Category Archives: around home

around home, shoulder, UK

Another shoulder update

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It’s now five months since the anthroscopic (keyhole) anterior stabilisation of my right shoulder – brought on by four dislocations over the previous couple of years.  Since my last update, I’ve continued with a variety of progressing exercises & stretches set by the physio.  Progress along the way has been mostly gradual with not too many obvious signs, but every so often I’d push my shoulder in some direction just a little bit further than I was used to & suddenly realise that there is more movement there than I thought.

I had one such moment a couple of days ago when it struck me that I could now lift my arm out away from my body (but in the same plane), with my palm facing down (much more difficult than palm up) & it would go all the way up & touch my ear.  Bloody brilliant, as that was the most restrictive movement.  When the physio saw that today, she was well pleased – she sent me out the door with a theraband with a bit more resistance & told me she didn’t want to see me again.  Fantastic – so after five months I have a much more stable shoulder & I can now start taking small steps (pedal strokes) in getting back to mountain-biking.  Hoorah!

The first six weeks post-surgery was of course the worse, being in a sling & not being able to drive.  The biggest hassle I found was not being able to cook as it meant I had to have ready-meals & they aren’t the best for the palate or the body.  Also, not being able to exercise harder than a brisk walk meant I wasn’t burning enough energy & therefore, not sleeping so well.  But once that sling was off, things got much better & I haven’t really missed the mountain-biking as much as I thought I would (mostly due to the poor weather this summer) and have managed four trips overseas, plenty of other weekends away in Britain and got to a better level of fitness at the gym & running in the New Forest (even if that has been pretty boring).

So definitely no regrets so far in taking the surgery route to fixing my shoulder.

around home, UK, vehicles

Grand Event

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Last week was P&O’s 175th birthday & to celebrate they’d spent a couple of years planning to bring all of their fleet of cruise ships to their home port, Southampton, Tuesday last week for a bit of a party. As it was another cool, miserable wet day of the summer-I’d-be-more-annoyed-with-if-I-could-go-biking – I thought it was worthwhile to pop down the road to Calshot (the headland where Southampton Water meets the Solent) to see all seven ships head out on their various cruises in formation. I didn’t really count on Southampton’s affinity for cruise liners & just how big a part of this city’s history shipping has been.

So I was surprised to see so many turn out on this rather bleak evening to watch the spectacle – the traffic stopped before Fawley powerstation. From listening to the local radio, I could tell I had a bit of a wait in the wind before the first ship emerged from behind the Calshot Activities Centre. Judging from traffic reports (Southampton jammed up & all roads around Hythe waterside closed), this event was even bigger than I imagined – it sounded like quite the party down at Hythe pier & even better if you happened to be out on the water. All the traffic build-up isn’t too surprising considering Southampton saw thirty thousand people either embarking on or disembarking from the seven ships that day.

Unfortunately the inclement weather had forced the Red Arrows to continue sitting at Bournemouth Airport & then cancel their display – aerial acrobatics aren’t much good if no one can see them. Eventually the vanguard edged out in to the Solent, it made sense Adonia led the fleet out as she is less than half, & in some cases almost a quarter, the size of some of the ships that followed. Once all seven filed passed and navigated Bramble Bank, they assembled in a nice flying-V – one could finally see all seven ships at once, even if my camera couldn’t capture it. By now the mist rolled in again & it was time to head home.

In the end I saw a lot of really big ships with plenty of people waving from the beach & decks. A different sight & one I’m not likely to see again. Something different for a Tuesday night, not sure the forty-five minute, few mile, drive home was a good way to finish it off – pity it wasn’t sunnier & I’m not bike fit or else it would have been faster to bike.

Naval ship that kept providing resounding salutes

Spot the Isle of Wight ferry

around home, city, Europe, food, friends, travel, UK

Reading to Istanbul – quite the contrast

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A dash home straight after work Friday & a mad pack for nine nights away was all to try & beat the holiday traffic (4 day Diamond Jubilee weekend). I’m not sure I did, but it only took ninety minutes until Reading’s awful road system had me going around in circles.

A delightful evening was spent with Anna & Luke and their NZ visitors – Penny, Kathryn & Megan. That is over half of one of my “second families” from my childhood in Te Puke. As always when visiting Anna & Luke, we ate well – Luke cooked up a storm, before we went out for dessert. A great evening of that easy conversation & banter you get with old friends was topped off with sublime lemon curd tart at Jamie’s (Oliver) Italian. So far away from home, a lot of talk was of travels past, present & future. I did actually remember to snap a photo of visitors from afar – it’s rather unflattering as people seem too interested in their phones. Leaving everyone after breakfast Saturday, I boarded a train to Gatwick to start my week’s holiday. Arriving in Istanbul and walking from the metro, I suddenly realised that this is the first Islamic country I’ve been too – the mosques & evening prayer call gave it away.

