TGV at St P

I’m watching BBC News 24’s coverage of the inaugural journey of the Eurostar along the high speed line to St Pancras – and I’m more excited than I really ought to be. We had vague plans to use the new service to Brussels later this year, but I suspect that will have to be put back til next year.

It is a bit of a national embarrassment that the only high speed rail in this country runs from London to the Channel Tunnel. I remember reading, but can’t now source, a factoid along the lines of 5,000kms of high speed track have been built in continental Europe in the time it’s taken us to get around 150kms from London to Dover. So, I’m very glad to hear that there are Lib Dem proposals to build more high speed track in this country, and look forward to hearing more about it.

UPDATE: Just heard on the hourly news they plan to drop the Bxl service.  That’s disappointing – don’t really want to go back to Paris right now, but haven’t been to Brussels since 2001.

Your favourite British beach

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You and Yours have been running an end of summer item in their programme asking people to nominate their favourite beach in the British Isles.

I thought I’d add my tuppence.

In recent years, it has to be the ten miles of sand running from Barmouth to Shell Island. On a sunny day, it’s gorgeous: miles of golden sand, ringed by mountains, and with the beautiful and unique SSSI in the dunes teeming with all sorts of weird looking plants.

However, for all my firm belief about the specialness and uniqueness of the place, I’m currently resisting the idea from friends that we should go there to camp in October. I think you’d have to be crazy!

Shower technology

We’ve bitten the bullet and decided to go ahead with the solar panel. It should be up by the end of next week. I’ve also requested a special controller that lets me keep a log of how well the panel is working. We’re not really going to find out over the autumn and winter, although it will make some difference to our gas usage.

In going ahead, I’ve learned that showers are much more complicated than they look.

Currently, we have a simple electric shower. Cold water at mains pressure goes into a little white box and comes out hot.

But with a solar panel heating our water it makes sense to have a shower fed by the hot water tank. This means more options than I’d ever thought about before.

We could have a pressurised hot water system, with the hot water tank at the same pressure as the cold mains. This would mean that the hot water tank could heat the water over 100 deg C – getting the maximum possible out of the solar panel. But the setup costs are much more expensive, so this gets ruled out.

Which leaves us with a gravity fed hot water tank, with a header tank relocated to the attic to give some pressure, but not as much as mains pressure. You can’t mix mains pressure cold water with a lower pressure hot water system, so some sort of clever has to go on in the bathroom.

You could have a separate cold water feed in the bathroom, also fed from a header tank. But this means an extra run of piping.

You could put a pump on the hot water system to bring up the hot water system to the same pressure as the cold water system. I was a bit worried about this option because it seems to me that it might be a way of using the water up quicker, and emptying all the hot out of the tank.

The last – and simplest – solution is to put a pressure limiting valve on the cold water feed to take it down to the pressure of the hot water. I think this is what we’ll be doing.

Pointless road factoid

Road A ZonesEngland’s major A roads, the A1, A2 etc up to A6 all start in London, with the A1 heading north to Edinburgh, the A2 eastish out to Dover, and so on, clockwise around the capital. Similarly, the A7, A8 and A9 all start in Edinburgh.

(The only one I’ve been on as far as I know is the A9 which goes up to Loch Ness and has many, many stunning views from the road)

The numbering system then works so that all roads beginning A1… start in the chunk of Britain between Edinburgh and Dover, the ones starting A2 are between Dover and Portsmouth and so on.

So it’s particularly interesting that when driving to Nottingham from the M1, we have three roads leading into the city in different sectors: the A453, the A52 and the A610.

Well, I think so, anyway.

Picnic

We went out and had a picnic in Wollaton Park yesterday amidst hundreds of other people taking advantage of the weather and the space.

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I cooked. Homemade feta, tomato and spinach quiche. Home baked bread rolls with salmon and cucumber, and with ham and pickle. Potato salad (but need a better recipe). Melon slices and fresh strawberries. Scone round with clotted cream and homemade strawberry jam. Homemade elderflower cordial to drink. All packed into a wicker hamper P was given by someone planning to move abroad.

A lovely time was had by all!

Wedding

My cousin got married yesterday, so we spent the day at his wedding with lots of my family. A lovely day, with the reception at Fairlawns – who did a really, really good four course meal: melon, soup, a pot roast blade of beef, and creme brulee. Yum.

Halfway through the proceedings, after the speeches (brief and very touching) but before the evening do, we all trooped outside onto the lawn and released the helium balloons that had decorated the room, with tags tied onto them with well wishes. A nice touch, and a clever seamless way of getting us out of the room while they got it ready for the evening do.

I drank far, far more than I should have done, carrying on well into the night largely with the brides family, long after most people went to bed. I finished at about 3am, with several members of the party keeping going much later.

The following morning, I felt much better than I had any right to – with practically no hangover at all. We had a lovely a breakfast then set off home.

I eventually remembered my camera. I’d left it out of sight in the hotel room which unfortunately meant it went out of mind also, and I had to drive all the way back to the hotel later in the day to retrieve it.

There were one or two nice photos on the camera.

Lib Dem blog-meet

Just like we did last year we’re hosting an informal Lib Dem blog meet in Brighton. This year it’s in conjunction with LibDemVoice.org and LibDemBlogs.co.uk. We’ll be in Brighton’s Evening Star pub from 7pm onwards, and warmly welcome bloggers and friends to join us for the evening or part of it. The pub is very close to the railway station, and just over half a mile from the conference centre. People are welcome to join us whether or not they are registered for conference.

Further details available over on Lib Dem Voice.

Online Scrabble

I have found http://www.scrabulous.com

Oh, boy.  I’ve been playing online scrabble for a few days now, and it’s great.

You can also play it on Facebook, and I’ve just kicked off a few correspondence games.  Of the 3 I started, I managed to go all out on two of them, with FELLOWS and GUITARS.

But I’ve just played a game against a very strong opponent who clawed his way back from my early all out of PARABLES which earned me 76.

My parents are huge Scrabble fiends. Maybe this is finally the thing to get my Dad on the internet!

Photo uploads

I have uploaded some more photos to Flickr. Firstly, the pics from our Norwich holiday in May, which have been languishing on my computer untouched for months. A boat trip on the Broads, an afternoon in Walsingham, and an eery fog that engulfed the chicken farm we camped on all feature.

Following on from that, photos of our choir week in Hereford – mainly long-lens candids in the pub, but also the official photos of all of us in our cassocks, taken using a tripod and a time delay, so I’m in some of them too. And because I was at home, there are also too many parents of Ellie, my aged parents’ aged cat.

And then later some photos from our weekend in Ipswich last weekend – more particularly our afternoon on the beach in Aldeburgh.

AJ180850

I have a new camera – my first digital SLR. I do like have the extra control, and seeing the machine focus for you. Some of what I learned using an old manual SLR has been useful with the new camera, but the amount of control you now get is great. Changing the sensitivity of the “film” at a key press is great. And instant feedback on whether the settings you used worked or not is fantastic. No more having to wait days to see whether you wasted another whole roll of film.