Fathers Day walk to Watership Down

On the 20th of June 2021 (yesterday, as I write this) we all went for a walk to Watership Down. I suspect most people who know of the place do so from Richard Adams’ book of the same name, and some of those would be surprised to learn that it’s a real place.

This is the footpath up to Watership Down. The soil is thin and the underlying rock is a mixture of chalk and flint. You can see the white rocks amongst the mud. It isn’t obvious in the photo but this is a steady uphill climb.

Taken near here looking NW.

Turns out there was a cross-country marathon being run and Watership Down was on the route. The local HAMs were providing comms support. There was a relay station / repeater near the highest point of the hill.

Taken near here looking SW.

The cloud base was low and Watership Down was shrouded in mist. The Down is mostly managed for training race horses; those are steeplechase jumps you can see with the square cut trees.

Taken from the same place as the previous photo, looking E.

There is a tree planted on the Down to comemorate the book and its author Richard Adams. I think its a beech tree.

The tree has a small plaque attached to its protective fence (the fence stops sheep and deer eating the tree).

Tree and plaque here, photos taken looking S.

Another shot of the Down showing various horse racing features. It does leave the grass cropped short and probably suits rabbits.

Taken near here, looking SE.

There and Back Again – Kingsclere to Hannington

If I’m going to start blogging again, why not start with the latest walk in the countryside?

Today was Easter Sunday, and (unusually for a UK holiday weekend) the weather was lovely. Blue sky, very little cloud (some high-level cirrus aviaticus), warm without being hot.

Cottington’s Hill, Kingsclere, with the TV mast to the right of the photo.

The four of us followed a well-worn path, starting near the George and Horn in Kingsclere and ascending The Dell, crossing Hollowshot Lane then over the fields towards Cottington’s Hill (pictured above). I was delayed leaving and didn’t catch the others until the top of the hill, roughly 2km into our walk. The kids are somewhat older than in the last walk I blogged; the eldest brought their r/c car (a Tamiya Rising Fighter) and the youngest their headphones. Not entirely sociable but at least we were all out for a walk.

A recently-ploughed field, with power lines striding across it.

It has not rained here for a while now, and as a result all bar the soggiest parts of our route were dry underfoot. The remaining mud and water could usually be avouded although the r/c car did seem drawn towards it, as if by some mysterious force …

Traditional barn, 20th Century roof and 21st Century power.

This barn at Plantation Farm caught my eye. The structure itself could have been built any time in the past 1000 years (possibly without the sliding doors) and it looks very much like any number of historic English barns. However rather than being thatched or tiled, it’s been re-roofed in “wriggly tin”, galvanised corrugated steel sheet. The roof is old enough that most of the galvanising has eroded and I can’t help but think it will need re-roofing again before too long. However that hasn’t stopped the enterprising owner from fitting 16 solar panels, probably totalling 4kW or so, to the roof. It was a wonderful day for solar power!

Our route, from Runkeeper.

By the time we looped back to Kingsclere we had covered almost 10km (6 miles) and were definitely ready for lunch.

I’m not dead (yet)

I realise it’s been about six years since my last blog post, so this one is a proof-of-life 🙂

Combe Gibbet walk

Today the four of us had another lovely walk in the countryside. (It’s not really 17 months since we’ve done this, it’s just that long since I felt like blogging it 🙂 )

This time we got out of the house fairly promptly, before 1100, and made our way towards Combe Gibbet. This is a lovely spot with a dark history, brief details of which can be found on Wikipedia at the link (the AA have more information in the background to a walk on their website). As well as the gibbet we took in Walbury Hill, the highest point in Berkshire; if we’d walked a couple of kilometres in the other direction we’d have found Pilot Hill, the highest point in Hampshire!

We parked south-east of Walbury Hill, then walked over that hill to Combe Gibbet and followed the Test Way south past the delightfully-named Sheepless Hill (fittingly, it was devoid of sheep) before hooking back through the village of Combe and returning to our car.

