Wednesday, March 30, 2011
New daffodils
We have been keeping an eye on the daffodils at Hampton Court, the wilderness there being rather special at this time of year. But we were pleased the other day to find a rival wilderness at the back of the formal garden part of Nonsuch Park. Not as big but special just the same. A lot of short daffodils and some very tall ones, set in a grove of large mixed pine trees, including the largest Scots pine that I have ever seen. Indulged in a spot of gazing right up the trunk while back to trunk - a relaxing sport I believe the Japanese are rather into. The visit to the grove being rounded off by a puzzle around the base of one of the pine trees, a puzzle in the form of a colony of small green plants which looked a bit like celandines but had no variegation on the leaves and no flowers, yellow or otherwise. Neither our Collins field guide nor FIL were able to tell us what the thing was. If we remember we will go back; if flowers do appear we might have more luck.
Today's puzzle was to do with mercury and gasometers. According to an informant in TB, there was mercury to be found at the top of gasometers in Brighton and boys used to try to recover the stuff, most of it getting spilt along the way. So the question is, what was the mercury doing there? Informant did not know, so I thought to demonstrate my Internet prowess by finding out - and failed. Along the way, also failing to find out how the upper seals of a telescopic gasometer work. Clear enough that the thing as a whole was often sealed by floating it in a large round tank full of water, but what about the upper seals?
There was some stuff about mercury in natural gas and a diagram of natural gas manufacture (so it is not so natural as all that) which included a mercury removal phase. And mercury removed might accumulate and be purloined by boys. But Brighton in the 1940s would have been town gas not natural gas, so that does not help. Then there was a learned paper about the cleaning up of town gas works sites which talked about heavy metal pollution, including mercury. But it said nothing about the accumulation or recovery of mercury at the top of gasometers. There were a few links which required one to flash the plastic but I was not that interested - and not really an option for the average GSCE or BSc projecteer. After about half an hour of this gave up. Not much wiser about mercury and gasometers but slightly wiser about the limitations of wire based learning.
Onto to roast loin of pork for lunch. About 6.5 pounds of the stuff, in a lump but with the butcher having sawn through each joint to facilitate carving. Then tied up to guard against disintegration. It looked most impressive on the plate and was not bad at all hot, although a little dry. For once I saw the point of apple sauce - which I had not thought to make. On the other hand there was cabbage and boiled potatoes. We will see how it does cold, often, in our experience, better than hot. A view shared by at least one of my paternal aunts.
Thus fortified, sat down to renew my wrinkly, known to some as a senior citizen's rail card, having been sent a helpful email reminder by the rail card people. Click here and off we go. I type in the very long number on my passport once, the rather shorter number on my credit card three times and the very short number on my current rail card once and I am now hopeful that a new three year rail card will shortly arrive in the post. The whole process reasonably tiresome and took rather longer than it would of done at the station, the only catch with this last being that the station cannot do a three year one.
One wonders by what sort of arrangement the rail card people, a private, possibly foreign owned company, have access to what one might have thought was the very sensitive and very private government passport database?
# posted by Jim @ 6:45 AM 
