ConistOFF

My agent reminds me* that I promised you all that Coniston Speed Week was to be an interim target, though the time-slip I'd hoped for since simply has not happened. Tomorrow, too, is the final day of this year's current event.

The home of speed on water in the UK is arguably Lake Windermere (our largest), in a region known imaginatively as the Lake District. It was here Norman Buckley, solicitor and daredevil, drove around in a hydroplane for an hour at 80 m.p.h.

Since then, in common with successive governments' efforts to squeeze the fun out of life here in the UK, anything travelling at more than six knots (for those with no GPS display to navigate various speed-restricted 'zones') is disallowed. To put it in context, Olympic swimmers push the limit and need a man in a red-flagged bathing-hat to go ahead of them.

Accordingly, thanks to a largely uncontactable cadre of enthusiasts the event has been revived on nearby Coniston, which is more of a base for record-breaking due to Malcom Campbell's efforts to exceed 300 m.p.h. in a jet-powered hydroplane in the 1960s.

In the Ozarks you could expect the scene below ~ and I need to break off blogging here for five minutes ~ whereas visitors to speed week here in the northwest should expect a scene more like that up top, filmed in colour. But it's how we like it... this blend of misery and speed.

So we shall get there, but for now we're better off sticking to the knitting so as to advance what we already have by way of a flying hydroplane. And when we do, I hope it will be as much about men in a boiler-suits, cork-lined hats and sepia tints as it will electrical airboats.

* Ed. Yeah, right.

The Alma Matrix

I've had a horrified response from the University of Sheffield, who were shocked at my Latin declension and have offered me their single-semester Latin primer.

I felt bad about using the f-word in truth, most of my readers being of delicate state of mind, but felt 'alma mater-fucker' made for a suitable tag-line on the day.

Alma Mater means 'nourishing mother' according to Google (and I can't be bothered waking ChatGPT up for this nonsense); the establishment at which you figuratively suckled.

The prof at the uni points out that 'mother-fucker' was not a known address among the Romans and appears nowhere in 'Ulysses' even when attacked by the Kraken... though in my translation he does shout 'Throw your spears at the mother-fucker!' at that juncture.

During a back-and-forth with the uni we did though settle on 'Alma Mater-Stuprator' in the end, and we have agreed that this will feature as the blog-post title in Latin versions of the blog.

Demos Demo

I think regardless of which side you supported, the overall winner today might be democracy?

Train of Thought

A final casualty of the recent train crash in Spain is apparently its Transport Minister.

Back in the early 1980s I travelled around the country by train, marvelling at how slow they were and how the seats on the metro in Madrid were still wooden, like the ones you'd see in the London Transport Museum.

Since then the network in Spain has long eclipsed ours in the UK, its rolling stock and locos as advanced as anywhere in the world. And yet another accident not unlike the one involving Charles Dickens a century ago, where one crashes into the back of another? Moving around ~ as this and the week's Learjet crash demonstrate  ~ appears as fraught as ever in a world where we expect everything to simply work.

In fact the trains I used back then were so slow that the one to Madrid from the French border featured as an overnight service. What it lacked was the sleeping accommodation, and seeing all of the compartments crammed in the small hours I got off at the next stop. Departing in a Panama hat and the sense of entitlement all Brits have when abroad, a couple of German guys appeared altogether amused at the antics of this crazy Englishman, jah?

Several hundred miles away at the opposite end of the country, I dropped down the steps into the public convenience in Granada's magnificent Alhambra and gardens... when standing at the urinal I overhear two foreigners discussing how this must be, surely, that fellow traveller who'd abandoned the train?

Reader, we went for tapas.

Cancel Colouring

Get cancelled by ChatGPT for labelling propeller blades in ways which might offend.

Asking them to appear like aliens instead, returning bright green I cancel OpenAI for galactic stereotyping.

Ed. And then carries on using them anyway because it's free.

The Madness of King Lear?

No need for gory pictures, whether static or moving, but I've flown business jets as well as turbo-prop and jet airliners and may be able to cast some light upon the loss of the Learjet in Florida this week with all on board.