The weather was, again, lovely; warm and dry without being oppressive, sunny without needing sunscreen. We tried out two of the local scout group’s brand-new Garmin Oregon 20 GPS receivers and were quite impressed by them! The children were largely uncomplaining until the last half-kilometre or so, which sees a steep 90-metre climb from Combe village back to the ridge (and the car park).

The walk was just shy of five miles, and took us a shocking two hours and twenty minutes. #1 Daughter did dawdle rather and Mrs QrizB kept stopping to sketch things; that’s my excuse anyway!

On Art

A good, and particularly literate, friend of mine claims not to be able to express anything in words but to have more luck in writing. This has in tun prompted me to write this note …

On Art.

Art’s a funny thing. Even defining it is difficult. The OED has it as “The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power” which is a bit of a mouthful. Through many discussions over several years I’ve come up with a shorter working definition of “a human creation that has no function other than to be admired”.

Technology has eliminated the utility from some forms of expression such that they are more properly considered art now. For example, painted portraiture has been functionally superseded by photography in essentially all applications; anyone commissioning a painted portrait is doing so for art’s sake, not for any functional reason. Art incorporated into technology is commonly called design (and the two are occasionally lumped together); while form should follow function, some forms are more admirable (have greater “beauty or emotional power”) than others and these design decisions are, I would suggest, more properly artistic ones.

Now I have a complicated relationship with art. I’m a bit of a functionalist, and as you might imagine that means that I’m not a huge art fan. I’m not claiming to be a complete philistine; I’m rather fond of music, and some painting and sculpture really gets to me, but generally these are at the “figurative” end of the figurative-to-abstract spectrum. Rothko and Pollock seem a complete waste of paint and canvas, while the criminal masterminds who stole Henry Moore’s bronze and sold it for scrap may have done the art world a favour.

Looking around my house right now, I’ve chosen to decorate our milky-coffee-coloured walls with my children’s (largely pre-school) art, their certificates of achievement from school, and a large map of Western Europe. I have a couple more maps (one local, the other of the world) I’d like to hang when I get the chance. This is all functional; the maps clearly so, but the children’s things are there to display my pride in and appreciation of their achievements. I’ve got no real desire for prints of “Tennis Girl” or “The Persistence of Memory” let alone “Four Darks In Red” or “Shark in Formaldehyde“.

That would be the not-very-complicated end of it if my wife wasn’t a professional artist.

My wife is an artist. She has wanted to be one since primary school (possibly earlier) and now, in her mid-forties, she’s got the opportunity since the aforementioned children are school-age and I’m earning enough to keep us all in comfortable squalor. I don’t know enough about art to accurately describe her work but she paints and draws, occasionally writes poetry and even-more-occasionally works in 3D. She is passionate about her art and loves being an artist. While she has rented studio space there are always a half-dozen or so of her works literally hanging around the house.

I don’t find her artwork objectionable, but at the same time I struggle to get interested in it. I can see that over the years her technique has improved considerably, but at the same time it has become less figurative and more abstract. This puts me in the odd position of appreciating her artwork less while it’s clearly getting better. I know she gets positive feedback from her friends and colleagues in the art world, I read the reviews and comments, and the fact it sells when exhibited shows that a certain segment of Joe Public also appreciate it. But in general it doesn’t do anything for me, which is a bit of a problem when I’m asked “what do you think of this?”.

It happens that (by accident, not design) I work in dangerous goods packaging. Unless you too have a need to package dangerous goods (and quite possibly even then) this is an inherently boring field of work that strives to make itself more boring since no-one really wants dangerous goods to get exciting. If I was to bring home a new design for a wooden crate and say “what do you think of this?” I’d get a muted response at best. But there seems to be an expectation that I’m a competent art critic, able to say something encouraging about “a suffusion of yellow” or whatever, and “that’s nice, dear” doesn’t quite cut it.

Today, I have mostly been building a shed.