As usual, it’s a lot hotter here than home & I’ve spent most of the day walking all around the Old City. The public buildings, mostly mosques, are incredible, things seem cheap, it’s busy and away from the main touristy area the place is filthy – litter, feral cats & dogs everywhere. The food is varied and well good. That’s enough of a brief introduction to Turkey for now, I’m sick of typing on my phone. Here’s all the relevant photos on my phone at once – as Blogger for Android is not particularly useful.

around home, engineering, history, UK

Gosport Museums

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After last weekend, a switch was flicked somewhere & it’s been summer ever since. All week with temperatures sitting in the high twenties, it’s been rather uncomfortable wandering around the plant at work. At least being pretty close to the Solent, there is usually a breeze around. With it not getting dark until well after nine now, I’ve been enjoying getting the only outdoors exercise my shoulder allows at the moment (walking) in the Forest, along the beach at Lepe and across numerous fields in the heat.

With a relatively free weekend on the cards, I thought it was a good weekend to visit Portsmouth for the first time in two and a half years. Considering it’s less than an hour’s drive away, a day-trip there was well overdue. Pleasingly, I remembered just in time that I’d stored the fact that Gosport would be worth a visit one day, after reading about it some months ago, somewhere in my mind. So I headed off to park at the wonderfully named museum, Explosion!, on the west side of Portsmouth Harbour just before anything opened. As I wandered around the old buildings, it was obvious that it’s not far across the harbour to Portsmouth and all its things naval – both old & new. While the groundsmen finished off mowing the lawns, I ducked inside right at ten o’clock & bought my multi-pass ticket – Explosion!, the Royal Navy Submarine Musuem & a day-pass on a water-taxi between the two, Portsmouth & HMS Victory.

Explosion! (really the Museum of Naval Firepower) is at Priddy’s Hard & centres around Grand Magazine which is an impressive brick structure built in 1771 to house gunpowder. I got through the first room, which was based around the memories of those that used to work at the Ordnance Depot, before ducking out to get the first water-taxi of the day to the submarine museum. The schedule is well timed so that when you step off the boat, having cruised past hundreds of boats packed in the marinas & numerous waterside apartments, you are soon able to get on a guided tour of the HMS Alliance. (Although not for long as major maintenance work is soon to begin.)

Being early in the day, there were only fifteen on the tour – which is more than plenty on a sub, I wouldn’t have been keen on being a submariner in here with sixty other men – none of whom have showered for six weeks. A diesel sub laid down near the end of WWII, it was fairly antiquated – but that just makes all the various valves, large batteries, pipes & so forth more interesting compared to what I imagine are much less cluttered modern designs.

I usually struggle to get representative photos of the cramped conditions on subs, so here’s a standard torpedo tube shot.

Our guide was excellent, having been a submariner for many, many years & actually having served on the Alliance. It’s so much more interesting with stories of what being on the watch was like, the thrill of chasing & evading the Russians in the Artic, & as it’s about the thirtieth anniversary of the Falklands War – a first hand account of being on the sub that sunk the Argentine cruiser Belgrano.

HMS Alliance – looking quite shabby outside, showing why it’s down for major work starting soon

Other submarines of interest at the museum include Holland I, the Royal Navy’s first submarine – built in 1901. It had a crew of just eight (it was quite small & used for coastal defence and basically to see what this submarining thing was all about), with a petrol engine and 25 tons of batteries for use under water. Having spent a little too long underwater (almost seventy years) after sinking while being towed to be scraped, she was raised again in 1982 and has been on display around various restoration works since.  In the main inside display area is the midget sub HMS X24 that was used in WWII to sneak in to heavily guarded harbours & deposit its two large bombs under targets (docks, ships & so on).

Holland I tail-fins & propellor

I rushed around the last of the very informative displays so that I could catch the next water-taxi across the harbour to Portsmouth for a spot of lunch (Italian market – yum) & some much needed clothes shopping (something that is always needed as I put it off so often) for an hour.  It was great tootling across the harbour dodging small yachts, superyachts, ferries & large power boats under the sun.

An hour was enough to scoff a couple of calzonnes, buy some clothes, gaze around at the sights – so it was back on the Jenny R for the double-leg back to Explosion! – via the main visitor attraction in town HMS Victory & HMS Warrior.

HMS Warrior

Back at Explosion! there was time to learn/be reminded about fighting sailships & various explosives before a very good multimedia presentation in the Grand Magazine. The Grand Magazine, with its eight foot thick brick walls, took three years to build and then another three years for the mortar to dry out (gunpowder doesn’t like moisture so much). I was pleased to learn I was standing in the very room where explosives for Nelson’s fleet at Trafalgar were stored prior to the battle. There was a great mix of military history, social history, physics & chemistry to keep me well interested. The stories of all the precautions that had to be taken over the 150+ years of work here were fascinating. As with many industries in both world wars, many women took over the jobs of the men that had gone to the front. Hearing how the women had to work with cordite (which had replaced gunpowder by that stage) was especially neat as it was in a munitions factory that my great-grandmother (Mum’s mum’s mum) worked and was awarded an OBE for preventing some sort of explosive disaster.

The rest of the museum is given over to various large mines, torpedos, shells, missiles & such forth. All very interesting & technical – but didn’t hold my attention as much as the tales of the people that had to work in such a large & dangerous facility. All in all, a great day out with two fantastic museums & a time lounging in the sun on the back of a little boat pootling around the harbour – not bad for fifteen quid.

I had a bit of time to spare at the end so wandered in to Gosport – fifteen minutes past large old barracks that are now nice looking housing & newer apartment blocks. Gosport’s High Street isn’t so much to wander around, especially as I’d been over the harbour wandering around Gunwharf Quays a few hours previous.