pumpkinstrokemarrow

Are coming at traffic lights at the moment. One in particular as one comes right off East Street into Hook Road. Generally speaking, you have green for ahead and when that goes red, you get a green for right. But sometimes, the traffic lights miss a beat and skip the green for right and you have to wait through the cycle again. But, as often as not, I notice the ahead green going red and assume it is my turn without noticing that the right red has not turned green and traffic is roaring out of Hook Road across my path. But survived so far.

The odd person continues to point up my cycle clips - which are the sort of bulldog clip which have wire grips which can be folded back once one has attached the clip to whatever it is one wants to clip - trousers in my case. I find them much more comfortable than the sort of clips which grab your ankle. But although a number of people have admired them over the years - having been doing this since I abstracted a pair of clips from what was OPCS in Titchfield thirty years ago (those particular ones had to be replaced recently) - I have never seen anyone else doing it. Maybe this reflects the proportion of bicyclists who wear lycra and don't need clips these days. Also useful when walking and one wants to lift one's trouser bottoms out of the wet grass or mud or whatever. BH not happy about walking with me when so dressed. Not sure why.

Been reading a book about the battle of Trafalgar - the details and tone of which I find I was very vague on - despite reading copious amounts of Hornblower as a child. Casualties on our side much less than I had thought at less than 500 deaths. But I suppose that is enough from less than 20 ships carrying maybe 500 each. And Collingwood had to stay on station after the battle, rather than going for R&R, to stop what was left of the combined fleet heading North to join their colleagues at Brest - which would have been a bit awkward for us. It seems he died of exhaustion some years later, before he was able to enjoy his retirement to the peerage. I was struck by two things in particular. One was the amount of letter writing which went on - something which was also a feature of the French march to Moscow and back. The other was the maintenance of professional courtesy in the middle of a big battle. So a British boat crew board an enemy ship, having wrongly thought that it had struck. The Spaniards explained that they had not struck, but nevertheless suspended firing until the boat crew had got back safely to their own ship. Courtesy nothwithstanding, I think the Spaniard had to give up shortly afterwards.

The length of ship duels seemed to vary lots. Sometimes they would be slugging it out for several hours - on other occasions one would achieve a quick knockout with maybe three quick broadsides, fired down the length of the enemy ship, more or less destroying the lower decks and their contents. The trick was to manoeuvre into a position to fire such broadsides without being at the receiving end of too many.

And reminded that the current fashion for collecting contemporary accounts of historic events is not the same as writing history. Contemporary accounts might help one get a feel for how - a perhaps poorly selected sample of - people felt at the time. But this is not the same as producing a balanced narrative which enables one to get a feel for the event as a whole.

Pushed into another bit of geekery by a lightening strike which caused the cheapest of our computers to reboot spontaneously, losing work in progress. Pushed into writing tricky recovery mechanisms in the code and buying a surge protector - I had forgotten if I ever knew how dear they are at around £30. All takes me back to the old days (at Titchfield again) when computers were always breaking down in the middle of long runs and one put a lot of effort into to writing recovery wheezes into one's application. This was before the invention of database software with lots of recovery wheezes built in and included in the price.