2012 - Museums

 The great thing about living so near London is that you can be in a museum within an hour of leaving work. Stressful Saturday morning at work, no proble, jump on the next train and before you know it you are surrounded by objects of art, science, literature and more...

I have enjoyed many events at museums this year, from recording podcasts at the British Library and the V&A, A strange talk about inanimate objects at the Wellcome Trust, the superb "Writing Britain" Exhibition at the British Library, and all the delights that the British Museum offers.

The below picture is from the British Museum, despite having been maybe 8 or more times I still have not seen everything, and every visit discover a new room of things. this bird statue is perhaps my favourite of all things in there!

2012 - Winter in Wycombe

In Devon it hardly ever used to snow, here up in the Chilterns it seems to snow for no apparent reason at all, and comes really fast and suddenly.

Although these pictures are not of snow, they are of the week leading up to a massive amount of snow. It was below freezing for the whole week, and we recorded -16c on our balcony one night!

2012 - Skeptics

When I moved here just about the only people (outside of work) that I knew were part of a group called Skeptics in the Pub. It is hard to sum up what the group is in a few lines, but it is a place inquisitive people can chat about issues as diverse as alternative medicine, ghosts, religion or psychics... although we usually end up talking about technology, beer, TV shows and beer. It is mostly, but not exclusively, made up of people who would describe themselves as atheist, agnostic, rational, or humanist.

I have met some really great people there this year, we had our first talk (Stevyn Colgan on Luck), our local MP came along, the journalist Martin Robbins is an occasional visitor, and the usual crowd are always up for a drink, beer festival or night out at short notice, which was really good when I didn't know anyone else in town!

I has been designated an assistant organiser, and although I have no idea what this entails I am trying to get a bit organised for next year, some more talks (a few big names have promised to help us out!) and hope to expand numbers a bit. I am looking forward to it, but we need a suitable venue for the events, which is proving the really hard bit! So if anyone has a small hall in Wycombe they are willing to hire cheaply...

More about Skeptics in the pub at the Wikidedia page.

More about our group here.

2012 - Settling in.

Although we didn't actually move towns in 2012, it was as good as. We moved in just before Christmas last year, and then were both away for a bit over Christmas and New year, so all the sorting out of the flat happened in January.

Our flat has many advantages over that last one.
1. It is not in Aylesbury.
2. It has a balcony.
3. It is not in Aylesbury.

Actually they are the main three advantages, I can also walk to work in about five minutes!

I never quite felt at home in Aylesbury, and any friends I had made were in High Wycombe anyway, and my job was also in High Wycombe. It made sense both geographically and financially to live here. We did breifly look at flats further into London, but the prices sent us running back to Buckinghamshire!

Another advantage is that Wycombe is surrounded by lovely countryside, with many parks and woods within easy walking distance. So I spent much of the early part of the year exploring the area... cue picture...

The sixteen, or so, days of Christmas...

'On the sixteenth day of Christmas my true love gave to me, a series of blog entries, hastily written, but with some nice pictures to pad it out a bit.'.

If the popular Christmas song had contained more days that is what the 16th would have been. the fifteenth day involves a stoat, a pencil and some Vasoline, and has been banned from being sung since 1929.

Over the next few weeks I will do a mini review of my year (how vain!) and put a few of my pictures from the year alongside it (vanity in words AND pictures!).

I will start with a picture I took last winter, just around the corner from the flat we had just moved into here in High Wycombe...

I've been through the mill this weekend.

 No, I literally have. Pann Mill in High Wycombe had an open day last Sunday as part of the National Mills Weekend. As I live a few minutes away, and have often tried to peer though the windows to see what is in there, I thought I would pop in.

 

Back when I lived in Exeter I enjoyed a morning at Cricklepit Mill on the river Exe, I knew that Pann Mill is a lot smaller, but it's always nice to see a water mill in action. The grounds of the Mill had a few stalls, including a second hand book stall, where I gave into my weakness and bought 2 books (Carl Sagan - Cosmos and the Pale Blue Dot) and then I made my way into the mill. I was surprised how tiny it was, but luckily it was not very busy, so was able to see the huge driving wheel and the gears. Fine flour was pouring down from the roof into a collecting pot.

 

 I then went up the stairs (think of the stairs you go up to get into a loft) and saw the stones where the grinding takes place (stop sniggering at the back!). Had a good chat to the miller about the history of the Mill.

