Kit Cat #5: WTF?

Meanwhile back at the Assembly Hall ~ and this is pure Boeing ~ I discover I've not so much ordered two starboard pontoons, as built them.

Cast round like Basil Fawlty looking for someone to blame, settling on calling the universe out:

Colin            What the fuck... why've you done this to me?

Universe       Ha ha ha... it's what I do, man! You been listening to Goethe again!

After an interlude banging my head on a wall I decide to list one online amongst the personals: 'Starboard pontoon in same-sex r'ship WLTM port pontoon for days at the seaside. No smokers'.

Ed. Colin is taking a long break and yoga-class as he's not yet forgiven the universe.

Kit Cat #4: Keep Railing

The universe has been on again to say if I look around the garage it has for me an ideal block of wood for resting the pontoons on whilst fitting the seat-rail.

I'd have liked this to be a whole lot shorter and matching the individual seat length but that would have required (a) knowing how many seats there need be and where to put them and (b) driving screws in from the reverse side prior to lining with foam because the screws need to be driven into timber and not insulating foam.

Accordingly they are fitted post-production as regards the uprights, whereupon we can fix them to the vertical post at either end thereof.

Although it adds weight and detracts from the aesthetics, it is a practical solution to making the watercraft a modular construction to which a range of accessories might be fitted. They might include seats, battery-packs, avionics bays or things those not at the seaside purely for the ice-cream may want to fit.

Kit Cat #3: Universal Truth

The philosopher Goethe said when you set out on a proj, that the universe conspires to make it happen... or at least it did before he got run over.

But there I was back in the workshop, planning to fit the seats to my creation mwah ha, mwah ha, mwah ha ha ha ha ha... when I get a call from the Universe.

Because I was just wondering how far up two-foot high pontoons each seat would need to be fixed, such that my elbows perched nicely upon them?

The conversation went like this:

Colin            Hello, is it me you're looking for?

Universe      Are you able to speak, because I have to do the health and safety?

Colin            Yes, I am.

Universe       See that garden chair over there you sit on drinking beer?

Colin            Hold on, I'll get my glasses.

Universe       No, it's too early to drink, but if you measure it I made it 24" for you.

Colin            Oh thanks. What can I do for you?

Universe       Tell Elon Musk he's not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy.

Nepalling

I've still a passing interest in geology, which I studied to a greater or lesser extent at university in Sheffield. We would look down microscopes at slivers of rock under UV light and ask what we were doing with our lives.

But glaciers are the sort of thing you don't pay attention to until they're knocking at your door; as they did in the last ice age when Britons lived on top of hills because there was nowhere else to go unless you liked ski-ing.

They are big though, and not something you want to be near when bits break off ~ as they are beginning to do with alarming regularity. They also however feed ways of life downstream that has existed for practically centuries and upon which we've come to increasingly rely.

There used to be a formula amongst Fleet Street as I recall when calamities would be reported were a Briton involved, three Europeans or a hundred plus from some other part of the world... or something to that effect. Or as John Donne would have said, 'Ask not for whom the bell tolls, but get yourself a cappuccino instead.'

Accordingly the focus has been on the drying out of the Colorado River basin, driven by a paucity of snow in recent years in the Pacific north-west of the USA. Snow will either melt, or accumulate to form glaciers under pressure of its own weight besides temperatures remaining stubbornly low for long enough.

But I flew a spell in Cambodia at Siem Riep where you could see the jungle temple that Lara Croft brought into every home; or drink a pint of lager in town for 25p and treat yourself to a fried scorpion on a stick.

To vary this routine we'd cruise the Tonle Sap, a giant lake that disappears and reappears each year with each monsoon. Here we'd learn that there are over four hundred types of rice ~ not just Uncle Ben's ~ and enjoy cocktails that proved to be an endless supply of rum and coke.

But these water-courses relied not so much on the rain falling during that monsoon so much as snow-melt from the Hindu Kush... I think that was it, though it may have been a restaurant I went to in Manchester.

Flying when in Türkiye though I'd hire a car days off and visit any number of Roman towns, invariably a few miles inland from the seaside whereas once they will have been on it. Walking there, what stands out is that lack of water flowing where once it must have done practically everywhere: like Venice in Vegas on a power-cut.

For what does for civilisations everywhere is not so much what we might guess, so much as a simple lack of water.

Have a good weekend.

Only one in the pic, but flying over China you have to ask what's with the blue roof?

Serf's Up

Went to get your backer-board panels Monday morning last and fell victim to a siren call from McDonalds for a breakfast burger... and spotted this exiting the retail park.

The royal family owns much of Cornwall, besides stately piles around London and elsewhere. I thought they owned the entire foreshore of these islands too, but apparently half of it belongs to local councils, the National Trust or the military.

They do own the seabed as far as the twelve-mile territorial limit, though' that's a moving target with sea-levels set to rise by upto two metres by 2100.

How that works legally is therefore a mystery, as since the time of Magna Carta the extent of property has been fixed by the Land Registry or similar and its borders not allowed to drift. 

As they own the Registry too, however, that shouldn't prove a problem.

Dolly Parton R.I.P.

The queen is dead. I'd a young lodger in Mitcham while setting out on working life in and around London, and he'd always been a huge Elvis fan: unusual in someone so young at the time. He told me how at home he'd gone downstairs in tears, hearing that Elvis was dead.

His father asked him what was wrong, and he said 'The king is dead.' to which his father replied, 'What... the Duke of Edinburgh?'.

Ed. The Duke of Edinburgh was the husband of the late Queen Elisabeth in the UK.

Oh, Come On!