Life before blogging

Carnarvon Western Australia 1965 – 1967

2008-04-08T21:01:00.007+01:00

Entering the town of Carnarvon for the first time in early November 1965 was reminiscent of going into a film set of an early Western Movie, the red earth, the swing doors in the saloon and the verandas which adorned the Hotels and shops in the main street were redolent of that era, apart from the names over the shops like Wesfarmers, Dalgettys, Fitz’s Newsagents and Fongs. The main street was incredibly wide to accommodate bullock carts and camel trains turning round when the bales of wool were transported to Geraldton by this method. The mature lady librarian, whose mother had lived outside Carnarvon all her life said that when it was proposed to include her mother’s name in a list of pioneers in the North West she had declined the honour saying “We weren’t isolated here as the camel trains came through every few weeks”.

We had just driven the 300 hundred mile from Geraldton along a recently graded and surfaced road, this work was paid for by NASA to enable easier access to the Tracking Station then being built on Brown’s Range just outside Carnarvon, the road only had tarmac on a middle strip leaving sand and stones along the outer edges. These stones were an ever present danger when vehicles were passing as many a windshield was lost in that exercise, this gave rise to certain sections of the road being called the ‘Crystal Highway’. There was an eighty mile stretch of the highway which was perfectly straight and monotonous to drive along and one had to be very alert to the dangers of falling asleep at the wheel. The only petrol station, called the Billabong, was situated halfway between Geraldton and Carnarvon. Just after the Billabong was a small faded sign saying Shark Bay was to the left. Seventy miles to the south of Carnarvon we had crossed over the dry river bed of the Wooramel, the wooden structure of this bridge was later washed away when Cyclone Elsie struck in 1967.

What were we doing in what the Australians then called ‘beyond the black stump’? Well, in early 1965 I had answered an advert in the UK Electronics weekly asking for engineers and technicians to work at a NASA Tracking Station to be built in Carnarvon Western Australia. Being interested in the Space program and also having a very stressful job servicing the first generation of commercial computers to go on the market I decided to apply. I obtained a position as Digital Engineer working on the operation and maintenance of the tracking data processor and antenna positioning equipment on the newly designed Unified S Band equipment. This necessitated a trip to the States to attend a training course held at the Collins Radio factory in Dallas Texas. This was to be a three month course covering all aspects of the S Band system. At the end of the course we paid a visit to the Greenbelt Maryland centre to see the operations there. During the time I spent in Dallas my wife took driving lessons so that when we arrived in Carnarvon she could use the car freely, this turned out to be a wise decision. So having flown from UK to Perth (it took 37 hours flying time in those days) stopping at Kuwait, skirting the east coast of India – there was a war on at that time - and landing in Ceylon then on to Singapore. Going into Singapore we encountered a tropical thunderstorm, the plane was thrown around violently. I spotted that the door seal had gone and that water vapour was entering the cabin. I then called the stewardess – who went as white as a sheet – who then called the flight engineer; they then spent the rest of the flight jamming a cot mattress around the door. After landing it took around six hours to get ready for the next leg of the flight to Perth. This last leg was a perfect flight; we flew down the coast line of Western Australia and could even see the dust trails made by the Gascoigne Traders trucks going up the Coastal Highway. We stayed in Perth whilst furniture and household effects were purchased for our new home in Carnarvon.

We called in at the Tracking Station in order to find out where we were going to be billeted, 4a West Street we were told and off we went to locate the house. We had all the essentials already sent up from Perth, beds table and chairs and a large refrigerator, our furniture and other personal effects shipped from the UK had arrived in a large crate which was unpacked later, it did not take long to settle in, make beds and a quick shopping excursion then blessed sleep.

Next morning, after breakfast we went on the porch and discovered a young kangaroo hopping around in the ‘garden’. This interested and pleased the boys somewhat. We set out to explore the town and to walk along the fascine, I was interested as to why the fascine was so called but no one seemed to be able to tell me but later digging into the origin showed that fascines were originally bundles of sticks tied together, hence the symbol of Fascism used by Mussolini. I presumed that bundles of sticks were put together to build the sea wall. It was possible to occasionally see sea snakes here in the water.

Wesfarmers was the only food shop in the town and the range of goods was initially very limited and sometimes one had to wait for the frozen milk to come on the Gascoyne Traders truck on the next weekly delivery. We eventually found that the powdered full cream milk made up and put in the fridge overnight was much more satisfactory than the blue tinged frozen variety. The bread – which was excellent - was provided by the local bakery with the delightful name of Memory and Shugg.

One of the first trips we made was to an area 40 miles to the north of Carnarvon known as the Blows. This was an area of soft rock where the sea had worn holes into its structure and the resulting effect of the waves was to produce plumes of water spectacularly into the air. There was an area of water protected by a reef in which one could bathe in comparative safety from sharks etc. We also went on the ‘road’ to Gascoigne Junction; this road ran alongside the dry river bed and the plantations, past the ten mile bridge. After about 20 miles of track we came to a pool in the river named ‘Chinamans Pool’. It was possible to swim safely in the shallow water.

Christmas 1965 was nearly upon us and we went to Geraldton to see what we could get for the boys’ presents. Geraldton suddenly appeared to be a very large town; it even had a set of traffic lights which was civilisation indeed. I had purchased a Volkswagen Combi in Perth to cope with boys and luggage on the way to Carnarvon, this proved a very good purchase as we were able carry all sorts of things to do the journey in relative comfort. Even in the high temperatures experienced in that part of WA the vehicle seemed to keep cool mainly due, I think, to the fact that there were no sloping areas of glass on the vehicle.

Christmas shopping over the real work began at the Tracking Station; a commissioning crew came over from the States and work for me started in earnest. Meanwhile Jean (my wife) and the boys settled down to coping with their new environment. We invited two of the Americans to Christmas day dinner, cooking a turkey in temperatures of nearly 100 degrees was a bit exhausting but the meal was a success.

The house we were in suddenly turned into a disaster area. Firstly, there were pigeons nesting in the roof space, I dislodged three nests by the simple expedient of sweeping them off the roofing boards into the garden, I think that this rather surprised the pigeons but it got them moved out. Secondly when turning the light on in the middle of the night we found that the kitchen was swarming with cockroaches. These were much more difficult to remove and eventually we moved to newly built house on Babbage Island Road which was free of unwelcome guests. We had a large ‘huntsman’ spider which inhabited a space over the front door – I think he kept any insects away for a considerable time. This spider was not harmful, unlike the ‘redbacks’ which sometimes inhabited the mail box.

This house kept me busy in whatever spare time I had from the Tracking Station, the floors being made of Jarrah polished up wonderfully well. I had a load of clay soil dumped in the front of the house which we put over the sandy driveway in order to stabilise it. I borrowed an old roller made of an oil drum filled with concrete and together, myself and the boys with plenty of water sprinkled on the soil produced eventually a good solid surface. After this I got water on the knee which was pretty painful, the doctor wanted to give me drugs to reduce it but I refused and I eventually found a cure – not recommended to everyone but it worked in my case. We were invited to a party during which I consumed large quantities of Port, this dehydrated me so much that the next morning the water had dispersed from my knee and I was back to normal. The front and back areas of the house were nearly pure sand and to try and give some semblance of a garden I obtained some buffalo grass cuttings and some gum trees from the river bank. With frequent watering during the year we eventually had the sand covered with greenery. Returning to see Carnarvon some 30 years later we found the gum trees were shading the front of the house – as I intended - and the grass still green. The town had changed beyond belief, the verandas had gone and the main street had a central reservation, gone was the compacted red earth. The town had the appearance of a prosperous tourist location.

During this time work at the Tracking Station was proceeding and the systems were being put through their paces. When the night time winds were practically nonexistent then we would do ‘star tracks’ which consisted of pointing the antenna at known stars, passing the antenna positioning information to Houston enabling us to correct our angle displays and to verify our geographical location. Two films were made over this period, one by NASA and one by the Collins Radio personnel; we have only succeeded in locating excerpts from one of them.

The time came when the whole system needed to be tested. To do this NASA had several Super Constellation aircraft – known affectionately as ‘Connies’ – which were specially adapted to emulate the Apollo spacecraft. So our first task was to track the aircraft. We found that some information was not being downloaded correctly and I reversed a phase sensitive connection which cured the problem – silly me this action seemed to upset the engineer in charge and I had to explain – with drawings how a phase change occurred.

We were now ready to do some serious work, one of the first tracks we undertook was to monitor the Saturn V1b booster rocket in Earth orbit to ascertain the fuel movement when a small ‘ullage’ rocket was fired, and this had the effect of moving the fuel toward the base ready to be reignited. The video obtained and later shown to us was very psychedelic to look at as the fuel moved in a weird motion.

When I was working outside on the antenna, helping to install some cooled parametric amplifiers I was on the hydraulic lift platform chatting with the native Australian who was operating the lift. He had, as I remember a colourful background, being brought up on a Mission Station inland, in a place called Meekatharra, had worked on sheep stations in the vicinity and having learned to drive, obtained a job at the Tracking station. The day was hot, sunny and windy and I found out to my cost the penalty of not wearing sun glasses as the next morning I awoke with eyes on fire and light was painful. Going to the doctor I found that I had severe conjunctivitis caused by fine sand, it was a condition locally known as ‘sandy blight’. It took several years to really get over it and to this day I use an eye wash every morning.

On the 14^th February 1966 we had the upheaval of the currency changeover from the Pound to the Dollar; sensibly the 10 shilling was chosen to be base unit. When some time later the UK changed over to decimal currency the Pound was chosen as the base unit and the subsequent chaos and inflation that followed would have been avoided – in my estimation – if the ten shilling had been the base unit. By this time Jean had obtained a job in the high school as a clerical assistant.

On April 8^th 1966 a Surveyor Model 2 was launched with the objective of simulating a highly eccentric lunar orbit. This was our first real track and we eagerly awaited the outcome, our antenna pointing data came from the FPQ6 system at that time as we did not have any tapes to program the USB equipment. This caused some inter rivalry between us and the FPQ6 team however when at about 25,000 nautical miles they lost radar contact and we proudly boasted that we still had contact and remained so until the Earth’s rotation caused us to lose signal. The next day we tried to locate the spacecraft and discovered that without pointing data, locating the Moon was a long and tricky business. I obtained an Ephemeris in order to try and plot the Moon’s track, this worked alright when the Moon was just rising although I was always 4 minutes adrift. Afterwards I discovered that I had not compensated for the refraction of the Earth’s atmosphere. One of the team had a brilliant idea and constructed a device consisting of two school protractors and a pea shooter which gave the X and Y co-ordinates simply by looking at the Moon through the peashooter tube and taking the angles of the protractor. This earned us the jocular title of the ‘Moonrakers’.

We took a week’s leave and went to Perth, we put beds into the Combi and transferring the boys into them we were able to set out very early in the morning. As dawn was breaking we were greeted with the sight of a kangaroo hurtling its way on to the road at a great lick, I slowed down but the creature was still bounding along and just scraped the front bumper. We took many breaks on the way and nearing Perth we walked along the banks of the Murchison River – which still had water in it. Perth was and still is a very pleasant place to spend some time. King’s Park was an ideal place to wander around. My boys still remember the huge trunk of a Karri tree on display. Sadly this tree trunk deteriorated so much it was used as mulch.

Driving back to Carnarvon especially in the dark was fraught with problems of kangaroos and other nocturnal creatures crossing the road, there used to be a mob of kangaroos around the Wooramel and at other river crossings, sometimes I waited for a Gascoyne Trader truck to overtake and then follow as closely as I dared, keeping alert to dodge anything he struck – I should mention that the trucks had substantial ‘roo bars’ on the front.

In going to and from the Tracking Station we noticed that new houses were being built and a strange looking antenna was taking form, we later discovered that it was to do with satellite communication and was part of the Overseas Telecommunications Company (OTC). One day we had a visit from Kim Corcoran of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation who interviewed me and my wife; we didn’t know until later that we had been picked to be part of the first live TV broadcast between us and our families in the UK. The other people chosen were the Vinton family and the Brightwells, the Brightwells – if I remember correctly – owned the petrol station in town, the Vintons were, like us, a tracking station family. The day of the transmission arrived (25^th November 1966) and we assembled in the town centre waiting for the moment when contact was established. In the morning the town traffic was blocked off and the outside broadcast equipment was assembled and made ready, there was a temporary microwave link made between the town and the OTC Station and the Indian Ocean satellite. The first interviews between the Brightwell and Vinton families went off exceedingly well but when it came to our turn I could not hear any reply and we just stumbled our way through the exchange. It wasn’t until about 40 years later when I obtained a copy of the transmission that I realised the satellite had drifted out of position and contact was lost for the period of our interview.

Prior to the TV broadcast there was a tropical carnival and some of the station staff made up a mock flying saucer and Saturn Rocket, it was quite a big event and we won a prize cup.

By now, at the Tracking Station we were keeping occupied by monitoring and tracking quite a number of spacecraft which were being launched in order to survey the Moon. They were the precursors of the Manned Lunar vehicles. Namely they were the Surveyor and Lunar Orbiters which were to survey and plan the actual landing sites. There were seven launches in 1966, three Surveyors, two Lunar Orbiters, one Explorer and one Pioneer. The Lunar Orbiter 2 was memorable as we worked two full weeks from moonrise to moonset – an enormous amount of data was sent to Houston over this period.

In between our tracking commitments there was very little to do and I was asked to take some visitors around the station, this relieved the monotony and I became the unofficial tour guide for the Station. I remember taking the Chamber of Commerce people from Perth around the site as well as Miss Australia 1966 and various tour parties and members of the Press. I must have posed for and had many pictures taken. One recently came to light extracted from the Walkabout Magazine for August 1966. How many more are there hidden away I ask myself?

Another Christmas was upon us, the town was by now gearing up to the fact that it was growing rapidly and we found it could supply its expanding population and there was no need for us to drive to Geraldton. There was a party held at one of the ‘trackers’ houses where we counted out the number of different nationalities in the room - we were surprised that we counted 14.

1967 arrived and we experienced our first Cyclone in the days around 21^st January. We battened down everything and waited for it to unfold. The rain came and we collected it from the down pipes and made tea with it, it tasted delightful – our town water was pumped up from the river bed and always had a sandy earthy taste. The word went round that the Gascoyne River was in flood inland and we went to the ten mile bridge to await its coming and what a sight it was. There was a tidal wave of debris at its head followed by sandy coloured water. The water level at the bridge rose to nearly 16 feet and the flow was tremendous, the causeway to Babbage Island was inundated and some boys had to be rescued from the water. After the water subsided we were able to swim by the pumping station for many weeks until the water eventually disappeared.

We were called to do a simulation and communication exercise on the 27^th January for Apollo 1, we had just completed our preliminary tests when I was informed that there had been an accident. A little later we were told to stand down and go home. I learned later that the Apollo capsule had caught on fire and the astronauts had perished. This event saddened us all. All further astronaut and capsule tests were suspended until further notice. This event started me thinking about returning to UK as the future didn’t seem to hold its initial promise.

About this time I was asked to become the President of the local football federation, we had four football teams in the area mostly made up of people off the plantations. Keeping the peace between them was difficult because of the ingrained rivalries of the nationalities concerned. I held frequent meetings in the Gascoyne Hotel to help smooth things over.

There were several unmanned launches scheduled for 1967. The first being a Lunar Orbiter on the 5^th February, there were no hitches on this track. When the next launch came along – a Surveyor on the 17^th April there was a departure from routine when the rocket was suddenly put into a lunar phase without first coming over Carnarvon it being put into this phase when over Bermuda. There was an anxious wait and I calculated that we would see it over our Western horizon in about 10 – 15 minutes time, fortunately this turned out to be correct and I had a very relieved Station Director.

We took a two week break and went camping down in the South West, firstly staying in Perth for two or three nights. During that time I booked our passage back to the UK on the Canberra leaving in late October. For me, the Apollo 1 fire and the subsequent delays in a manned launch plus the fact that my boys needed a better education than that available in Carnarvon was the reason for this decision. I also purchased a new camera which I used later to do some internal pictures of the people in the USB area.

Then we went off down south passing through places with delightful names like Bunbury, Busselton, and Margaret River and down to the Diamond Tree forest where I climbed the 200 ft tree which had the fire look- out on top – I think that they called it the Gloucester Tree. We spent a night in the Porongorups near to Castle Rock which we climbed the next day. We looked in at Albany and then wended our way back to Perth and then the trek to Carnarvon. I should mention that to get from Perth to Carnarvon we had, in those days, to drive inland up the North West Highway through New Norcia, this was the only paved road at that time, then into Geraldton. Today there is the Brand Highway which runs up the Coast which makes it an easy drive.

Back at the Tracking Station there were a few more unmanned launches, a total of two more Lunar Orbiters, three Surveyors and a Mariner, the latter was for a Venus flyby. We began to prepare for our departure, when I spoke to the administration officer I found that they were prepared to give me some help with school fees if I wanted to send my boys to a boarding school in Perth – this was a very generous offer – but I had to decline it.

We packed, sold or gave away some of the things we had purchased whilst in WA and set off at the end of October 1967 back to UK. The journey to Perth was uneventful save when we had a ‘comfort stop’ and found two 6ft red kangaroos watching us with interest. We stayed in Perth for a couple of weeks to organise the finances – tax returns and such. In the bank we found an ex-Carnarvon manager who gave us some sound advice, delaying the money transfer to UK until devaluation had taken place in the UK. The journey on the Canberra was routine until we hit a Force 10 gale in the Southern Ocean. We called in at Durban and Cape Town spending enough time in them to take trips inland and see the sights, then it was Las Palmas and the UK and another period of upheaval till we finally settled down. I took a job as a system engineer, my wife (Jean) went into teaching and the boys both obtained Honours Degrees in mathematics at Emmanuel College Cambridge. This period spent in Australia has a special place in our memory.

Alan Gilham UK January 2008.

That bloody woman…

2007-08-31T19:46:00.000+01:00

Ten years ago, I had just gone out for a curry, and on the drive home, turned on the radio to hear a solemn announcement about the Prince of Wales meeting a coffin.

"The Queen-Mum? The Queen?" I thought.

No, it turned out to be that woman. "A not-quite-accidental overdose of slimming pills?" I wondered, "But anyway, 'Ding dong! The bitch is dead!' -- and so that means that Charles should now be able to marry his first love."

The crazy disturbing emotional hoo-hah over the next days, made me ashamed to be British; and the shutdown for the funeral made it very difficult for me to get the provisions for my 40th birthday party on the Saturday following.

What Tarot card...

2007-07-22T21:41:00.000+01:00

You are The Hermit

Prudence, Caution, Deliberation.

The Hermit points to all things hidden, such as knowledge and inspiration,hidden enemies. The illumination is from within, and retirement from participation in current events.

The Hermit is a card of introspection, analysis and, well, virginity. You do not desire to socialize; the card indicates, instead, a desire for peace and solitude. You prefer to take the time to think, organize, ruminate, take stock. There may be feelings of frustration and discontent but these feelings eventually lead to enlightenment, illumination, clarity.

The Hermit represents a wise, inspirational person, friend, teacher, therapist. This a person who can shine a light on things that were previously mysterious and confusing.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

HeroQuest Character Sheets

2007-07-13T20:09:00.000+01:00

I put these together a while back and they are on the Issaries site. Word 97 and StarOffice/OpenOffice 1.0 format.

Genealogy

2007-07-13T17:56:00.000+01:00

Introduction

My branch of Gilham family originates from Dover, Kent. The name comes from the Norman French - Guillaume, or William. This is in contrast with the etymology offered by such sources as the Reader's Digest Condensed Encyclopedia, which offered the meaning of the name as "dweller by the head of the glen" - presumably ghyll-hame - which might explain the run of Gilhams along the Great Glen in the latter part of the 19^th century, according to the recent trace-your-name display in the Science Museum, if the Auld Alliance does not.

The name is quite a common one (including the -ll and -llh variants) along the south-east coast, from Kent around to Sussex at least, but is otherwise quite rare in my experience. It's sufficiently rare that I've only encountered the name once in fiction (a Senator Gilham in a series of SF stories on the subject of head transplants written R.C. Fitzpatrick, and appearing in Analog in the mid 60's).

Overview

On the direct male line, he family can only be traced as far back to the Census of 1881 with any certainty, although the dates of birth can be taken further back as the ages are listed in the census.

Running back, the ancestry combines with the Walters family from North Staffordshire. Both of the early Walters family married Austins, so we suspect that they could have been cousins. From this marriage the progeny moved to London and the South East, and Australia respectively.

A branch of the Walters family strangely enough moved to Dover and created their own dynasty. Their maternal line is also named Austen (spelt with an E); another branch is now living in Norfolk.

So far we can only trace the maternal side of the Gilham family back to the Pett and Wallis family. Other families are noted as they interact with the main streams.

The Australian line needs to be expanded when information is available.

Unattributed ages are those of the 1881 census.

Outline Pedigree

The core of the genealogy I will take as my paternal grandfather Edward John, and his marriage to Alice Walters. His father married a Pett, while my grandmother came from two generations where a Walters married an Austin. Her siblings married a Kemsley (Dover) and a Mountford (East Anglia). Of his two sons, the elder emigrated to Australia, while my father Alan Edward stayed in England.

Kent Family Gilham

Henry Pett born 1838 at Leybourne Kent, Married Elizabeth Ann Wallis born 1841 at Wrotham Kent and married 15th November 1869. Children listed in 1881 Census were: Horace (15) Elizabeth Ann (12) Charlotte Emily (9) Florence (5) and Priscilla (10 months)

George & Julia Gillham née Ashman of Hougham Kent were the parents of Richard Edward, William John, and George (born 1870). Richard E Gillham was born 14th Feb 1862.

William John Gillham married Anne; their children were called Ethel and Jane.

