David Morris – brassedoff.net

It’s been half-term this week, so I’ve had a couple of days off to coincide with Daniels week off. Mrs Woolforbrains decided it would be a good idea to visit Beamish, the open-air museum near Durham, so as the weather was passable on Thursday, we headed up North. In hindsight, it’s a good job we did because the Picasso failed its MOT on Friday, so we’ve spent the last couple of days getting repairs to the front suspension and anti-roll bars. Ah well. Back to the trip anyway…

I’ll probably have more to write (or certainly photos to share) later this week, but one thing that struck me is how many phrases used in everyday life stem from old professions (and I don’t necessarily mean the oldest profession). Take this for instance. It’s a picture in the print shop at the museum.

There are two sets of type in this arrangement. I bet you can’t guess where the capital letters are stored? Yep. They’re in the (roll of drums)… upper case, and the little letters are in the lower case. Who’d have thought?

If you’ve got a sweet tooth, you’ll also like the sweet shop at Beamish. Every hour, the man makes sweets in front of the assembled crowd and hands out free samples.

He starts with sugar, glucose and water in a mix at around 140′C which he pours out on to a steel table. between two dividers (to stop the mixture running off). He then adds colour and flavouring (in this case, he’s making pear drops).

Using something not unlike a wallpaper scraper, he mixes the mixture around as it begins to set. You can see how it comes up in sheets. As he mixes it, the colouring and flavourings are getting evenly distributed throughout the batch. It’s also cooling down. All the time, he’s looking for the right level of solidity before moving on to the next stage.

The penultimate stage is kneading the mixture. He does this to get the air out of it. As he was kneading the dough (?!), you could hear tiny little pops as the air bubbles punctured. Once this was complete, he flattened the mixture to about 25-30mm thick then with a big pair of scissors, proceeded to chop postcard-sized lumps off it and roll each lump into a thick saisage shape.

These sausages of hot mix (note that he’s still got his gloves on) go into something that bears an uncanny resemblance to a ravioli machine. Crank the handle and out pops perfectly formed pear drops. A few minutes cooling on the steel table, a quick tap on the hard surface and the sweets are ready for dishing out. Warn pear drop. Yummy!!

There’s an old school building at the museum which bore a close resemblance to the infants school we have here in the village (Daniel’s old school),  one main difference being that our village school was older! It was kitted out with some traditional toys to play with. Funnily enough, there was a picture in one of the Guardian supplements today showing some African kids playing with something similar. It took a bit of work but Dan eventually got the hang of it. If we hadn’t dragged him away, we would have been there yet.

In the interests of child protection etc, I’ve obliterated the face of the kid behind Daniel to avoid him being recognised. I clearly would not have permission for him to be on this photograph.

I’ve just had a couple of abortive attempts to install JBuilder 2006 on a new openSUSE 10.3 installation.

The installation keeps aborting with the following error:

java: xcb_xlib.c:52: xcb_xlib_unlock: Assertion `c->xlib.lock’ failed.

A quick google didn’t turn up a problem with JBuilder 2006, but did turn up the same problem with Matlab. Luckily, the same fix works… thanks to kzarog:

set LIBXCB_ALLOW_SLOPPY_LOCK=1
export LIBXCB_ALLOW_SLOPPY_LOCK

This appears to have solved my installation problems. If it turns out to be a problem running JBuilder 2006, I’ll have to put the above set in a script that fires off JBuilder.

…time passes…

Despite the above fix, I couldn’t get the installer to work. I ended up copying the whole tree from /opt/Borland/JBuilder2006 on another machine into /opt/… on the new machine. Fortunately, these sorts of things often work on Linux. A quick re-registration and I’m up and running.

I’ll be honest here. It’s not in my back yard although with a bit of judicious tree pruning, I would probably be able to see the proposed Network Rail maintenance depot planned for Beighton.

There’s an active pressure group trying to stop Network Rail building this depot on the site of a former rail yard in what is apparently designated green-belt land. I for one hope Network Rail do get to build this depot. It’s got to go somewhere, and we should be supporting the railways as a form of sustainable transport. True, there are probably other potential locations for this, but it’s probably land already owned by Network Rail. This link on Google maps shows the proposed location and it is quite clearly an old rail yard (at the time of writing). In fact, I think it’s only recently the track was lifted.

It seems like an ideal location for the depot, bordered by two existing used railway lines and the River Rother. There is a nice walk in that area across the Beighton Washlands, but that’s further to the East and North and won’t be directly affected by the depot, except for the visual impact.

What makes me smile is that many of the people at the bottom end of Beighton closest to the build are in the shadow of the A57 flyover, and that’s hardly sustainable transport is it?

It looks like an argument that’s going to rumble on for a while yet.

It’s probably one of the first tunes everyone learns to play on a musical instrument. Why? Because you only need three notes. Typical therefore that Daniel’s brass teacher has taught them B natural, C and D. You can’t play Merrily We Roll Along with B natural, C and D. You need notes a tone apart. Enter cornet-playing father. Daniel now has an extra note in his repertoire, namely E. You can play Merrily We Roll Along with C, D and E.

