More canal bridge art

Lots of the bridges in the Rugby area have artworks on the sides - and I don’t mean the graffiti! Many of them feature the game of rugby, of course.

Incidentally, this bridge is less than 3 miles from the home of the friend who accompanied us. She’s able to tell her friends when asked where she’s been on holiday that she visited Rugby! I had the same experience a few years ago when we visited Aylesbury - by canal!


This is the remains of a railway bridge with some railway art.

Tunnel of Light

The 189 metre long Newbold Tunnel, on the Oxford Canal at Newbold on Avon, near Rugby, has been fitted with coloured lights. Originally installed in 2005 as part of the Rugby's celebration of the Hindu Festival of Light, Diwali, the lights still operate during the day and provide a fascinating background to what is usually a rather gloomy part of a canal cruise. Here by comparison is the Braunston tunnel – the light is an approaching boat (isn't there some saying about the light at the end of the tunnel?) This picture was taken about 20 minutes before we emerged from the tunnel. Braunston is longer, of course.

The lights are turned off at night for the bats. The tunnel is pretty well semicircular so the reflections form a full circle of light. 

Great – but is it art?

Bridges on the Canals

We've just spent a few days on the Oxford and Grand Union canals. The bridges on this stretch show a range of interesting engineering – and artistic – enterprise. I snapped lots of them: I'll post these bridges over the next few days.

Let's start with the classical accommodation bridge which, although fairly basic, was a significant engineering task in its day and has a simple elegance. There are dozens in this style – the minimum width to allow a boat to pass and a towpath for the horse.

The cast iron bridges – this one is over the branch to Rugby Wharf – are amongst the most beautiful constructions along the canal.

This bridge is listed – the details of the listing can be found here.

Car park signs at Church

Installed today

Wyred apple juice – from tree to bottle

… well, from picked to bottle.

Wyred, the Church youth group are generating donations for their trip to Africa next summer. They've been offered apples to make apple juice to sell. The apples are on trees so they have to pick them. They're then transported to Chiltern Ridge where they are pressed and bottled. Chiltern Ridge have a wonderful service: they press, pasteurise and bottle apple juice from apples delivered to the farm.

The Wyred apple juice is selling like hot cakes - £3 a bottle or 4 for £2.50. It's available after services, at cream teas or from the Church office. 

Wyred's planned trip is described in more detail on the Church web site missendenchurch.org.uk

The apples

The press at Chiltern Ridge

Bottling the juice

Bat watch

Great fun tonight: a bat watch up at Church. After hearing a fascinating talk about bats and seeing some specimens, we were given detectors and waited for the bats to appear. Eventually we heard some pipistrelles and then saw them flying round the outside of the Church. In spite of evidence in the Church – bat droppings – we failed to detect any inside. 

Pipistrelle bat

The IBM PC is 30 years old today

and is still with us – just about! It's demise has been forecast for some time, particularly with the advent of smart phones and tablets however, I think the PC in some form will be round for some time. To misquote Mark Twain “the report of its death was an  exaggeration.” There's an interesting article quoting one of the original design engineers Mark Dean here. Mark's point is that the interest is moving from the technology itself to what is behind it. We've seen that in the recent riots where communications through social media enabled the mobs to gather rapidly.

My view about the 'improved' communications that the new technology enables is that it often inhibits good communication between people: because they can be in touch all the time, they don't communicate. A case of less is more (or the reverse.) I'm not arguing for going back, rather for learning to live better in this new joined-up world.

Speaking of Mark Twain, one quote of his I like is “I don't understand all this fuss about giving up smoking: I've done it dozens of times”

It's a bit calmer in Little Hampden...

no riots here – yet. Don started the harvest this afternoon. I hope the weather lasts but the forecast isn't too good.

Managing volunteers

Now for something a little more serious. I've been wondering for some time how to apply some of the management techniques used in the commercial world to volunteers.  The problems are the same: how to ensure planned activities are completed successfully without too much hassle; how to ensure people use their skills, contribute to the overall aims of the organisation and are happy in discharging the responsibilities they have taken on. Managing activities is reasonably straightforward: it involves planning all aspects of the activities to an appropriate level of detail communicating the plans to people involved and then following the plans to completion. Of course, it's not quite as simple as that because things change – or go wrong – during the project. But with well thought-through plans, success should follow.