Elizabeth Ann Pett married Richard Gillham (note the double-l in the name at the time) who was recorded as being 19 in 1881 (born in Dover) and a militiaman stationed in Canterbury at that time.

Richard E Gillham married Elizabeth Ann Pett on the 29th March 1887 and had twins Edward John - my grandfather - and a girl (Annie) who did not survive.

Later they had a daughter also called Elizabeth Ann, who was always known as Cissie, who married Walter Whiting.

Edward John was born in 1889 at 4 Prospect Cottages, Dover. In the 1891 census they were living at 35 Peter St., Dover. Richard is noted as being a Bricklayers labourer, in 1919 he was a builder and later became a member of the Dover Masonic Lodge.

Edward John Gilham married Alice Maud Walters (Christmas Day 1919 in Fenton, Stoke on Trent) He had served in the Royal East Kent Regiment. (The Buffs) from Feb 1908 to July 1919. Returned from India Oct 1914.

Promoted Sergeant Xmas 1914 then sent to “the Front” ie. France. He fought in the trenches at Ypres and was wounded. He spent the remainder of the war in charge of the Army Post Office in Marseilles. Alice was a nurse and served in the military hospital in Kent.

They had two sons.Eric John 12 May 1927 & Alan Edward 26 Sept 1929. Eric later married Muriel Shenton and they emigrated to Australia in 1951.

It is interesting to note that on my grandparents marriage certificate that Harold Mountford was a witness. He married Alice's sister Gladys.

North Staffordshire: Walters Family

Thomas Walters married Elizabeth Austin and had five children recorded in the 1881 census: Sarah (17) Elizabeth (15) Hannah (13), James(11) and Thomas (5).

James was born in Burton on Trent on the 21st October 1869 and is recorded in the 1881 census as living at 9 Gladstone Street, Stoke on Trent. There is only a picture of Hannah and her family with husband Charles who was an interpreter in the Army, branch unknown.

It seems (but not confirmed) that Thomas Walters married the sister of Charles Austin making James Walters and Harriet Ann Austin cousins

Harriet Ann Austin (12) was the daughter of Charles and Mary Ann Austin, both aged 40. In 1881 they lived at 36 Spring Road, Longton Stoke-on-Trent together with other siblings, Charles, (10) Thomas Henry, (8)Frederick W (5) and William Jas. (16 months)

James Walters married Harriet Ann Austin in Normacot, Longton, Stoke-on-Trent 27 Jan 1889, both aged 21years. In 1881 they lived at 33a GregoryStreet Longton with Alice Maud then aged 11 months, giving a birth date for her of 20th April 1880. They had two more children Gladys and Fred.

They eventually lived at 37 Holly Place, Fenton, Stoke-on-Trent.

Gladys married Harold Mountford (a miner) and had two daughters Freda Patricia and Christine, known as Chris. Gladys later remarried to a George Perry. There was no further issue.

Freda married Reginald Hunter and had a daughter, Patricia. Freda became a sergeant in the ATS during the war. Reg was a “Bevan Boy” and worked in the coal mines. Now (mid-2003) resides in East Anglia. Chris married Shearer Macintosh (known as Mac) in 1953 and died in Scotland (Burntisland) in 1998.

It is possible that the Salt family of Dilhorne, near Stoke, has some connections with this branch of the family.

Kent Walters Family

Fred Walters married Ada Kemsley, born circa 1900 in Gillingham and died aged 98. They lived in Dover at 2 Redvers Cottages, Kearsney They had one son and two daughters. Len, Gladys and Joan. By a strange coincidence the mother of Ada Kemsley was also an Austen but this time spelt with an E.

Fred was Company Sergeant Major in the 2nd Battalion on the Royal East Kents (The Buffs) during the war.

Gladys married a Mr Smithson and later they emigrated to South Africa and then Australia.

Joan married Joe Adkins; there was no issue.

They were both stationed in El Adem (Libya) when my father, Alan Gilham landed there in 1948 en route from Tripoli to El Fayid (Suez Canal Zone) as part of his National Service.

Len married Edie Dixon and had a daughter Carol and a son James.

Len served in the Royal Artillery and took part in the Burma campaign. Edie was a “clippie” on the buses during the war. The Dixon family took part in the Dunkirk evacuation using small fishing boats.

London Area Gilham Family

Alan Edward Gilham married my mother, Jean Louisa in 1952.

He was a wireman with London Transport and she was a secretary with the Ecclesiastical Insurance Office. He later became a Chartered Engineer (in electronics engineering), and finished his career in electronics sales, while my mother became maths teacher when her children were old enough for her to return to work.

Alan served in the Royal Signals (National Service) in the Middle East. Alan later spent two and half years working for NASA in Carnarvon W. Australia. They had two sons Steven (yours truly) and Andrew.

They both graduated with MA Cantab. in the Mathematical Tripos after reading maths at Emmanuel College Cambridge. Steven also gained an MSc in Astrophysics - like Trilian from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, really, only not so glamorous.

Steven Alan Gilham was born in Wimbledon (St. Teresa's Hospital) and educated at primary schools in Poplar Road, Morden (Surrey) Carnarvon (West Australia), King Edward VI Grammar School, Chelmsford, won scholarship to Emmanuel College. My CV elsewhere on this site brings the story up to date.

Andrew John Gilham was born at home in 194 London Road Morden Surrey (my earliest memory is of that day), and followed the same course of schools and undergraduate degree. He now runs his own computer consultancy.

Steven Alan Gilham married Karen Alison Edwards in 1981. Karen is a King's alumna, with MA Cantab. in Classics, and a Post Graduate Diploma in Classical Archeology and is now an FCCA. Being childless by choice, this branch of the family leads no further.

Australia Gilham Family

Eric John Gilham married Muriel Shenton in 1948 in Stoke-on-Trent Staffs.

They emigrated to Australia in 1951 and became naturalised Australian citizens later on. Muriel already had one son Toniand later they had two sons and a daughter, Richard, Stephen and Susan, all born in Australia.

Eric later married Fay McGuiness and finally lived in Mt Gambier. South Australia. Eric died there on the 4th April 2003 aged 75.

Toni married Judy They reside in the Northern Territory.

Richard married and had two sons named Christopher and Rodney. Later he married Faye.

Christopher married Kath and have (at least) a daughter, Caitlyn.

Stephen married Margaret Hopley and they have two daughters Sandra and Kerin. They live in Traralgon, Victoria.

Susan married Philip Robertson. They have twin girls, Lee and Ellen. Susan is a nurse and has worked with the Flying Doctor service. Philip is now the Clinical Nursing Manager at the Royal Melbourne Hospital.

This is just the start of an Australian dynasty, so the continuation of the name seems reasonably secure. It will be interesting to see how all the all relationships and families have grown by mid-century.

Maternal line

Recent data are redacted for obvious reasons. Research along this line has been more fruitful, reaching as far as my great⁴-grandparents in one place.

My maternal great²-grandparents and their antecedents

William H Moreton (~1835 - ~1897) born in Bucks. married Sarah Ann Martin (~1834-?), born Sussex, in ~1860.

Alfred Arnold (~1829 - 27-Dec-1888) born in W. London. married Emma Gisbey (~1829-?), born S. London, in ~1860. Alfred was the son of William (~1803-?), Emma the daughter of Jacob (~1798-?).

Joseph Butler (~1835 - 22-Dec-1900) born in N. England. married Elizabeth Miller (~1833-?), born London, in 1854. Joseph was the son of Joseph (~1800-?), and Elizabeth daughter of Abel (~1800-?).

Henry Beeden (~1836 - 5-Mar-1907) born in N. London. married Jane Tomkins (~1840-?), born N. London, in 1858. Henry was the son of Thomas (~1816-?), and Jane daughter of Henry T (~1816-~1863) and Louisa Harris (~1815-?), married ~1838. Louisa was the daughter of Henry R (~1790-?) and Sophia - surname unknown - (~1792-?).

Acknowledgements

The hard work that went into this was done by my parents for the Gilham line, and my aunt Joan on the maternal line. Thanks to them all.

My National Service by No.21067688 Signalman Gilham A E

2007-07-13T15:05:00.001+01:00

Call-up

It all started - as things usually do - with a letter addressed to me (Alan E Gilham) shortly after my eighteenth birthday. It contained an invitation from His Majesty's Government to attend at Whittington Barracks near Lichfield on the 1st January 1948, and asked "Did I have any objections?". As I was not in a reserved occupation how could I object? Later on, after a cursory medical with a local doctor, a travel document arrived with train details and a travel pass.

January 1st was a Thursday and I - as was normal in those days - had worked up to the end of December only having had Christmas and Boxing Day as holiday. Fortunately the day was mild and dry and I left home round about 9am, my mother went out to clean the front windows and I sneaked out round the back so that there would be no tearful goodbyes on her part. I walked to Stoke station and caught the specified train together with quite a number of other youths. On arrival at Lichfield station we were met by several NCOs from the South Staffordshire Regiment and two three-ton trucks into which we were bundled for the journey to the barracks. This was to be the first of many journeys like this either hanging on for grim death or slouching on the floor and sides.

On arrival we were stood in line and marched to our barrack room which was devoid of anything but empty frame beds with mess tins laid on them and wooden wall lockers, whatever we had brought with us in the way of toilet gear was put into the lockers and we then "stood by our beds" and waited till our troop sergeant appeared who duly took down our names, it turned out that his name was Bilham and we entered into a strained relationship from the first. We then had our first experience of foot drill as we were marched off to the cookhouse for a midday meal (dinner in those days). Foot drill was no problem to me and many of my compatriots as a lot of us had been in organisations like the Church Lads Brigade and similar, but many did not know their left from their right causing quite a few observations from our barrack room corporal. We learned about the cookhouse routine of having your mess tin being filled with food ladled in from a height of several inches causing the unsuspecting to lose their grip on the handle when such delights as a "dollop" of potato hit it with force. When the meal was over mess tins had to be rinsed in a communal bowl of lukewarm greasy water, cleaned and ready inspection. Later that same day we were taken to the Quartermaster's store and drew out three "biscuits" - these formed our mattress - and two blankets and two sheets. We also were fitted with uniforms and new boots; since the store personnel just gave you what size they thought would fit there was much swapping about of trousers etc. until most were reasonably dressed. That evening, after tea, we had to parcel up our civilian clothes and send them home and learn how to shine up your boots, blanco your belt and get a shine on your brass buckles.

The next day began in earnest, reveille at 6am, shave, perform your "ablutions", have breakfast and assemble on the parade ground at 8am ready for two hours of foot drill. Then there was a "NAAFI" break and continue till dinner time, and back on the parade ground for the rest of the afternoon. Evenings were always spent cleaning your kit or the barrack room or fatigues. Since I would not let Sergeant Bilham get at me I always got the worst fatigues such as polishing the brassware in the urinals and scrubbing the floor in the officers' mess. Later came the issuing of rifles, short magazine Lee Enfields, and rifle drill ad infinitum until that marvellous day when we were marched to the ranges and actually fired ten rounds each. I think I scored reasonably well although references to my pay book record of " tests of elementary training" dosn't substantiate this. Then we took our turn in the butts in order to signal where the shots landed in the target, there is always some clever person who uses your signalling stick as a target when you stick it up causing everybody to duck down and swear.

After rifle drill etc. came the Bren gun and we went through all the drills on changing barrels, stripping it down and reassembling until we could do it in the dark. I won a barrack room competition on how quickly I could load the magazine on the gun, fire, clear an imaginary jam and commence firing again. Going to the ranges with the Bren Gun gave Sergeant Bilham great delight as I had to put the gun on my shoulder, hold an ammunition box with the other hand another guy holding the other side of the box and in double time we went to our firing point. I found that firing the Bren was easy as there was hardly any recoil and I could obtain a good grouping on the target.

During the above activity there was a requirement to parade outside the medical block and receive the first of many "shots" for typhus A and B, cholera, smallpox and a Schick test, the latter was having the delight of having two needles stuck into your forearms, lack of reaction showed you were free from TB. Having all these vaccinations done in the space of about ten minutes caused several bodies to crash to the ground and I have to admit I was very nearly one of them, according to my old army pay book this was on the 2nd January.

There was also a lot of physical training during these six weeks of primary training, the usual 3 miles route march with full kit, but fortunately no extra weight in the form of ammunition, then immediately after that a half mile run without respite, all this was quite a stress on a lot of the men, some of them coming from very poor backgrounds.

A weekend leave at Easter was granted (25th March - 30th March) and I remember enjoying it, I could walk the dog and go out with some old school friends who were waiting to be called up. Then there was also a seven days mid training leave during which invites were given to families to attend a passing out parade at Lichfield.

This passing out parade date duly arrived. We spent a lot of time practising drills etc. until the NCOs were satisfied. The actual day was damp and was very nearly the cause of an accident, we had fixed bayonets and then the order to slope arms came and my hand slipped on the rifle which started to come up at an angle towards the back of the man in front of me, with my left hand I managed to stop this and performed the rest of the manoeuvre without incident. The rest of the parade was judged by all and sundry to be a success and my mother was very proud.

The highlight of this time was the fact that I refused to allow my sergeant to get the better of me and in one incident when we were having a silent battle of minds he actually called me a "moronic robot" a phrase I remember with pride as having caused him to resort to abuse. On reflection I think this antipathy was caused by me being highly indignant by having to run round a gas chamber without my mask for two turns instead of the one we were told about, the sergeant keeping his mask on all the while.

We were all called into the troop commander's office to be given a choice of Regiment or Corps to be posted to; I was given the choice of the Household Cavalry or the Royal Signals as a telephone lineman, thinking of all the ceremonies etc. I would have to do I chose the latter. I was given the shoulder flashes to sew on and a travel pass to Richmond (Yorkshire) for the next Monday. Another reason for choosing the Signals was that tradesmen earned at least another shilling a day, which would make it more than the basic three shillings a day which ordinary privates got.

Catterick

Arriving at Catterick we were put into asbestos huts - like Nissen huts but not as substantial - and called Mons lines (all the lines were named after first world war battles) and told the course we were to attend would not begin until the next week so we were to get our fatigues unpacked and be general dogsbodies. I drew a session on the Catterick golf course, which was fun, playing with a tractor, very dangerously as I recall, and keeping the greens clean. We subsisted on "haversack rations" collected from the cookhouse every morning, together with whatever one could beg, borrow or steal in the way of extras, potatoes for putting on a bonfire and any leftovers from the day before, it was cold and we were very hungry.

The next week we started the course and I eventually became a D3 assistant lineman on the 1st May 1948 halfway to becoming a fully-fledged B3 lineman. During this time I was promoted to a lance corporal, this was not substantive and I lost it on leaving Catterick. We were also moved into new accommodation in Le Cateau lines.

My main duties were to march the squad to and from the parade ground and lecture rooms and to perform what was known as "canteen cowboy" i.e. keeping order in the NAAFI during break times, when I had to do full days I got plenty of undisturbed practise on the snooker table.

During May the weather turned abnormally cold, so much so, that yours boots literally stuck to the parade ground if you remained in one spot. Everybody went to sleep with vest and pants on and your greatcoat put on top of the blanket. There was a stove in the middle of the hut but no fuel until we managed to scrounge some coal, it didn't throw out much heat at all. There was a minimal amount of hot water for shaving in the morning, but no hot water for showers etc. I finally managed a very cold shower in desperation after about a month of skimpy washes.

Being an ever so junior NCO I had to have my back pack and ammunition pouches all square and symmetrical, luck favoured me here in that the carpenter was an old school friend of mine, by name Ernie Byatt, who said he could very easily put a thin plywood inner frame in them, if I provided the ply wood, which I did by visiting an empty hut one night and carrying away a wooden locker on my shoulder past the Orderly Officer, who took no notice of me, into the carpenters shop where good old Ernie carved it up exceptionally accurately for me and disposed of any incriminating evidence. I threw them all away when I left Catterick as not being necessary. I also used lead weights on a piece of string to pull my trousers down over the gaiters in a "regimental fashion"

There was a guard duty to do that was disliked by everyone; it was at the School of Signals. Being the HQ of the Corps it was a "regimental" guard; everything had to be just so, greatcoat pleated correctly, webbing and gaiters freshly "blancoed" and brasses polished and boots shone until they looked like mirrors. The rifles also had to have the treatment, the wood being highly polished so everything looked like new. You had to salute every officer by sloping arms and slapping the rifle butt smartly, when they were above the rank of major you had to present arms, fortunately this was a daytime guard only and I only did it once.

Tensions ran a little high as one might guess in this environment, one night someone fixed one of the guy's beds so that it collapsed when he got into it, and he tried to take it out on me with a rifle butt. Fortunately being used to wrestling with my schoolmates I managed to subdue him and put him in a headlock until he calmed down. I did not charge him for attacking an NCO. Things settled down after that. There was a chap who came into my section, whose name I can't remember but he was known as "Angel"

because he came from the Angel Islington. He was forever being slung into the guardhouse for being insubordinate. His demobilisation group was 108, mine was 125, so he should have left the army by that time, for some strange reason we took to each other and I persuaded him to be sensible about things and covered up for him in one of his escapades. He managed to steer clear of conflict until I left Catterick when I lost track of him. I often think of him and wonder what eventually became of him.

During this time (May) we went out on the Yorkshire Moors to set up some telegraph poles and connect them all up, one section had to have an overhead cable strung between the poles supported by a steel wire on which was put a small chair pulled along by a rope. The idea was to put clips on the wire to hold the cable; the problem was that this provided much "amusement" by the chair being pulled from pole to pole at a great rate of knots with its occupant having to hold on for grim death, this together with using climbing irons on poles which had had so much traffic up them they were like shredded wheat meant that many splinters and bruises were received during this exercise. These exercises made one exceptionally hungry and many raids were made on the cook house, returning to camp one night I remember finding some cold rice pudding with sultanas in it, filled two mess tins with it, took it back to the hut and several of us had really full stomachs that night. One day two of us were collecting items left behind from previous exercises when we stumbled across an old POW camp still being used for that purpose, mostly being occupied by Italians who wanted to stay in UK, the cook provide us each with two enormous slices of corned beef dipped in batter and placed between two slices of bread which was at that time a taste of sheer heaven.

After this we took a course in making cable joints, sweating joints with blowlamps and discovering that the Army fatigue dress was quite flameproof, people who were caught bending over sometimes had a blowlamp applied which soon straightened them up. Somehow we all managed to pass the course successfully.

I managed to get a pass for Whitsuntide Leave (14th to 18th June). I did not manage to get leave for Eric's wedding. The trains at this time were always unreliable and slow (what's new) and I could not get any further that day (14th) than Stafford so commenced to walk to Stone, it was about 8am after a few miles a kind motorist picked me up and dropped me off in Stoke. On returning to Catterick the train, as usual, was crowded but I managed to find a space on the corridor floor and sat down and nodded off I awoke when the train started to slow down to stop at York. When I woke I found that I was sitting by a very pretty girl and my head was on her shoulders, somewhat disconcerted by this I stumbled out an apology, she just smiled, got up, collected her case and got out of the train to be met by an Army Captain. I often wondered who she was. Train journeys were always a hazard in those days; you never knew what was going to happen or how long the journey was going to take.

On the 19th July 1948 I became a fully-fledged B3 lineman, moved to a transit camp in Ripon to await posting abroad somewhere then send on embarkation leave from the 23rd June to 8th July. Back to the camp in Ripon we had no real duties to perform so we swam in the river Ure, looked at the orders every day and hoped for a good posting. Some people were sent off to exotic places like Washington and other Embassies, but others less lucky were to go to Palestine, West Africa and other places like that. Five others and myself were to go to Benghazi and later, after a very long train journey ending up at the famous Lime Street Station; we dutifully embarked on the SS Staffordshire at Princes Wharf Liverpool.

At Sea

On board we were ushered to our mess deck, instructed on how to sling a hammock, where to stack our kit bags and where the galley was. The next day we cast off and sailed, there were no bands or waving crowds, it was just another troop ship sailing off.

There were daily drills on assembling at your lifeboat stations, putting on your life jackets and getting to know the ships layout. We sailed with a battalion of the Royal Irish Fusiliers and they had a very callow 1st lieutenant who explained to his men that the bows were "the pointed end of the ship" causing us to have a little snigger

The food on board ship was very good, not only were there the usual three meals but an additional one, afternoon tea, which consisted of freshly baked bread and jam, we went through the Bay of Biscay without incident, the weather being clear and warm, apart from the routine drills we had no other duties so we could lounge about on deck, play cards and have games of tombola. I used to get out on deck as soon as I could so I could see the land we were passing with white painted houses just discernable in the far distance and the dolphins playing around the bows. One day we spotted a swarm of "flying fish" skimming over the water behaving just like small dolphins. The voyage was not without incident, suddenly when we were off the coast of Spain the ship's alarm bells began to ring and the ship veered round and the engines stopped, several men with rifles appeared on deck and aimed at an object in the sea which eventually turned out to be an old packing case in the water and not as was suspected an old floating mine.

I only remember one chap who was seasick, he was in a terrible state, he was found under a pile of spare hammocks nearly dead and was rushed of to the sick bay, he eventually got over it.

We passed the Rock of Gibraltar and in to the Mediterranean and on toward Malta, I tried one night to sleep out on deck to get away from the closely packed decks below, (two feet between hammocks), this was not a success as one blanket was not sufficient to keep the cold out and a steel deck is quite hard.

Malta

Entering the Grand Harbour Valetta in Malta was quite an impressive sight seeing what was left of the brickwork put up by the Knights Templar when they held the island in I think about the 1400AD mark. We, that is, all the Signals personnel, dutifully disembarked leaving the Fusiliers to go on to Egypt. The transit camp was about three miles out of Valetta through Silema Creek to a place we knew as St. Georges bay, looking at a modern map it now seems to be known as Soldiers bay. A Maltese driver, whose driving skills were reprehensible, conveyed us there in a three-ton truck; to put it mildly this woke us all up!!

