pumpkinstrokemarrow

But it has not solved the baler problem. The other day someone at the TB was telling me about his work on a farm during the harvest, during his youth, which involved using something like a screwdriver to complete the knotting of bales. The story seemed to be - and this was well before anyone started to wobble in stance or diction - that the bales popped out of the baler with strings wrapped around them ready to be knotted, but not actually knotted. The human knotter then used something like a screwdriver to ram the two loose ends down into the bale, a procedure which amounted to a knot. One does not like to probe such yarns too hard on the spot, but one does wonder why the bale did not fall apart after it left the baler. Part of the point of a bale is compression, so that you get more bales into any given barn. A bale which is compressed but not knotted will fly apart, well before any knotter can get to it. And then, does one believe that ramming the loose ends of the twine down into the bale will really hold it? For a start, the loose end running left would have to be rammed in well to the left of the loose end running right, otherwise all one is doing is making a hinge in the bale. But my informant said nothing about two strikes with the screwdriver to the bale. By implication there was just one. He did say, thus giving the whole business some verisimilitude, that by the end of the day one had a very tender palm.

The real life baling expert I consultant, someone slightly older than my informant, had never heard of such a thing. The Wikipedia and other virtual baling experts, suggested that mobile balers took a while to reach farms: they had to wait the availability of tractor power to power the things and for the invention of a suitable mechanical knotter. There were also transient problems with the supply of twine with a bit of a dearth during the Korean war. Commies cornered the market or something. Which strikes me as a rather unlikely tale. But nothing about balers which did not do knotting. The fact that they did do knotting seemed to be the whole point. And they were around in numbers from the end of the second world war. Well before my informant would have been anywhere near a field full of bales.

Yet another fascinating topic which I do not suppose I shall get to the bottom of. Perhaps someone can offer a plausible variation of the story which makes sense?

In the meantime, I wonder whether the London tube train drivers are on a suicide mission like the print workers and dockers before them. Also, I have been led to believe, water works workers. All these groups thought they could hold their employers to ransom. Not to mention the well paid & padded cabin staff from BA. Or the coal miners. Maybe they extracted some short term gain, but the long term result was that they were written out of the industry. Printers found that it paid to replace print workers by computers. Dock owners found that it paid to replace docker workers by containers in highly mechanised container handling facilities. The water boards found that it paid to replace water works workers with machines. Total employment in all three industries much less than it was. Much less than it might have been had the unions involved had a better understanding of their bargaining position.

I understand that it has been possible to run tube trains without drivers since around the time of the introduction of the Victoria line, maybe forty years ago. And control systems must have come on up leaps and bounds since then. And come on down in leaps and bounds in price. Has the relatively new Jubilee line been tooled up with this in mind?

The objection raised in TB was that a tube train driver, assuming that he had not propped the dead man's handle open with a milk bottle full of whisky (there have been stories about this sort of behaviour in the past), would be able to stop the train in the event of there being an obstruction on or near the line. A person on or near the line, dead or alive. I thought that a person on the line would result in some detectable blip in the electrics, detectable at the control centre, resulting in the braking of the train more or less as fast as a person could do it. Not so sure about a person near the line. Another line of attack would be cameras in the front of the train. Get a computer to read the pictures and to do something when it saw something odd. But one would have to think about the something: stopping the train every time the computer saw something odd might do bad things to the timetable. But just raising an alert with the control centre and hope that someone processed the alert might be a bit slow. Maybe the best thing there is to deny access - something which some at least of the stations on the Jubilee line do. No doubt the London Transport R&D guys are grafting away on the whole thing as I type. Or perhaps the R&D guys from the companies which will sell the necessary systems?

PS: just renewed the acquaintance of Sainsbury's basics. Three interesting looking pieces of pork - described as chops (in big letters) of various shapes and sizes (in small letters). Very cheap at £2.75 for 0.75kg, but they do not look much like the sort of pork chops which I might buy at Cheam. Maybe they come from the head end of the pig; a porkine version of best end of neck. But they will do very well for the intended use - a sort of pork version of Lancashire hot pot, made in an open dish in the oven. Very fitting really, when I think that I make Lancashire hot pot with the neck of a sheep.