A wonderful video from The Mighty.
A excellent video from the folks at The Mighty on stimming…
As this first appeared on facebook and not all my followers use facebook I am keeping comments open even though this is not my own work.
A celebration of the fifth anniversary of aspiblog – read, enjoy and please share!
What does the title of this post refer to? Here, courtesy of Robert Harris, backed by Edgar Allan Poe is a clue:
The special significance of lustrum in the sense of a five-year period to aspiblog is that today is the fifth anniversary of aspiblog. To view the post that started it all on May 10th 2011 click here.
There are many approaches to blogging. Some blogs deal almost entirely in original content, some blogs are devoted principally to sharing stuff created by others, and some like this one are a mixture of the two. I create new posts such as this when I feel I have stuff to write about and/or enough good pictures to warrant creating a post to share them.
Sharing can be done in various ways. There is the “Links” section was has been a frequent feature of this blog, which enables one to share lots of stuff in a single post. Other wordpress posts can be reblogged, and some other posts not on wordpress allow one the option of ‘pressing’ a link on to a wordpress blog (I have a ‘press this’ tool for my wordpress hosted London transport themed website www.londontu.be to enable me to post links to interesting and appropriate articles). This morning I used the press this button on Richard Murphy’s Tax Research UK blog to post a link to a piece of his speculating on the prospect of Mr Osborne being reshuffled into obscurity on June 24th and took some screen shots along the way to illustrate the process:
This blog features many things, but there are several recurring themes:
I spent yesterday listening to commentary of the fascinating match between Somerset and Warwickshire. While elsewhere in the country vast numbers of runs were being racked up this match was low scoring, and the better for it. The big scoring that has been such a feature of this early season is partly due to a daft playing condition introduced into the county championship whereby the visiting side can dispense with the toss if they wish to bowl first. This has resulted in a succession of pitches on which batsmen can fill their boots. There is no logic to such a playing condition – if you want to absolutely ensure that home teams cannot prepare pitches to suit themselves simply get rid of the toss altogether and award choice of innings to the visitors, although I would personally stick to having a toss for innings. If, as currently seems likely, Somerset win, they will owe it in large part to Peter Trego who in a low scoring game has amassed 94 and 51.
I heard while listening to that commentary yesterday that there are going be matches played between the North and South to give the best county players a chance to play in matches of higher standard than normal county games, taking place in the UAE in March, before the MCC v Champion County match, which I think is an excellent idea.
I have three links to share:
First, a petition on change.org calling for a statue of a suffragette to be erected in Parliament Square, which I urge all of you to sign and share.
My next two links are both related and concern a subject close to my heart: libraries. Libraries in many parts of the country are facing cuts, and one of the areas affected is Lancashire. A campaign is running to save their libraries, and they have recently created a bit of a stir by telling their MP to stay out of it, such is their (entirely justified) lack of trust in the individual concerned. Two links for you:
No aspiblog post would be complete without a few pictures, and I choose to finish with this section…
Finally to end this post a message to all my readers, and fellow bloggers who have helped to inspire me to keep this blog going…
Richard Murphy of Tax Research UK raises an interesting possibility…
A mention of politics, cricket and summer being here. Some good photographs as well.
I have various things to cover, and of course pictures to share. I will work up to the pictures, covering everything else first…
The only vote I was able to take part in was for Norfolk Police & Crime Commissioner, and although disappointed that it went the way of the Tory (by a small margin from Labour) I was pleased to see the incumbent, Mr Bett, finish a humiliating fourth.
The news from these was nearly all good. Sadiq Khan won with a record vote for any candidate in any London Mayoral election. This has probably had the added beneficial effect of ensuring that no further campaigns will be conducted under the malign influence of Sir Lizard of Oz (yes, even as the latest effort to be besmirched by his dirty pawprints was unravelling in spectacular fashion Mr Cameron was orchestrating a knighthood for him) aka Linton Crosby. Sian Berry was rewarded for the excellence of her own campaign with third place, a record vote for a Green candidate and election to the Greater London Assembly along with Caroline Russell, while Shahrar Ali just missed out on becoming a third Green GLA member.
In the first set of elections since Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader his party won 47% of the council seats contested while also succeeding in in two mayoral elections (Bristol as well as London) and two by-elections. For comparison during the first set of elections contested after the election as leader of Anthony B Liar Labout won 46% of the council seats contested, while in those days there were no mayoral elections.
The English cricket season is well under way, with some heavy scoring going on all over the country. May 9th 1895 was the day on which W G Grace played his first first class innings of that season, and just 21 days later he reached 1,000 runs for the season, the first time that feat had been achieved in May (the strict 1,000 in May has since been emulated only by Wally Hammond and Charlie Hallows, although Tom Hayward, Don Bradman (twice), Bill Edrich, Glenn Turner and Graeme Hick all reached 1,000 for the English season before June, having played some innings in April).