This transit camp consisted of rows of scruffy huts on bare earth surrounded by a high barbed wire fence. The one entrance was tightly controlled by military police who logged you in and out as well as making sure you were properly dressed. We later found out that the CSM who ran the camp had been posted there from the Colchester glasshouse where he was reprimanded for cruelty to the prisoners.

This was the first time we put on our previously issued khaki drill shirts, shorts and hose tops, now hose tops were a remarkable invention consisting of a footless long sock which you put on your legs first, then you put on a normal short sock and then your boots, your gaiters then went on covering the gap between hose top and boot, the end result was that you appeared to be wearing long khaki socks!!

We had started to take of our shirts on board ship and by now we all had the start of an overall tan except one of the chaps, by name of Bernard Hartley who had very fair skin and was prone to sunburn. He came from St. Ives in Cornwall and years later we met there.

This camp was remarkable for two things, salty water and latrines which consisted of long bench with twelve holes and a semicircular trough running underneath with constant sea water flowing down it. During morning "ablutions" it was common practise to set fire to a paper boat and send it down the trough and watch everyone there suddenly jump up in sequence as the flame seared their backsides. I was only caught once. The salt in the drinking water was the biggest nuisance and we all volunteered for fatigues which took you to the other side on the island where you could get fresh water, you took as many canteens as you could with you to fill up. One chap thought that he could use Andrew's Liver Salts to disguise the taste and thought it was great until the combined effects caused great upheavals of his bowels!!

After two weeks we were given orders to be on parade at 4am to get a boat to go on to Tripoli in Libya, not Benghazi as our original destination was. A chap I had palled up with by name "Bomber" Bates - I don't recall his first name - and I decided to have the night out and explore the island prior to embarkation, so we sneaked out under the fence and went into Valletta.

We wandered around the streets of Valetta and outside a grand building - its name I never knew - there was parked a small car with its key in the ignition, my companion could drive - he was a vehicle mechanic - I walked down the street and kept a lookout and he released the hand brake and coasted down the hill and I got in, the motor was started and we went for a ride around all the places we had not been before. After two to three hours we decided to return to camp and got within half a mile or so, parked the car in a side track, as I got out I saw some paperwork in the side pocket and had a read, what we read made us replace everything and run like hell back under the wire and innocently to bed. The car belonged to the Provost Marshall of Malta!!!

Next day we passed the place where had parked the car the previous night round about 11pm and saw that it was gone, it was now 6 o'clock in the morning and we were heading to the harbour to embark on our boat to Tripoli. We made a pact that when we returned to Malta we would take a "dhyso" (water taxi) out of the harbour and see Malta by sea. I'm glad we split up later on; I could still be in jail!

At Sea

Our ship was an ex Air Sea rescue vessel, small and fast, with only sufficient accommodation for about 30 people, we took it in turns to get food from the galley and take it into the mess. It was my turn to get breakfast the next morning and I picked up a tray of sausages and tomatoes and a large container of porridge, placed the tray at the bottom of the stairway and took the porridge up, at the top of the stairs the boat suddenly lurched and I grabbed the handrail the container of porridge went flying, most of it over the sausages. I went to try and find something to clean up the mess and when I returned, a miracle had occurred, someone else had cleaned it up, I think that it was a crew member who did it as there was to be a ships inspection that morning. I was very careful with the replacements. Later when we were hanging over the bows I saw the cause of the problem, the bows were stove in and bent sideways and any side wave hitting it caused a sudden lurch. I later learned that the ship had hit a wreck in Benghazi harbour a few weeks before.

Tripoli

We disembarked and were taken about a mile and a half out of the main town to an elegant marble structure built by the Italians (pre-war) called Marina Barracks that was to be home for the next seven months.

Tripoli was a good posting, during the summer heat you were dismissed after the two o'clock works parade and unless anything else was scheduled you could go swimming in the beautiful clear sea water, that is unless you swam across to the wrecks in the harbour where you could easily get coated with fuel oil, only once did this happen, it took a long and painful session in the showers to get it off.

We were paid in Military Authority Lira, and to our joy we had a local overseas allowance of sixpence a day, later in Egypt it was ten pence a day.

The next thing we knew we were doing combined operations training spending some time with the Grenadier Guards at their camp scaling 20ft walls using nets to simulate a ships side. You had a full pack and a Sten gun - not loaded, thank goodness as they had a reputation for suddenly discharging after a knock. One chap dropped his Sten and I had to pause to listen to a Guards sergeant major describing this poor chaps ancestry, I don't think he repeated himself once in five minutes.

After this it was getting into a landing craft with fifty other men and many reels of cable, going out to sea and then running on to the beach gather up your Sten and one side of a reel of cable, run like blazes on to the beach and lay out the communications lines for the Beach master. I realized that this would be a dangerous activity if an enemy was firing at you at the time and learned later that during the war linemen in the Royal Signals had a large casualty rate!!!

They found out that I had had some typing training and I was asked to go into the troop office, this I did and found it to be a good move. I worked with a Captain Taylor who was seconded from the Kings Shropshire Light Infantry to the Signals and we got on famously.

One advantage working the troop office was that I did not do any other duties and went straight from the first works parade to the office to commence typing out orders for the next day. I was not scheduled to go on the combined operations exercise that we had trained for, as someone had to look after the troop office whilst Captain Taylor was away leading the troop, when they all returned several days later and I listened to some of the things that had transpired I was glad I had had a few really quiet and lazy days.

Among the Arabic words we learned was the word "ghibli". There was a forces newspaper called the Sunday Ghibli the word was roughly translated as wind. It wasn't until one arrived around about October time that we knew what it was. It was a wind from inland that brought dust storms that clogged your nose and stung your eyes, got into the food no matter what you did to avoid it and was generally an unpleasant experience.

With the advantage of extra pay, I managed to make two really worthwhile trips, one to see Leptis Magna, an old Roman city to the East of Tripoli, and was fortunate enough to have as a tour guide an Italian archaeologist who had taken part in the rebuilding of the site pre-war, the city having been subjected to an earthquake round about 600AD. The other trip was to a place called Garian, inland and up in the mountains. This was a remarkable trip, for the journey was across desert for the first part and then the road went up into the mountains, it was very narrow and had many hairpin bends but fortunately no one else seemed to be using it.

When we arrived at Garian we went to an Italian hotel and had a meal of spaghetti topped with Parmesan cheese, which because we were unwise in the ways of the world caused us great hilarity in trying to cope with removing it from plate to mouth. I remember the air was sparkling fresh and the starry night was exceptionally clear and bright. The next day we visited an underground village, well the houses were really caves built in great pits about 20 to 30 feet deep. The Emir came out and we were escorted down a long ramp to view one interior, I would imagine that the temperature would be pretty constant and comfortable all year round. Many years later in India at a neurology seminar I was talking to a neurologist and his wife who had done the trip when he was in the RAMC and she was a nurse, this gave us quite a good talking point.

Being in the troop office I had the task of writing up the orders for the sports day afternoon, by this time I had retired from playing cricket for the Signals because of receiving a cricket ball in the face whilst playing wicketkeeper. So I arranged to have driving lessons from my pal "Bomber" Bates and we spent several afternoons with me driving around Tripoli. One day, after nearly taking the gates of the sports field, we stopped and talked to one of the Arab ground staff in a mixture of Italian, Arabic and English. He was grateful to the British for looking after him when the Italians wounded him during the push from El Alamein.

There was an old seaplane base in the harbour where an occasional guard was required; this was an easy duty since all it required was someone to be there overnight and report in at occasional intervals. I did this only once, which was a great pity. When the ration truck pulled with my evening meal I had enough to feed several people, so I spoke to an Arab watchman who had a hut further down the jetty and gave him the remainder of the food. Later he invited me into his hut to partake of a few cups of strong, sweet tea and to meet his family who were devouring the now ex-army rations. Looking back I can't remember any of the Libyan people being hostile - quite a difference to the Egyptians!!

Around the end of September we had an influx of personnel who were moving out of Palestine, their tales of the atrocities committed by the Jewish terrorists were grim. Despatch riders had to watch out for wire strung between trees, several were apparently decapitated. The same applied to commanders of Dingo armoured cars who learned the hard way to keep their heads in the vehicle. As usual there was a reverse side of the coin inasmuch as that there were illegal transactions taking place with the military equipment that was to have been destroyed.

November the 11th 1948 and we had a grand parade and service with all the troops in the region, among them the 1st Battalion Grenadier Guards, we had lost to them in a tug-of-war match earlier and we were not going to be bettered at marching and foot drill, so we practised and practised until we were as near perfect as we could be. All our Khaki Drill was washed and scrubbed, carefully folded and placed on a towel under our "biscuits" and slept on. If all went well they would have good creases in them. The day of the parade arrived and all went well; we were complimented on our turn out by the Brigadier, we all felt very satisfied that day.

Christmas arrived and we had what the army calls "gunfire" brought round to us by the troop sergeant at six in the morning. Gunfire was tea with a liberal portion of whiskey mixed into it. I later walked into Tripoli and attended a communion service being held in a small chapel in the thick walls of the old fortress, it was an impressive service, with only about 8 participants and has stuck in my mind because of that. Later that day I disgraced myself by drinking too much of the local variety of Marsala, brewed from wood alcohol I think, getting into the back of a truck going into town getting out of the truck in the middle of a heaving mass of people struggling with a lot of drunken Grenadiers and disappearing for a few hours. I woke up on the beach in the out of bounds area completely intact with all my possessions and proceeded to walk back to the Barracks. I met a few of the troop walking into town to find out where I was. We then returned back, on the way I picked up a bottle on the promenade and threw it into - I think - some sort of receptacle, I did not realise that the bottle top was already broken and the bottle cut my hand. Being still somewhat under the weather I went to bed and woke up the next morning with a heavily bandaged hand, washed and shaved with difficulty and went to the MI room, when the bandage was removed I only had two nicks at the base of the index finger which was easily plastered up. I still bear the scars to this day. I found out later the lads had used up at least two bandages practising on me.

We had a raw lieutenant posted to us who thought he would catch the guard out one night. He dressed in an old sheet and waited by the trucks in the vehicle park to surprise the guard, well I happened to be the next sector guard and this is what transpired. I heard a challenge of "Come out of there you bastard or you will get a bullet up your backside" or something like that which I leave to the reader's imagination. A sheepish lieutenant went to the guard commander and complained that he was not correctly challenged. I think that the retort was "If you do stupid things like that you deserve all that you get". It never happened again!

In January 1949 came a request for volunteers to go to Egypt where the Signals needed reinforcing and what did I do but volunteer, I only had another year to go so I thought I would see some more of the Middle East - silly me.

Later in that week we were asked to pack our kitbags, one with immediate essentials and the other with our spare Khaki Drill etc. the latter would be forwarded on to us. We never saw the second kitbag again; this was a problem later on since we had to be reissued with things like battledress and denims and as the loss was not our fault the quartermaster had to stump up and smile.

My main memories of Tripoli are the walk along the sea front towards the town and seeing the ancient walled castle ahead of you and the sweat trickling down your back during first works parade and wondering if your clean Khaki Drill was getting soiled by it.

By Air

Now we normally had egg and beans as a breakfast dish but on this journey from Tripoli to Egypt we had five meals all the same in twenty-four hours starting from about 1900 hrs on one day to about 1800 hrs the next day.

We first went for breakfast No.1 at our barracks before getting in the trucks to go to the airfield. There we were given breakfast No.2 whilst our kit was loaded onto a Douglas DC3 (Dakota) then we got on board, the accommodation was as to be expected very crude, just bench seating along the fuselage and no seat belts as I recall. No one had warned us that it was going to be cold and we were still in Khaki Drill, after a while we managed to get a blanket apiece and wrap ourselves up in it and sleep somewhat fitfully. I watched the sun coming up over the desert and remember thinking hurry up over it so we can get warm. It was my first flight on a large aircraft - a flight on an old biplane over a seaside resort in Wales for a quarter of an hour didn't count - and I watched the wingtips shaking about with some sort of trepidation. We landed in the early morning at a staging post in the desert called El Adem and promptly went to the cookhouse for breakfast No.3. Now for a remote desert outpost it was surprising that as we went from the plane to the cookhouse an old "schoolie" I knew who went into the RAF waved and we had a short conversation. Later I learned that my cousin Joan and her husband had also been stationed there.

Why we landed at El Adem I don't know, maybe the pilot wanted a leak, I know we did. Anyway being now warm and fed we went on to the last leg of the journey getting a good aerial view of the sandy wastelands of the Western desert and eventually landing at Fayid in the southern part of the Suez Canal zone and guess what, breakfast No.4 awaited us. Shortly after landing we were packed into trucks and made our way north to Ismailia and into the tented camp of 3 Infantry Division Signals and you guessed it, breakfast No.5 awaited us.

Egypt

Here, because it was classed as winter we had to go back into battledress, which meant getting re-kitted out. We thought that battledress was a bit odd until we experienced night time temperatures especially when doing the incessant guard duties demanded of us. On some of the early morning Signal Despatch runs in open top Jeeps we had a greatcoat on. Anyway it was back into Khaki Drill around the end of March.

Going into Ismailia one Saturday night we discovered that young lads would threaten to throw ink or some similar substance over your Khaki Drill unless you gave them money, the first time I encountered this I threw some lira I had left over from Tripoli into the far distance and got them out of the way. Later we usually went out in bigger groups and gave them as good as we got. This type of activity was a menace in Egypt not at all like Libya.

During the time here we had plenty of work to do, some of which was quite an experience, one time several of us were checking the lines going into and out of the Main HQ when the portable phone which we had connected for testing purposes rang and was answered by one of the chaps with "Chinese Laundry here". He was told off by the Colonel in no uncertain terms and was collected by the MP's in the space of about half an hour. Fortunately I was up a pole at the time and only knew about it when the Military Police arrived.

There was a village nearby called Arishia, which had to be gone through by truck to several destinations, one time I was standing up on the front seat with my head through the observation port when a large stone came over and just caught me on the nose. Being somewhat startled I raised my Sten gun up and turned toward the rear of the truck to see several of the chaps who were seated on the canopy diving like hell for cover. We kept our heads down after that.

One day we were called out because some of the main lines to Cairo were down and we were ordered out very quickly without any arms and proceeded to where we had located the break, which was caused by some enterprising Egyptian digging down into the sand and removing some twenty feet of cable. We commenced to dig down to expose the two ends of the cable ready to insert another length. The corporal and I went to see if we could trace the culprit and followed the marks made by someone dragging something heavy in to a small village. We were met by a very hostile crowd and we had to retreat because the only weapon we had was my pair of pliers in a belt holster.

After digging and toiling in the heat - this was summer time - for some six hours we were exceedingly parched. A ration truck should have arrived but was delayed due to a breakdown, I remember climbing in the back when it arrived and dipping a mug into some foul liquid that was supposed to be tea and drinking this down with relish closely followed by another one. I was glad to get back into camp that evening.

On the lighter side I was sent into the RAF camp in Ismailia to check the tension on the overhead lines, the copper got stretched when it was hot. I put on climbing irons and climbed the pole and was busily sorting out the lines to re-tension when I realised I was being waved at from down below. I was overlooking the WAAF compound and some of them were sunbathing in the nude, well after all I had my job to finish, which I did exceedingly quickly, climbed down and was off the site very quickly. I discovered later that the pole had been condemned because of termites.

During the early part of the year my spare time was taken up by sailing and swimming in Lake Timsah. Somehow I had made friends with one of the corporals who had managed to get into the local boating club and we often sailed a dinghy on and around the lake. The lake was connected to the Suez Canal and we sometimes had to manoeuvre very quickly out of the way of the shipping passing through. From the dinghy the size of even a twenty thousand ton vessel looked very large.

Passing through the Canal at this time were a lot of emigrant ships sailing to Australia and New Zealand and we always exchanged waves with the passengers.

One day we were called on to go on to the banks of the Canal and give rousing cheers to the destroyer "Amethyst" which was returning from China having had a brush with the then Communist rebels.

The guard duties were getting monotonous, sometimes once every seven days because we were short of personnel. These guards sometimes had their lighter side, I recall the clear starry nights, which made all things seem peaceful and unreal. Then there was the time we were called out to find a little figure running in the distance with a huge load on his head and the guard trying to take a pot-shot at him, we later found out it was a tent that had been stolen. We had to fix bayonets and turn out the "dhobi wallahs" who were resident in the camp and did all the laundry and remove them from the camp. There was always a lot of thieving going on by the locals and they were really ingenious at it and could carry items between their legs under their robes and not look as if they were doing so. The "dhobi wallahs" were replaced and life got back to normal but the searches on those entering and leaving the camp were intensified.

I was sitting in the NAAFI one evening and there was the sound of a shot and a hole appeared in the wall and roof, one of the guard had somehow put a round up the spout and fired during the guard mounting inspection process much to everyone's consternation.

On company orders one day it stated that a trip to Cairo and the Pyramids was being organised and would interested personnel put their name down. Having some back pay due I used it to finance the trip and having borrowed some civilian clothes, later found myself on a bus heading toward Cairo. According to a leave pass I still have it was 25th September 1949 [the day before his 20^th birthday -- SG]. We arrived in Cairo and went to The National Hotel, which was an old fashioned place with marble interiors and plumbing that didn't function very well, but it was a change from living in a tent. The Pyramids were impressive, only spoilt by the antics of the boys who wanted to sell you "genuine souvenirs". Inside the Great Pyramid was impressive especially the huge blocks making up the passageway to the "Kings Chamber". I later stood by the sarcophagus and felt strangely disquieted standing right under all that mass of stone. Later we went into the Cairo Museum, the guards there were not particularly friendly. Overall the trip was enjoyable.

There was a great flap one day; we had to prepare for a large exercise, which was to take place in the Western Desert south of Suez. It was to a combined exercise with mobile artillery, armoured vehicles and the RAF, all utilising a few hundred acres of desert for bombing and shelling practice. There were to be landlines running all over the place, put there previously by another Signal Troop, we were to be just maintenance and support. We arrived two days before the start of the exercise, our truck was so full of equipment that there was no room to sleep there so I rolled myself in a blanket, dug a hole for my hip to rest, and went to sleep under the truck. The next day was uneventful, but at about 2am the next morning I was roused from a surprisingly deep sleep to be ordered to go with several others on a wire laying truck out into the middle of the range where some half tracks had chewed up some of the landlines and get them repaired before 8am - that being the time that the guns would open up. To cut a long story short we suddenly realised that time was ticking on very quickly, so we stopped what we were doing and the driver tried to break all land speed records. Now hanging on in the back of and old "Guy" one-ton truck with a large cable drum and trestle and other heavy items going like a veritable Jehu was to put it mildly, disconcerting. To make matters worse the truck went up a mound and suddenly swung round and back down. What we called the driver I can't remember, he then went round the mound and stopped so that we could disentangle ourselves and nurse our bruises.

We went to "question" the driver more closely when he pointed at the muzzle of a self propelled gun pointing over the mound and then at his watch. While we recovered the gun suddenly opened up and we reluctantly saw the reason for the driver's actions. We had nothing to do for the remainder of the exercise and later collected all our kit and returned to camp.

There used to be a regular run from all the camps in the area to the main stores in a place called Tel-el-Kebier, in Arabic the large mound or hill, it was just known as TEK. One day I was told to draw a Browning 38 pistol and five rounds of ammunition from the armoury and go on escort duty on the aforesaid truck. I was instructed to keep my back to the driving cabin and not sit on the sides as going through some of the crowded villages some of the Egyptians were prone to stick knives through the canvas. We passed through some very crowded places and I received quite a few hostile stares from the populace. I felt very much like John Wayne entering an Indian village except I couldn't draw as quickly as him, being hampered by a lanyard and a holster flap. Anyway the trip was without incident and we collected our stores and had lunch in the mess. TEK was staffed by the RASC and protected by the Royal Irish Fusiliers who did their guard duty racing round in a half-track at night and they claimed to bag at least one thief a night who was left to hang on the perimeter wire until collection the next morning. It is no wonder there were hostiles around the place! We returned to our camp without any incident.

At the end of October 1949 I was suddenly informed that my demobilization group (125) was being advanced, I presume that was in order to fill up a troopship. So we caught a train in Ismailia and went to Port Said. There we had the most remarkable medical I have ever had, it was called an FFI, meaning free from infection. It consisted of stripping down to our Khaki Drill shorts running past two medical orderlies with your arms held high, stopping at a table where a medical office sat, dropping your shorts and turning round, then running out and getting dressed ready for embarkation.

At Sea

Everything was uneventful, being an image of the trip out from Blighty, until we ran into a storm passing by Malta. Swinging in hammocks took the sting out of it - everybody swayed in unison, a few people were sick and in the crowded space this was a trifle unpleasant. I got up and stowed my hammock early and went on deck for some fresh air and as I passed the galley I had a whiff of kippers being cooked for breakfast, I very nearly succumbed there and then to being sick but struggled to the air in time and had a bracing walk around the deck which settled everything down. I think I managed a hearty breakfast after that, more so since the mess deck was comparatively empty. We were with a lot of infantry; I can't remember which regiment. One night there was some shouting and bawling; one of their sergeants was shouting at the lads, I think he must have been drunk or rather stupid, there was a thumping noise and peace and quiet reigned. I never bothered to find out what had happened but you don't mess about too much with troops returning home.

We arrived at Princes Wharf Liverpool early in the morning and commenced disembarking by sections, being one of the last sections to disembark we took a tour round the ship and found in the galley a lot of oranges some of which we stuffed into our battledress blouses for sustenance on the interminable train journey to Aldershot. How I got through customs without comment I don't know, but I did. Several chaps were stopped and searched, one I remember had a diamond ring in his field-dressing pocket, which the customs unearthed and he had to pay a lot of duty, and fined for saying he had nothing to declare.

