Smiley Myrus

My doctor warned me not to watch videos of this kind before bed-time, but I wonder if you like me are trying to figure out whether a wind-machine might have been used in the making?

I'm thinking that yes, on that day in Malibu ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it had to be used in the absence of Nature coming up with the goods.

Exhibit A: flowers waving around in the foreground with no back-up from the rear

Exhibit B: spliced footage from the same shoot, the wind dropped to a dead calm

Exhibit C: a dog who's ears aren't flapping in the wind... for it's been turned off

I have contacted Miley to check, and to offer a chance to meet me over a pint of ale and bag of pork scratchings at a pub of her choosing next time she's in Manchester. Or at least a badge.

The Eyes Have It

The last four CEOs at Boeing provided themselves enumeration to the tune of a half billion dollars whilst the company's losses mounted, but as that's the MO in business during the period of decline in the West, it's hardly a surprise and likely what Rome was doing prior the 'goths turning up at the gates of Rome.

But put on the spot by one Senator Hawley, at the point at which he is asked about that (see the Netflix doc, #2 in the UK currently), the pupils dilate in a fight or flight response.

One thing about flying airliners is that once the departure's been dealt with and the autopilot's plugged in the options are (or were) to review the papers, eat your fried breakfast or talk shit with the co-pilot. And ideally all at once.

But flying with a Turkish co-pilot ~ who admittedly would be more likely to view the events of 9/11 from a Muslim perspective ~ he was of the opinion that it had been a deliberate act orchestrated from within the USA.

I suggested that if he watched the president's reaction to the news whilst listening to a class of school-kids, you can see that same response... and it can't be faked because it springs from a part of the brain that reacts before we're aware of it. Hitting a low bridge once at 40 m.p.h. I asked myself who was screaming like a Neanderthal; before realising it must be me because no one else was there.

Now many years on, the thinking amongst the people who think paedophiles spring from Pizza Huts is that the president would not have known because he would not have been involved. And the scary thing is, that looks like it might even be true.

What do you think? Could the Earth be flat, or our Moon really made of cheese? Let me know in the comments below... you sad bastards.

Ed. The following reconstruction may have been digitally altered.

bide a wEE

Prior that thatched woman with the hair, utilities used to be straightforward whether it were gas, electricity, telephones, water or what were known as the 'rates' or local council tax. Now they are uniformily expensive, fairly shit (literally in the case of the water utilities), in your face on TV all of the time and not least requiring that regular churn at the expiry of the contract.

In an effort to deter me from leaving one they practically doubled in price on expiry, EE has let me know what I'll be missing... as pictured below.

This is like, were Suzuki to hear I was considering a change of car, describing those benefits I'd be missing as (a) wheels on each corner and (b) one inside for pointing it in whichever direction I should choose.

And isn't that Meghan Markle who's sorry to see me go? They do use Kevin Bacon at every turn, whose forthcoming slasher movie can be seen at theatres near you or by livestream hereabouts if ever he appears at my door.

Ed. That's not going to happen Colin, is it, unless he falls from space?

Tekever Takeover

We've seen how heavy-lift drones are doing the heavy-lifting on the front line, but in addition to that there is the reconnaissance that allows for bombs to be dropped on targets like SAM anti-aircraft equipment at a greater comparative cost.

You'd like to think that after the Spitfire and Mosquito the UK could do this itself but instead they have turned to a Portuguese firm, which itself has funded the supply of such drones to the tune of $250 million.

Did you know however that they are manufactured under licence hereabouts before they are returned to Portugal, re-assembled and signed off prior to being driven to the front line in a low-tech Ford Transit van?

By such means the UK government has pledged £1 billion in the effort to shift some 150,000 of such drones over there in the coming twelve months. If that sounds like a lot, bear in mind the Ukraine alone deploys upto 10,000 per day.

If there is one thing war gears up more than any other, it's production lines.

These aircraft are snapped together like Airfix, something Boeing hoped to cut costs with at a non-union plant using anyone who could wield a spanner. Sections were, if you watch the Netflix doc, an inch out: okay for trousers but less so for airliners.