To prove it, here’s a short mp3 of Daniel playing that good old standard…

Merrily we roll along as played by Daniel aged 7

Just a reminder that he’s only been playing around 10 days. I think this is pretty good progress and he’s making a reasonable sound to boot.

For once, something off the TV. More specifically, the Cadburys advert. For those outside the UK (Anna :-), Cadburys’ is the major UK chocolate manufacturer. This is an ad that started airing last weekend and here’s a YouTube recording of it.

Interested to see what Phil Collins looked like when he was playing it himself, I also managed to find this YouTube recording of the man performing the same song on his farewell tour. Compare and contrast (as I’m sure many many people in the UK have been doing over the past few days…)

(Thanks to
CK Sample III for the clue on fixing the YouTube video import URL.)

Well and truly. I really tried to convince him that he wanted a cornet, but he insisted on the euphonium. I had to give in because it was better than a saxophone or a clarinet. To find out what I’m talking about, take a look at this posting on Mrs Woolforbrains‘ blog. This posting is filed firmly under family and loosely under music.

I’ll apologise for this posting up front. It’s not often I resort to political ranting… not on my blog anyway, but this is annoying.

We are becoming an increasingly on-line society. Chez Morris is certainly an on-line household. We e-shop at eBuyer, Amazon and a host of other e-tailers (Mrs Woolforbrains uses lots of smaller on-line sources for woolly things). Of course, all e-tailers depend on some sort of distribution and delivery network to get the stuff you’ve just ordered to your doorstep in a timely manner. Consider therefore the consternation that the current UK postal strikes are causing in this household.

Why are the posties striking?

I’ll admit, I find it easier to listen to the likes of Adam Crozier,  head honcho at the Royal Mail. He holds that, if I understand it correctly, if a postie is paid for an eight hour day, they should be working an eight hour day. Perhaps what’s hapening is that if a postie sets off on his round and finishes in five hours, he / she classes it as a days work. The ‘bosses’ want the postie in that instance to go back to the sorting office and do another three hours work.

Now call me middle class, but that seems like a reasonable request on the part of the bosses. I know there are other issues that they’re striking about: pensions etc, but if this I’ve described is part of the problem, sorry, but no sympathy from me (on that count).Once of the Union guys on Radio 5 this morning made reference to ‘Dickensian practices’. Sorry, but getting paid for what you work isn’t Dickensian, it’s a fact of life.

Having said all this, I’ve got a lot of respect for our posties. I wouldn’t do the job, up at silly hours in all weathers, but there again, if there’s a chance of them doing another three or four hours after they’ve done the first run in less than a day, I’m sure me and many more would welcome the restoration of a second daily delivery.

Whatever happens, please get it sorted out soon. We need our fix of Amazon (and other) deliveries in this house. The  only saving grace is Mrs Woolforbrains must be knitting out of the stash rather than replenishing the stash which must be a Good Thing.

That’s it. Rant over.

My claim to fame appears to be as the bloke that took the picture of Harry Brearley. This picture in fact.

Harry was the man that discovered stainless steel back in the early 1900s and this picture is one I submitted to Geograph some time ago. Since that, it’s attracted some attention. Last year, I was contacted by a Danish publishing house who wanted permission to use the picture in a school textbook they were working on. This week, I was contacted by one of Harry’s relative, his great granddaughter, who was kind enough to thank me for taking the picture and providing a bit of missing history in her family archives:

Hi David,

I just wanted to say thank you for taking the photo of the monument to Harry Brearley. I am his great grandaughter and as all my relatives from the Deepcar and Stocksbridge area have since passed away, it was lovely to be able to track down some history of him but more importantly, I now know what he looked like! I knew that he was the inventor of stainless steel, but no one ever really spoke about him much, I think he may have become the black sheep of the family, but I know that my aunt ( his grandaughter) used to come down to London to see us and then go on to Torquay every year with my father when I was small to ‘ visit a cemetary’ but would never say anymore!

Best Wishes Chris Turner(Nee Brearley)

I can’t begin to tell you, dear reader, how nice it is to receive emails like this, out of the blue. I feel like I’ve not only contributed something to the richness of the Internet, but also contributed something to this person’s research of her family history. It’s also nice when people take the time out to contact you and let you know you’ve helped. If you ever read this Chris, thanks for the email!!

I’ll be a bit light on readers this week as one of my regulars is on holiday in ‘Vegas, playing the tables and generally having a good time, aren’t you Mark?

Finally for today, Mrs Woolforbrains has, in her little corner of the Internet, broken the magical  barrier of (on average) three comments per blog post. This from she who was never really bothered about a blog. At least it gives us an excuse for a glass of champagne to celebrate, although to be truthful it will probably be a glass of Aussie look-a-like rather than the French stuff for all the usual anti-Gallic reasons! …not that we usually need an excuse…!