On the train journey I had time to reflect on life in Egypt. The sight of the ordinary fellahin squatting on the banks of the Sweetwater canal doing their morning ablutions on the canal bank and washing their backsides with canal water was disconcerting at first as was the sight of mothers feeding their babies and afterwards expressing their milk in to a mug to be used in tea later on. Life there seemed very primitive at that time.

Of all the people I served with I remember Bomber Bates for our escapade in Malta, two Northern Irish signalmen Paddy Moreland and Paddy Morgan who became my firm friends in Egypt. There was a troop sergeant in Ismailia called Howard; I don't remember his first name, who had collected a Military Medal in Europe somewhere and for some reason he and I got on exceptionally well. We devised a method of reeling in cable over the front of the truck so that the driver could see what he was doing and we didn't need to continuously keep guiding it by hand. Once during a guard duty he called me into his tent and supplied me with hot tea and against regulations we chatted away for some while. The duty officer walked in saw us talking, ignored me and spoke to Sgt Howard, I sloped off out of the tent and there were no repercussions on me at all - such is the power of a Military Medal in the army.

We arrived at Aldershot and exchanged out kit for old battledresses dyed blue (no demob suits those days), paid up and given travel passes home. At Euston station waiting for the train with several other chaps one of the "ladies of the night" was highly indignant that the Army sent us home dressed like that. These uniforms later had to be returned or paid for: I returned mine!

Returning home was strange especially as my parents were moving from Stoke to Barking in Essex and I had to adjust to many things. One thing didn't change; I was still listed on Z reserve and was required to attend camp in June 1951 and duly went to Penhale camp near Newquay where I met my wife Jean, she had just joined the Territorial Army, later I joined the TA at the same place at Brompton Road London and officially discharged from the Army having served 1 year 330 days with the colours and 1 year 191 days with the reserve. In 1952 Jean and I got married and all service ceased on discharge from the TA. I had stopped being No.21067688 Signalman Gilham A E and was now a fully-fledged civilian.

Carnarvon Western Australia — 1965–1967 : Project Apollo in Australia

2007-07-13T14:48:00.000+01:00

My father's recollections...

It was during the early sixties, after the Cuban missile crisis of late 1962 and the J. F. Kennedy speech about putting a man on the moon that I became interested in the space program. In particular listening to the broadcast of the first Gemini flight with John Glenn, it seemed to be the way to go. At that time I was working on some of the first main frame computers of the time and spending more time going out and repairing them than there were days in the week. In early 1965 I noted an advert in the “Electronics Weekly” from Amalgamated Wireless of Australia asking for people to go to Carnarvon, Western Australia to operate and maintain the electronic equipment to be installed in the ground station there for the Apollo project. I applied and was accepted.

In June 1965 together with several other people I attended a short course arranged by AWA in London’s Tavistock Hotel. This course was really “a get to know Carnarvon” and having obtained the appropriate visas and clearances I was bound for New York (first class) and thence on to Dallas for the inaugural course on the Unified ‘S’ Band system designed for the Apollo project. This course was given by Collins Radio at their factory in Arapaho Road in Richardson County, Dallas, Texas.

There were seven people on that course mainly Australians of English, Irish and Italian ancestry, a “true blue” Aussie and three Brits. At weekends we took the hire cars back to Hertz for cleaning and refuelling and occasionally went with the Hertz people to Love Field to collect the rental cars left by departing visitors. The Texans, being great jokers, once allocated me a huge vehicle to drive back; it was very fast and nearly got me into speed problems. Arriving back at Hertz they were all laughing over it, but at least they had a cold beer waiting for me. One weekend one of the instructors, me and two others went on a “self drive” flight to Fort Worth and surrounding areas. I actually “drove” the plane to Fort Worth under the eagle eye of the instructor. This was an enjoyable experience.

At the end of the course we went on to Washington for a few days to look around the Space Centre at Greenbelt Maryland, and then we split up returning to UK and Australia respectively. After the usual family visits and packing up ready for our new life in Australia we set off from Heathrow in a piston engine Bristol Britannia. This flight stopped at Kuwait airport, which was then just a shack guarded by a man on a camel, then following the coast of India to Ceylon. Back in the air to Singapore we ran into a tropical thunder storm. The plane was tossed about like a straw in the wind and I spotted water condensation coming in from the door, I called the stewardess who gave me great confidence by turning as white as a sheet and calling for the flight engineer. They then stood by the door jamming a cot mattress around it until the plane landed with some violent skidding before finally coming to a halt. We were delayed some six hours whilst the door seals were fixed and thence on to Perth. This last leg of the journey was perfect, we saw the North West coast of Australia very clearly and spotted a large dust cloud moving down the coast road obviously caused by a large vehicle, later we came to know and love the large Gascoigne Trader trucks which were the life line of Carnarvon.

Spending a few days in Perth we purchased a VW Kombi in which we explored Perth and the surrounding countryside, after this we headed north through places like Midland and New Norcia until we got to Geraldton some 300 miles from Perth, I used to joke that Geraldton, situated some 300 miles south of Carnarvon was where you had to go to get your hair cut, the haircut wasn’t bad but it was the tar they dabbed on if they nicked you with the shears that stung.

Heading north from Geraldton to Carnarvon was through a much more desolate landscape made memorable by having a petrol station called the Billabong some 150 miles along the way. There was a very small weather beaten sign a few miles from there indicating that Shark Bay was down the track to the left, if you cared to take it. There was also a sign at the 26th Parallel so that you knew where you were. We spotted the antennas of the tracking station on Brown’s Range from quite a distance away having crossed over the dry river bed of the Wooramel River. We called in at the tracking station to find where we were going to live and then on to 4 West Street which we were going to call home for at least a few weeks. At West Street we had pigeons nesting in the roof but with the aid of a broom I gently eased them over the edge and into free flight, nest and all. Later we were infested with cockroaches which caused us to move to a new house in Babbage Island Road.

The next few months were hectic, an American team had arrived to commission the equipment and we had problems on the angle sensors on the antenna and had to wait until there was very little wind at night whilst the antenna was pointing to set star positions, the angles were then set to correspond to the star positions. If I recall correctly at the end of that period the antenna was .0023 degrees out on the X axis and about .004 degrees on the Y axis, but to all intents and purposes it was “spot on” since any corrections were to be undertaken by Houston during actual missions. The memory of those clear star filled nights was brought to the fore when having a meal outdoors at Ayers Rock some 38 years later.

Christmas Day 1965 arrived and the American team were given invitations to meals and parties, we had two for dinner, Don Park and Bill Ross (whose daddy was a tail gunner on a beer truck during prohibition). We managed a traditional dinner, much to their delight, although the temperature was touching the hundred degree mark.

My job was to operate and maintain the Antenna Positioning Programmer and the Tracking Data Processor with some secondary responsibility for the pseudo random numbering range calculation system and an item of telemetry equipment which I can’t remember the name of but it was the source of some disagreement between myself and the supervising engineer when during a test flight I changed the phase in the input feed to correctly get the information in and processed. I justified this later by drawing innumerable phase diagrams to prove the point. We then had a slack period whilst we waited for an actual mission.

We then moved to Babbage Island Road and new neighbours with whom we are still in contact. My wife got herself a job at the local High School as school secretary which led to her becoming a maths teacher when we returned to UK.

I suddenly found myself giving guided tours of the Tracking Station to visiting dignitaries or tourists, most notably Miss Australia 1966, this exercise gave me a much needed break from doing very little during slack periods.

The American team left a large coffee machine and for some time I ran a coffee club which for two shillings a week provided unlimited coffee for the participants of the scheme until we had a fully operational canteen. When the club closed down the money in the kitty provided for a large barbecue. The wives provided salads and sweet dishes and it proved to be a big success.

Over the next two years, if my recollection is correct, there were 5 Lunar Orbiter missions, one Surveyor mission and several Saturn VIB test flights. The last Gemini flight was in 1966 but we were not used to track this. In those early days there was insufficient tracking data available for us to use and locating the moon’s position was quite a headache so I obtained a Nautical Almanac and used it to locate the moon’s position on the horizon, my positioning was correct but I was always 4 minutes adrift in time. I never really found out why but suspect it was the refraction caused by the Earth’s atmosphere. Locating the moon when it was away from the horizon and overhead was much more difficult to do “on the hoof” as it were, with a present day PC it would have been easy. One of the chaps came up with an ingenious device which simply consisted of two school protractors mounted in an X and Y plane with a peashooter as a sighting tube. This worked extremely well for the few weeks we were without pointing data. I laugh when I think that two protractors and a peashooter were used on a multi million dollar project to enable us to check out the equipment. After this we were called the “Moonrakers” by the rest of the Tracking Station. The device is shown on the console in the picture right.

One of the first missions we undertook was to gather information from a Saturn rocket on the behaviour of rocket fuel when in orbit. The TV pictures we obtained had a surreal quality about them especially when in free fall an ‘ullage’ rocket was fired to send the fuel to the rocket engines.

When we were given our first Lunar Orbiter mission it was quite a thrilling experience made more memorable when at a distance of 25,000 nautical miles the other radars on site lost contact and we announced that “USB was still in contact” and remained so until it passed round the other side of the moon. This more than made up for the Moonraker comments!!

At about this time I was asked to see if a device could be made to check for any discrepancies in the Pseudo Random Number ranging equipment when we had Lunar Missions. I thought about this and came up with some circuitry made of the standard logical circuits used. I never used it myself being on leave when it was used but apparently it functioned OK and did pick out generated errors successfully, which was a good job since I could not remember how I had worked it out!

We were allocated leave, expenses paid to Perth twice a year and a long distance trip once a year so we usually took ourselves off to Perth for a week staying in what was then The Terminal Motor Lodge and watching Star Trek on television, what luxury! There was no television reception in Carnarvon although I recall in Fong’s Chinese emporium there was one which showed mostly interference patterns although I gather occasionally they could actually see a program.

On one holiday we toured the South West as far as Albany and the karri forests, I actually climbed the 220ft “Gloucester Tree” which had a fire lookout post on the top, and how I managed to crawl into the hut on the top I don’t know but the view was worth it. We camped in the Porongorups near to Castle Rock; this photograph taken there still graces our sitting room.

Carnarvon was classed as a desert area since it had less than an inch of rain per year but in 1966 we had a cyclone whose centre passed some 80 miles north and brought with it torrential rain. We battened down the house and waited, when we discovered it was not going to be too traumatic we went out on to the verandah and watched the rain teeming down, I suddenly realised it was pure water cascading down the pipes and filled a kettle and some saucepans with it and made some tea, it tasted delicious. The tap water in Carnarvon was pumped up from the river bed and tasted of “red earth” the rain water by contrast was veritable nectar. When the rain ceased we went, in company with many other townspeople to ten–mile bridge to watch the river flood. The flood water carried a huge amount of debris with it consisting of all manner of trees and sundry small animals. The flood left enough water depth for us to use the river as a swimming area for quite a few weeks, and then it dwindled into a small pool by the pumping station.

In about June 1966 a strange looking antenna began to be built near the Tracking Station, it turned out to be a Cassegrainian Horn device being built by OTC (the Overseas Telephone Company). It was built to utilize the Early Bird satellite which was in place over the Indian Ocean. Little did I know then that my family and I would be asked to participate in a trans-world link up with UK. On 25th November 1966 this took place, from my point of view it was nearly a disaster since the satellite was drifting out of position and whilst the initial people could hold a conversation when it came to my turn I could not hear a thing and I had to keep starting my spiel, fortunately my wife managed to talk away without bothering about a response. However it was recorded and 38 years later I obtained a video copy.

A tropical festival was going to be held in the town and some of the USB personnel built a flying saucer which was a success winning a cup, the other station personnel built a Saturn VIB rocket which I thought was very good. The festival made a change from the daily routine.

We used to be picked up by mini bus and taken to the Tracking Station: one day I looked at the bus and it appeared to be weighted down on one side. Our lady driver (known as the local Stirling Moss) asked us to sit on the other side to balance out the weight of a huge man who was joining the tracking station staff, in later conversations with him I discovered he was the sub chief of a local Aborigine tribe. After a few weeks he disappeared and I found out later he was in jail in Geraldton having taken part in the ritual tribal killing of a young girl.

One of the local policemen came from Surrey and he was a big man, he had red hair which he said was strawberry blonde (and who was ever going to say he was wrong). At that time he used to go on horseback inland to visit the sheep stations and local tribes. I asked him if he could get me a genuine boomerang on his travels and I gave him, I think A$10 to get me one. I still have that boomerang which he assured me was carved especially for me by one of the tribal elders he contacted.

One other notable occurrence at this time was the changing over of the currency from Australian Pounds to Dollars. The new system was based on the 10 shilling as the base unit (Dollar), this to me was a sensible decision and took place on 14th February 1966.

At last a real mission, one of the Lunar Orbiters which we tracked from near launch to the Moon and for two weeks after. The equipment worked so well that a card school flourished, we had only one breakdown in the relaying of information to Houston and this was cured within twenty minutes. I think it was during the Surveyor 3 launch there was a sudden change of plan and the rocket instead of making a first pass over Carnarvon was sent directly into orbit over Bermuda, a slightly worried station director called me in to discuss when we could hope to acquire it, fortunately I had worked out the position on the horizon from Bermuda's geographical location and assured him it would in about 10–15 minutes. This turned out to be a very good estimate and we acquired to rocket in that time.

On the 27th January 1967 we were preparing for a real network simulation when we had the news that the capsule had caught fire and the astronauts had perished. I think we were all stunned by this event and the Apollo program was halted for an indefinite time. At that time it had become evident that both my sons needed to be in a good educational establishment, so I prepared myself and family to return to UK. In the event this turned out to be a good decision since both boys obtained degrees in Mathematics from Emmanuel College Cambridge, the elder boy also obtaining a Masters degree in Astrophysics.

In early November 1967 we made our last trip to Perth, this was not without incident as when we had a “comfort stop” we were confronted with two 6 foot kangaroos. We sold the car to our old bank manager who was now in Perth. There was another bank employee from Carnarvon in Perth who advised us on our money transactions to our advantage — Harold Wilson's famous “Pound in your pocket” speech happened just before we bought Sterling!

We shipped home on the Canberra, visiting South Africa and the Canary Islands on the way; it was a fitting end to what was really a unique experience.

Carnarvon Tracking station

The Honourable Allen Fairhall, M.P., Minister of State for Supply, opened this station on 25^th June 1964 on behalf of the Government of the Commonwealth of Australia and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration of the United States of America.

This fountain was presented to the station by Amalgamated Wireless (Australasia) Limited to commemorate the occasion.

Auxiliary Languages

2007-06-28T00:14:00.001+01:00

Auxiliary languages, the invented "universal languages" have been a long-standing fascination of mine, and was re-awoken during an earlier tidying up of my web presence, some years back.

Most of the technical terms will be explained by a quick visit to Google.

Esperanto

Unfortunately, this is the most popular invented language, the one that most people will have heard of, and the only one with easily available treeware documentation, but it has problems. The first is the one that really stopped it for me, back in the '70s and '80s, when all I had was a manual typewriter, with no accented characters…

The very alphabet

The Esperanto alphabet is:

A E I O U; B C Ĉ (or Ĉ) D F G Ĝ (or Ĝ) H Ĥ (or Ĥ) J Ĵ (or Ĵ) K L M N P R S Ŝ (or Ŝ) T Ŭ (or Ŭ) V Z

Maybe you didn't see all those letters - C^, G^, H^, J^, S^ and U-inverted^ - as they don't live in the ASCII, or even the Latin-1 range of common characters. In the full Unicode standard, they are in the next block, the Latin Extended-A set, and in the character justifications, while U-inverted^ is shared with Latin, the rest are Esperanto-only.

For a language that was happy to throw away X in favour of 'ks', the addition of these accented characters seems strange. If you have only ASCII, I'd prefer the following reform.

The letters involved are ones with multiple sounds - C is a 'ts' and C^ a 'ch'; G as in 'gay' and G^ as in 'gem', H^ as the 'ch' in 'loch', J is as the 'y' in 'young' (or the Germanic 'J' in 'Jung'), but J^ is a 'zh', S as in 'gas', but S^ as 'sh' in 'ship', while U-breve is as W.

Why not one of the following?

C->S (merge the 's' and 'ts'), C^->C, G->G, G^->J, J->Y, H^->Q,S^->X,U-breve->W, J^->* if you're stuck with ASCII, or

C->ç (soft C as in French garçon), C^->C, G->G, G^->J, J->Y, H^->Q,S^->X,U-breve->W, J^->Ð using Latin-1.

The assumptions

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is that language constrains the thoughts we can have, as without words, we cannot articulate a thought. Esperanto shows the reverse is true. The language was first published in 1887, and shows some of the values of the time - the word for 'father' is the obvious patro, but the word for 'mother' is patrino, using a feminine modifier. You can't even say "single parent" in the language as the word parent only formally exists in the plural, gepatroj, ('ge-' meaning "both sexes together") from which one has to hack off the pluralizing -j to coin a clumsy singular.

Similar value-laden decisions in the vocabulary have us use maldekstra, rather than something based off gauche or sinister, for left. But south is sudo, rather than "malnordo"!

The long words

In natural languages, common words are short words. Esperanto's systematization leads to long words for simple common concepts. For example rust (iron oxide) is rusto; iron rusts (fero rustig^is), and becomes rusted (rustig^inta). In this case, there is the shorter rusta (rusty), but that offers a slightly different shade of meaning in English.

Admittedly, English does have an unusually broad vocabulary with different shades of meaning, having assembled fragments of a number of other languages, something not common to other languages, so this may be an idiosyncrasy.

Interlingue

I discovered this one when searching for the ISO-639 language code for Latin (la) and Classical Greek (there isn't one, but there is an ISO-639-2 standard 3-letter code (grc), for Greek from before the fall of Byzantium). But there are first-class, 2-letter codes for Esperanto (eo), Volapük (vo), Interlingua (ia), and Interlingue (ie). I'd been aware of the first three, but it took Google to unearth the last.

It's a real minority choice among auxiliary languages, being kept alive by the ability of the 'net to bring together scattered individuals of like mind. It starts with the same sort of brief - gather together common European Romance word roots and a systematic grammar, but is much more accessible.

It uses just the 26 ASCII letters. There are some apparently complex rules for pronunciation, such as for whether 'C' is soft or hard, or whether 'T' is sibilant (like in caution) - but they are just the ones we use everyday in English.It is quite happy to use doubled letters, usually with H, - 'ch' as in 'church', silent h after g (ghetto) or k (khedive) or r (rheumatisme), 'sh' (or occaionally 'sch') as in 'ship', 'th','ph' for Greek derived words that had θ, φ - but 'ss' for a hard S, 'zz' for a 'ts' as in plazza.

I like its use of shorter words - for example, its use of simple and more obviously European e,o for and,or, as opposed to Esperanto's kaj,aŭ (that's u-breve); and it uses forms that are much more natural for an English speaker.

This remains my current favourite.

Esperanto to Interlingue dictionary

Interlingue to Esperanto dictionary

Ceqli

This is the c.2003 state of the language. More at its now somewhat spammed Yahoo! group.

Pronounced Ching-lee, a Loglan(lojban) derived language with a Mandarin influenced grammar, and a global reach in populating its vocabulary, being constrained to have fundamental words with alternating vowels and consonants. Being a language of the 1990s, it has a neutral form, pam, for parent, with father, mother, being pamzo, pamxi by adding systematic elements meaning man, woman.

It does use some "funny pronunciations" - C is 'ch', Q is 'ng', X is 'sh' (that being only half-funny, being akin to the familiar use in the Portuguese place name, Xeres, that gives us the English 'sherry'), so where I've used it as a quasi-gibberish language in my SF, elsewhere on this site, I've written it in a phonetic style.

Forgotten Cults

2007-06-27T23:43:00.000+01:00

One project that I considered was to use the Forgotten Realms maps for an alternative far future Glorantha, where Orlanth and the Red Moon fought to a standstill, and Jar-Eel ended up in a role akin to the Lady, out of Glen Cook's Black Company books. The campaign would be set long ages after the fall of the Red Dominion. The AD&D2 Complete Priests' Handbook is assumed. The inspiration was sparked when a player chose a priest of Strength with the Barbarian kit, and it looked a lot like a Storm Bull cultist…

Commentary

Mother Night is probably not an attractive choice for players; Lady Starbow will gather some women warriors; the Secret Moon is not really a player character option, given its secrecy and restrictions; the Blood Moon is a relict cult, found only in a few out-of-the-way places and usually despised. The Red Magic secrets it teaches are one of the prized posessions of the Red Wizards in their mountain lands, rumour of which makes them hated and feared beyond what their own efforts can achieve. Mistress Moon is a semi-fighting and partly mystic priesthood, suitable for player characters.

Mother Night

One of the nameless spirits of the Dark under the Earth, Mother Night first became noted when Thunder Father struck down Emperor Sun from his throne at Skytop. As the dying, bleeding Sun fell down the sky into the underworld, its inhabitants fled the sudden light. Mother Night led those who ascended into the sky, spreading her protecting cloak of darkness over the land, as she still does to this day.

She has only a small following, as she is content to spread her benefits to all, each night. Her importance is more mythological and practical than spiritual.

Alignment: True Neutral. Priests and worshippers may have any alignment.

Minimum Ability Scores: Wis 9

Races allowed: Any, though most common are creatures of the underdark.

Proficiencies: Recommended — Religion, Blind-fighting (no extra out-of-class cost).

Duties: Protecting those who are distressed by the raw light of the Sun.

Weapons and armour: Chain, shield, any club or similar blunt weapon.

Other Limitations: Function at -1 level in natural light, and half level (drop fractions) when in direct sunlight.

Spheres: major — All, Sun(reversed), Protection, Wards, elemental fire (reversed); minor — Healing, Necromantic.

The reversed form of Summon Fire Elemental summons an elemtal of darkness, with similar stats to a Fire elemental, whose attack has the effect of a Cause Fear along with regular damage.

Followers and strongholds: As a minor deity, her priests only have those followings they can personally attract.