Blue Sky Thinking

We saw recently, didn't we, how contrails help reduce the transparency of the skies, so that they will never again be as blue as they were ~ or we like to think they were ~ during our childhood? Well turns out they increase global warming considerably, that veil they produce serving to trap solar radiation and warming the atmosphere.

They've even got their own interest group at contrails.org where you can order tee-shirts and spray-cans of shaving-foam to create your own trails in the class-room.

But now Google, guardian of this blog, has underwritten a project intended to ask pilots to ascend or to descend so as to stop producing these contrails at all... or at least in one small patch of sky.

They are produced in the first place by a process called sublimation, when the hot gases emerging from jet-engines freezes so quickly that they miss out the bit in the middle we learned about at school called the liquid phase... altogether. Had they not done so, the vapour would simply evaporate rather than form reflective ice-crystals.

All depends though on the temperature of the outside air, and the only way to alter that is to climb or descend into colder or warmer air. Note to pilots, the atmospheric temperature does not continue to fall with height but eventually stays put at the levels Concorde flew at, and rises briefly beyond. Back at space, however, you must not go out without a coat on.

Nonetheless as commercial aviation is set to double in the near future, all of this is about as effective as trying to mitigate global sea-level rise with dessert-spoons and buckets.

Shanwick is a conflation of Prestwick (Scotland) and Shannon (Ireland) and sounds like it should be pronounced without a 'w' but with an 'Ahaaar' at the end of it... but isn't.

Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing

Netflix's doc as ever a valuable insight in this case into regular oversights related to Boeing product, and specifically the 737. Introduced in 1967, or just ten years after the Trabant to put that into context, it would be possibly the most reliable airliner to be built until such time as Boeing appointed Jack Welch's proteges as CEOs... when it would become perhaps the least reliable.

Withdrawn from service after two fatal crashes within five months, it was described on its re-introduction by Michael O'Leary as the most reliable airliner ever: when a clown like that says so, you know something's amiss. As with the Air Alaska flight above, when the stargazers would be delighted once it had shed a door or two mid-flight.

Welch prided himself at GEC on sacking ten percent of 'least performing' employees on a regular basis, which made him something of a saint to financiers but a bit of a cunt to everyone else. His proteges, rather than design a new aircraft from scratch, decided to keep upgrading what they had, which is when the problems started. For example, imagine running with the Trabant but adding everything to it that we hope for in a modern car?

And the problem with the firing thing was that the bulk of those were sourced from the quality department... employees with decades of service sacked at a moment's notice and their tires slashed instead of the carriage-clock. They went better, driving one whistleblower to suicide in a hotel parking lot prior to testifying. Organisations do exaggerate evil besides excellence, though, as I've suggested here before.

So when you get on a Boeing, chances are nothing amiss is likely to happen but do bear in mind that unlike with Airbus, any number of the people who built it viewed the process as fairly shit, and the product they build not one they'd want either they or their family to use on their next holiday... as the documentary suggests.

Ed. Thatcher had her own Jack Welch in the shape of British Airways' Lord King, who was known as Baron King of Wartnaby to her and as the warthog to everyone else. For 'warthog' again, read 'bit of a cunt'.

DRA, DRA Rasputin...

President Putin today said of the UK's support for Ukraine that (a) he's very angry and (b) has a nuclear weapon. This is because the long-range strikes hitting corner-shops nearby appear to be provided almost exclusively by UK drones like the ULTRA up there or ~ if not Molloy Aeronautics ~ the HYDRA seen down there.

Thing about humans is, we were designed for tangible threats viz. world on fire, not an issue but great TV; my house on fire, an issue as I've no TV.

Therefore we go on about climate change and how concerned we all are, but aren't really until there's no water emerging from the tap.

Likewise, war with Russia is not something to exercise any of us until a Russian drone lands on a Tesco warehouse and sends our burgers up in flames.

The reason we have a representative democracy in the UK as elsewhere is, as with the death penalty, the government feels it is more enlightened than the rest of us and should 95% of the populace not want to go to war with Russia, it doesn't matter for it will all work out well in the end; or at least until those big mushroom clouds start popping up here and there.

It's a great question though ~ appeasement or war ~ isn't it? Do we let apparent bullies do their worst, or fight back... ideally by getting others to do it for us first?

