Our Big Day Out at Windermere Jetty Museum

I've brought you along for the ride with it being a wet Saturday morning!

The tag-line, ‘Stories of Boats and Steam’ is somewhat better than the name, ‘Windermere Jetty Museum’, but then perfect is the enemy of the good isn’t it?

Don’t let my smorgasbord put you off going either, but simply treat is a taster. 

Viewing then from top to bottom and left to right:

1/ The entrance to the refurbished building that opened in 2019 on the shores of Lake Windermere.

2/ The cafe, sumptuous views and fare, in my case a cauliflower soup with a soupçon of coconut milk.

3/ Triple expansion steam engine… each crankshaft bearing lubricated by its own oil-reservoir!

4/ In those proud days, toilets would often feature a name and this is the legendary “SL”.

5/ A selection of fast boats, nearest of which of wood and linen fabric construction not unlike an airship.

6/ East German hydroplane, fitted with the expansion-box invented thereabouts to boost power output.

7/ A boat was built around its engine, a Rolls-Royce derived from an airship: note the hand-crank.

8/ A lake steamer whose steering wheel appears ideal for reversing, but less so for cruising.

9/ An inboard four-stroke petrol engine: they don’t make them like that any more, fortunately.

10/ The float from a Short Sunderland flying boat, some built here, and converted later into a canoe.

11/ A boat-launched glider built by Slingsby and trialed unsuccessfully by the War Office in WW2.

12/ The way they ferried things across Windermere prior engines of any sort: with oars called ‘sweeps’.

13/ Workshop, where I guess those are thickness measurements in millimetres to check for corrosion.

14/ A glorious 1930s-era Chris-Craft from the US.

15/ Aluminium-bodied Albatross and Coventry Climax engine combination from the UK.

16/ Steamer Osprey used for lake tours, though sadly not today.

17/ A vintage sailboat, still in use today on the lake next door.

18/ Beatrix Potter’s boat: couldn't she have got something better given she owned a matching tarn?

Altogether a great day out with free parking if you spend £5 or more; the only criticisms a paucity of fridge-magnets and substitution of the steamer by a diesel for the cruise I didn't take anyway, what with Storm Amy passing through.

(Strong Message Here)

PM returns to Downing Street in his German taxi

The title stems from a podcast featuring Armando Iannucci, creator of the national treasure that is Alan Partridge, and is derived from a speech given by then leader of the Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn: who read out that stage direction in his speech. It is said that David Cameron could memorise a speech, one of the few things he seems to have got right, but you have to go back to the likes of Churchill to find a leader who both wrote and delivered a speech.

I'd like to be a speech-writer (although there are lots of things I'd like to be) and so here's an opening the PM can use for free during this traditional conference season:

(Strong message here, insert saline solution to create tear)

Welcome delegates!

(Polite ripple of applause.)

In the Britain I grew up in they used to say that whereas kids seeing someone drive a luxury car in America would one day hope to do the same, here they would throw stones at them instead.

(Murmurs of agreement.)

But let me tell you that we've come a long way since then, and now our kids steal luxury cars and export them to Dubai!

(Whoops and hollers.)

You know, with my wife and our two point four kids I was recently in Germany, and I saw how all public service vehicles were German, and all taxis were German.

And I told my wife, THAT's how the UK should be! And I stand before you to tell you that just six months on, vehicles the emergency services and taxi-drivers use here are German too!

(More whoops and hollers. Remove flag from under seat and wave.)

Milton (Keynes): Paradise Lost

The UK's newest luxury rail service ~ from London to the Lake District ~ just broke down at Milton Keynes, a quarter of the way there, after its automatic doors failed.

For years I used the 'slam' doors as a commuter on third-rail electrified services into London, and despite being in use for around half a century I don't recall any of them ever failing to open or close... which in an ideal world is everything you want from a door.

Thomas Cooks rail tours meanwhile ran for a century and a half without, to the best of my knowledge, ever failing because passengers could not get in or out.

Meanwhile Edmondson's classic cardboard railway ticket introduced and patented in 1840 continues in use in some of the countries it was exported to two centuries on.

As we dwell on two hundred years of passenger railways, it is worth reflecting upon what works and what doesn't and increasingly the latter includes modern cars.

The desperate net-zero measures in the UK in particular means that increasingly a smaller and smaller engine has to rely on more and more exotic means of squeezing every last ounce of power from that of petrol: which means buying, maintaining and servicing them costs more than ever.

It also means that because fewer make it into the third-tier of used cars of around a decade old, increasingly cars are the preserve of the well-off. At the same time the necessary replacement of failing vehicles with brand new ones emits more carbon or environmental pollution than would be the case were we continuing to operate cars like my own twelve-year old Suzuki.

All tho' what you'd expect from any flavour of government, but especially one that advertises itself as 'socialist' or on the side of the people.

