to be quite comfortable for long journeys and did the 500+ mile round trip with ease. Would I drive it again - depends on what I plan to do. For a trip to pleaseremove the train makes more sense, for heading deeper into Cornwall the car gives me more options.

Speaking of film, I scanned a much older negative the other day (Red 7351). This one is from a family holiday in Portugal, many years ago! Around the turn of the millennium my grandparents sold their house in Falmouth and spent a few years gallivanting around the world (as one does). For a time they were staying in Portugal (somewhere in the Algarve region) in a friends/relatives villa and so we went over to visit. This would have been probably in 2000ish - they left Cornwall in 1999, and this would have been before I started university in 2004. In fact, I'm fairly certain it was 1999 or 2000 as it was before the Spanish holiday and on that one myself and elemnar had recently got Pokémon Gold/Silver which came out in 2001 (I remember the pair of us passing time in the airport by sending Mystery Gift messages to each other). That's got to be one of the more unusual ways of dating photos!

This film is a Kodak Gold 400-6. Being ISO 400 there's a fair amount of grain... and with a basic point-and-shoot camera it was generally very overexposed to boot (I looked up the specs of the Canon Snappy LX-II - shutter speed ranges from 1/45 to 1/180 with a f/4.5 lens. Correct exposure on a sunny day with ISO 400 would be more like 1/2000). Fortunately colour negatives are fairly forgiving of this, though it did mean all the dynamic range was squished into one end of the raw scan. I also experimented some more with white balance as I was having problems with colour casts with the White Balance setting - trying to lock it on an unexposed portion of the film didn't work well (because of the dynamic range issue mentioned), so in the end I went with the theory that colour negatives are balanced for daylight and set VueScan to Auto Levels (which preserves the colour balance of the original scan). This generally worked well.


( Anyway, the photos! )

I've finally finished posting the posts for the Hay-on-Wye holiday, from about... 2 months ago.

That delay is about par for the course on this journal.

Anyway, they're all backdated to the date each post is talking about. This does mean they won't have appeared in your friends page, so to read them go to the hay-on-wye tag.

Right, that's the obligatory post for the month done :)

Photo of the day:


After all the time spent driving over the past few days, the GNU decreed that he wanted to go somewhere local. So, after poring over the Ordnance Survey book of walks for the area (well worth getting) we found a nice local walk around the village of Llangynidr.

The walk took us down and along the River Usk, at times scrabbling along a narrow path against the cliff face, before heading up and back down the towpath of the Monmouthshire and Brecon Canal. The promised waterfall was a bit disappointing, but we got a surprise treat in the form of a jet fighter out to play (possibly a Tornado). They often practice low-level high-speed flying around the Brecon Beacons, and this one did a couple of circuits before vanishing into the distance.

Photo of the day:


Today's outing was Hereford, a cathedral city on the English side of the border. With the exception of my aunt we've all been there before (and I've still got the "I climbed Hereford Cathedral" sticker somewhere), but it was still interesting to explore again. We ended up visiting a grand total of 3 churches along with a sort-of museum in an old house right in the middle of the main market square (which for some bizzaire reason had a sand pit of all things).

The museum house had a sculpture exhbition that could only possibly be described as "strange". I think they were supposed to represent something about the family that originally owned the building, but to me it seemed to be more of the "it's art because I say so" that you get from the Tate. The actual museumy bits were much more interesting.

There's several churches, but the main one is Hereford Cathedral (the photo is of a tactile guide showing it). Its main claim to fame is the Mappa Mundi, a circular map of the world as it was known in medieval times. The map has a wonderful mix of things in it, from reasonably accurate positionings of major cathedrals to the Cretan Labyrinth complete with Minotaur. It's well worth a look. The other major attraction in the cathedral is the chained library, which is exactly what it says on the tin - a library where the books are chained to the shelves They claim it's to stop the books being taken, but I maintain it's to stop them escaping.

I know, I know, I only managed to get two days worth of posts up while I was actually there. I blame part of that on the apparent complete worthlessness of GPRS internet these days.

Photo of the day:


Today was the official "pottering around Hay-on-Wye" day. It's a fascinating old town, with half the shops being second-hand bookshops and the other half being disguised second-hand bookshops (even the castle is a bookshop!). As is expected, the concentration of books has resulted in very weird geometry in some places. We didn't find any portals to L-Space - they must be too well hidden.

More than one bookshop had some sort of anti-Kindle poster in the door. The most amusing one was a spoof ot The Mirror Crack'd, entitled The Kindle Crack'd. Another had a poster campaigning for Hay to become a Kindle-free zone. It's not too surprising, considering that the Kindle does away with being able to resell books (or even lend books, for that matter), and I can see bookshops really struggling if e-books take off. That said, give it five or so years and there may be something of a comeback. The same thing has happened with vinyl in the music industry - it was completely displaced by first tapes and then CDs, but recently has resurfaced in popularity.

Later on we did a short spot of geocaching. There's quite a difference in cache density here - where I live, there's about 400 caches within 5 miles (and that circle includes a decent chunk of sea). Here there were ten, of which only two are actually within Hay-on-Wye. So we did the pair of them. The first was a traditional cache made slightly awkward by tree cover, while the second was an offset multi that involved searching all around the churchyard for clues only to find we'd walked past the cache on the way there!

It's time for yet another sequence of holiday blogs, this time for the family holiday to Hay-on-Wye. Maybe this time I'll actually finish the set rather than stop posting part-way through (though the fact I'm not starting these until monday is not a good sign...)


Photo of the day:


Today was mainly spent travelling in what the GNU described as being rather hard work due to the very gusty crosswinds. About half-way along the route was some services where we stopped for luch, and in the middle of the card park was an electric car charging point... with a solar panel on top. Presumably there's some sort of subsidy or thing for having the solar panel, because it can't actually be at all useful for charging your electric car unless you intend to spend the entire day there (that said, it was a very green coloured charging point).

Anyway, eventually we arrived at Hay-on-Wye with just enough light left for elemnar and I to potter around the town and work out where everything is. We discovered both a fudge shop and an ice cream parlour (and decided that they required detailed investigation, possibly spread across several visits), and tracked down the tourist information. And, of course, the eleventy-billion-and-one second-hand bookshops that Hay-on-Wye is famous for.

The above photo was taken part-way round that walk, from the bridge leading out of Hay-on-Wye. The sky looked every bit as yellow and stormy as it did in the photo, but by the time night fell it cleared up and we were treated to a wonderfully clear moonless night sky. Living as I do in the middle of urban southern England I normally can only see the really bright stars, so it was absolutely amazing to be able to see the stars and constellations. I even got to see what I think was a pass of the ISS!

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!