What to do for New Year’s Eve.

Posted on December 29, 2020 Posted in UncategorizedTagged Celebrate, Covid, History, Life, Local pub, Memories, New year, New years eve, Time, Virus4 Comments

I guess we won’t be going anywhere this New Year’s eve. And yet that’s not a bad thing. Usually we visited friends to get away from the noise at the pub across the road. They were always rowdy and played very loud music that had such a loud base beat that it shook the house. Dum dum ddiiddi dummmm.. Each year seemed to get worse. I didn’t complain because that’s what people do.

So what shall we do, we might go for a walk in the afternoon if it’s not too icy. I think it would be nice to find our scrabble set, or a chessboard. I do sound like an old fuddyduddy, but I just want to be cautious. Virus news is that the infection is escalating. I’d rather stay in and be safe….

Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh

Posted on December 11, 2020December 11, 2020 Posted in UncategorizedTagged Christmas, Element, Frankincense, Gold, History, Incense, Metal, Myrrh, What are theyLeave a comment

I know what Gold is, a precious metal but I had to look up Frankincense and Myrrh were. According to http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov :

Frankincense and myrrh are two olive plants from different species and genera. Frankincense is a hard, gelatinous resin exuded from the trunk incisions of the frankincense tree, Boswellia carterii Birdw. or other species in the genus Boswellia of the family Burseraceae, mainly from Somalia, Ethiopia, and India
Myrrh is an oily, gelatinous substance exuded from the bark of Commiphora myrrha Engl. or various other species of Commiphora, and can be classified as natural myrrh or colloid myrrh. Myrrh exists mainly in tropical and subtropical areas, such as Somalia, Ethiopia, and the southern Arabian Peninsula

Taken from:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov › articles ›
So now you know!

Swimming

Posted on December 7, 2020 Posted in UncategorizedTagged Before austerity, Canoeing, History, Memories, Newbuildings, Sports hall, Swimming4 Comments

Our senior school was amalgamated with another one and so they decided to to rebuild science and craft blocks and a sports block with a swimming pool! The great thing was that we got to do life saving skills as well as learning to canoe!

That was the time years ago when governments spent money on schools and education…. And it was good because children who couldn’t afford it got to learn to swim. I wish that austerity hadn’t cur so many services now.

Not a swimming pool

Posted on November 28, 2020 Posted in UncategorizedTagged Cauldon canal, Etruria, Etruria Industrial museum, History, Lock, Lock forty, Photo, Picture, Staffordshire, Stoke-on-Trent, Trent and mersey canal, View, WarehouseLeave a comment

Through the door of the warehouse looking out over lock forty of the Trent and Mersey canal. Steps lead up from the depths of the deep lock, picked out in white paint amidst the concrete sides of the canal. Behind me on the other side of the warehouse the Cauldon canal flows. It is higher up than the Trent and Mersey canal until lock forty raises it to the same level. The warehouse is slightly damp inside which may be to do with its position between the two arms of the canal. I like ‘views through’ things, like views into windows and through foliage.

Found photo

Posted on September 28, 2020 Posted in CatTagged Basis for painting, Cat, Clever cat, Feline, Found, History, Love, Memories, Photo, RememberedLeave a comment

I found this in the front bedroom while having a clear out. It’s the photo I used to base a painting of my old cat on. Looking up the stairs at the window. It’s great to find it, it brings back great memories of a very friendly intelligent cat. She used to like sitting in the sun on the windowledge. She would sit there in the mornings until the sun moved round to the other side of the house, then she would move to the bedroom window, or she would come downstairs and go out into the garden. Good memories.

Potteries

Posted on August 28, 2020August 28, 2020 Posted in UncategorizedTagged Blogging, Ceramics, City centre, Hanley, History, Plates, pots, Potteries, Pottery, Staffordshire, Stoke-on-TrentLeave a comment

The ‘Potteries’ is the name people call the city of Stoke-on-Trent in the North Midlands of England.

Built on the coalfields of the area, with an abundance of water and clay, it was an ideal place to start making pottery in factories during the industrial revolution. Bottle kilns, or ovens (so called because of their shape) were built across the six towns of Stoke-upon-Trent, Hanley, Burslem, Tunstall, Fenton and Longton. The six towns were bought together as a Federation in the early twentieth century and this created the city of Stoke-on-Trent.

The Potteries Museum and art gallery is crammed with beautiful ceramics and is situated in the Cultural Quarter of the city centre which is in Hanley. Also worth a visit are the Gladstone Pottery museum in Longton and Middleport pottery in Middleport (near Burslem). There are many places to visit here. Hopefully they will all be open again soon.

Old equipment

Posted on August 11, 2020August 11, 2020 Posted in UncategorizedTagged Battery, Bush radio, Cassette player, CD player, History, Music, Obsolescence, Old, Radio, SoundLeave a comment

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My bush radio, and behind it a CD player and cassette player.

The radio takes a large square battery. It tunes in to Long wave so I can get Radio Four (including test match special). Its a real Bush radio from the 1960’s? I found it at a car boot sale years ago covered in splashes of emulsion paint. I gently cleaned that off (with a knife!) and when we put the battery in it worked!

I used the cassette player to listen to my fortieth birthday present, a boxed set of the Radio 4 series of the Lord of the Rings. We listened to it one weekend. Thirteen episodes, six episodes one day and seven the next. The epic series starred Micheal Horden as Gandalf and Ian Holm as Frodo. It includes parts of he books that don’t appear in the films. It’s not as complex as the original books, but very good.

Finally my CD player. I’ve got cds but I don’t listen to them very often. The whole lot of equipment is getting very old. But they have worked well for me. It would be sad to get rid of any of them. That’s the trouble with built in obsolescence.

Train set

Posted on August 1, 2020August 1, 2020 Posted in UncategorizedTagged Blogging, Diorama, Fun, History, Life, Steam, Steam train models, Toy trains, Trains4 Comments

It might look a bit of a jumble but this is hubbies train set. There is an oval of track with a spur onto a siding. We worked together to add a canal on one side, a very steep curved bridge ove the railway, some colliery buildings and lots of other bits and bobs. The buildings are either made from card or plastic, or little ornaments of buildings. I guess it’s like a little village. I think I built a tiny greenhouse.

Hubby has some bits of train that have been in their boxes for many years! I hope he liberates more of them.

Mask

Posted on May 31, 2020May 31, 2020 Posted in UncategorizedTagged Art, Blogging, Design, Digital drawing, History, Life, Mask, Random, Thinking, ThoughtLeave a comment

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What mask do you hide behind? Are you a wise owl or something more peculiar. I’ve seen photos of Italian masks, all black, with a massive beak shape. I think they wore them during the plague? Apparently people have recreated them and are wearing them during the pandemic. It’s because we are more interconnected than in the past, so people can reference historical times and be recognised as doing something that would not have been understood in the past…..

Life, the world, history, fascinating,

Student memories

Posted on April 24, 2020 Posted in UncategorizedTagged Coal fire, Friends, History, Life, Memories, Old House, Remembered, Student house, Time, Tumble down houseLeave a comment

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Forty years ago, here are two of my friends who I shared a student house with. Unlike the accommodation today things were different then. It’s like something out of ‘the young ones’ TV series. There was no hot water, just a broken water heater. I hate to say this but there was no bathroom and we used the showers at the college. The washing machine was an old twin tub. Our cooker was gas, but there was no gas fire. Instead we just had a coal fire to warm the whole house. And the toilet was down the yard in an outhouse.

We moved on into a slightly less tumble down house, finished college, and ended up in our own house. But I actually enjoyed life in that house. X

Mallaband-Brown

Tag: History