Was Nietzsche right, and does war reinvigorate a culture? Or does it simply ruin plans we had for the coming weekend?

Discuss... all night in an underground shelter.

Ed. Today's blog-post was sponsored by the Russian embassy, and I'd nothing to do with it.

Vertical (Taking) Flight Society

As a paid-up member I was taken aback to read it's membership has declined by some 10% in recent years, which they attribute to:

(a)    Government travel restrictions (Ed. on the gravy-train?)

(b)    Aerospace market contraction

(c)    Declining research funding

(d)    The 'bowling alone' effect

(e)    An ageing workforce

I would add that its location in the US, formerly a benefit, will be of declining value. A look at the expo in Shenzen if nothing else (the size of fourteen football fields) will convince most of us that the real innovation in vertical flight is all taking place with drones, and practically all of that in China. DARPA's heavy-lift challenge was entirely welcome in this regard, but looked like a village fete in comparison.

The VFS has too been bank-rolled by the military-industrial complex, with members in the US and Europe with a sour-grape 'not invented here' purview of what is going on with drones. This in turn means ~ they paying the piper ~ there has to be wholly more articles on incremental improvements to conventional means of flight than on any other. Which is of great interest to the aging community referred to above, but of little or no interest to my fourteen year-old son.

Organisation of the UK chapter, from which I was ejected for suggesting we meet at bars on Harley-Davidsons and sleep with menstruating women by way of induction, is a case in point. Organised by one man in Glasgow and one in Liverpool, invariably they arrange meets in London ~ because that's a half-hour from Farnborough where most of the MIC is based.

But to a great extent it is down to the digitisation of every means of doing anything. For what makes driverless taxis worth reviewing is not the car so much as what is making it tick ~ and as that's a series of charges on a silicone chip it doesn't make for good copy. I headed up training in full-motion simulators that were literally the front end of airliners; but what I did is done nowadays by a company called LOFT which relies on VR headsets to do much the same thing for a fraction of the cost.

Do I have a remedy? Yes, but it is to relocate to Atlantic City, rebrand as a Vertical Fight Society and let the academics have it out in a cage whilst we place bets during a global livestream.

Ed. And can we have this published among correspondence in 'Vertiflite' please?

Crash Investigation Investigation

Are crashes really worth investigating, aside from the cracking TV series they make? 

I'm throwing that out there because yesterday the main arterial road between the south of this great nation and its northwest ~ not least Scotland ~ was closed all day northbound. It was also closed southbound as screens were erected, because we all love a pile-up. Note to government, robotic cars don't.

But we've already the lowest productivity in the developed world, and diverting cars and trucks through Little Snoring all day won't have helped. But the fact there was one fatality and several injuries involved in this collision involving three trucks and a car required an investigation.

At the end of the day, however, it is difficult knowing how anyone will benefit. The dead won't be coming back, the insurers will be paying out regardless and anyone sent to prison in the UK as a consequence will be out sooner than expected and will emerge a criminal if not already: especially as nobody will be hiring them afterward. 

A full twenty percent of accidents occur due to one or other driver nodding off, the bulk of these at the circadian witching hour of 03:00 a.m. The accident here took place at 04:10 a.m. and it is much harder to attribute blame to the sleepy driver than it is to the drunk or drugged-up, for like an ice-bullet it leaves no trace. 

Offset that against a knock-on effect of billions of pounds and countless cats kicked at home by people like me who've had a bad day. As Jason Arday's case proved we already treat each other as inhumanly as possible, and I foresee a day when rather than investigate scenes we'll bulldoze wreckage out of the way and treat motorists involved as road-kill.

Now turn your papers over children, and:

"Is this a world that you would want, or anyone but Colin would want? Discuss."

                                                                                                            10 marks

Ed. Colin is bitter for he applied for a job at the Air Accidents Investigation Branch and failed, principally because his executive summary on the set investigation read 'Shit happens, mate.'

Air Wear

What do tricks and golf balls have in common? Surface textures designed to help fill the void behind each in order to move more efficiently, or farther in the case of the latter. These vortex generators produced swirls in the air that help fill that gap that would otherwise create suction at the rear.