Powers: Darksense (sonar based sense, including “acoustic daylight”, rather like dolphins); Hide in shadow 50%+5% per level, modified by race, armour and Dexterity as thieves; Carpe Noctem: Once per level per night, the priest may cause a 10' radius sphere of night's darkness around him or herself to become fixed, and endure through the coming day. If the priest has cast any spells during the day, one of the priest's choice is renewed at sunset.

Symbols: A black disk.

Lady Starbow

As Emperor Sun fell dying into the underworld, splashes of his burning blood fell onto the sky. When even Lord Gloaming, the least and last of the sons and retinue of the Emperor, had followed his master beneath the Earth, the spiritual nature of these bloodstains quickened them to life. Nurturing these last remnants of light came a hitherto nameless and despised sister of Lord Gloaming (the Sun having considered the only feminine spirits of worth to be the fertile Earth, and then worthy only for their fertility).

Defending Heaven and Earth against the encroaching Night, she took up the great Sky bow her father had let fall, defending each remaining spark until the Sun was finally freed from Hell.

Alignment: Neutral Good. Priests and worshippers may have any good alignment.

Minimum Ability Scores: Wis 12, Dex 12, Cha 12

Races allowed: Human, elf(except drow), half-elf; only women may advance beyond 4th level, and only those who have quested for and won a Unicorn mount beyond 8th.

Proficiencies: Required: Riding(land-based) Recommended - Religion, Blind-fighting, Tracking. Crossover: Priest, warrior.

Duties: Protecting the weak and oppressed, especially women.

Weapons and armour: Chain, shield, spear, lance, javelin, shortbow, short sword.

Other Limitations: Often despised by patriarchal Sun worshippers (her worship being most common in areas that revere

her father and brothers).

Spheres: major — All, Sun, Protection, Combat, Elemental Fire; minor — Healing, Necromantic.

Special spell: Shooting Star: as the mage spell Flame arrow, but the spell is cast on the weilder's bow, which then transfers the spell's effect onto each arrow fired and lasts until the maximum number of arrows have been affected, or one hour has elapsed. Detect Silver and Gold (1^st level)

Followers and strongholds: As a minor deity, her priests only have those followings they can personally attract.

Powers: Infravison 60' (120' for elves and half-elves); May track as a ranger if there are stars visible in the sky if she has the Tracking proficiency. At 4th level, if virgin, may quest for a Unicorn mount (stats as for a Paladin's war horse). May choose one melee and one missile weapon to have Warrior THAC0.

Symbols: A silver bow; a labrys (double bitted axe) — note that this is a weapon that the Starbow priests may not actually use in combat.

The Secret Moon

Only initiates of her mysteries know any but the barest rumours of her past and current actions. She was the barely visible moon only glimpsed in the radiance of the Unfallen Sun, and who fled beyond the sky at his fall.

Alignment: True Neutral. Priests and worshippers may have any alignment, but usually tend to Lawful Evil.

Minimum Ability Scores: Wis 13, Cha 13, Dex 15

Races allowed: Any, though usually from outcast populations.

Proficiencies: As the Assassin kit from the Complete Thief's Handbook, plus Recommended — Religion, Blind-fighting (no extra out-of-class cost). Crossover: Priest, Thief.

Duties: Furthering the cryptic purposes of the Secret Moon; ensuring that things best kept secret remain so.

Weapons and armour: As thief; weapons of quiet death like the stiletto or the garotte are preferred.

Other Limitations: Must obey their superiors without question. All aspects of the Assassin kit.

Spheres: major — All, Summoning, Divination, minor — Healing (both normal and reversed), Necromantic (reversed), Sun (reversed).

Special spells: Glow: A variant on Chant. The priest glows with am eerie blue light, which gives him and all his associates +1 on all their defensive rolls and -1 to be hit. Lasts 6 rounds, plus 1 per level of caster. Summon Secret Moon Elemental: As Summon Fire elemental. The elemental is invisible.

Followers and strongholds: As a minor deity, her priests only have those followings they can personally attract.

Powers: Gain thief skills as a thief of the same level and the benefits of the Assassin kit.

Symbols: A wavy-bladed dagger.

The Blood Moon

After the first War in Heaven, and the return of the Sun from the Long Night, there was at first no moon. How the Moon later arose is not known. She may have been the Secret Moon returned, or a once-mortal sorceress who attempted to fuse Solar might with the feminine principle, or even a synthetic construct built through arcane engineering as an anti-Sun either by creatures of Darkness or as a weapon against them. Whatever her origin, the presence of a new power enthroned in the sky led to a Second War in Heaven, culminating in a battle between the Moon and the Thunder Father from which both took sore wounds, and in which the world was shaken and remade.

The worship of the Blood Moon is a weakened survior into historic time of the days before that final war; and is without doubt a debased form of the original worship

Alignment: None. Worshippers may have any alignment (but see below). The worship of the Blood Moon is often appealing to mages of an appropriate mindset.

Minimum Ability Scores: Wis 12 Int 13 Cha 15

Races allowed: Any.

Proficiencies: Required — Spellcraft, Astronomy, Recommended - Religion, Reading/Writing, Ancient Languages, Ancient History, Astrology. Crossover: Priest, Wizard

Duties: Spreading the liberating and enlightening message of the Blood Moon, if desired.

Weapons and armour: Chain, shield, Sickle, Scimitar, Shortbow, Scythe, Rhompia (crescent bladed axe).

Other Limitations: Receive only D6s for hit points; subject to the equivalent of Ravenloft Power Checks, and hence may often sport some malformation (power checks may occur for any essentially selfish act): with freedom, such as the liberation from alignment, there comes a corresponding responsibility, and those who succumb to temptation wear their failures externally. The Blood Moon is also regarded as a demonic figure from myth, so her followers also labour under that burden of prejudice, especially in areas that were once conquered by, or under threat of conquest by her Dominion.

Casting of priestly spells is affected by the phase of the moon as follows:

Dark of the Moon — 1st and 2nd only
Crescent Moon — up to 4th
Gibbous Moon — up to 6th
Full Moon — any

This does not affect casting of wizard spells for split or dual class Wizard/Priests.

Spheres: major — All, Law, Chaos; minor Sun, Charm

Special spells: Moonbeam (Sun 5th), Summon Moon Elemental: As Summon Fire Elemental. The Moon elemental attacks for only half the damage of a Fire elemental, but those attacked must save vs Death Magic or make a Madness check.

Followers and strongholds: As a minor deity, her priests only have those followings they can personally attract.

Powers: Worshippers may follow any alignment, but its value is hidden. Alignment detecting spells yield only "Neutral"; and take no damage or other adverse effects from magic items based on their alignment; and gain benefits as the better of their own alignment and Neutral. When casting any spell, may modify it with metamagic spells (as per Tome of Magic) as follows:

Dark of the Moon — none
Crescent Moon — level totals equal half spell's
Gibbous moon — level totals equal to the spell's
Full Moon — level totals equal to spell's + 2

without memorising the metamagic spells or using extra spell slots. If the priest is also a wizard, these benefits transfer to casting wizard spells as well. Spells so affected glow bright red, even if normally not visible.

Symbols: A half-red, half-black disk.

Mistress Moon

After the War in Heaven between Thunder Father and the Blood Moon, when calm at last returned to Earth and Sky alike, and the clouds that had long blocked sight of Sun, Moon and Stars alike parted, a white moon was revealed, rolling along the same path as the Sun. Perhaps this was the conquering Blood Moon washed clean by the storms, but broken like the Sun before her to wheel between Heaven and Underworld.

Worshippers of Mistress Moon align themselves according to their age into the appropriate aspect — maiden, matron or crone.

Alignment: True Neutral. Priests may have any part-neutral alignment. There is no restriction on worshippers.

Minimum Ability Scores: Wis 10, Cha 12

Races allowed: Any surface dwelling; only women are permitted into the priesthood; few men even join the worshippers.

Proficiencies: Required Astronomy; Recommended Religion, Navigation, Astrology, Spellcraft, Reading/Writing.

Duties: Guidance, Marriage, support of women in the transitions of their life.

Weapons and armour: Chain, shield, Sickle, Scimitar, Shortbow, Scythe, Rhompia (crescent bladed axe).

Other Limitations: The secretive and nocturnal nature of their worship can cause a negative reaction from non-worshippers.

Spheres: major — All, Charm, Divination, Summoning, Sun; minor - Elemental, Healing (and Necromantic if you use the unrevised spell spheres).

Followers and strongholds: As a minor deity, her priests only have those followings they can personally attract.

Powers: A priestess of the moon as maiden has Charm/Fascination; a priestess of the moon as matron has Soothing Word; a priestess of the moon as crone has Turn Undead. Saves against any of their magical effects are at -1 during the appropriate phase of the moon.

At 5th Level, all gain Inspire Fear (as per the CPHB).

Symbols: A silver disk.

Mountain Daughter

The martial daughter of Mother Earth, the patron of warrior women, and especially those who fight to defend, or, damage done, to avenge.

Alignment: Chaotic good.

Minimum Ability Scores: Wis 10, Str 12 (gain +5% xp if both are 16+)

Races allowed: Human, elven or half-elven women.

Proficiencies: Required Tracking (as Ranger); Recommended Religion, Reading/Writing, Riding, Healing. Crossover Priest, General and Warrior

Duties: Defending, especially other women; avenging harm done to them.

Weapons and armour: Any armour and shield, any axe or axe-like pole arm. May specialise in one chosen weapon.

Other Limitations: Joining this priesthood separates a woman from her normal society. In particular, she may not marry

Spheres: major — All, Healing, Protection, Elemental Earth; minor - Necromantic, Guardian.

Followers and strongholds: TBD.

Powers: Bladethirst, level times daily, castable on her own axe. Incite berserker rage in self or other members of the cult.

Symbols: A bloody axe.

Sir Sword

Once a brother of the Thunder Father, now the wielder of the archetypal sword, and that sword itself, that first brought death to the world.

Alignment: Lawful Neutral.

Minimum Ability Scores: Wis 9, Str 13

Races allowed: Any.

Proficiencies: As CPHB war god, including crossovers

Duties: Excelling in martial prowess, separating the living and the dead (including laying to rest those who should be dead, but are not - the undead).

Weapons and armour: Any armour and shield, any sword. May specialise in all swords.

Other Limitations: May not be raised or resurrected or even turned into undead (though the physical remains of the priest may be animated as a skeleton or zombie). Any transition to undeath e.g. by level draining by high level undead, results in the character's death rather than transformation into undead.

Spheres: major — All, Combat, Necromantic (but may not raise the dead); minor Healing, Protection.

Followers and strongholds: TBD.

Powers: Turn Undead; Sense Assassin ( WIS based proficiency ); CON bonus as poison and such as a dwarf (doubled if you are one).

Symbols: A sword.

Volcano Brother

The youngest brother of the Sun, who fell into the Earth, not into the Underworld. As the CPHB Fire god with the following changes:

Proficiencies: add bonus one forge-related and one farming-related

Duties: Aiding and being an example to the workers on the land.

Spheres: major — All, Healing, Elemental Fire; minor — Healing, Necromantic, Protection.

Symbols: A burning spear.

Thunder Father

The son of Sky and Earth, who fell in the Gods War long ago. This is how his priests of that age might have appeared.

Alignment: Neutral good.

Minimum Ability Scores: Wis 10, Con 12

Races allowed: Air-breathing males.

Proficiencies: As CPHB Sky/Weather god

Duties: What a man's gotta do; to be an exemplar of the role of man as father, provider, protector, and, as needs be, warrior.

Weapons and armour: As the CPHB ruling god.

Spheres: major — All, Weather, Elemental Air; minor — Healing, Combat.

Special spells: Add the following mage spells at their original level — Fly, Dimension Door, Teleport, plus Conjure Air Elemental (as Conjure Fire Elemental).

Powers: Incite berserker rage and Inspire Fear as CPHB.

Symbols: A thundercloud.

Desert Storm

A brother of the Thunder Father, patron of berserk warriors who strive against unnatural monsters. As the CPHB god of Strength, with the following changes

Alignment: Chaotic (urrr... Disorderly) neutral.

Duties: Destroying unnatural monsters.

Special spells: Replace Flamestrike with Conjure Air Elemental.

Symbol: A bull's head.

Mothers of the Moon

The wizard-priests who created, empowered or restored the entity whose remnant is now the Blood Moon were at one time worshipped as demigods in their own right, and in their collective role as those who brought the moon into being, as a fully powered god-equivalent. This is how their worshippers might have appeared

Alignment: Neutral.

Minimum Ability Scores: Wis 10

Races allowed: Any.

Proficiencies: As CPHB god of Everything

Duties: Spread the word. Bring civilsation to the barbarian and savage.

Weapons and armour: Any armour and shield, scimitar, sickle and scythe. May specialise in scimitar.

Spheres: major — All, Charm, Necromantic, Sun; minor — Healing, Combat.

Followers and strongholds: TDB.

Other Limitations: Casting of priestly spells is affected by the phase of the moon as follows:

Dark of the Moon — 1st and 2nd only
Crescent Moon — up to 4th
Gibbous Moon — up to 6th
Full Moon — any

This does not affect casting of wizard spells for split or dual class Wizard/Priests.

Special spells: Summon Moon Elemental: As Summon Fire Elemental. The Moon elemental attacks for only half the damage of a Fire elemental, but those attacked must save vs Death Magic or make a Madness check.

Powers: Turn Undead.

Symbols: A silver moon.

Emperor Sun

The first ruler of the cosmos.

Alignment: Lawful (= bureaucratic) good.

Minimum Ability Scores: Wis 12, Int 12

Races allowed: Men whose fathers were priests of Emperor Sun.

Proficiencies: Required Healing; Recommended Religion, Reading/Writing, Riding (horse), Play Harp. Crossovers as CPHB Sun god.

Duties: Governing. Being an example of austere virtue

Weapons and armour: As CPHB Sun god

Spheres: major — All, Divination, Healing, Necromantic, Sun; minor — Charm, Elemental Fire, Plant, Protection.

Special spells: Imbue with Spell ability — despite only having minor access to the Charm sphere.

Followers and strongholds: TDB.

Powers: Turn Undead, Soothing Word, Inspire Fear.

Symbols: A golden sunburst.

A&E Ig-theme capsule essays

2007-06-26T20:36:00.001+01:00

The posts for today are my responses to the optional theme-for-the-issue posed in Alarums & Excursions

The difference between Old and New campaigns

2007-06-26T20:35:00.001+01:00

How old is old? While 1960s rock stars may have talked the talk, my experience is of campaigns that actually did die before they got old. Usually I was introducing new campaigns (often also implying new systems) to old players.

The only longish running campaign with some later introduction of players was the Champions game from the mid '80s. There, the genre conventions were strong enough, assuming the players understood them, that they could hit the ground running. In the case of the genre-unaware player cited above coming in later, I guess that the campaign in mid-flow had enough momentum to ride through that sort of local difficulty, whereas a newly starting one, with less player investment all round, might have foundered in favour of something more attuned to the new consensus.

Working around Combat Patterns (he hits, I parry)

2007-06-26T20:34:00.001+01:00

I didn't play Ars Magica for long enough for the variant “He hits, I soak” to become clichéd, though my converted high-CON ex-AD&D2 Uruk Hai was very good at that version of the old standard. And it depends what you mean by a pattern — if you take the software engineering meaning, that really means a stereotype, in the same sense that that word used to have in printing, of a ready made format Opening gambits are a source of behaviours that often get thus stereotyped — “Here come the flying feet of Kung Fu!” or “We Starsky & Hutch the door.“ — a reference from when they were on the TV (as opposed to the 2004 movie), not that long before the very early D&Ding days — the fighter knocks down the door while a mage stands ready to Magic Missile what may be revealed.

But I guess the real intent of the topic was on the behaviour that emerges when you actually invoke the game mechanics. At this point the fact that each entity in its turn — and that encompasses even the different turn rates for different entities that is part of the Hero system — is given an action that may be used to attack, and that usually meets some implicit resistance from the target. The underlying game mechanics will always drive you to some variant of the the “I attack, he defends” iteration; even in Over the Edge and Feng Shui, no matter what their respective authors would like to have you believe.

All that those games attempt to do is hide this inconvenient fact under layers of fluff. Such spurious detail has for me the effect of reducing both my immersion (as a distraction) and also the credibility of the action — I would rather hide detail I'm no expert in under the abstraction of the mechanics. Otherwise you get to the ludicrous things like in the Theatrix thread on r.g.f.a about 8 years back where what the acting player described in the belief that it is a strong move was resolved by the adjudicator taking the point of view that it was a weak one, or descriptions of a combat in terms of fencing stances (recalling a somewhat more recent thread on u.g.r or perhaps r.g.f.m). Not only am I not au fait with the technical terms, but I do not find it credible that such technically precise stances would be applicable to wilder melee — especially in the example I recall of a combat with a broo. This style of play also seems distressingly full of examples in which a player asserts what his opponent is doing as much as his own character.

No, either you go to systems that plot moves at the sub-100ms increment with Laban Notation, using complex transition rules to simulate physical limitations on how far you can move, and that you can't move one arm though another, and computing whether you'll fall over given that current stance, and how to recover, and then you have to learn how to fight properly, for real, to use it — something I contemplated over 25 years ago, and then drew well back from — or you're stuck with the abstracted action/re-action iteration.

What do you use for genre sources

2007-06-26T20:33:00.002+01:00

The one time I found I really needed to get players into the groove for anything I ran was Shadowrun when few if any of the players had read anything even vaguely cyberpunk-ish. To remedy that, I handed around the first accompanying volume of fiction, the Into the Shadows braided anthology, for them to read in advance of the character generation session. In other cases, my players seem to have already had some idea of the genre or at least conventions typical of these games absorbed by osmosis from the surrounding culture. The main exception I recall was a player who just wasn't into superheroes who joined in one session of Champions. I don't think a reading assignment would have helped in the short time available.

The time I really went looking for genre material (as opposed to things like historical references for period context before finally not getting around to joining the Saxum Caribetum saga) was when running Vampire — and there it was easy enough to find source material in the usual bookshops — which I then plundered for NPCs.

Kill or stun — which to do

2007-06-26T20:33:00.001+01:00

One reason to kill is when you cannot deal with the opponent in any other fashion. The last game I actually played had just about come to this point - the mind warping powers of the elves out of paratime were such that they couldn't be kept prisoner by mere humans for any length of time. So, for our own security, the only good pointy was a dead one.

Saintly PCs — what makes them, what game mechanics might they use, and

2007-06-26T20:31:00.002+01:00

I think we have to distinguish between pious characters and those who are merely holier-than-thou; and also have some ground rules on what the piety is being measured against to do this topic justice. How would a character that's not following something close to one of the Faiths of the Book be judged as saintly?

It is true that many characters that say “pious” or “holy” on the character sheet actually turn out aligned simply Lawful/Obnoxious — the one I remember from local play being an LG dwarf cleric by the name of Aman Naug who came over as very austere and puritanical, and noted as to be one of the first against the wall when the CG revolution came. Most interestingly, when dusted off post AD&D2, as a priest of Aurochs, lord of berserk strength (the CPHB Strength specialty priest type), he became the rather lighter-hearted Noggin the kung-fu barbarian dwarf in very short order. And he was doing a lot of righteous smiting as befitted his faith. Was he saintly?

In a more familiar style, I remember affectionately the write-ups from long, long ago of the Tale of Two Clerics, two pious characters and their unfortunate companion, the rather more self-interested Frank (and all his relatives — replacements — of the same name). They sounded saintly, and certainly seemed to work.

Had I actually completed character generation for Saxum, my character there would have been inspired by Roger Bacon, as portrayed in Blish's Doctor Mirabilis, and would have had a definite background from the Church, even if a mildly heterodox one, from time spent in the University at Paris, a pious inquirer into the majesty of Creation. As it turned out, I don't think he would have fitted the rest of the group, so that's saintly character that wouldn't have worked, but in that case only due to the particular context in which he would have been set.

Why are some players reluctant to GM

2007-06-26T20:31:00.001+01:00

I can't say for sure about the habitual player-only type, but I might share some of the problems. For me, my reluctance to resume after burn-out was, and remains, centred about the problem of excessive GM authority in anything adjudicated. It's about not being able to sustain the necessary illusion of player free will from my PoV, while keeping the amount of GM prep needed to a manageable level. For a fully live quasi-simulation, a world that “runs itself”, in which the players can really do what they want, the workload is enormous (at least compared with the amount of time and energy I feel I can devote to it these days). That's before one faces the possibility that every player takes off on a separate agenda (as helped crash my V:tM chronicle). For anything constrained, I have to guide the players, and this feels wrong.

On top of that, choosing a system, choosing how to customise it, can all lead to analysis paralysis even before getting to the crunch point of selecting a setting, and trying to set it in motion. And then you have to worry about whether your players will be happy to consume what it is you have to offer, whether they will propose characters that you can handle, and that won't do violence to what you wanted to run.

It was all so much simpler when a satisfying evening's gaming could be put together by selecting opponents for two fight scenes and a skeleton of narration to join them up. Things started to go downhill when gaming evenings had to stop at half ten rather than one a.m., and violence had to be suppressed after the 9 o'clock watershed and/or speeded up by abstraction, and other things had to be introduced to fill the space. Nearly as good are the few very best pre-packaged adventures where the GM can just play the hand he's been given without needing to rewrite it to eliminate crass bits, and allow the time for the game system to produce results, rather than have to also make them up.

Rules that players disagree with

2007-06-26T20:30:00.001+01:00

Long, long ago, the real biggie was the wizards and swords one. We cured that one when one time the mages and thieves, the sole survivors of a mêlée, started to squabble over the division of the loot, drew swords and axes, and slaughtered each other tout de suite. Then they saw the wisdom of the arbitrary ruling. By the early 90's, it had even become one of the bits of antique charm of the *D&D rules (another thing to dislike about 3e) that made it attractive to pick up AD&D2 and play that rather than RQ.