Managing people when they are volunteers is a little more tricky. Employees can usually be expected to do more or less as asked and in general will have been selected because their skills and aspirations match the requirements of the organisation. Volunteers' commitments are often uncertain, as are their pressures and aspirations. There's a risk that if we start asking people how they are getting on, they'll immediately interpret this as interfering bureaucracy or will take it as an opportunity to give up or move on to something different. 


But we're going to give it a try. We're going to start recording and reviewing plans for significant events in Church, ad we're going to meet with volunteers to see how they are getting on with their roles and what extra support would help them. We hope this will enable us to make volunteers' jobs easier. We're also hopeful that we'll be able to gather positive suggestions and ideas and spread these around the group. 
I'll keep you posted.


While looking for something to illustrate this post I came across this:

I hope we can be clearer than this!

Fun

How's this for an fun at the fete?

A great school fete at Tring. One of the best stalls was the human fruit machine: three big boxes each with a youngster hidden. They had a choice of insects (the theme of the fete). You paid your 10p and they jumped up showing one of their insect pictures. If two were the same, you won a sweet!

Celebration

Pimms at Little Hampden last week

Barbecue at Great Missenden this Sunday

Thank you reception

I think everyone enjoyed tonight’s reception to thank all who contributed to our Appeal.

And a few fun pics - captions?

Little Hampden Bell

We had a visit from Matthew Smith on Friday evening. Matthew is a bellringer at kimble but he is currently visiting all the bells in Bucks to collect inscriptions so that he can update the 1897 book “The Church Bells of Buckinghamshire” written by Alfred Cocks.

Our bell at Little Hampden, which is mounted in the first floor of the timber-framed porch, is dated 1791 and was cast by Thomas Mears of London. Matthew reported that this was the year that Thomas took over the foundry from his father so our bell is one of his first. The bell is slung between two wooden beams with no metal bearings. It looks as if the original mounting was nearer the North end of the porch where there are grooves in the beams and another hole for the bellrope in the floor beams. The speculation is that these grooves were wearing too close to the bottom of the beam so rather than repairing them, the bell was simply moved and hung on two new beams. The new beams appear to have been cut with a circular saw whereas the original would have been cut by hand.

Matthew has worked with bells but is currently employed by Smith of Derby - clockmakers. Not watchmakers - but Church and Tower clocks. Have a look at their web site www.smithofderby.com.

Our bell is not very secure and Matthew is going to quote for repairing it so we can ring it at services and weddings. I’ll keep you posted.

Alfred Cocks sounds an interesting character. As well as writing “The Church Bells of Buckinghamshire; Their Inscriptions, Founders, Uses and Traditions, Etc.” to give it it’s full title, he was secretary of the Buckinghamshire Archeological Society. Their history has two interesting references:

Alfred  Cocks  had  published  his  monumental Church Bells of  Buckinghamshire  in  1897, a work of  enduring scholarship, and  his  many contributions  to  Records  ranging  from Great  Marlow Church  in  1866 to  the Penn version  of  the Mummers play forty years  later were always scholarly. On a lighter note his three articles which he called Contributions  to  a  Buckinghamshire Vocabulary (VII. 61 and 284, IX.  124) where he records  local dialect, then rapidly being lost, make almost compulsive reading.
Crabbling:  Noise of a pot boiling
Unmournful:  Very,  'She wus unmournful ugly'
Drotchek: Slut
Cribbling:  Lame  'He goes proper cribbling'
Clats:  Horse droppings
Mizzy-muzzy:  'My  poor  head's all ofu mizzy-muzzy'
...
Secretaries:
1896-1908  ALFRED HENEAGE COCKS  (1864-1928) FSA. He was a meticulous scholar and a distinguished naturalist who contributed much to the Society but was a prickly colleague. His many articles cover a wide field but he is best remembered for the monumental The Church Bells of Buckinghamshire published in 1897 which whilst a work of scrupulous scholarship is not improved by the alarming varieties of typeface which he insisted on using.

100 years of IBM

IBM is 100 years old today. It  struck me that I worked for IBM for one third of this time! It was a good company to work for and much more than a technology company. The IBM 100 web sites list lots of the company's interesting achievements. As well as lots of technical ones there were many early employment and management innovations that were later adopted by other organisations. IBM employed its first disabled employee in 1914, it had an equal employment opportunity policy from 1953, well before the legislation required it. 

The technical innovations are significant, too: early commercial digital computers, the PC, the floppy disk, the selectric (golfball) typewriter, the term 'word processing', fractal geometry, the scanning tunnelling microscope, laser surgery and the UPC barcode. Have a look at the IBM 100 icons of progress web site