The treatment below is rather more of a quandary, but sidewinds squeeze into the gap between cab and trailer creating drag, and I'm guessing this is less of an issue if there's an 'air curtain' between the two made of high-energy swirls of the same?

All a bit of a green box-ticking exercise in view of the fact a fifth of trucks on roads are running empty, but beats doing nothing at all.

Flower Power

There's a man round the corner keeps a spectacular display of dahlias going through the summer. But here's the thing: he can't see it except when he's tending it as his garden and house are the other side of the fence.

The important thing is, it makes me feel better and if you could all do something to make me feel better each day then the world would be a better place for me mainly.

Rocket Men

Only right that this should eventuate where amateur rocketry began with Goddard back in 1926, but here an amateur rocket with two stages besting the Karman line.

Only two gripes: where was the onboard camera for a Sputnik-eye view and what kind of name is "Dear Rodeo" for a team of rocket men?

They do have the advantage of the Nevada Desert for a playground too, which beats Mitcham Common hands-down.

Dash Cam

It appeared a man on a unicycle was set to win the women's 800m final at those European Athletics championships in Birmingham this week; but it's a cameraman tasked with close-ups that are beyond drones or else our old friend the spider-cam.

Watching it, I wonder if you like me found your mind straying toward the Gulf War?

Dean Kamen pioneered the self-balancing electric unicycle which he went on to call the Segway. As I recall it was developed as 'Project Ginger' and demo'ed to tech bros like Bezos and Gates in secret. They all agreed it would change means of transport on a revolutionary scale, which just shows that brilliant people can be as stupid as the rest of us.

But move on, and Segway would be sold to an ex-coal-miner from Leeds, who made his money developing those cages ~ or baskets ~ filled with rocks and used to build defences in places like Iraq. Sadly he died reversing his Segway off a cliff whilst making way for a dog-walker. History doesn't recall the dog-walker in question, but he has to be up there with the 'man from Porlock' in the English annals.

The Segway would be evolved into a more compact version altogether by someone based in the UK who co-founded Y Combinator in the US ~ and this (unless it is the Australian equivalent) is what allows us to enjoy the efforts of local athlete Keely Hodgkinson at Birmingham.

I can't leave off the reflection however without recalling my own efforts in the 1980s to build a unicycle; lost to posterity because digital photography was yet to escape Kodak's clutches. It was not electronically stabilised, however, and proved a dismal failure.

I like to think there was a life lesson there, but if there is one at all it is not to be so stupid.

Float, Float... Off

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is what extremely thin mono-hulls want to do if left to their own devices. Vowed I'd never be back here stood in the anaerobic sludge that comprises the nearest pond, but here we are. The exercise prompts a number of questions, of which the most pressing has to be, Why am I wasting my life like this?

I have to add a couple of sizeable battery-packs that each weigh around 2.50 kilos, just to set the mono-ski at an angle of around forty-five degrees... hopeless. Issue as much as anything is the timber content of the ski, which produces some 0.75kg of buoyancy and at a considerable remove, which gives it greater leverage.

What we would need to do is sub it with PVC strip of around 2mm by 100m section, which can be sourced in Burnley for around £11 per 2400mm, although the point is that in prototyping you have to choose your battles. The density of spruce is of the order of 0.50 that of water, that of PVC nearer 1.50g per cubic centimetre.

For the fact is, the dis-benefits of mono-skis are positive benefits when it comes to catamarans, which relish the idea of lighter and more buoyant skis for example and for whom floating upright comes with the territory. There is a literal tipping point if close-coupled pontoons are involved as we intend, but this will be addressed by the wings that are extended to either side.

Well done me though, and well done the waders!

Patently Clever

But none of this has been getting boats built, so let's recall the benefits of putting a maquette or model together for the purpose of producing drawings that would grace the pages of a patent specification. And here below, a delightful render from my old friend and erstwhile technical drawing expert Richard Bache at Carimet.

During the process of mocking up the cat, I got to wondering whether it might ever be feasible to build a drone that may be racked, an almost two-dimensional product.

The one advantage that batteries have as a means of powering airships for instance is that they remain constant in weight. And as for boats, it means they can be used as ballast. We've all seen glass bottles bobbing upright at the seaside, the question being whether sufficient ballast might allow for a mono-ski to float upright prior to take-off with its motors and avionics in particular clear of the waterline.