And nobody liked the fire-and-forget magic system, so we replaced it almost from the get-go.

I can't remember any other focussed little rules that were contentious, though there must have been many. More often it was whole-system things not amenable to single-point changes (bricks über alles in Champions, the system sagging by about 8-9th level in *D&D, the unreasonable effectiveness of mages when played with a little thought in Shadowrun). The nearest to a point problem was with Pendragon (which we used in a Glorantha setting), where no-one liked the number of shots a slinger could get off on an opposing foot-soldier charging at him, a combination of range, rate of fire and movement rules conspiring together, but that was washed way by the other problems with that particular campaign.

Have you tried hitting PCs with a baby

2007-06-26T20:29:00.001+01:00

One time, this was almost literal - a small child was used as a missile by a supervillain (Malice, of the Bad Girls) in a Champions game. It's not a very effective thing to do, as they are limited in the damage they can inflict by their low BOD and zero DEF. Paving slabs are more effective.

As for the idea of inflicting parenthood, even adoptive or something like, and transient, it was never explored while I was involved. Heck, we didn't even have any “spunky kid” PCs (thank goodness, worse than kender…) The only episode I can recall in which children actually appeared was an almost off-screen incident in the Glorantha/RQ game where the PCs had returned to their home steading, and my Babeester Gor axe-murderess was co-opted by the Voria nursemaid as an assistant. This being a cult obligation, she grimaced, went along, and into an off-screen interlude.

Subsequently in the same GM's Saxum Caribetum saga, I gather the mages get involved in orgies, sparked off by faerie wine, which have resulted in offspring as well as points of vis, but I get the impression that the grogs are left to deal with the sprogs. There may be more sordid details on the campaign web page than I wot of.

Creating a home base for PCs

2007-06-26T20:28:00.002+01:00

In many cases, PCs were peripatetic, where not simply garaged somewhere abstract between weekly dungeon delves, so the issue rarely arose. In the earliest days, some characters had (off-screen) castles - something spend six figure fortunes on. My MU, Ororo, was planning to create a demi-plane, a cottage in an eternally summer garden in a small valley magically hidden in the middle of a howling snowy waste, the way in being through a gate in the wastes, but the campaign folded before she could organise the magical wherewithal. It would have had home comforts, defence in depth, and, most importantly, significant swank value.

The one home base that had significant time invested in — both design and play - was Doc Savage's lab in the London Watch Champions campaign, but despite the fact that I did the job of putting it into a CAD system, the passage of the years has eroded memory of the design process. In that game I did have a PC with a defined pied à terre; Pushover had a flat [never detailed] in the block containing the Women's Centre where she worked, but having been developed as a character, decided that the macho super-hero thing wasn't for her and faded out of play. [I'm getting my revenge now — an alternate version of her is co-starring in my latest fiction, and she's going to have to deal with being faced with the problem of saving the world this time.]

There was a home base in the last AD&D2 game, a castle, but as that was the holding of the NPC Baron for whom the PCs worked as elite forces, it was a given, rather than being chosen. In the paratime/60's spy game, we were also eventually given a base, an alternative where a paratime capable civilisation had been wiped out. The most involved base-like stories with off-beat design criteria would have come from the local Ars Magica saga ( Saxum Caribetum ), where founding the covenant took most of the first realtime year's play, and it took a resolving a lot of squabbling about the library before construction even began.

What tips can you give about starting a gaming group

2007-06-26T20:28:00.001+01:00

Thinking about it I guess I was always lucky, I always joined existing groups, already accumulated by someone I knew from university, so it was more a case of finding a group than founding it.

What do the players want the PCs to accomplish

2007-06-26T20:27:00.001+01:00

I don't really recall having much in the way of grand PC-level goals. This was one of the difficult things about trying character play. The satisfactory games tended to be the ones in which what was to be accomplished was limited and tactical — goals like “Clear out the deserted Wiri colony on 3rd level”. Such goals, of course, arose on a player level, answering the question “what do we want to do tonight?”. The episodic nature of the games — dungeoneering, superheroics — lent itself to such tactical play. Adding continuity did tend to replace the answer of “whatever we feel like” with “whatever we were lumbered with as a leftover from last week, again”. This, in retrospect, may not be an entirely unalloyed plus.

Pulling heartstrings — friends and family as levers

2007-06-26T20:26:00.001+01:00

I never did much with this. On the family side, starting RPGing at college when leaving home was a big step just being taken, characters had automatically done much the same thing. For those of us who stayed close to University, and especially those who have also refrained from breeding, the same lifestyle decisions seem natural. The only vestiges of such things were the DNPCs taken for a few odd points, when other disads have been mined out.

But then much F/SF writing has the same conventions.

Restarting old games — whether to and how

2007-06-26T20:25:00.001+01:00

That's restarting as in a car, though one could have written revive, to avoid the sense of reinitialise.

Ignoring essentially stillborn games, in my experience games falter most often for one of two reasons. The most prevalent is that the game mechanics have given way under play; restarting means porting to a different system, in which characters don't work like they used to, and it soon needs to be put out if its misery (after seeing it happen a few times, we stopped doing it).

The other is that some of the players — often the GM — can't get out enough to justify what is being put in. This may manifest as the thread getting lost, perhaps due to pushing past a logical stopping point, or an acrimonious terminal session where divergent goals can no longer be smoothed over. In this situation, admitting that this is dead, and burying it is the only way.

What rôle does Party pressure play

2007-06-26T20:24:00.002+01:00

This is more a player level set of agreed — even unspoken — conventions in my experience. The characters work together as a genre given; so I can't really comment on in-game effects.

What helps players stay in character

2007-06-26T20:24:00.001+01:00

I'm not sure my experience is typical. In recent years at least, the problem, when gaming in the evening after work, was keeping players from lapsing into a comatose state, rather than dropping to player level. Caffeine has little effect on the habituated. Worse, when players were out of the limelight, multi-tasking happens as people took to maximizing the use of their free time (reading, checking e-mail on laptops), to the extent of needing to prod people when their PCs' actions came round in combat.

At that point a simple “Your turn” and a pause for context-switching sufficed.

No-one violated character, but were active only fleetingly.

How do you treat anachronisms like Futuristic Wizards

2007-06-26T20:23:00.001+01:00

Futuristic Wizards are entirely OK if the genre accepts them (e.g. ShadowRun). Things like the Arduin Techno class are, as written, much more of a problem as their tricks would really need a large technological and industrial base to support, and thus don't ring so true. Like the old “mages can't use swords” argument, it's best if the players just take any limits as one of the canons of the game, and the worst is to respond to provocation with a tantrum — “I'll ban it forever!”

Does your GMing style vary by the rules set you're using

2007-06-26T20:22:00.000+01:00

In hindsight, I can't see much difference in my own style in broad, save perhaps in some slight and gradual maturation over the years. There may have been a selection effect, in that games that didn't gel with my style I simply passed by.

I also tended to treat games more as different ways to slice reality, and impose different limits on the possible; and can't off-hand think of any game which came with an associated setting that I have ever used the setting from, at least without having customised it myself, until at the very end when I used the Planescape setting.

Even the late slide into a style which was more low-dice, narrative with adjudication came more as a response to trying to fit more than just a fight scene into an evening's play, and happened as much with AD&D2 as with V:tM! It was an exploration of what I could do to improve the execution of the game based on current received wisdom rather than being tied to the actual set of mechanics or genre in play.

What to do about occasional players

2007-06-26T20:21:00.002+01:00

When in the past players have been unable to show up for one or more sessions, the characters have by default been played by the other players by committee, and somewhat in the background. In some genres (cyberpunk, superhero) it is easier to agree that the character is doing his/her day-job or similar schtick and can't respond to “Avengers Assemble” or whatever.

How have you used game mechanics to explore religion in your games

2007-06-26T20:21:00.001+01:00

I never did much with this. RQ cults were the best mechanism I've given any time to — they did give a notion of concepts like “holy” that an entirely barren (i.e. state education requirement for religious instruction) Church of England background had only rendered meaningless.

When is breaking character the right thing to do

2007-06-26T19:41:00.001+01:00

I think one needs to take a utilitarian approach — what will bring the greater good for the greater number of those assembled to play. This covers the jerk chaot and narcissistic thespian cases nicely with reasons for breaking (or retiring) the character. It also stands against the breaking character just to follow along with what the GM alone wants.

For me, keeping character usually led to PCs leaving the story to do their own thing off-stage, while ciphers prospered.

What makes for Bad experiences

2007-06-26T19:40:00.000+01:00

Well as I note elsewhere, they have all been about alienation from the hobby (not alienation as a tool within it), when I could no longer say why I was doing this thing. Encounters with dorks get forgotten, or maybe turned into war stories.

What's good or bad about Convention games

2007-06-26T19:39:00.001+01:00

I had a brush with tournament style rules (a choose-your-stats D&D where CHA was made useful by controlling how many times the player could speak during the game) at the first Dragonmeet I went to (c1980); and didn't stop to play. I've only actually played or run “delegate organised” games, haphazard pick-ups that were at worst forgettable.

What makes for a Sense of wonder moment?

2007-06-26T19:37:00.000+01:00

Thinking hard on this one, I think I can honestly say that the only gaming related sense-of-wonder experiences I can recall have been while reading the books, or maybe a decade ago (c.1991), trying to infer Glorantha trivia with a similarly minded friend. GMing is always looking at the scenery from the wrong side; and as player, the charge I used to get was adrenalin highs from chancy combat.

One how not to do it with a really nifty setting is to play tour guide. Taking one example from experience, visiting Tada's High Tumulus in game is likely to concern itself more with logistics than any “gosh wow” one might derive from taking the old RQ2 Prax map and talking out the consequences of assuming that it depicts the tumulus to scale, never mind whether the other players are or are not Glorantha groupies at the time.

(How) do you limit the spectrum of choice of PCs

2007-06-26T19:36:00.000+01:00

My first reaction was: Doesn't everyone, at least when it comes to “genre appropriate”? But then I remembered the Arduin Techno character class. The real limitations I'd impose along with genre are “able to get along with all the others” and “plausibly sane” which are both fairly vague; and usually unspoken or implicitly expected of players. I have done “no non-humans” as an explicit limitation in D&D games, but that has been a part of the setting — I've deleted the damned clichés and added in different races without the usual baggage of preconceptions.

I don't really recall any significant player reaction; the general principles are part of the cooperative playing style that evolved fairly naturally; a style that led to “Does not compute!” reactions when later once faced with Paranoia.

There are a couple of instances where I should have limited but didn't — vetting character secret agendas up-front for the Vampire game (rather than having it explode into five separate solo stories), or helping a player doing a one-off appearance in out mid-80s Champions game who had no experience of the superhero genre to build a superhero rather than a fantasy character.

How would you treat sentient plants?

2007-06-26T19:34:00.001+01:00

Should they be mobile? how would they communicate? How would they react to harvesting their fruit?

I never so much as considered this sort of thing in any of my games, even though Ents, the Aldryami, and the various plant peoples in Stapledon's Star Maker were part of the genre background. (My exposure to the possible motile sentient plants of SimEarth came only shortly before my burnout.) But I do have one war story about them.

It was one of our “armageddon” games — a bring a couple of characters for a wild weekend's gaming — back in the mid 80s, aimed at superheroes and using Champions. As some players were lacking any Champions characters, they brought along character concepts for statting up. One of them was Pete Windsor's character, Falain, a sentient, motile tumbleweed, with a Judge Dredd-style hoverbike — apart from that it was generally a Pete character (aligned chaotic-daft); apart from its making disparaging comments about animals (the other PCs), I can't recall any other details at this decade-plus remove. ISTR that was also the game where another player had a swarm of killer bees — People's Attack Regiment #5 — with a yellow rain area effect NND.

Not quite a sentient plant war story — One player's non-gaming wife, had managed to take on board, from games being held at their house, that Gloranthan elves were walking sentient plants; so some while after the Glorantha game crashed, and we were playing Shadowrun, she commented, à propos of something that the elf street samurai did “But aren't you supposed to be a lettuce?”
The character was ever after known as the Electric Lettuce.

Memorable games

2007-06-25T22:05:00.000+01:00

So what does make a game memorable? And is it for the right reasons? This is an essay I wrote for the 300th issue of the venerable treeware publication, Alarums & Excursions.

To a first approximation, games from the long ago were either great or forgettable; while more recent ones have been so-so or dreadful. Asking which were more enjoyable than more recent memorable ones is, on one level, facile. The true question is “why did it stop being good?”

I feel a major factor is that the early games were run while innocent; later games cannot regain that state of grace.

Although I got into D&D in late '76, I just tinkered with game systems for the next couple of years primarily because I didn't find a group I wanted to join whose schedules meshed with mine (i.e. not an all-nighter every Sunday), and actually did more than one or two sessions before folding. So the '78-9 when I finally got into a regular game, and got a character through more than a couple of levels was the real start of my practical experiences. Yes, it was a dungeon crawl, with maps kept neatly on graph paper, one 2mm square to the pace, with one-pace-thick walls, and I couldn't repeat it and enjoy it these days — but, oh!, the memories!

Like the time some randomly encountered mage dropped an Ice Storm (not your wimpy D&D version, but an proper area-denial spell doing a few dice per 2s melee round for several minutes) on the party, and Ororo (my elementalist) tumbled out of the room at his feet with just a handful of hitpoints left, and had to do a highly risky fast-cast Dimension Door to get the hell out of there.
Like the infamous 36+ hours with only a few cat-naps post-exam Overland Expedition to the fabled Crystal Pyramid — so we were getting stoned on sleep deprivation by the time the characters reached their goal — and dealing with the thousands of vampire bats arising from the trees ringing the pyramid — one mage's owl familiar strafing them with a wand of fireballs (“How many charges are you using?” “As many as it takes.” “30 seem reasonable?”), and mopping up stragglers by waiting until flocks were strung out chasing flying mages, and then Cone of Colding them. Plus the escape from the surrounding gardens with the wagon train going hell-for-leather ahead of a horde of nasties — ropers, shambling mounds, probably more — and the STR37-equivalent Knock Ororo cast (involving major rolling up an open-ended 20 on the casting roll) to blast open the gate to get out of the surrounding garden.
Like the time when, lacking other healing, and with the front line fighters well down on hit-points, we broke out the herbal tea acquired from a group of pot-head pixies from the Planet Gong — which did the healing required, but left them stoned and chatting amiably with the guy in black leather with a guitar who strolled by. Meanwhile the rest of us were having to deal with a type V demon and her friends.

About the only early memorable negative I can remember is the campaign where characters were assigned, rather than rolled or designed, and when the GM presented us with what was in effect the script outline for the campaign's second season, everyone declined.

And so we fast-forward over the 80s. More recent memorable gaming incidents from the early to mid 90s (i.e. as recent as they get) are somewhat different, such as

Having designed a character in a 60's spy genre campaign to complement the skills of the team (the other characters were a boffin and a proper secret agent) a hippy with a VW bus who was mainly a driver/mechanic with a bit of Kung Fu on the side (having to have some combat skill, but with stats in the Star Wars based system being used that made firearms a liability), we found out that the villain organization, Paradox, was actually from out of paratime. Essentially without exception, the parallel worlds encountered either had vehicles that even the boffin couldn't figure out how to tinker with, or used horses. It was bad enough violating character when the agent's player — who did fine with the suave jet-setting role-play aspects I can't handle — couldn't remember the genre clichés required to pull off the field operations! I didn't want also to buy, from an unfavourable base, a duplicate of the other characters' strong points. So I gritted my teeth and made a silent protest by usually leaving 2-3 sessions worth of xp unspent, and never — at least never voluntarily — improving firearms skill (I can't remember if towards the end I was forced to). To cap it all, he kept on getting into situations where his hair got cut and beard shaved, while none of the other characters were exposed to any equivalent indignity.
The RQ2.8 (later Pendragon based) Glorantha game which involved a little bit of sightseeing, and a lot of running away from small groups of trollkin, while acting as gophers for the agents of the aides of the people who looked like they might actually be the ones going to make a difference in Dragon Pass. And including a shameless bit of coerced power-gaming (having been knocked over by a werewolf while companions were dealing with its packmates, I DI'd out — and then rather than let me fold my hand with a POW 2 character, I was argued into buying POW by the process of buying a spell, getting a POW check from the spirit combat, forgetting the spell to free up INT, lather, rinse, repeat). Pendragon made things worse in that it went from having to take a couple of volleys from emplaced trollkin slingers when closing to melee from extreme range to dozens. This destroyed my faith in a couple of game systems and a world that had been for many years almost a gold standard to me.

Those weren't the entirety of my playing during the 90s — there was an AD&D2 gritty Central European campaign, which fell over when the first story arc concluded and the characters were converted to Ars Magica; but I was playing like a lump all through and never really got drawn in. About the only thing that sticks in mind as exceptional was finding that after the systems conversion, my Uruk-hai warrior was even more heedless of damage than she had been before (Soaking all of an attack doesn't whittle away any hit-points). Another Ars Magica game started when 4th edition came out, but I just zoned out when faced with assigning skills for my magus, and never finished chargen (having no good idea as to what level was beginner, what competent, what expert).

Note that all the above events have been from the player perspective, where the visceral experiences have been, even if in the latter days it was desperately trying to prevent my frustration bursting out in a fit of petulance that would be more appropriate to a two year old. GMing has always been a much more cerebral pursuit, since I can see the hidden side of all the stage scenery, and have to manage the cast of thousands. I know I've GMd more than I've played, but the olden days on that side of the table are lost in the haze, with very few flashes where an incident has remained clear in memory. All I know is that I must have enjoyed doing it, even if designing a session was mainly an issue of setting up two fight scenes and threading them together.

I have more positive memories of later GMing — the catharsis of the AD&D2 modules I ran (the Horde campaign) after the RQ mentioned above; the quiet satisfaction of watching the players thinking their way through a run of Shadowrun modules (when those used to be good); the ambiguous Vampire run, which was technically well executed, albeit at the cost of far harder work than the result justified.

And then there was the worst — a few sessions where I foolishly agreed to GM because no one else had anything ready, and after frantic ad-libbing I just burned out hard.

So, after all that, the conclusions? That the really good experiences were early times, with no preconceptions. Yes, the PC was just a thin proxy — I know the adrenaline was pumping when rolling for the DimDoor, but at the same time I was thinking how long it would take to work a new PC up to the same level — what I was fighting for was to protect an investment in playing time. Later games also suffered under the load of raised expectations while familiarity was breeding contempt — a feeling of “once you've gotten a mage to 12th level, doing the same again is just going through the motions”.

And then there was role-playing in the character crafting sense rather than “my tactical role is as combat air patrol” which was good enough for Ororo at high levels. This has been held out by some as a source of high-octane emotional charge when done right (just see the archives of the r.g.f.advocacy newsgroup during 1995, for example).

Naturally, I was seduced by this concept, and threw myself into it; alas also getting infected by the rider to the meme, that “if it isn't working for you, you're not trying hard enough” which seems to be the sub-text of most role-play evangelism — and is well crafted for inducing guilt trips. Note for example the difference in terminology between the 1970s and 1990s era experiences discussed above.

At one extreme, characters are nothing but barriers (condoms?) between me and the action, where I have to consciously work through their thought processes to arrive at their responses; at the other extreme where they work naturally, both of them that got this far said “Sod this for a game of soldiers, I'm off somewhere safer.” and continued in play only under protest, and not for very long.

Role-playing games and me

2007-06-25T22:02:00.000+01:00

I got into the hobby from SPI games and thus reading about this D&D thing in the SimPubs UK 'zine in the spring of '76, which was during my first undergraduate year. It then took me six months, finding only a random copy of either Greyhawk or Blackmoor in one of the general games shops in Soho, before I tracked a copy down, and a group of gamers who were using a highly variant home-brew set of systems. Taking it home at the Yuletide holidays that year, I plunged immediately into DMing (mainly for the crowd at my old school), and system tinkering.

I would probably have drifted out of the hobby in a couple of years, as my brother did, but for meeting Karen. Shortly after we had gotten together, she told me about this wonderful game one of her friends had been playing, and wondered did I know about it. I said that I did and advised she probably didn't want to. But she wasn't deterred.

That became the classic 78/9 highly variant dungeon crawling game that really (mis-)informs my opinions of (original, pre-Basic, pre-Advanced) D&D. That in turn drove me to stop tinkering and start DMing again myself, on a regular basis this time.

This early period while still in and around Cambridge was marked by a lot of variously successful home-brew FRP systems, many unrecognisable as derivatives from D&D, as well as some “roll a d20 and see what it looks like” super-hero games (finding Superhero 2044 unusable as it stood). There were attempts at C&S, DragonQuest and TFT which came to naught, and a little variant RQ. Burnout with fantasy by the early '80s, and moving away for work, led to playing a bit of Trav that got nowhere, and then Champions, the latter turning into an open campaign where everyone who had something to run GMd, until the flaws (bricks rule, energy projectors suck) were too blatant to ignore. One off (and never again) sessions in this time also included Call of Cthulhu and Paranoia.

Returning to Cambridge in the late 80s, gaming mainly alternated between myself and one other GM (who has now gone on to run the Saxum Caribetum Ars Magica Saga), with AD&D2 being the default system, but also RQ2.8/Glorantha (later Pendragon 3rd edition), Shadowrun (1st & 2nd), V:tM (2nd), and Ars Magica(3rd), with a little bit of Trav, MegaTrav, and Star Wars (2nd) (this last being used as a generic RPG) on the side.