 

 Great to see a little bit of local history, and meet a few people. Maybe next year I will go up to the Windmill at Lacey Green (or is it Loosley Row?)

Crawley. Rainy, not creepy.

I spent most of last week in Crawley. It rained the whole time.

This means I am in no place to judge how the place is, no where looks good in the rain, and Crawley was not good in the rain



But the course was good, and in a boring worky way I feel more confident in what I am doing. Sadly the food in the hotel was awful, was a great relief to get back home for my taste buds sake!

Friday I'm in Crawley

Two photos today, Sun over High Wycombe (with small pink UFO, and small blue UFO) and then a picture across town.

I will be back from training tomorrow. Of imagine the tales I will have to tell of Crawley.

Thursday Photo

This photo was taken one evening a few weeks ago from our balcony. I thought the contrails on the left hand side of the picture looked a little like a shuttle launch!

 

Wednesday

Today I am away starting my training in Crawley, but here is a picture of me being silly with Ivonnes knitting.

Tuesday Photo

Swan on the Rye...

A Week of Photos

Most of this week will be taken up with training at work. They are sending me to Crawley, how exotic.

So this week I will just set my blog to post a picture each day, as I am not up to date enough to have a smart phone or anything, so I am effectively off line all week.

Here is todays picture, which is a coot sat on the football pitch at the Rye in Wycombe!

Protest

Last weekends protesting swimmer at the Varsity Boat Race, this weekends Grand National, and next weekends controversial Bahrain Grand Prix have got me thinking about protesters using sport to make their point.

There is a long history of protest in sport, Suffragette Emily Wilding Davison throwing herself under the Kings horse at the 1913 Grand National must be the most famous, and perhaps most tragic of all incidents, but there have been many more recently.

The 1993 Grand National was not actually disrupted by protesters, but after 2 false starts officials failed to stop the race because some jockeys thought the red flags were being waved by protesters trying to stop the race. The race was voided. Only a few years later a phoned in warning from an Irish terrorist group meant that the Grand National was cancelled again, but this time was re-run on the Monday.

The Olympics are an obvious target for protests, but I can only actually think of two specific incidents, the events of Munich in 1972 where 17 people died, and the Atlanta bombing in 1996 where 2 people died. I vividly remember hearing the incident on the radio, and staying up well into the night listening to the events.

There are just 2 incidents I can think of in my chosen sport of Formula 1 (let me know if you can think of more!)

There was this crazy man at the German Grand Prix in 2000, I love Brundles comments in this clip...



And then there is the crazy priest who ran on track during the British Grand Prix in 2003. Sadly this idiot has become a mini celebrity in some circles, it should be the brave marshal who is the hero!



Lets hope that, if it does go ahead, next weekend Grand Prix is without incident, and that we can move on with the rest of the season and put the whole situation behind us.

To quote Joe Saward...
When it comes to propaganda, there is no question that both sides have been very busy in recent weeks, with the authorities finding people to say all the right things and the opposition trying to show that all is not good. The FIA, which is supposed not to involve itself in politics of any kind, has embraced the government argument, but as no-one inside the federation has questioned the activity (at least not openly), nothing has been done.

There is no doubt that there are people in Bahrain who honestly do believe that the race is what the country needs. Others (myself included) think that F1 is unwise to get involved at a time when things are unstable. 

Changing nature of friendship

Yesterday I mentioned my wet day in Brighton.



Our friends from Exeter moved there last year, and have settled in brilliantly, it is a town that is very 'them', and although I am not sure I would live there it is a lovely place.

It was a great day catching up, Dave (a mutual friend from Exeter, and the other half of Words Fail Me podcast) visited as well, and we all chatted a lot about what we had been up to the last few months.

But it made me think about how friendship has changed. When in Exeter we used to hang around together for hours and just played silly games (Pass the Pigs, Poker, Uno) or just sat talking about random things for hours.

But when you have not seen each other for months, and have the time pressure of just a few hours before the train home then every bit of conversation seems to carry more weight, and it seems more important to find out what has been happening, and less time to explore the strange and random interiors of each others minds and thoughts. The conversation seems more important, but somehow you get less out of it.

I don't know what the solution is, other than spending more prolonged time together (and hopefully this will happen in the summer), but it seems sad to have largely lost this art of conversation in my life.