Firstly, storms over the Florida panhandle are super-sized. The worst visibility that I have ever seen from the windscreen of a car was in the Everglades, and slowed us to a walking pace.

Second, the worst icing I have ever seen in terms of the rate of accretion was at high-level (30,000' plus) due super-cooled water droplets that freeze on impact.

Third, jet airliners rarely need de-iced tailplanes, but any number of turbo-propeller airliners and business jets do. No aircraft though is immune to severe rates of icing, or certified to operate within it for any significant period of time.

Fourthly, aircraft are biased nose-heavy, so that if all else fails they will drop like a dart and recover flying speed. It has to be compensated in level flight by the tail, which like an inverted wing provides a downforce around the pivot-point of lift.

Fifth, those pilots I knew who'd flown highest in the civilian world ~ Concorde pilots excepted ~ had flown Lears upto 54,000 feet, or curvature of the Earth levels. At such altitudes the air is decidedly thinner, and aerodynamic controls altogether less responsive.

All things considered, lose that downforce from the tailplane and any dive is going to be difficult to recover from given the 'startle' factor of an autopilot dropping out, the environment within thunderclouds and icing on windshields and elsewhere. The combination of delays to reducing thrust from engines, of thinner air, and of control surfaces reduced in effectiveness can prove lethal... as it may here.

With speed rapidly increasing beyond those the airframe was designed for, aircraft will begin shedding parts and should they include the tailplane (horizontal stabiliser) then what is left is little different from a missile ~ the Lear here dropping at 600 m.p.h. prior to impact.

If you look at the picture too, regardless of the Learjet's success its tail-surfaces are not the biggest in the business in comparison to practically every current airliner out there. And when you see strakes on aircraft ~ like those beneath the aft fuselage ~ they will generally have been added as afterthoughts that make up for what tail feathers lack.

As indeed happened to the Lear, which lacked such surfaces upon its introduction to service.

Ed. The foregoing penned by the author after several tins of lager, apparently how Shakespeare worked best too.

Third Quarter Results 2026

We go live to the chairman who, stepping up to the laptop, is more of a breakfast-bar-stoolman.

'I wish first to turn to our vast ~ and growing ~ media empire. I am happy to report that having in September accrued our first million views, October surpassed this with 1.30 million views in that month alone.

 

(I realise this is Skelmersdale Valley and not Silicon, but it would help if we could have at least one whoop and cheer before I proceed?)

Thank you. But I would especially like to thank the AI bots ~ many of whom I know will be in the audience here today ~ for their contribution to these figures. We're all in this together, and so I have also to mention my general practitioner, who this week diagnosed the repetitive strain injury that has been put down to my obsessive clicking.

But it's not just about blogs, and during the quarter from among our back-catalogue  'Final Call' and 'Flying Foam' were published on Google Play, which you are now able to suffer at touch of a screen. Besides this publishers Hachette have decided that to offer my e-book 'Penis Pending' would crash the site, and have granted remaining rights to my own publisher, GLOBAL MEDIA DOMINATION. Accordingly it will appear alongside existing titles on Google Play and all three are available in velveteen cover form on our merch page in time for Christmas.

On the boating side we've spotted a niche in the market that has identified those of a schizoid personality disorder and cannot decide whether they want to be sailors or pilots. Accordingly the 'flying hydroplane' uploaded to the cloud in recent days fills the need entirely, as it will in due course be able to fly clear of the water's surface. I myself have this special need and am hoping the NHS will join my campaign to have it released on prescription.

I am thus indebted to 'TD Commons' and 'Boat Design' for helping promulgate these boldest of schemes, because here in the UK there are few platforms beyond those devoted to meeting new people and shagging them.

You can contact me on any number of these, incidentally, or else through this portal here where my laptop is always open... but don't come to me with your problems.

Thank-you for coming and you're welcome now to join me in the canteen to watch me eat steak and fried eggs.

Well I am sure we would all like to thank the chair, but meantimes there's been one question selected from the press corps and it asks whether he plans to split boating and blogging in order to produce a pair of unicorns? 

Colin has said he won't do this, however, as it's already been done on stage by Penn and Teller.