Bit of a rabbit-hole to go down and means donning the waders again, but someone's got to do it, haven't they?

Ed. Not sure why my thumbnail looks like that, but I've a manicure Friday anyway.

Skyweaver

Always thought this would be a good idea, but thinking and doing are two different things altogether as a casual place at my own life will testify. But the DARPA heavy-lift challenge has thrown up any number of beautiful innovations and this amongst them.

What has been encouraging too is that invariably innovators have drawn upon the possibilities of electrical motors or jet-turbines, eschewing IC engines altogether so far as I can see; even the relatively compact rotary engines that are produced here and do power aerial drones worldwide requiring range or endurance.

And that is probably the key, not much of either being required for this challenge, instead a requirement to move heavy stuff a short distance across what would in reality be a battlefield of sorts.

This one though flies a couple of aircraft in circles so as to put the line connecting them under tension, whereupon they both climb in order to raise the payload that is fixed to the vertical line to the ground. Thereafter they are co-ordinated so they can move in one direction or another.

It is all software driven and way beyond my pay grade, so well done!

Eh Aye...

There's considerable debate out there as to whether these are human, robotic or AI; all I know is that I'd like one for Christmas.

Livestream*

We go now live, now that funding has been withdrawn from the radio telescope at Jodrell Bank, to Astronomer Royal Colin Hilton's back garden for an epic view of the 65% eclipse that won't be coming this way again until 1990. Direct views of the sun are NASA's ball-park really, and so here we have bounced an image of the sun off a pair of concave make-up mirrors and onto a black-glass set of bathroom scales. Finally we view all of this through a pair of sunglasses from my Chinese neighbour, who now (as she has long suspected) thinks I'm a trannie.

The Astronomer Royal comments: 'Basically this was shit, but an excuse for tinnies in the back garden. I was in London for the 1999 full Monty: birds shut up, multiple shadows of leaves, cappuccino, nutty Danish pastry. Basically if it's not advertised as 95% or more, it's like a cunt in a BMW on high beam with a headlight out.'

* Ed. Of golden bats-piss, sadly.

Istanbullish

Back when I 'served' you all at London's Heathrow airport it was the busiest in the world, but after I left it went into severe decline and so has since been overtaken as Europe's busiest by Istanbul (above). It might change with a third runway, although as this was first considered eighty years ago your breath should not be held. We do have the consolation IST was designed by London architects... ours being a service economy.

Actually LHR once had a third runway, the crosswind 23 that I used on windier days altogether. Without an ILS, it required a sidestep that would put the fear of God into most airline pilots ~ as it did me.

Heathrow as it looked when I was still there

Inflated Expectations

Elsewhere in these pages there's a post on the remarkable rise of mega-inflatable, which the UK government dismisses as a 'small boats' problem whereas it should be celebrated as a 'big boats' sensation. As children we too had an inflatable, although a canoe seating just two or three. Later in my time as a captain we would be tasked in a swimming pool with climbing into those inflatable slides that can be detached from the doors of airliners after a ditching.

But this stuff is on a whole different scale. The prior post pointed out that inflatables of this kind are wholly unique, and kindly supplied by Mr Alibaba and his friends for record attempts across the English Channel ~ a route that has inspired any number of historic crossings in the past from Bleriot to that Frenchman with his jet-powered platform!

Such is the pace of development ~ on a par with DARPA's heavy-lift challenge in the US ~ that my recent post described inflatables capable of seating some 130. Now therefore in just a short time we've (not me personally) been able to nearly double that number!

Were I a vlogger I would buy one to mount a challenge, along with a select group of followers... but I'm not, so I won't.

We shall however wait in anticipation of an entry in the forthcoming annual, which to my mind is a bit too 'Dorling Kindersley' for my own tastes nowadays. Back when I was a child (shut-up, Luther) it looked like a telephone directory and would include records we were more interested in, like the world's longest human penis.

Ed. The author has a good friend who arrived on an inflatable... or used to.