After a somewhat patchy spring, summer appears to have started early. For the second straight day I am in shorts and t-shirt. Here are some summery photographs to end the post (in tiled mosic form – click on an individual to view at full size)…
An account of today at work, featuring the creation of a poster, a laminated copy of which is on display in our shop window at 5 Norwich Street, Fakenham, NR21 9AF
Today as well as producing the poster which forms the first part of the title I did some more postal history imaging and imaged
a couple of lots for a small militaria sale in which i have otherwise had no involvement. Also, I assembled a metal detector for display in the shop.
The purpose of this poster was to advertise the hats and helmets I blogged about yesterday. This required selecting the images which would work best, getting brief descriptions of the items chosen to feature and fitting the whole together in a visually appealing way. The three images I selected were:
I went for the white helmet to provide a contrast withe dark colour of the other two. Putting these together with the descriptions and appropriate top and tail pieces gave this final product:
POLICE HEADGEAR AT JAMES – this is a link to the original word document – a screenshot is below…
Just a few images from today…
An account of voting in the Norfolk Police and Crime Commissioner election and of my day at work.
I have had a busy day imaging auction items at James and Sons, but before going to work I did find time to…
The only election in which us Norfolk folk had a vote today was for Police and Crime Commissioner, and to put it mildly I was not 100% convinced that this was an election worth voting in. However, in my inbox this morning was an email from the Grteen Party candidate, and that settled the issue – I would vote. The polling station was not a hive of activity (indeed to judge from the reaction to my arrival I may well have been the first voter the folks running that polling station had seen that day). This election used a preference system – one vote for your favourite candidate and one for your second favourite. With three of the candidates being respectively Tory, UKIP and a highly suspect Independent, and a fourth standing for what is effectively an ex-party, I used my votes for the Green party candidate (1st) and Labour (2nd):
Today’s imaging consisted of two distinct parts, first a collection of police helmets and such, and second starting work on some postal history items. I will start with the…
These feature a wide range of police organisations.
Most of the postal history stuff was not so interesting in appearance, although there were a few hihglights…
From the wonderful folk at DPAC comes this – please read and share the original…
Source: 5th May We Support #ENILILDAY
From thepoorsideoflife by way of dpac (please note the request at the end of the dpac version to contact your MP – I have already done so)
Source: You cannot serve two masters.. Universal credit and your employer.
Wise words (as one would expect) from Richard Murphy of Tax Research UK…
Source: Can we build a new consensus?
An account of a visit to London for an NAS training session, including Sutcliffe’s Laws of Travelling by Public Transport and lots of photographs.
This post deals with events on Saturday, when I attended a training session for branch officers at NAS HQ in London. Before moving on to the main part of my post I have a small section on…
April is Autism Awareness month, and here in West Norfolk we certainly did our part, with our hugely successful Positive Autism Awareness Conference. However it is also important to make it quite clear that autism does not stop at the end of April. Improving awareness, understanding and ultimately acceptance of autism is a year-round task.
I have never previously set these out in full, so here goes:
Zeroth law: Any journey involving public transport requires careful planning no matter how apparently straightforward it is.
First law: If you allow scope for things to go wrong you will have a quick, clear run.
Second law: If you decline to allow scope for things to go wrong you will have a horror run.
Third law: Because bitter experience has taught them to make allowances public transport users are less likely to arrive late than car users.
Do you recognize the more famous set of laws on which the formatting of this set is based?
The session was due to start at 10AM, which gave two options for which train to catch – the 7:54 and be tight for time or the 6:54 and have time to spare for things to go wrong. In keeping with the first law of travelling by public transport the second option was chosen. The other person travelling from West Norfolk wanted to travel there with me, so we agreed to take the 6:54. On the day preceding the journey I called in at the station to make sure that the service was running as it should be (The branch chair had kindly arranged tickets for us, requiring in return that we make sure to come back with expenses claim forms so that she could reclaim the money). Here are some pictures from this preliminary stage…
We took our places on the train and having allowed for things to go wrong had a clear run to London. Callum’s girlfriend had decided to travel with us so she could have a look round London, and at King’s Cross she and Callum arranged a meeting point before Callum and I head off towards NAS HQ.
Walking up Pentonville Road (between Pentonville Road, Angel and our London starting point of King’s Cross this was quite a monopoly board journey!) we arrived at NAS HQ almost dot on 9 o’clock, and were the only people there that early. I took some pictures while we waited for others to arrive, including the feature image…
Alessia, one of the two people running the session arrived a few minutes after we had, and let us in to the building. We took our places in the training room, and examined our training packs…
The training session consisted of presentations and some group activities. I found it to be a very valuable day, definitely worth the early start. The bit I enjoyed most came near the end, when we had to decide whether certain scenarios were things we could do as NAS volunteers, things we could not do or things that we might be able to do. At the end of the session Callum and I went our separate ways, he to meet his girlfriend and I to head back (albeit by a somewhat circuitous route). The pictures I took between here and the concourse at King’s Cross station will be featuring on my
London transport themed website, so I shall not share them here.
Apart from providing a few good photos, the return journey was pretty uneventful (yes, on the Saturday of a bank holiday weekend I had two public transport journeys pass without incident), and I arrived back home just over 11 hours after setting off in the morning.
aspiblog 