Gaming keynotes

in 1984, while preparing for a “everyone bring a couple of favourite characters” gaming weekend, while others were exercised narrowing down to a couple of characters from a vast portfolio, my problem was coming up with characters to shortlist. I could now call upon the many Champions PCs I later designed - but it established that I was already more the GM than the player
my first character of any consequence (as opposed to first that lasted to gain levels at all) was an elementalist mage from the 78/9 game, almost the only mage I've ever played. The later PCs have tended to be simple “walk up to other people and hit them a lot” types, perhaps with a little magic on the side (e.g. RQ characters or AD&D2 priests).
the all-comers Champions aside, I've not run or played in a long running “signature” campaign. Too many one-shots that folded ignominiously, and campaign longevity meaning lasting 6 months.
In 1995 I went through a serious bit of burnout, and that's why I'm only in 2003, so many years later, actually getting round to scanning and uploading all this stuff.
In summer 2003, I went to the Conjuration, the biennial con at New Hall, and saw the demo games of HeroQuest, almost on the 25^th anniversary of the original RuneQuest which promised it as one of the few detailed “To be published” sources. And it fired my enthusiasm enough to start to look for players — but these turned out to be thin on the ground, and by the time I'd managed to accumulate a possible quorum (and that needing to take account of players with children having to work around their bed-times), work was going through a “as many hours as it take” patch, and after that, I'd managed to get distracted by watching anime DVDs on the PC, and finding that other things had then arisen to take up my creative energies, away from dealing with flea-bitten barbarians. And so I'm in total RPG burn-out.

Penny (4th June 1998 - 14th April 2007)

2007-04-14T20:56:00.000+01:00

Penny was a pedigree chocolate Burmese. She's looking very serious in the first photo, in reaction to the new arrivals Bleys and Jemima.. Before this, she still seemed very kittenish by comparison with older cats, playing serious games of tig, when Smoke was in the mood to join in. Later she spendt a lot of time fighting over her place in the hierarchy with Bleys; and then eventually became subordinate to Jemima (twice her size) at the feeding bowls.

As expected, she has become a mighty huntress, as well as a scrounging alley-cat, preferring her food well aged; and to the end made use of other cats as a hot water bottle, first Smoke, and later Jemima.

With the newer arrivals, there was a lot more communal sleeping.

An unhappy death.

Bleys (June 2002 - 30th September 2005)

2005-09-30T20:52:00.000+01:00

Bleys (ginger) was a softie — happy to be cuddled and stroked, and purring when fussed or when eating, much like Smoke. Not the swiftest on the up-take, but compensated for it by being very beautiful — and knowing it!

Run over on a dark Friday evening.

Smoke (1st March 1989 - 22nd November 2004)

2004-11-22T20:45:00.000Z

Smoke had a long tenure as the senior cat. He was a generally affable cat, and for all his size (a lean mean eight kilos in his prime, though getting a bit scrawny towards the end due to hyperthyroidism) somewhat unwilling to allow other cats to see that he was a great softy. He allowed other cats to snuggle up to him — here he is with our late lamented brown Burmese, Shen Kuei who was the previous top cat (and thus considered any other cat or person who stayed still long enough a valid hot-water bottle) — and, showing that this was not a fluke, with later Burmese members of the household, Kundalini and Penny, the latter picture being taken less than 24 hours after Penny's arrival.

Smoke's favourite food used to be cat biscuit. But as his teeth failed and he got crankier, and always hungry it was just the jelly from lumps-in-jelly, or occasional mouthfuls of senior cat food.

At the end, suddenly, on a mild day after a cold snap, he demanded to be let out. I half noticed his absence when I gave the other cats the end of a tin before we went out to dinner. He didn't show when we got back, so I went out, fearing the worst, to find him curled up under the rhododendron by the conservatory door, cold, but not yet with rigor set in. I guess he knew it was his time.

My Life in Glorantha

2003-09-26T21:30:00.000+01:00

As anyone who's read my other RPG posts — and especially my background page — will know, I burned out on gaming in early 1995 — and that I spend a lot of time on those pages talking about either variant D&D or Champions, but other systems are only mentioned in passing.

As it happens, I've had a love/hate relationship with RQ/Glorantha for going on 25 years now.

I first encountered Glorantha in the form of the original Nomad Gods game at the Wargames Soc. at college, and thought it a little bit silly — though by no means as bad as Greg Costikyan's humour in the SPI Swords and Sorcery game. It was a while later, when looking to other systems to find bits to plunder to fix D&D, that I picked up a copy of RQ2 (the new edition at £8, as opposed to the old one at £5, this being back in about '78). RQ2 had a lot of things that I thought made for an ideal game — individual skill ratings rather than blanket levels, fixed hit-points — but it didn't have a splashy magic system in that way that *D&D always has, so while I tried a few one-off sessions, and Karen even did her first bit of GMing c1980 with RQ set in a setting of her own, Glorantha languished as something I read fragments of in Cults of Prax, Trollpak, and Cults of Terror, but never did anything with.

Neil Taylor picked up a copy of Borderlands, and started to run a campaign based on that set. The characters were mainly Orlanthi (Sartar's equivalent of the Church of England), with a neo with a death wish playing an Humakti. With the limited source material, we modelled Sartar after high classical Greece, like the pictures in the rule-book suggested, and the Praxians — at Horn Gate, at least — as Arabs at the stereotypical oasis.

And at that sort of time, the group burned out on the whole fantasy genre, and Karen and I moved house from Cambridge to Stevenage because I needed a job. When we found our feet there, we started playing other games with a new set of players (the group that Phil Masters had accumulated), mainly Champions. Meanwhile HeroQuest had gone from being a “source to be published” in the list at the back of the RQ2 rulebook, to an item in the Spring 1982 issue of the Chaosium Games catalogue in which promised it for that summer.

Time passed. RQ3 happened, and the combination of the dollar price hike, and the pound falling almost to parity meant that it cost 5 times what the previous edition did — £40 in 1985 money [by comparison, HeroQuest is priced at about £24 in 2003 money]. I did pick up the hideously expensive boxes of Gloranthan background (Gods of... , Genertela) and pored over them for arcane details, while the modified rules stayed on the games' shop shelves.

By the late 80s, I was back in Cambridge and working at the same company as Neil Taylor. As the Champions game folded due to increasing dissatisfaction with the Hero System, he and I would spend hours going over the minutiae as revealed, especially the new scraps in a new fanzine, Tales of the Reaching Moon. I remember fascinating discussions about recherché topics like the implications of the RQ2 Prax map showing the burial mound of a prehistoric hero even larger that the specially large mountain pictogram used for Kero Fin, the mighty goddess-mountain.

And so he set up an RQ3 game based in a slightly variant Glorantha (the big conflict was Tarsh — oriental in flavour — vs. Sartar — more like the current received wisdom, though Babeester Gor was in the role now occupied by the Vinga cult which hadn't been discovered at the time, and Yelmalio was taken as the cult accepted as the Sun among Storm), based alternately in Pavis and Sartar. I had problems stumbling over bits of rules that had changed subtly since the previous edition; other players had problems with other bits of the system like the experience rolls (one Unicorn Woman had her most frequently used combat skills stick at ~45% while others went up to ~70% because the dice would hardly ever convert a skill check into a % increase). We all found that the restraints on spirit magic meant that the old standby of “Glue” (Healing 6) battle-magic that made combat a survivable thing was no longer a plausible strategy. A belated change to Pendragon, to use the virtues and passions system as part of the cult attributes just made things worse — the movement rates and ranges meant that we had something like five times as many rounds to take damage from emplaced trollkin slingers when advancing from their extreme range to contact. [From this experience, I'm somewhat dubious about Pendragon's ability to truly emulate the almost D&D-like combats in Malory.]

The game also suffered from the “tourist trap” tendency — with a detailed world, the temptation comes to play tour guide, and escort the PCs around all the interesting parts — so our lowly step-and-fetch PCs were sent hither and yon, until the game folded under cumulative dissatisfaction, and I ran some cathartic high level D&D to permit some righteous ass-kicking that the RQ had denied us.

With the '90s also came the RQ-revival, spearheaded by a group that gave the appearance of seeking to play something between “Morris-dancing, the RPG” and “Iron John, the RPG”, which is still present in Hero Wars material like Thunder Rebels. The Glorantha that came out of this was trapped in a Procrustean bed of unsatisfactory mechanics, and with revelations that changed my perception of the world — not essentially trivial things like the (Y)elmal(io) flap, but that the Sartar/Lunar conflict was a lot more German/Roman rather than Greek/Persian as the RQ2 art implied. Yes, Orlanth is meant to be Tiw, not Zeus, and the new vanguard had only contempt for the stuckist grognards who liked the old way better.

In the middle of this I burned out on gaming, and when Hero Wars came out, I couldn't even gather the energy to focus my eyes on Neil's copy. I knew I had reservations about what I heard about the system — important events getting handled in a quantum box, with abstract action points expended until the state collapses and you can tell what happened — like who got wounded and how much. Later on, I did buy Storm Tribe, another gods book, and without the damnable barbarian culture.

But this year, HeroQuest — I did like what I saw at Conjuration enough to look out Storm Tribe, if only to try and answer the question “who are all these strange gods that the demo game PCs were devotees of?” and then get a copy of HQ for my birthday. I'm still not sure about the system, the extended resolution in particular; and when I'm in a mood to worry about having too much arbitrary fiat power as GM at the totally free scope of attributes (like Over the Edge, but more so). The rules hacker in me starts to think about perhaps using something like the West End Games' StarWars D6 system, with a HQ keyword corresponding to an SW stat. But I was motivated to at least think about doing something.

Having been out of the loop for a while, I found much Gregging and counter-Gregging had gone on, but I think that Glorantha has reached a point where it has completed a metamorphosis, to a new understanding and a new system, unlike the very awkward state in the '90s when the New True Way and the uninspired changes that went into RQ3 mechanics tore in different directions. Now at last we have a mechanical exposition that supports, rather than thwarts the subjectivist approach.

For example, back in RQ2 days, there was the assumption that a warrior would be an Humakti, and there was the one-size-fits-all cult of Humakt; but in ST, Humakt is a seriously scary god that only dangerous weirdos follow (normal warriors would follow Orlanth sub-cults that no-one who hasn't been following Gloranthan events in detail for the last few years will have heard of, like Hedkoranth and Helamakt). In HQ, he's back to being a standard warrior god – but only for cultures neighbouring Sartar. This I interpret as being because the core Orlanthi culture has access to all the minor attributes/associates of Orlanth, which squeezes the other big gods out into the margins. A similar process seems to have taken place with Babeester Gor, with the Orlanthi having Vinga in the place that the Earth Avenger takes in related cultures who don't also have the Defender Storm.

Of course the process is not 100% – it doesn't fix the (Y)elma(io) problem that really set the cat amongst the pigeons over a decade ago, and had been just about reconciled (provided you don't enquire too deeply into how the myths fitted together) – the ST version of Elmal as the Orlanthi sun-god doesn't really hang together as a myth (it singularly ignores who it was that the Orlanthi think was the object of the Lightbringer quest, or the fact that Yelmalio is the light of the sunless sky i.e. twilight). So far he's swept under the carpet in HQ, in favour of (St.) Ehilm (a Saint in Aeolian Esvulia (formerly Heortland)) — and we last heard of Ehilm as a western figure, the sorcerer who had become too entangled in solar powers, cognate to Yelm.

It is interesting to note that, having the assumption in the examples of a PC party made up from folk all across the continent, and with only distant ties to their kinfolk (occsaional calling in of favours for support in the play examples), the game has drawn back from the anthropological style of RPG that was going to have killed the setting eventually. The rigid tribal Sartarite society is alien to most 21^st century players, more so than easy things like feudalism. Indeed the restrictive elements are stronger than some in real-world societies which are causing active harm to people in the UK caught between their ancestral ways imported from the Indian sub-continent and the ways of their peers and age-cohort.

Having the God of the New Way of Things associated with the people of “We've always done it this way” isn't something that most people will get.

One thing that hasn't changed in HW, and by adoption, HQ, are the rather silly monsters, which hark me back to the first encounter with Nomad Gods. One thing that has improved a bit are the scenarios. I dismissed an early famous RQ scenario with this summary:

The adventurers are approached by a man seeking armed assistance. He explains that he has bought, for resale, a sacred item. The person who he'd bought it from had stolen it from a small nomad tribe, killing most of the adults in the process. When two of the survivors demanded its return from the man now seeking PC assistance, he had his assistant shoot one. He has now found out that they intend to return in force to recover their property, and is seeking help to defend his house and this item. – What do your characters do?

The scenarios in HQ are better than this.

Happy Fun Legal Text

Glorantha is a trademark of Issaries, Inc. HeroQuest, Hero Wars, and Issaries are registered trademarks of Issaries, Inc. These they tell me about on their web site.

Nomad Gods, Borderlands, Cults of Prax, Trollpak, Cults of Terror, Gods of Glorantha, Glorantha : Genertela were presumably Chaosium trademarks (and are presumably with Issaries, Inc. now). Presumably Storm Tribe and Thunder Rebels are trademarks of Issaries, Inc. [I have to guess not only the changes of ownership, but also the trademark status of the current material as the books lack any legal indicia, unlike the usual case with comic-books. Pick up a copy of, say Lucifer, and the On the Ledge section tells you that indicia — and that would include Lucifer and On the Ledge — are trademarks of DC Comics].

I'm not certain of the exact status of the RuneQuest trademark these days. Ditto for Tales of the Reaching Moon. King Arthur Pendragon used to be a Chaosium trademark, but they sold the property on, and I can't remember to whom (Green Knight?).

Over the Edge is a (registered?) trademark of Atlas Games.

D&D is a (registered?) trademark of Hasbro, Inc. Swords and Sorcery turns out to have reverted to Greg Costikyan, rather than having been inherited in the Hasbro buys WotC buys TSR acquires SPI chain of events; Champions and Hero System are (registered?) trademarks of Hero Games.

Star Wars is ultimately a LucasFilms registered trademark, though the game rights are currently with Hasbro, Inc.

Conjuration might well have been a service mark of the British Role-playing Association.

All omissions are purely accidental. I'm certainly not an owner of any of the cited intellectual properties.

Doesn't it get complicated when you try to cover yourself while writing an overview that spans much of the life of this turbulent hobby industry!

Books

2003-07-10T21:13:00.000+01:00

Let's deal with *that* book (You-know-who and the Order of the Phœnix). No, I didn't buy it, I had it forced on me by my parents. It's a pure maguffin-hunt, with the final revelation coming as no surprise (if we didn't already know it, it was pretty obvious if one applied the conventions — or should I say clichés — of the genre. There's a lot of teasing before she actually does kill of the character; and it's not a major one in terms of the reader's estimation, only in terms of Master Potter's. There were a number of places where it seemed that even some light copy-editing hadn't been done. let alone the heavy blue pecilling to cut out the fluff.

Permanence by Karl Schroeder – this starts off in Andre Norton mode (outcast adolescent flees repressive family after death of supportive parent), detours into Carol Cherryh territory (she's soon worrying about financing docking fees when her ship will reach the next civilised port of call), and then takes a left turn deep into strange territory, with ForeRunners like you've hardly seen them before, plus a whole new type of interstellar colonisation. Not a book afraid to confront the Fermi Paradox and that last term in the Drake equation – factors which are strongly correlated with my liking interstellar-SF.

Now in paperback, the Scar returns us to the world of China Miévilles Perdido Street Station, to follow what befalls one of the peripheral characters who got out of New Crobuzon while the going was good. Not quite as bleak as its predecessor, it is still just as darkly Gormenghastian in its construction, both in its use of language, and in its setting in an urban labyrinth. I did manage to read this one all in one sitting, which Perdido certainly didn't lend itself to.

Hannibal's Children by John Maddox Roberts (author of the SPQR Roman mysteries) has Rome losing to Hannibal. It's not surprise that this book (#1 of 3? it doesn't say, but the tempo looks right for that) has them preparing to kick much ass in a belated 3rd Punic war. So-so what-if historical fiction. While in that neck of the woods, I'll belatedly mention Thomas Harlan's Oath of Empire sequence, whose final volume should be out in paperback summer '03 – that one is Rome (+magic) never fell, and has a massive Eastern Empire vs Western Empire vs Persia vs Mohammedan four way struggle in the 620's CE. At worst, harmless holiday reading.

Cat people should definitely look out for Varjak Paw, by SF Said (publ. David Fickling Books, which is a Random House imprint). It's an urban-horror story, as the youngest of a family of pedigree cats has to save the day when the old lady who owns their house dies. As the cover puts it "This cat must learn to fight."

In the field of comics, I recommend the Red Star, a feast of post-Soviet nostalgia for the eyes.

In gaming, well, maybe I spend too much time in odd hangouts, like the Singularitarian SL4 mailing list at sysopmind.com, but given the title, I had to buy Transhuman Space. From that context, it does feel very timid even within its no-Singularity remit – comparable to 1980s SF like Voice of the Whirlwind, I'd say. Something very twen-cen is expecting people to buy general purpose computers. Having either cycles on demand (grid computing) for general purpose computation, or special purpose appliances (you don't buy a car for the CPU) that might use spare capacity in the grid would be more plausible. The high-tech smart clipboard (descended from the Tablet PC) is perhaps more 2010s rather than 2100s, but would feel a little more sexy-future-gadget than most of the electronic hardware that the game offers.

Redemption Ark by Alastair Reynolds – while Chasm City was a detour to fill in some background for his universe, this latest book follows on from the events and disclosures of Revelation Space, and gets us back to the main plot; the discovery that something is wiping out starfaring civilisations, and we're next.
This time more back-story gets filled in as many factions struggle at cross purposes to find ways to cope with the Inhibitors, and the book closes when another little facet of the tale comes to an end. Now there's the frustrating wait for the next part – it feels like there are 2-3 more chunky volumes' worth to come, not counting other side stories.

Marrow by Robert Reed. An STL interstellar setting, set in the lightly populated epoch of the 10^5s CE, with (at least) emortal post-humans as the primary protagonists. It's not afraid to take this to its logical conclusion - a few dozen such are marooned on a marginally habitable planet without equipment. So they respond by spending the next 5000 years building a technological and industrial base sufficient to escape from their exile, and to find who trapped them there.

Security Engineering by Ross Anderson. OK, this is a title I'm also assigning my colleagues for reading, but it is very much the most comprehensive and up to date book on the subject, with plenty of relevant examples of how systems - military and commercial - have failed in the past, usually as the environment in which they operate changes, or the assumptions of what it is that they need to protect changes. The exploits can both be enlightening, and can also be mined for use in modern or soft-cyberpunk type gaming to add an air of verisimilitude.

In similar vein, but definitely more a popular exposition than an instructional text, is Secrets and Lies by Bruce Schneier. This isthe less substantial of the two works.

Cosmonaut Keep by Ken McLeod - His earlier books were all set in one future, but at least had the grace to be free-standing. This one suffers from being a first volume of a trilogy, and is not well paced. There are two strands that alternate chapters (as in his earlier The Stone Canal), which finally meet, but the far future line suffers a lot from keeping mysterious to the reader much of the everyday world of the characters, doesn't well establish the characters (especially their ages - maybe I'm getting old, but I assumed they were a decade or more older than they turned out to be) - and was bloated by a romance sub-plot which failed to advance anything. If only publishers weren't fixated on multi-volume epics, and editors could ply their trade. But it does have Reptoid Greys who would say "Take us to your dealer." which helps to repair things.

Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett. The dangerous idea being that purposeless algorithm is all that's behind the development of life. And that it's algorithms all the way down. And up. Which is what makes people seek refuge in more comfortable magical explanations - and that includes Penrose or Gould as much as the usual suspects. A well reasoned overview of the historical perspective and debunking of contemporary arguments for magic.

There and Back Again by Pat Murphy is a charming re-make of the original work of the same title in the form of a space opera. Not profound literature, but a fun read.

The Stars Dispose/The Stars Compel by Michaela Roessner: cookery and other magics in the Medici household in Florence and Rome c1530. Not books to read when you are feeling peckish already; but they do come with recipes. I expect there to be a third installment at some point.

Restoration London by Liza Picard, covering 1660-70 is every bit as interesting as its companion Dr. Johnson's London. It slices things differently, but covers much the same breadth of topics with reference to the source documents. This is the sort of thing an RPG city sourcebook should be like.

The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene is a non-technical survey of string theory by one of the people at the cutting edge. It suffers from having to first cover relativity and quantum theory in order to set the context - and falls into the all too common trap of explaining relativity as if it were Lorentz' Ether Theory, with its length contractions and time dilations. One of these days someone will write a popular book that starts from the geometric approach as presented in Gravitation (Misner, Thorne Wheeler, 1973), which gives a much more intuitive approach, once one has unlearned the LET-preconceptions. The intro to quantum mechanics isn't too stellar, either. However, after these sections, and we get on to what the book is really all about, he does get into his stride, and, with personal anecdote, but without resort to any equations whatsoever, fills in a lot of gaps between the type of popularizations found in New Scientist or Scientific American articles, and the hairy stuff to be found in John Baez' This week's finds in Mathematical Physics (math.ucr.edu/ home/baez/twfshort.html) - I now understand what the fuss about Calabi-Yau orbifolds is about, even if I can't do the math - they satisfy the generalized equivalent of Einstein's field equation on a vacuum, so are as flat as possible while being scrunched up, so give no new background mass-energy density as a consequence of the compactified dimensions.

All of an Instant by Richard Garfinkle. From the alternate hard SF of Celestial Matters, Garfinkle has turned his hand to time travel, and the fight for History, with an equally novel approach to the genre that makes it make sense that the main characters are Africans and Aboriginal Australians from prehistoric times. The very novelty of the approach makes description difficult without spoiling the developments within the tale; so I'll just say that I recommend it.

London, The Biography by Peter Ackroyd covers from the mists of antiquity, but mainly the last 1000 years in a miscellany that spans the whole history of this ever noisy, ever consuming city. It is more than I can hope to summarise here.

The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch is an interesting counterpoint to Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Starting with a brutally direct route from the two-slit experiment to the Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, he folds in epistemology, computation and evolution into a credible Theory of Everything (OK, we still need to tidy up the math of super-strings, but that's a detail within this big picture).