Southern Rail ran electrical multiple units non-stop from East Croydon where I first worked, to London Bridge and as it barrelled along on a summer's evening it was a joy to drop the window and lean your head out like a dog.

Occasionally this meant passengers were decapitated by not withdrawing their head prior impact with a railway bridge or tunnel, but this only added to the excitement.

It also meant the population steadily evolved toward people intelligent enough not to lose their head, or at least not in this way.

You can read a history of trains with doors that worked as per the inset above.

You can't knock the carriages though and I'd be happy to live in one should (a) they deliver to your driveway and (b) retro-fit a slam-door.

Epicure

Not the clearest of pictures but yes, it does like a pheasant-shoot and a Californian company called Epirus is showcasing its microwave weapon that makes drones drop like flies: upto several dozen at a time.

The incursions into Danish airspace and shutdowns of its largest airports reminds us of the three-day shutdown affecting Gatwick some time ago, which conveniently we forgot about as you do in peacetime.

There is some speculation that much of it was imagined, the way the good people of Salem saw witchcraft in all aspects of their life, including faces in their cappuccino.

At the time though I was building a team building drones for entry to a challenge in that same California, and sharing a real ale of an evening with... employees of one such company tasked by the government with a solution. Which turns out to have been one such device, some years sooner than the demonstration here but kept in reserve... as all of Bond's weapons are.

Their thinking at the time ~ borne out by recent events ~ was that it was tentative attempts by 'non-state actors' to disrupt civil aviation viz. people doing these things on behalf of a state but without wearing the baseball cap.

Most alarming to hear (but obvious to anyone with a science GCSE) is knowing that the same method of frying electrical equipment can be used on just about anything nowadays, given that all of it including airliners is dependent on electronics.

It is ever a threat from solar eruptions, the largest in recent history only taking out telegraphs and not Netflix subscriptions; but as ever this time round more artificial measures and counter-measures are set to be altogether different to what we've been used to.

Torque It Up

Here's what I mean when I suggest that the adverse torque-effects experienced by Supermarine seaplanes on take-off may be used to advantage by maritime drones which need no moveable surface (along with servos, linkages and electricals).

This catamaran ~ which we may build if ever I get out of my dressing-gown ~ turns to the right because firstly it applies an asymmetric thrust like every fast-cat; but also because it pitches weight due torque-reaction onto the farther hydro-ski so as to create a pivot-point around which that thrust can be applied.

There's an ace up the dressing-gown sleeve too by way of a third means of driving it one way or the other, and that is to fit fixed rudder-surfaces to the rear of each ski within the efflux of each propeller... a more practical solution than off-setting either motor.

For when I showed my catamarans to a man who knows about these things, he was worried ~ well not that worried ~ that asymmetric thrust alone may not be enough to achieve turns one way or the other.

And on my part I didn't know in which direction the propellers ought contra-rotate: but now I do, and for that we have to thank the test-pilot of Supermarine seaplanes and his struggles with adverse torque-reaction during each high-powered take-off.

We stand on the shoulders of giants, and that's never easy in a dressing-gown.

These Are a Few of My Favourite Things

People often ask me ~ in my head ~ which are my favourite fixed-wing aircraft, and for short-haul the Caravelle edges fellow nominees Trident, BAC 1-11, Tupolev 154.

At long-haul, cherish the 747 as we may the L-1011 clinches it for onboard elevator alone.

As a personal jet, it would have to be the consummate F16, six-hundred-plus flying hours some among my co-pilots in Turkey had.

And the only aircraft I would use again to fly from Chicago to Denver in the course of one day and over the Rockies into Aspen: would have to be the under-rated Piper Tomahawk.

Yes there are pilots who prefer wings above to those below, but there are people who like eating insects too.

And the Caravelle is pictured at Manchester's 1960s terminal before they replaced it with a leaky duty-free shopping mall with travelators that don't travel.

Free Wheeling

This tuber's good on bikes and here he shows how the only ones buying motorcycles these days are people of a pensionable age trying to recapture their youth.

More than that though it's the transport of choice for a criminal under-class that, minus crash-helmet and all else, use it as the ideal tool to support endemic theft and shop-lifting that few governments have the will or means to counter.

The problem only really arose because few people ever thought an electric motor might power illegal e-bikes to 70 m.p.h. as some have done in the capital.

My own first motive means is inset: the fabulous engine-in-wheel Honda P50 that would only achieve 30 m.p.h downhill.

But the sound it's motor made ~ and that of the exhaust once I replaced it with a length of copper piping ~ I can hear to this day.

It would be usurped by the fore-runner of such e-bikes, the motorcycles with pedals as an afterthought that were the Honda SS50 and Yamaha FS1E.

My Geography syllabus at university included demographics, and it turned out that during the late 1970s there was a peak ~ a blip ~ in fatalities worldwide coinciding with the age of sixteen, or that at which most people were first allowed to ride such machines.

People who chose the P50 went on to live to sixty-six and beyond, however.