Category Archives: around home

around home, family, history, UK

Colchester

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I played the part of bad-son this weekend past & went off up to Colchester to distract Mum from her university studies. It took me a few trains & hours to get there, but it was a nice day on Friday to stroll through the City. Another bonus of living in London – in a short time I’d strolled past St Paul’s, the Royal Exchange, Bank of England, the Lloyd’s Building & the Gherkin, all architectural masterpieces in their own way, before eventually finding Liverpool St station.

Colchester was the Romans’ first capital in England (before they moved to the more central Londinium) & is the oldest settled town in the country. Later on Friday afternoon we had a pleasant wander, checking out the Hollytrees Museum which gave a good outline of the last few centuries in Colchester, then enjoyed the late afternoon sunshine in the extensive gardens nearby, crossing the old Roman wall (also the oldest in the country) & checking out a large water-tower which could only be Victorian in its splendour.

The water-tower, Jumbo, through the old Roman wall (first century AD)

Colchester Town Hall

After a surprisingly good sleep on the floor of Mum’s room, I settled for watching the first Rugby World Cup semifinal online – Wales vs France. A game that had a lot of the occasion taken out of it by that careless & dangerous tackle. I’m not completely surprised that the French made such hard work of it, but I was disappointed that the Welsh didn’t have the nous or skill to put at least one more kick over – they missed so many penalty & drop-goal opportunities. We popped over to campus in the afternoon for Mum to get some books out of the library. Most importantly, this was my first opportunity to see & ride a Paternoster Lift – I had not know that they existed until the previous day when Mum told me about this example. Basically, it’s a continuously moving chain of small boxes (two person) that you can hop on & hop off at any floor you want (there are no doors – so watch you don’t have a go at self-amputation of an unwanted limb). All good fun – especially when you go in to the dark & over the top through the loft.

Mum about to disappear into the unknown

Late afternoon was spent in the charming little riverside village of Wivenhoe, a short bus ride away. With little winding streets, houses & shops doing their utmost to stay close to upright, plenty of small yachts & boats docked & more bright autumn sunlight slowly sinking away it was nice pottering around.

More rugby on Sunday morning with All Blacks playing very well indeed in an intense semi-final to end up utterly outplaying & dominating the Wallabies. Once again, many missed kicks – but enough went through that it was a comfortable margin in the end. I might have to find some Kiwis to watch the final with next week – shouldn’t be too hard in London. We had a good long visit to the Colchester Castle (a Norman one built on the remains of an old Roman fortification). Curiously, the castle has been a museum for eighty-odd years & a visit there is more about the museum than the castle itself. The museum mostly dealt with the Roman period of Colchester’s history & was very good. After that I endured the perils of travelling by rail in the UK during the weekend, on my way home three separate rail journeys were disrupted by that scourge – Planned Engineering Works. Great to spend the weekend with Mum – hopefully she can now not be disrupted for a little while & settle down to the study at hand.

And Now For Something Completely Different – I’ve had to choose between two different process engineering jobs last week. In the end I went for the role just out of Southampton at a good [£5K+better benefits] less as Hereford is really so much further from an airport & London & all its travel options – travel is the main motivator for being here, after all. Also, I wasn’t too keen on being told when to take three of my five weeks of annual leave a year (mandatory plant shutdowns). I feel like a bit of a wally turning down a much-better paying job from people that were really keen to employ me – but there you go. At this stage, I should be at work at the start of November – I’m looking forward to settling down to life for a while & having some money coming in so I can plan brief & not so brief trips to Europe & north Africa. The biking will be a lot flatter around Hampshire, but I might just have to build up a single-speed, come touring machine, & satisfy myself with mid-week rides in the New Forest & so on.

around home, family, UK

Cambridge

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Getting up & watching Rugby World Cup matches in a cold lounge wasn’t the best step for my health – but thankfully it’s only a two or three day cold. So when I found Mum’s day-trip (put on for the Study Abroad students) to Cambridge was on Sunday, a plan to go up & see her & the town was hatched rather hastily. As it turned out, Trish was keen to go up as well so we ended up driving. Cambridge is another one of those places I’d been meaning to visit for a while & hadn’t quite had the opportunity or sufficient motivation to do so.

