I am a founder member and currently secretary of the West Norfolk Autism Group and am autistic myself. I am a very keen photographer and almost every blog post I produce will feature some of my own photographs. I am an avidly keen cricket fan and often post about that sport.
In a bid to divert attention from the wet blanket of Philip Hammond’s budget last week, the Establishment has been attacking Labour’s plans for borrowing (only) for investment.
Channel 4’s FactCheck issued an article criticising Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell’s supposed lack of understanding of how government borrowing works – allowing Tories to crow briefly and erroneously – only to have to issue a corrected version. Other ‘MSM’ piled in with similarly-misplaced attacks.
The push-back against this nonsense has started. A group of twenty-three renowned economists also made a firm, public statement of support for the sound economic principle of government borrowing to invest to strengthen the economy – and the tax take.
Now the impact of government investment – and the reality that it pays for itself in economic growth and improved tax-receipts – can be seen in these previously-unreleased case studies of three planned Labour investment projects:
Every individual pledge has been published on this site, including as of yesterday mine. Mine has also been reblogged on FireBrightStarSoul for which many thanks. I reproduce it below as well:
#TheAutisticUnion Pledge |Thomas Sutcliffe
I pledge . . .
I pledge to always uphold the principles of #TheAutisticUnion pledge. I believe firmly in every one of the ten points of this pledge.
As someone who is both autistic and branch secretary of the National Autistic Society West Norfolk branch, I am doing my bit to ensure that autistic people are involved in the running of their own welfare/ support organisations.
Vistaprint gave me a £10 voucher off my next purchase, with a use-by date as a reward for using them to make my 2018 wall calendars, so I used it to create a card which contains some information about me on one side and a sample photograph on the other. I collected them from the delivery office on Austin Street this morning (delivery was attempted yesterday while I was out), and they have come out superbly.
A bird post provoked in part by the Angling Trust seeking permission to double the rate at which they cull cormorants.
INTRODUCTION
This post has two elements: first, I saw on twitter something about the Angling Trust calling for cormorants to be shot “to protect stocks of coarse and game fish”, and following the link located the details which you can see here, and second while out looking for cormorants to photograph for this post I saw something else that I had not previously captured.
CORMORANTS
I would take a lot persuading that increasing the number of cormorants licensed to be shot copuld be justified in any case, but the grounds given, which amount to a statement that “our sport counts for more than cormorants” fail to come even remotely close. There is a cormorant colony within walking distance of central King’s Lynn, and although they were not about in big numbers when I went looking, there were four of them in evidence. Here are the pictures:
AN ASPI.BLOG FIRST
While observing the cormorants I also a got a couple of pictures of this:
Going through my bird book I could find only two birds with black wings and a white bar across their tail. The first, the Storm Petrel was an unlikely option given how far King’s Lynn is from the nearest ocean (it is an ocean going bird). That left me with the second, the Lapwing, a medium sized wader that likes marshy or muddy conditions (not a problem in the vicinity of the Great Ouse!). Here to conclude this post is what my bird book has to say about Lapwings:
This is the final post I shall be producing about my first visit to my parent’s new home in Cornwall. There will be photographs of all the publicity materials that I picked up while down there, captioned where appropriate with links to the posts that they relate to, except for one section where I am following the route of my journey to Penzance and flag that at the start of the entire section. Thus, this post will contain links to every other post I have produced about the visit.
THE PUBLICITY MATERIALS
We start with…
THE RAME PENINSULA OFFICIAL LEAFLET
This is the particular area in which my parents new home is located, so in one sense it relates to all of the previous posts in this series…
The posts that relate most closely to this are those relating to Thursday,Friday and Sunday.
Next we have…
A DOUBLE SIDED RAILWAY MAP
This features the Great Western Railway network map on one side and the whole national railway network on the other:
This map particularly relates to the posts for Wednesday, the first of the Saturdayposts and Monday.
Our next port of call is…
A SOUTH DEVON GUIDE
This is a stout little booklet, with a pictorial map as a centrepiece:
Next we come to…
A SELECTION OF RAILWAYANA
These are all unrelated to anything I blogged about, but represent things to consider for future visits…
We are now going to cover…
CORNISH TRAIN JOURNEYS
For most of this section we will be following the route of my journey to Penzance, but first a couple of pics to set the scene…
Now starting our survey of stuff that relates closely to my Saturday journey we begin with the St Germans Walk…
Our next staging post is Bodmin Parkway, for the Bodmin & Wenford Railway:
Continuing our westward journey our next diversion is at St Austell where those so minded can catch a 101 bus to The Eden Project (the officially recommended way of visiting that great attraction – they are not great admirers of the motor car).
Before arriving at the destination for our next section we give a passing wave to Camborne Town:
These maps relate to my post about my day in Penzance. The first two pictures are of the only item in this collection that had to be bought, for a whopping £1!
We have almost reached the end of this post, which we do with…
A FEW LAST PICTURES
These are the last few bits…
The official mainline timetableI will not be able to make use of this, but some of you might.