The Dove from Above

During a social run of an evening my attention was caught by something you'd not expect to be sat in a barn amongst straw and chickens, and arrangements had to be made to discover more. It is being restored by one aircraft engineer whose personal circs allow sufficient time ~ though not enough ~ for labours of love like this. The paintwork is brush-work in enamel, incidentally, just like a big Airfix kit.

The aircraft operated in the RAF between 1948 and 1984 as a transport for VIPs and will have borne any number of ministers besides members of the Royal family in its time... hence the stars on the trailing-edge nose-gear. Unusually too, braking was by pneumatics on the main-gear only and thus steering would be done in much the same way using the rudder-pedals.

Where it ends up once a pair of wings and Gypsy Major six-cylinder inverted engines are added is up for debate presently, but is likely to be the museum operated by the family most notable for the production of Cosworth racing engines. Meanwhile turns out that the self-same Boeing 737 that I have blogged about elsewhere in the posts was here too for five years unbeknown to me, or at least the portion between nose and leading edges.

That has gone to a glamping site in Blackpool that I hope to decamp to in order to report further and sit in that left-hand seat for one more time before I die, you with tears in your eyes like you had when they saved Private Ryan. The restorer we have met here, however, also has a Percival Pembroke that he intends to turn into a touring caravan; although he says the build quality is nowhere near that of the twin built back in the day by De Havilland.

Which is what you might expect of the people who put up the world's first jetliner.

Ed. This literally got the author out of bed today, so let's here it for people doing things to make that effort worthwhile...

The Cloud

With relentless high pressure sitting over Western Europe what little cloud there is comprises mainly cirrus, the ice-crystal clouds at high level forming what are known as mare's tails. My attention was caught however by these, which are contrails that have formed a foundation for a broader spread of cirrus, from jets headed north and chances are, across the Atlantic.

During the grounding of airlines following 9/11 it is thought that the skies were 10% clearer due to the absence of water vapour dispensed by jet engines high in the sky that forms a basis for widespread cover of this kind. And so if you were my age then the skies really were bluer when you were a child.

Digital Commoner

Monthly check reveals a new layout, which in some ways is not as clear as previous and a good deal slower and so I don't dwell as long as I might. Perhaps inevitably, it looks like a reasonable guide as to who might be gearing up for prolonged conflicts: the bulk of downloads in the US scattered among Silicon Valley and Washington DC, a number in both China and Israel and even one in Zaoprizhzhia. Besides being one of the hardest towns to spell, it's also on a frontline and somewhere apparently that is more interested in the notion of a self-launching boat than I am presently. This is unsurprising in view of the fact that theoretically it could be launched from a covert location on land to find the sea itself and go on to do whatever it was designed for: which I fear won't be childrens' birthday parties.

But the DARPA Lift 4 challenge just wound up and the sort of thing I'd have been up for sooner in life; but the whole idea of the public coming up with military solutions is relatively new in the US and non-existent in the UK, each having been borne of a patriarchal society in which you're not expected to come up with ideas unless you're on the payroll.

To qualify you had to be native to the US, which led to the bizarre conclusion that the winner of the challenge would be Canadian, but referred to by DARPA as a US entry viz. Avidrone. The aim of the challenge was to get a drone to lift four times its own weight and haul it over five miles (or it may have been minutes). To put it into context, DJI's agricultural drones used for spraying ~ which US farmers are crying out for ~ can lift just half of their own weight. Difference being, they can do so for much, much longer.

Disappointingly, although the top three entries from some eighty-odd got close, no one hit the 4:1 mark and of those that did, first and third were conventional helis. This is astonishing, not least because (a) they've always given away 20% efficiency to offsetting torque with a tail-rotor and (b) the winners specialise in dual-rotor types like the Chinook that do not suffer in the same way. I may mail them to ask why, but probably won't so you'll have to do it yourself.

What was good to see was that torque-less systems like that of the Fairey Gyrodyne appear to have been in the ascendant; although clearly not ascendant enough on the day. I've a couple of ideas up my sleeve for improving the efficiency of a single rotor that too is torque-less and that might best that magic ratio, but if I do so at all it will be via uploads to the Digital Commons. Then again there's a guy in the Lake District with a set of 23-foot gyroplane rotors for sale, which is quite the sort of thing I'd happily waste my money on.