Due to a proliferation of larger children’s bicycles (both the children and the bicycles have become larger) and a new gas BBQ we had a bit of a garden storage crisis. The only possible answer was another shed.

It’s a steel shed, nominally 6′ x 4′ but a little smaller in practice. I ordered it from Argos a couple of weeks ago and it was delivered yesterday. The weather today was a bit meh, early morning rain turning into intermittent light showers, but I had a shed to build and it’s nominally summer so I got on with it. My 11-year-old son was also keen to help, although his enthusiasm did wax and wane a bit! Overall it took probably 5 hours to erect, and I could probably knock an hour off that building a second one (for the record, I’m not).

The shed is made by Arrow, a big US-and-Canada-based manufacturer of metal outbuildings. Argos list it under catalogue number 705/3225. The shed isn’t high enough for me (5′ 10″ tall) to stand upright in, although my son can. We joked that we’d have to fit an astrodome (or maybe a washing machine door?) to the roof so I could poke my head out.

Given that it’s largely made of tin-can-thickness steel (the whole thing weighs about the same as the aforementioned 11-year-old), is held together by a profusion of self-tapping screws and cost less than a meal for two at the local gastropub it’s actually pretty good. It doesn’t rattle or wobble, he doors fit together and slide easily, and it gives the general impression of reliability.

Time will tell!

Am I the world’s worst blogger?

Has it really been four months (less a day) since I last blogged anything, promising tales of excitement and adventure? Crikey.

Let’s hope it’s not another four months before I next apologise for not adding anything here 🙂

Too busy to be interesting

I must apologise to my readers (both of you!) for being away for so long. The summer was packed with stuff that I might’ve blogged about but I never quite got around to doing it.

Noting that today is the Vernal Equinox, autumn is upon us and the evenings are getting darker, it’s possible I’ll pick a few highlights from the summer and blog them retrospectively.

Watch this space!

Cotton wool and petroleum jelly firelighters

Various people I know, both in real life and online, have talked about how you can make wonderfully effective firelighters (tinder) using cotton wool and petroleum jelly (the best known brand being Vaseline). On Sunday decided to give them a go, so I made I made 15-20 of them (enough to fill a small sweetie tin). The process I followed is pretty straightforward and goes roughly like this.

Put three good-sized spoonfuls or petroleum jelly into the sweetie tin (not also the compulsory pot of tea to accompany the job; I was boiling the kettle for the next step anyway):

Dishing out the petroleum jelly.

Melted it in a pan of boiling water (once the water has boiled you can turn off the hob, there should be enough heat in the water to melt the jelly):

Melt it in boiling water.

Take the cotton wool balls and drop them in the liquid jelly, a few at a time, so they saturate:

Saturate the cotton wool with molten jelly.

Squeezed out the surplus liquid jelly, placed the balls in a pyramid on the lid of the tin to cool:

Cotton wool balls cooling.

Once cool packed them into the tin:

Firelighters packed into tin.

Finally, wrapped a band of PVC electrical tape around the tin to keep the lid on and stop the greasy balls falling out in my pack!

I tried one out after making them and was very impressed by their ease of lighting and long burn time. My wife (who’s fairly outdoors-ey) also commented on how effective they were.

Emma and Andy’s Wedding

Two people I know surprisingly well were married yesterday, and I was honoured to be there. Emma Walker and Andrew Wall were joined in matrimony in a conventional Church of England service at 1400 on Saturday the 21st of June 2014.

Didn’t they make a lovely couple? (Please excuse the fuzzy phone photo, you do the best with the tools you have.)

Andy and Emma, the newly-married couple, with gathered well-wishers.

Slightly odd is my relationship with Emma and Andy. While I was aware of them vaguely as neighbours since they were children, it’s only in the past couple of years that I’ve really known them as I’m now their landlord (and it’s a testament to how well we get on that they even invited me to their wedding). I’ve even seen their daughter grow up from a newborn to a charming two-year-old.

Andy, Emma, I wish you all the best in your married life.