My account of the homeward journey from Fort Picklecombe.
INTRODUCTION
We have reached the penultimate post about my Cornish holiday – the last day. This post details the long journey home.
STARTING OFF
The length of time it took to get from Plymouth to Fort Picklecombe on the Thursday was playing on my mind, and I wanted to be sure that we were away before 9AM, since my train was due to depart Plymouth at 10:44, and I reckoned that a single ticket from Plymouth to London bought on the day (London-Lynn would still have been valid on the original ticket) woulkd probably cost more than my original ticket (in this assessment, to borrow from history, there was the proverbial “cubit of error my way that does not obscure the 99 cubits of error the other way” – actually said ticket would have been fractionally less. Nevertheless, I did get a few lasy pictures before leaving the fort:
A first for me – the first time I have captured a heron on camera.
On the journey into Plymouth I managed to snap two pictures from the back of the camper van:
I had some time to kill at Plymouth station and did so by taking photographs…
An avian passenger?
PLYMOUTH – LONDON
This train was a service called “The Cornish Riviera”, which starts in Penzance and snails up through Cornwall stopping pretty much everywhere and then makes up time by calling only at Exeter St Davids and Reading between Plymouth and London. Although I had an aisle seat on this journey, and no opportunity to move to the window seat I was not going to be denied at least some photos. I got a good few between Plymouth and Exeter and a handful thereafter…
Exeter St Davids (two images)
This chalk horse, carved directly out of the hillside, is visible at distance at a time when the train is at full speed.
Reading stationRoyal Oak – the Hammersmith & City line’s last station west of Paddington. The next station towards Hammersmith, Westbourne Park, used to offer an interchange with mainline railways but nowadays Ealing Braodway is the last mainline station before Paddington. Back in the old days there was a connection – the first locomotives to run over what was then The Metropolitan Railway were supplied by the Great Western, while this extension to Hammersmtih opened in 1864, only one year after the original.
LONDON TO KING’S LYNN
I crossed to the Hammersmith and City line platforms, nos 15 and 16 of the main station, and waited a long time for an eastbound train, then discovering that it was terminating at Edgware Road (very odd indeed for a train from Hammersmith), so I had to change again. I arrived at King’s Cross and was just in time to catch the 14:44 to King’s Lynn, which was not overfull (as the 15:44, the next service, certainly would have been). This means that I was at home and unpacking by 5PM.
This picture was the cause of minor quarrel – I was challenged by another passenger as to why I was taking pictures of his friend, and it took my a while to get the point across that I was not, and that it was this map which was my target. His friend’s hat did appear in the uncropped version, but no face was visible, and my only interest was the map. I was perhaps a little harsh as I was fully expecting to miss my intended connection at Kings Cross due to the delays on this leg of the journey.
The platform from which the train to King’s Lynn was l.eaving was revealed with a mere eight minutes to spare, and if you going to Lynn you have to go to the front of the train (or else get out and dash along the platform at Cambridge).
We have reached the Sunday of my Cornish holiday. I am going to cover the day in three sections for reasons that will become apparent as the post develops.
SUNDAY MORNING
From my point of view most of this day was taken up with editing my pictures from the previous day’s excursion (see here and here), but Fort Picklecombe also provides regular opportunities for taking photographs, and I also took a number of these opportunities.
We were going out for Sunday lunch, and at about 12:15 we got ready to leave. We were lunching at an establishment that doubles as an art gallery and is located in a set of Nissen huts in a village called Maker. Here is their Sunday menu:
In the event we did not have starters, and each of us went for a different main course – I went for the slow-roasted pork shoulder, my father for the beef and my mother for the hake. It was a long wait to be served, but that was because they were cooking the vegetables from fresh. The pork was excellently cooked, with crackling that was both crunchy and flavoursome, and the vegetables were excellent. The roast potatoes however were not as good as they would have been had I cooked them – the potatoes had been peeled but not chopped, hence were very large and therefore somewhat lacking in the crunch factor. Overall, considering all factors, I rate this meal at 7.5/10. Here are the rest of my pictures from lunchtime:
A good picture of the Nissen hut in which we ate.
Our table.
A bad picture of a Nissen hut (as you will note not much of the art on display here could really be considered good).
Then it was back to the fort, and back to photo-editing, although in between editing pictures from the previous day I captured some…
An account of the time I spent in Penzance on the Saturday of my Cornish holiday.
INTRODUCTION
I have finally edited all the pictures from my recent Cornish holiday and have now at last got time to get back to blogging about it. My last post described my journey down to Penzance, and this post provides the story of the rest of the day.