Bank Holiday in Brighton

I love the seaside. I lived most of my life just a few miles from the beach (Dawlish Warren a 2 stops away on the train), a year with a flat with a sea view (in Exmouth, if you stood on the window sill and there was no car parked on the street).

I now find myself in Buckinghamshire, handy for London, but not famous for having an coastline.

Any chance I can find to go to the seaside I will now take, and having friends recently move to Brighton is a perfect excuse to visit the coast.

We could not have picked a worse day to visit the seaside! It was great to catch up with friends (more of that tomorrow), it must have been the wettest and windiest day the south coast has seen this year, it rained from the moment we left our house in Wycombe in the morning, to the amusements on Brighton Pier, all the way back to Wycombe in the evening. My waterproof proved not to live up to it's name.

We had a great time though, catching up on news eating food, lots of coffee and plenty of copper coins lost in the arcades.

But hopefully next time I see the sea the weather will be more suitable for ice creams and sun bathing. 

3 Spring Pictures

A break from all the serious stuff, here are 3 pictures from when we had the lovely sunny weather a few weeks ago.

All taken with my new camera that I got last month for my birthday, I love the colours and details that it shows, and I realise now how rubbish my old camera was!

What are the chances?

Tonight is High Wycombe Skeptics in the Pub, a meeting of rationalists, humanists, atheists, secularists and beer lovers. Do come along if you feel any of those labels fit you, or if you just fancy chatting to interesting and intelligent people over a few beers.

The point of this blog entry was not supposed to be an advert for SiTP (but too late now I've done it!) but rather I was reminded of our meeting 2 weeks ago when the excellent Stevyn Colgan gave us a little talk/presentation about the year he decided to test luck.

It was an interesting and funny story involving much walking under ladders, collecting lucky charms, crossing the path of black cats and horseshoes. He tested his luck by rolling two dice multiple times to see if he would roll double six more than statistically likely.

I won't give away the results of his little experiment, as he hopes to do the talk around other groups, and maybe put a book together on the topic one day, but it got us all thinking about luck, and superstitions we may hold.

The next morning my mind was still full of rabbits feet, charms and chance, I considered walking to work not stepping on any of the cracks in the pavement, but abandoned the idea and got on with making my way to work.

I had only walked 50 metres when I saw this graffiti daubed on the wall...



Double one, snake eyes...the unlucky roll of the dice! What are the chances of that?

Well, the chances were the same as the day before, as I am fairly sure the graffiti had not appeared overnight, but because of what was on my mind I noticed it that day.

It was a perfect illustration of some of what Steve had been talking about the night before, and the phenomenon came up again in an excellent book I read last week by Richard Wiseman called Quirkology. (it is a form of what I know as the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, although I don't think Wiseman calls it this).

I also noticed that these dice, as well as not being very fair, are also impossible, as the six always opposes the one. I checked my collection of dice to confirm this! (Yes I have a collection of dice I may post a picture later in the week!)

Putting all this together it looks like I am going to have a lucky week... fingers crossed!

All Being Equal

I have posted this on Facebook before, but it is important enough to post again.

A conservative group called the Coalition for Marriage started a webpage and protest against the governments plans to allow same sex couples to marry. This has over four hundred thousand signatures so far.

In response a website called Coalition for Equal Marriage was set up, arguing that any two people in love, what ever their sex, should be able to get married in the UK. This has now got over forty thousand signatures.

I don't believe that the fact the Coalition for Marriage has over ten times the amount of signatures as the Equal Marriage site is reflective of the majority views of the British people, but is rather a testament to the strength of conservative lobbys and publicity.

If you do agree with the Coalition for Equal Marriage please sign up on the site, and lets try and show the true thoughts of people on this issue.

I Found a Funny Shaped Sweet...

...and thought I would share it with you.

I never promised any level of standards in my blog posts.

Living by faith

I have been on another course of antibiotics this week, this time the tablets are brightly coloured and huge, which means they are more likely to work (It is true!). I have no real idea how they work, or why they work, or even if they will work, but I have faith that my doctor prescribed them for a reason, and for my good.

Why do I put faith in my doctor? Well because she did all her training and learning and got the job as a doctor, she understands more about how the pill works, she has experience of the pill fixing problems similar to mine before, and she has one of impossibly cold stethoscopes.