It’s a much more compact town than I remember Oxford being, mostly devoid of parking – so the Park & Ride just off the M11 was most handy. We met Mum just as she was finishing up her lunch & heading off on a walking tour. With a week of settling into uni & organising all sorts of things, she is doing well if a little tired – I imagine it will be nice to have had classes finally start today. Trish & I wandered around a bit down twisting cobbled streets & through courtyards – getting a good look at Christ’s College Chapel, crossing the Cam a few times & stopping to watch the novice punters doing their utmost not to fall in the river or knock themselves out on low bridges.

Meeting Mum again there was more wandering around spotting various famous colleges – a few I must admit I only had heard of from watching University Challenge a year or two back. There were people everywhere, being a weekend in very much a tourist town – I’m glad my university was overcome by sightseers, although Massey doesn’t exactly have much on Cambridge otherwise. It was pleasing to see bikes almost everywhere – although it did seem that their primary purpose was to clutter railings, we saw proportionally few being ridden.

Mum rejoined a very large group of foreign students to make sure they didn’t miss the coach back to Colchester & we continued back down the motorway to visit Trish’s (& Mum’s for that matter) cousin Carol & Barry for a huge roast meal, a catch-up & much family history. Another pleasant little outing, even if it wasn’t the best recuperation plan.

around home, shoulder, UK

Now, where’s my pistol?

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More of the same – arm in sling, no riding, reasonable fall weather & trying to find a job. Tuesday was the day for my appointment at the Fracture clinic – I managed to show the registrar that I have reasonable movement in my arm. He then demonstrated that he could make it click & almost come out again quite easily. So I’ve got an MRI in a couple of weeks, followed by another appointment with the registrar. I suppose that, & the explanation he gave me of recurrent shoulder dislocations, means surgery may be a possibility. An idea I wasn’t particularly keen on, but if that would make my shoulder more stable I could be persuaded – especially as it hasn’t recovered so well this time. Today I was back at the hospital picking up another sling. This one is over the top compared to all I’ve had before (so it should be, retailing at £120) – with a strap around my belly it uses a metal plate to rotate my arm out. There’s a grip in the front of the sling to hold on to – with my arm straight out in front of me & my fingers wrapped around the grip I feel that I’m shooting from the hip, alas a six-shooter doesn’t come with the sling. It looks kind of goofy, but the shoulder joint is supposed to heal better rotated externally – or so some research says (of course, it’s easy enough to discover contradictory findings). It also proves difficult to take a webcam photo of oneself while wearing it.

Thankfully, I don’t have to wear it all the time as there’s a bit going on this week. Mum arrives early tomorrow morning – it’ll be great to see her – & we are heading west to stay with some cousins of hers (ours, I suppose) for a few days south of Bristol. I’m also looking forward to going down to see John, Anna & their young twins while Mum recovers from the flights – pity that there’ll be no big (or small) ride with John. It’s worked out well has I have two (possibly three) interviews in that part of the world next week. It was neat to catch up yesterday with Roger, a riding buddy from NZ is over this side of the world for a couple of months having ridden in the World Singlespeed Champs in Ireland a few weeks ago. I met him & Michelle at St Pancras a couple of hours before they were due to get the train to Paris – I was mildly jealous, it’s two year to the week since I made the same trip & loved every minute of it. After they left I enjoyed wandering in the sun down to Charing Cross checking out the British Library, the British Museum & stopping in nice sunny parks to read for a while.