GETTING MY BEARINGS
Having arrived in to Penzance pretty much bang on schedule I visited the local information office, purchased a detailed and very cheap souvenir map (I will conclude this series of Cornish posts with one featuring all the publicity materials that I collected while down there), and set out on the first part of my exploration of the town. An early necessity was finding somewhere to eat lunch (although I am not entirely inflexible on the matter I generally aim to eat lunch some time close to 1PM), and having walked past the Harbour and the Chapel I found an establishment suited to my needs. The Turk’s Head was not too extortionate (there are no cheap places in Penzance). I opted for a BBQ Chicken, Bacon and Davidstow Cheese melt, and enjoyed it, although I felt that it did not really live up to its name on two counts:
1. There was precious little evidence of bacon (though they had used good quality chicken)
2. Davidstow is supposed to be a strongly flavoured cheese and yet I barely noticed it over the other flavours – if I ask for something of which cheese is a featured ingredient I want to taste said cheese.
Here some photos taken between leaving Penzance station and having lunch:
The Egyptian House
The first of a number of shots of interesting items on display at The Turks Head
There were five sets of framed banknotes starting with this one.
Poor lighting prevented me from doing full justice to this map.This, and the two set of framed cigarette cards the follow it were in a narrow passage that meant that I could not get them fully in shot from front on – had to photograph at an angle.
POST LUNCH EXPLORATIONS
Having consumed my lunch I headed for the Promenade, and walked along it. From the other end of the Promenade I walked back to the train station and then did some exploring on the other side of the train station, locating a path that ran between the tracks and the sea. Here are some photographs…
In November one would not expect an open-air pool in Engalnd to have much custom, and indeed the Jubilee Pool was empty.
A number of post boxes were painted gold to honour people who were successful at the London 2012 Olympics – this one Penzance is dedicated to rower Helen Glover.
I conclude this post with two special sections, firstly…
ST MICHAEL’S MOUNT
Being grey the whole time, and misty for most of it this was not a great a day for taking long-range photographs, but St Michael’s Mount was not a target I could resist, even under those circumstances, so here are the results:
You will notice gulls in a couple of these shots, which leads to the second special section, which concludes this post…
BIRDS
There are many seabirds to be observed in Penzance and I was able to capture some of them on camera…
The journey back was uneventful, and with the train departing Penzance at 16:41 on a November afternoon it was too dark for photographing through the windows of that train.
An account of the journey to Penzance, setting the scene for my next post, about Penzance itself.
INTRODUCTION
This is continuing my account of my visit to Cornwall. We have reached Saturday, which for me featured a trip to England’s westernmost commercial railway station (note England not Britain – Arisaig on the Glasgow-Mallaig line in Scotland is further west), Penzance. The closest station in time terms to my parent’s new home is St Germans, and that is where my train journey started.
ST GERMANS
St Germans is completely unstaffed, and therefore, since there is no one to maintain it, has no ticket machines either. Tickets are purchased from the conductor once you are on the train. You are only allowed to do this at unstaffed stations – boarding without a ticket at a station where you can purchase one renders you liable to a penalty fare of £20 (I heard another passenger who had done this escaping with a warning not to do it again).
I had a bit of time at St Germans (given that the next train to call at St Germans was two hours later this was indubitably the sensible position to be in. Here are some photographs from the station…
The ticket issued by the onboard conductor is much bigger than a standard train ticket.
THE JOURNEY TO PENZANCE
Taking pictures through the windows of a moving train is not especially easy, although I did at least have a window seat for the entire journey, so was never shooting across people. After leaving St Germans the train called at Liskeard (change for the Looe branch line), Bodmin Parkway, Lostwithiel (although the name might suggets otherwise as far as I am aware no elves live here!), Par (trains to Newquay depart from here), St Austell, Truro (Falmouth services diverge here), Redruth, Camborne, Hayle, St Erth (branch line to St Ives from here) and Penzance. Here are the pictures from this journey…
PENZANCE STATION
These pictures were taken both on arrival at Penzance, and towards the end of my time in Penzance.
This was my first effort at capturing this tile picture……and this, later in the day, was my second and final effort.
I am a bit behind with blogging about my stay in Cornwall because of the time it takes to edit the photos and the fact that I had a long day out yesterday – an excursion to Penzance about which there will be much more later.
THE LUNCH
Ahoy Fish and Chips, a mobile fish and chip shop, call at Fort Picklecombe for Friday lunch time. We bought lunch from them – cod for my parents and a beefburger for me, all with chips. The chips were of excellent quality, and the pricing was very reasonable.
How to mee your health & safety obligations without actually doing anything.
THE WALK
Having walked to Kingsand and Cawsand the previous day I walked the other way this time, climbing up quite high above the sea. Here, barring a few preserved for the next and final section of this post are the pictures I took while out on this walk…
FOCUS ON THE LIGHTHOUSE
The lighthouse which is visible from my parents new home features in a number of pictures that I have taken. I open this section with a mini challenge that I titled “Framed” – do you have a picture where there is a natural framework for the centrepiece of the photo? If you create a post containing the picture, and provide details in the comments, and I am impressed I will reblog you. Here is my starter…
This brief post is dedicated to the various ships that I have seen while down here overlooking the sea. Yesterday was a bonanza, with many warships in evidence.
I pledge . . .
aspiblog 