The interest in replacing pin- and pass-codes with faces you might recognise (and others may not) appears to be gaining traction because as Victor Hugo suggested, there's no stopping an idea whose time has come. The ongoing interest in a drone that can lift an upright operator stood in a minimal phone-box eludes me however.

RV, US, UK.

Each special in their own way, North America's view of expansive living and another from the North of England with the expectation of a life lived with respect to its heritage viz. an ex-Army Foden to which a freight-wagon is appended.

Big Day Out: Beamish Museum of the North

You're almost certainly in the Northeast to visit the old seminary at Ushaw I guess, or the ancestral home of George Washington in the eponymous village it occupied. Consider if you would though a visit to a 'living museum' that has been expanded greatly since my first visit?

The idea for a living museum derived from a man in Scandinavia who realised that the buildings and artefacts of yesteryear were disappearing, along with the skills involved in their manufacture and use. He thus set about recreating villages as they once would have been, which is largely what they've done at Beamish. The idea has spread to the Black Country besides the ironworks in Shropshire, but this was likely the first on this scale.

So sit back, relax and let Colin do the talking.

First up, a steam hammer for pounding red-hot lumps of iron into the shape you'd dreamt of. The guide felt the nearest end did the pounding, but I suggested he was wrong and that those grooves were likely for rings to seal the piston, and the other end had a form of bracket that might be used to replace the hammer-head. They did let me back in later after negotiations withe the management, however:

Here they have re-created the safety-lamps used by the miners prior a twelve-hour shift. They were well paid, as you'd expect for squeezing through seams of coal just 18" deep (although 16" was permissible in Wales). In the adit mine you are able to visit, eighty-eight miners died when one of them unscrewed the bottom of his lamp in order to light a pipe. Universally unpopular afterward, it mattered less as he was dead too:

The engineering shed is worth a glimpse as it contains a number of interesting locos, like this one with a vertical boiler that they called 'the coffee-pot':

And you don't get a better view of a saddle-tank than this, nowadays. You'd only a choice to stash water in a tank behind the cab, or else in a 'tender' hauled behind. This was an innovative alternative, though harder to build and uglier too, some may say. Note the leaf-springs, in contrast the simplest possible means of suspension:

I queued for a visit to the coal-mine as hinted at above, and here ChatGPT helped in rendering an image of me as I might appear after emerging from twelve hours down the pit. Coal-miners worked six days including Saturday, got hammered in the pub afterward and went to church Sunday; to rinse and repeat until an early death. Nor would they get to wear a polo-shirt:

There were many makers of bricks in those days, and here are just a fraction:

To create the museum involved the recreation of any number of buildings, piece by piece, rather than have them demolished and forgotten for good. One example of just how well this has been done at the museum is the school seen here:

I like the names they'd not hold back from giving their products in times past, like the machine seen here at the bakery that would go on to get its own Marvel series:

Among the many vehicles restored to perfection at the museum are this one at the bicycle repair-shop. They were known as 'quadricycles' and pre-dated automobiles. to the extent Ford himself had a hand in their development. I think they'd go down a storm if electrified nowadays:

In the park, besides a band-stand and live music of the era there is this magnificent howitzer of World War One vintage. I was anxious for a moment as I couldn't spot a recoil mechanism, but if you look closely you can see the rails that the carriage will have slid backwards along. Whether this would be sprung or elasticated with bungee cords was unclear, but I was able to get over it once given an ice-cream:

Sheffield was among the last city to abandon trams back in 1960, Glasgow following two years later. The council in Sheffield is known for stupid decisions, one of which was to chop down the trees it was famous for not long after I went to the university there. I wrote them to say they were stupid, and stupidly they never replied:

I feature this exhibit here from the 1950s housing section, because I realised we'd had it in the family home for years not long after, though in a lighter shade. Called Rosebud, I'll have visions of it in a snow-globe on my death-bed:

Doing the loop of the museum are a range of public transports that include the bus seen here that would be known as a 'charabanc' and especially popular for tours of the countryside during summer-times in England. Here you can sit in it wearing a Panama hat and imagining that at some stage the vicar will be murdered:

The cost of entry is currently £35. It sounds a lot, but then it's a Disneyland for the demented besides fun for all the family.