Unexpected delight of the week was chewing through both series of Rizzoli & Isles (I have too much free time) – a TV show based on a series of books I read when I was back in NZ. While a gritty cop show, it’s pretty funny too & I was surprised to see how much one of the leads reminds me of a good friend back home. The subtle east-coast accent, intelligent professional, fashion enthusiast, loves to cook elaborate meals & a home stylishly decorated with everything just-so. Mind you, pathology & academia are quite different careers.

around home, engineering, history, London, UK

Crossness Pumping Station

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One of the few places in London that I really wanted to go to the last time I was here & didn’t get the opportunity to was the Crossness Beam Engines. As this great example of Victorian engineering is still undergoing extensive restoration work, there are very few days this year that one can go & visit & see an engine in operation. But today, as part of Open London (an annual weekend when a lot of London’s great architecture that is usually off limits to the public is opened up) the complex was open & welcoming visitors. What a lot of visitors there were – we queued patiently for about an hour just to get in. Who would have thought so many people would turn up to the site on the side of a huge sewage works in south-east London?

A brief history lesson – in the early half of the nineteenth century, rapidly expanding & industrialising London did not have a central sewage system & almost all waste from over 200000 cesspits was discharged into the Thames (“dump her in the Thames?”) system. Unfortunately, the Thames at high tide (it really is surprising just how far the tide flows up the river – well out west) had a habit of returning that sewage to where it came from. Even worse, the Thames was still the main supply of water to the city! Outbreaks of cholera & typhoid were, in hindsight, hardly surprising. Eventually, mid-century, a plan was devised & put in to action to deal with the problem. Basically, a two sewerage systems independent of each other were built on either side of the river. These used gravity to move all of the sewerage to the east of the city, where it was then discharged to the Thames. In the last four years of the 1850s, over eighty miles of brick intercepting sewers were built (using 318 million bricks!) & this is also the reason we have the Victoria & Albert Embankments today.

But the problem of preventing the sewage coming back into the city on the tide still had to be overcome. This is where the pumping stations came in – one at Crossness (south) & the other at Abbey Mills (north) were used to pump the sewage up to large reservoirs. From the reservoirs, the sewage was released on the outgoing tide. There was no treatment initially, later settling ponds were introduced & the solids were shipped out to sea & dumped there. The pumping station at Crossness had twelve boilers powering four large rotative beam engines. Each engine had two pumps attached to the beam & at peak they could move over 500 tonnes of sewage a minute. That was after a retrofit, changing the engines from single-cylinder to triple-expansion (high, intermediate & low pressure cylinders). The engines were superseded by diesel & eventually left to decay & vandalism for thirty years from the mid 1950s. I’m sure the restorers are also stoked that someone had the foresight to fill the engine area up with sand to prevent methane accumulating – they’ve had to remove a hundred tonnes just to restore the first engine.

Being built by the Victorians, the building & fittings are fantastic. But the real star is the fully restored Prince Consort engine operating under steam. The flywheel is almost nine metres in diameter & has a mass of over fifty tonnes. The beam is almost fourteen metres long & forty-seven tonnes heavy. It was surprisingly quiet as all the valves opened & closed in time to drive that massive beam up & down. It was well worth the wait to get in as one could wander around at leisure poking around not only the restored Prince Consort, but Victoria (which they are starting to restore now) & the still derelict Albert Edward & Alexandra engines. All the volunteers were friendly, knowledge & some were in period dress which added to the old time feel of the place. It was a great few hours out & I particularly enjoyed marvelling at the feat of engineering from 150 years ago & seeing the Prince Consort engine all painted up & effortlessly gliding through its cycle.

Engine house at rear, boiler house in foreground

The brickwork was exceptional all the way around

The Prince Consort’s flywheel – note the trimming on the guard rail

Looking up to the Prince Consort’s beam – flywheel connecting rod in front of pump connecting rods

Counter beam on left, top of the low & intermediate cylinders

End of the main beam looking down on top of drive cylinders

More superb Victorian detailing

Unrestored beams

Just in case there’s anyone left wondering how this thing worked

Just in case there’s anyone left wondering how this thing worked

The rest of my photos from the visit are here. I left wishing I didn’t have a gammy shoulder & was staying around here a bit longer so that I might volunteer a bit – a fantastic historical project all round.