This is not a blind faith, it is a faith based on good evidence, evidence that is all around me, a culmination of hundreds of years of scientific progress (I see it, for instance, in the rise in life expectancy, and in the development of my mobile phone),

I know that if i put my mind to it I could understand how this pill could fix my problem, I could read books, or find someone to explain it to me. I could do experiments myself to find out the effects of the pill (If I had a lab, and lots of time and money).

But I don't need to, as I have faith that this pill could solve my problem, and if it doesn't (and it is actually looking that way) I will go back to the doctor and she will try something else.

So, (and it especially came to mind on this Christian festival to which faith is central) please don't call agnostics and atheists faithless. It is just a faith placed in arguably more important areas, and a faith that can become fact through understanding.

Right, I need to go and try and swallow this huge pill now. I may need a miracle.

Blog Awakening

This blog seems to have gone quiet, and for that I apologise. I have decided to restart it, and make a concerted effort to keep it up to date. The last thing I want is for the blog to go dormant and the government donate it to charity.

So I will try to update it with something each day, even if that something is just a quote, photo, link, or quick thought.

I will start with this picture of a Red Kite catching some lift over Hughenden Park in High Wycombe.

I was really happy with this picture, but most people just go 'it's ok'. I am posting it here today, and will keep posting it until you realise it is good.

Favourite Podcasts - 25 - Danny Baker

Finally, it is the last of my favourite podcasts, and I have saved the best until last.

Danny Baker is known by most people in the UK, but only truly loved by a few. Many know him as the drinking partner of Chris Evans, many know him as the man from the annoying Daz adverts, many may know him from laddy TV in the 90s.

I know him from doing genuinely creative and innovative radio, from Radio 1, to Radio 5, TalkSport, and now the present day FiveLive. If you ever hear a radio show where the presenter throws out a few topics and gets listeners to phone in with real life funny stories about those topics then it is worth bearing in mind that he created that genre. It may seem an obvious thing to do now, but once it was a brand new idea, and it was Danny Bakers idea.

Of course technology has helped a lot, and played into the hands of Bakers style. Email, Twitter, texts and facebook have all increased the speed of feedback from listeners, closing the feedback loop perfectly and making for fast paced and surprising shows.

Topics are wide ranging, from What sports have you played using improved equipment, to Zombie cars, to moving food, to things that have Just Vanished.

Listening to the podcast is a celebration of the small things in life that could be overlooked, but are actually hilarious, life affirming, or bizarre. You will feel better at the end than when you started.

I could go on, but listening for yourself is the best way to find out more... all I would say is do you want Brown Sauce, Red Sauce, or no sauce at all?

Listen to the podcast on the FiveLive site here.

New Year, New Flat, New Town.

I know it's a week or so late, but Happy New Year! There has been a lot to do the last month, with moving flat before Christmas, getting used to living in a new place (High Wycombe), going away for Christmas and again for new year and Ivonne starting new job.

 This weekend is the first one for a while that almost feels normal, although I think it will be a few months before things feel really normal. I am still crashing into things in the flat all the time as I have not got used to the space, I keep forgetting which way I need to walk to various places and its hard to get used to all the new noises at night.

I have had a little time to wander around the local area, a lovely park area nearby called the Rye, which has a nice lake and wooded area. Squirrels are everywhere at the moment!

 

 Also a nice park and wooded area just behind the flat, and although it is a very steep walk to get up to there are great views from the top.

 

Also a great location for Red Kite spotting!

 

On the way back saw this odd cloud/rainbow thing... the pictures don't do it justice but it looked very strange.

 

Favourite Podcasts 24 - The Life Scientific

I love science, but am often confused by the details of theories and the technical side. What I always like though is the real lives of the people who do science, the accidental discoveries, the rivalries, and the interesting stories that surround particular areas of science.

That is why I have really enjoyed listening to BBC Radio 4's podcasts The Life Scientific, where Jim al-Khalili chats to a leading scientist about their life and work.

Past guests have included Paul Nurse, Jocelyn Bell-Burnell and Colin Pillinger, but the two I have really found interesting were Steven Pinker talking about his studies into language, and reflecting on some of the controversies he has caused, and also Robert Winston on his work on fertility (this podcast has oddly vanished, despite being on only being a few weeks ago).

I really hope this podcast continues and the BBC don't stop it (like they recently did with the excellent Home Planet) , as I think it is up there with In Our Time as the most interesting show and podcast they have done for years.

Download a selection of episodes here at the BBC podcast site.