Time and Space by Stephen Baxter. I find that a lot of what I feel to be good SF deals in one way or another with the central issue of the Fermi Paradox. This related pair takes two diametrically opposed takes on the issue, starting with the same near future Earth. In the former, we have N=1, and the vision of far deep time of a Universe gardened by human derived intelligences. In the latter life - and star-faring intelligences of nowhere near transcendent technology - are everywhere, and a lot of what looks to be natural is just the action of layer after layer of engineering. They suffer a bit from the "tour of the balloon factory" approach to the genre, but are at least thought provoking, and grist to the SFRPG mill.

King of the City by Michael Moorcock. Despite the cover blurb, this isn't a sequel to Mother London. It interweaves autobiography (the character does things I know MM himself did, like play banjo on Lucky Leif and the Longships) and part tirade against Thatcher, Di, and Blair. It's also, bizarrely, his cyberpunk novel.

Soldiers Live by Glen Cook. Finally, the whole Taglios/Shadowmaster/Kina/Glittering Stone plotline gets resolved. Which means, of course, that this issue, (nearly) everybody dies. Given some of the sprawl over the previous five books, the resolution may not be very tidy, and is downbeat, but overall, satisfying, with a feeling that as best as is possible, closure has been achieved. There are of course some loose ends, and things are set up so that yet another generation of the Black Company can get into further scrapes, but I would hope that he would do something new, at least for a book or two, before succumbing to the temptation to return. If you've stayed the trip with the previous books, you'll enjoy this one.

Music

2003-07-10T21:12:00.000+01:00

Although my CD collection does have a lot of stuff that tells you that the golden age of rock is 14, with artists who were around in the 70s (including acts like Hawkwind and BÖC that are getting to be their own tribute bands), my current “I just keep playing these albums” are Godspeed you! Black Emperor';s lift yr. skinny fists like antennas to heaven – mixed rock and orchestral strings along with “found” sounds, and Sigur Ros' Agætis Byrjun – haunting, almost jazz-like.

Both have new albums out - Gy!BE's Yanqui U.X.O. has grown on me; while Sigur Ros' ( ) is positively accessible by comparison with its predecessor, but perhaps not quite so good.

To show I'm still in touch with my roots, I'm also playing Bowie's Heathen, and, more retro yet, Leonard Cohen's The Future (and discovering that he's wilfully misquoted in the Werewolf:the Apocalypse Umbra supplement).

Driving at going on midnight one day, and searching for something tolerable on the radio, ended up listening to Late Junction on BBC Radio 3, I encountered the group Dirty Three, the final track off their album Whatever you love, you are. Their style is violin, guitar and drum instrumental, sometimes slightly Celtic/folksy, often simply an oceanic drift of sound. Then a few days later during the afternoon on Radio 3, I caught Steve Reich's 1974 composition Music for Mallet Instruments, Organ and Voices, which is a minimalist, long time-scale set of rounds. More serendipitous radio discovery, like in previous years with John Adams'Hoodoo Zephyr , or the Afro-Celt Sound System (also known as the Afrocelts), whose Sound Magic(From the Light Continent) is about what you'd expect, from the band's name.

Having gotten into gy!be, it was inevitable that I'd get into other bands on the Constellation label (Silver Mt. Zion, Do Make Say Think, Fly PanAm) which are also into related flavours of instrumental music.

Movie Roundup, 2003

2003-07-10T21:10:00.000+01:00

The film Dolls, is made up from three interwoven tales of love and loss in modern Japan, framed by a traditional puppet story on the same theme. The main story ( of a salaryman who breaks with his fiancée to marry the boss' daughter, then leaves the wedding when he hears that on being abandoned, she had attempted suicide, and the two of them ending up wandering around Japan tied together) fails to have the clean resolution of the other episodes (an otaku almost stalks an idoru who has retired after beign disfigured in an accident, and of an aging yakuza oyabun who on getting bad news after a medical check-up, goes to find the woman he abandoned when he took to crime), and spends rather too long on admittedly gorgeous scenery shots. I was surprised to see that the wedding was to have been held in church — I suppose that is, like Kirimasu, another quaint foreign custom that the Japanese have taken to heart.

Matrix:Reloaded is another film that will have been seen by most people who would want to by now. Pity it was only the first half of a five hour movie :-( - there really wasn't a resolution, just a cliff-hanger. The FX were kewl, though. Interestingly, apart from the councillor and Neo, the real-world Zion characters were women, non-white, or both - the white males (Agents and Architect) were Matrix constructs. I agree with Howard Tayler's assessment in an open letter on his Schlock Mercenary site that it could have lost the bump'n'grind/Zion Party digression, near the beginning. Placed where it was, it didn't even have the utility of the smoochy bit in Armageddon which at about half way through the film, came at a good time for taking a leak without missing anything important.

X2 - about as perfect a realization of what have been for most of the last 35 years my favourite super-team as one could hope to see. Good performances all round, and fans will know what has to come in X3.

Russian Ark is a 96 minute single take as a viewpoint character wanders through the St. Petersburg Hermitage Museum, and through the last couple of centuries of Russian history. Visually sumptuous, though it probably packs more punch if you have a decent grouding in the history being covered.

Caught Divine Intervention at the local independent cinema. This is the Palestinian film that did well at film festivals in '02. Strange, quirky, bleak, with a very black sense of humour, from the opening scene where Santa is being hunted down by youths outside Nazareth, to the final one where a mother and son sit in a Ramallah kitchen watching a pressure cooker and she says “It's been long enough. It's time to stop it, now.” via a number of vaguely interwoven slices of life and vignettes. Everything in the film could be read as a metaphor for the desperate situation there, while simultaneously showing that even so, the people can still laugh at human folly.

See 2002 section for Avalon and Revenger's Tragedy.

Also continued at the Film Festival.

Site makeover

2003-06-30T15:58:00.000+01:00

Thoughts behind the full redesign from this to something like this.

This site will use valid XHTML and CSS throughout
Coding strives for maximum accessibility to all.
That the site should be usable in most browsers with the minimum of skull sweat on my part.

The image in the banner is a picture of Mt. Taranaki in North Island, New Zealand, taken in November 1996. Fading into the banner is done with the Fade to Black... application.

Valid XHTML and CSS

This site uses the forward looking XHTML 1.1, but with fairly light use of features that are new after HTML 2.0. This means that, while I'm primarily aiming to have it look nice on modern browsers (Netscape 7, IE6), it should be adequately viewable with back-version browsers (I test with Netscape 4.5), or even as plain text. Indeed the difference between Lynx and NN4 is colour and pictures.

Version 4 browsers will not lose anything of substance - just most, but not all of the prettying-up that is done via style sheets, and some of the recent features like tool-tip titles usable on most elements (which I mainly use to explain links and obscure - often Latin - phrases). They, and users who turn off Javascript, will also only get the human-readable form of the contact addresses, as I use scripting to decrypt a version of the link and replace the plaintext human-readable part on the fly with something that has a mailto link in it. I do that to reduce the gain from trawling spammers.

I had used a table hack to put a narrow button-bar down the left, linking to the site map, but only the most recent browsers were able to emulate a stretchable clickable link area, and in small-screen devices running PocketIE, tables break the "fit-to-screen" algorithm for image layout. So I'm going for a for CSS-based formatting that looks good on a modern browser, but degrades gracefully in NN4.x and PocketIE and works for text browsers. I'd like to thank the CSS gurus at alistapart.com, bluerobot.com, and thenoodleincident.com for the hints, tips, worked examples and design philosophy.

Accessibility

Not everyone is physically able and in possession of the standard gamut of senses. That's no reason to deny them the Internet. I check my pages with A-prompt, and take heed of its warnings.

Not all pages are marked as accessible. Some are difficult to do over the whole spectrum (pages with many pictures). Some because of assumptions in the A-prompt code. As I code in XHTML 1.1, I don't have the HTML lang="" attribute, to tell what language I'm using - I have the XML xml:lang="" attribute instead, plus the <meta name="language" content="en" /> header tag. Neither are recognised by the checker.

If it weren't for the scripts, this page could gain an AAA rating. As it is, none of the pages with the webmaster address on them are accessible because the significant use of scripting is to replace a part of the page.

I can't tell the checker that a page with script on already has the non-script text in place, so I don't need a <noscript> section (and I don't because such a section is painful in XHTML 1.1). But I can tell the checker that there is no flicker on the page, even if I actually have some really horrid animations, and it will accept that. BTW, there animated images on this page, but they are the only ones on this site, and are well below the fold. [.mng files in a Java applet, rather than animated .gifs; .mng is animated .png, but alas only a few minority browsers have native support for the format.]

As noted above, the e-mail address is replaced that way. I do put the (not at all germane to the point of the page, and usually discoverable through asking the browser for page properties) last modified date in at the same time, and on this page I add the "downgrade to Lynx" experience only if it is a downgrade in what you see.

Once you get into the text-rich parts of the site (the fiction and RPG pages), they are almost all AA-level (and would be AAA if xml:lang was recognised). How well the other pages work will depend on what restrictions you operate under - they should all degrade gracefully to text, but in the picture rich pages, how useful that might be is debatable.

This rolling redesign at Easter-Midsummer '03 is also intended to be friendly for mobile users with small screen devices such as old style PalmOS devices with 160 pixel wide screens, or SPV smartphones at 176 pixels wide. For them a 150-200 pixel wide navigation column at the left eats up all the space you have, leaving the meat of the page several screen-heights down. That rather ruins any attempt that the page would have to put the key stuff "above the fold". The browser is IE3 if you're on a Windows hand-held, which also reduces the scope for fancy stuff.

No Sweat

Most pages are composed in a plain text editor using a standard template file as basis. Where a new page is not trivial, I'll compose it using Amaya (http://www.w3.org/Amaya/User/BinDist.html). However composed it will finally be cross-schecked for standards conformance with a dedicated XHTML & CSS validator in Java , also available in .NET for Windows. Amaya is useful in providing a source view with line numbers to match the tool's error messages. The tool and Amaya spot slightly different things as being wrong, but the real definitive place is the validator at validator.w3.org run by the W3C, who define what's what.

All the hard work is in putting the templates together and running them and the style-sheets past the various browsers.

Background

While I disagree with some of the more evangelical "web standards" people, who really mean by that "the most recent web standards" - HTML 2.0 is a perfectly adequate standard that will suffice for writing simple, spartan, text plus images hypertext, after all - but they are right in saying that pages shouldn't be coded to employ non-conformant browser quirks, but rather should be coded for general usability across a wide range of platforms. This site works well with PocketIE, Konqueror 3.0, IE6, Netscape 4.5, 6.2 and 7; it is possible that in IE5 the CSS pattern may not lay out so well, due to known bugs, for which there is no valid CSS workround, and it will be less fancy on the older browsers, but will still be usable.

Personally I can see a reason to use browsers on a "horses for courses" basis - NN4.x has a convenient and obvious cache directory that's well placed to wipe with a secure deletion tool if you're being paranoid - NN7.x hides its cache a little more, and IE does its best to keep you from playing that sort of game. In general, if you control you hardware, and it's reasonably modern, and you don't have accessibility issues, you're probably best off accepting that we're no longer living in the mid 1990s, and you should be able to find something better on a cover disk than a 4.x browser for your platform. Or for the really cash conscious, the cheapest way that I know of to get a high-feature modern browser would be to download Mozilla Firefox () - at 4.7 Mb, for the Win32 version of the 0.9 release, that's less than half an hour with a 56k modem, or about 10% the price of the magazine with the cover disk (using cheap-rate calls) - Amaya may be slightly smaller, but it's very spartan, and is better used as a first pass conformance checker. If you need a browser that's also a mail client, chat client, news client and what have you, and you aren't using EMACS (because it does everything already) go for the full Mozilla, which is about twice the size, or Netscape at three times - both are smaller than a full IE6 download.

Cornwall and The Eden Project

2003-06-02T20:54:00.000+01:00

Spring half term in '03 we took in a short break in Cornwall, including visiting the Eden Project.

This is well worth spending a day at if you're in that part of the world (we stayed 5 hours, and stopped only because the day had gone from foggy, with the haar blowing in over the rim of the old china-clay pit that houses the main Eden site, to bright sunshine, and Karen didn't have any sun-block, and was starting to burn around the back of the neck). It's best to get your tickets and one of the orientation leaflets from one of the tourist centres around the region rather than adding to your queueing, and to help plan your visit.

It's not just another botanical garden, or arboretum, interesting as either of those sorts of places might be; it also makes good use of artworks, starting with the horse at the entrance.

Once through the ticket booth, you see the true scope of the project.

Descending to the biomes, you find the inhabitants

Adam, a spiky metal statue on rockers that sways in the wind,

Eve, a green woman of grass

- and not one but three Serpents, of articulated wood, and other lesser pieces of decoration, in amongst the plants.

The Myths and Legends outdoor zone was still bedding down when we were there; and construction seemed to be beginning for the 3rd (desert?) indoor biome, blocking off the eastern end of the site.

I would recommend going early to the humid tropical biome, on a day where there isn't direct sunshine, and when you can feel comfortable outdoors in the light clothing that will be all that is bearable in the 25C/100% humidity within that set of domes. It was humid enough that the camera misted over.

Not so in the Hot Temperate biome - the Med, South Africa and California. Exterior first for scale

and now the interior, Med and California sections.

California scrub.

Stone fruit orchard.

We stayed at the Seapoint House Hotel in Mevagissey, which is just about visible against the sky to the right of the mast in the middle of the picture below. The grey wall above the cars on the harbour-side opposite is the path up, carrying behind the orange house and curling back around the point. Access by car is from above, then along the terrace - but to get to that level, you have to go past several "Unsuitable for Motors" signs and a 30% gradient warning.

We recommend the Mr. Bistro seafood restaurant, just off to the left of the picture (it considers Rick Stein to be a bumptious newcomer), and the Alvorada Portuguese Restaurant (which is far more than just a provider of salt cod, if that is all one has encountered of that cuisine - in fact there was no salt cod on the menu!).

Even by comparison, what we found upon returning home wasn't too shabby.

Movie Roundup, 2002

2002-12-31T21:08:00.000Z

Some of these I saw at the Cambridge Film Festival, and didn't actually see full release until 2003...

I hadn't planned it that way, but I almost managed the year without seeing a Hollywood blockbuster (read - I explicitly didn't see the latest Star Wars, and nothing I've heard made it seem like I made the wrong decision, nor SpiderMan, as I always felt that Spidey was a tedious tosser. But, at a loose end one evening while Karen was out gaming, and having had good word of it, I went to see xXx. It has action, wise-cracking, sticking it to James Bond, gratuitous hip-ness, and keeps the slushy bits to a minimum – just the sort of thing to indulge one's inner 12-year-old with.

Having broken the clean run, I compounded it by seeing Chamber of Secrets – which I felt was better than Philosopher's Stone for spending more time on plot and less on gosh-wow scene setting. The station exterior shown for King's Cross is actually the next door station at St. Pancras – its recently cleaned Victorian Gothic brickwork being more spectacular than the low, modern, frontage of King's Cross, even were it not at the moment surrounded by the desolation of the works being carried out for the new Eurostar terminus.

Two Towers wasn't bad, but in a situation where they were having to juggle three storylines anyway, and trim to fit into 3 hours, adding the needless extra Aragorn material from whole cloth wasn't what I'd've done. I was amused to see them continuing to top their previous “elf stunts” with the snowboarding with a shield trick. Overall, though, I didn't think it was quite as good as part 1, which I'd seen again a couple of weeks previously.

Le Roi Danse (distributed in the UK under the translated title The King is Dancing) is a behind-the-scenes story of the youth of Louis XIV, the Sun King, from the point of view of his Italian dancing master, Lully. While Louis struggles against the severe demands of his mother's faction, Lully has to contend with maintaining his popularity against the scurrilous Moliere.

Avalon (2003 release), from the director of Ghost in the Shell, and shot in Poland, with a local cast (Polish dialog subtitled in English). The film is in some ways the Matrix in reverse – people from the dark depressing future (shot with Eastern European locations in a colour subdued style – not quite sepia, but nearly so, to the same effect as the bleached out 1984 version of 1984, but darker – by halfway through I had almost forgotten what green looked like, except as an artefact of low-light scopes) lose themselves in the eponymous VR wargame. The game takes the language of D&D – characters form parties of Warriors, Thieves (self described as guides or scouts), Mages or Bishops, and gain levels and experience; though it is all modern small-unit combat – even when there's a Bishop in one scene we never see him do anything other than be Command and Control. In another Matrix-like touch, the future computer UIs (outside of the immersive VR) are very retro – those shown here would have been cutting edge c1975.
The plot follows Ash, a 12 or 13th level Warrior, at the top of Class A, the highest division. She has been playing solo since her once famous party split up, following a game that they didn't complete after one of their number bailed out midway through. She is following leads that suggest another member of that team has managed to find the way into a higher set of game levels (Special A). It's all very atmospheric, but pads itself out by repeating a number of bridging scenes, and eventually ends a couple of minutes before we'd find out what the hell was really going on. In all, unsatisfying but pretty.

Lost in La Mancha, a documentary about the abortive production of Terry Gilliam's film The Man who killed Don Quixote, as it accumulated one jinx after another (on a tight schedule, stars don't show, the locations turn out to be next to an airbase with constant overflights, a flash flood wipes out the first day's shooting, and the actor playing Quixote is invalided out with prostate and back problems). In its 90 minutes, we see just about all the film that Gilliam actually shot, as well as seeing the true life story of a Murphy's Guide to making a film. Perhaps one of these days the real film may get made; as it is, this gives an idea of what really goes on behind the scenes.

Revenger's Tragedy (2003 release), Alex Cox (Repo Man)'s realisation of Middleton's (or Torneur's - the authorship is disputed) 1607 play, described at the time as the product of a diseased mind, transposed into a dark future Liverpool. It was shot on location there, with an all-local cast. Intertwining the original dialog with just enough Scouse for context, it makes the old story feel modern. Unlike Avalon, this dark future is all night and neon, where the Duke (Derek Jacobi, playing an aging roué) rules with an iron fist, and takes his droite de seigneur seriously. Disturbing this comes Vindici (Christopher Ecclestone, eXistenZ,Elizabeth) to take revenge for the poisoning (for refusing the Duke's advances) of his bride on their wedding day, playing his sons (Eddie Izzard superb as Lussurio, the eldest) against him and one another until the predictable Jacobean gorefest at the end. Simply superb, with a soundtrack by Chumbawumba.

The Warrior, a Hindi language film, based, I believe on a Japanese tale. Not Bollywood; rather think Kurosawa in colour.

GPS 44° 43.324'N 3° 17.038'E +1063m to home

2002-05-11T20:41:00.000+01:00

At least it has stopped raining, but it's chilly. Headline news on the TV this morning is Potter's Bar derailment, so groan at thought of travel disruption. French railways probably seem better because they run so few trains (often if you miss the train you want, it's a case of wait to tomorrow; and here at Aumont, most of the trains are coaches).

Breakfast is standard issue - bread, croissant and jam.

Buy cheese and fruit when the grocers opens, check out, and go stand opposite the station for an hour. Meet some of the folk who I passed yesterday, also waiting. Coach not too crowded, and only makes one other stop - St Chély d'Apcher, twinned with Tadcaster. But there are two kids - burbling under fives - who I'd gladly strangle by the time we get there.

Long motorway haul to Clermont, breathless scramble to train. Which then waits for another late train.

And I'm in a compartment now with three more brats. *sigh* The one old enough to sit and read Harry Potter, and comics, is only annoying when he sucks the drawstring of his hoody, or later complains about something to do with his Gameboy (and is taken out into the corridor for strict telling off). The younger two fidget, burble, and ask if we are there yet. The corridor is narrow and busy with through traffic to the Buffet car, and the vestibule by the loo at the end serves as refuge for smokers and users of mobile phones. I alternate position as I am driven.

In Paris by just after half four, but it is raining from solid overcast, though the forecast had promised broken cloud and some sun. Metro to Chatelet, stop at the Trappiste for salad and Rodenbach, then back into the crush for the Gare du Nord.

Arrive with an hour to spare before check-in (could easily have caught an earlier Eurostar), and go up anyway for aircon comfort. Coach bloody miles up the platform, but Halleluiah! No-one in the seat next to me - especially not the huge sweaty pleb who boards shortly after me. One couple misread the class as the coach number, but are sent back to correct coach. And off through misty drizzle we set.

It was after the tunnel that the rot set in. Phoning home, I'm told not to worry, there's an emergency timetable, running every half hour, so decide to use King's Cross line rather than Liverpool Street. Half an hour late - with no announcement that we were going to be - at Waterloo, arrive at King's Cross just to miss a train. A few minutes before the next one, we're told to wait for an announcement. There are a series of these, saying that it's on its way, and so it's eventually there 15 minutes after promised. This train is full of overexcited Arsenal supporters, flush from having won the double, but find the least noisy coach. They get off at Stevenage, and then the quiet guy in the suit sitting across the way from me starts throwing up, so off to another coach, where some girls are talking about the families in the audience of the performance of Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang they'd just been to see as we sit in Hitchin station. The driver then pours on the coal, and drives like the clappers. Even so, it's gone midnight by the time I'm home, having left the hotel at 9 UK time.

Bath, beer (real beer, even if in a half-litre bottle rather than real pints) and bed.

French holiday diaries continue in my main blog.

GPS 44° 48.246'N 3° 25.460'E +1129m to Aumont-Aubrac

2002-05-10T20:40:00.000+01:00

Dark clouds when I get up, but then sun through a low gap under them. Forecast says rain in the morning on one channel, afternoon on another.

Most inedible breakfast to date - "French toast", last night's left over bread from supper grilled more to desiccate than brown. Not even a croissant as well! Choked down a couple of slices, but most of calories came from sugaring the coffee. Meanwhile all the other tables were sending out for seconds!

Sun gone when we set out, but will make brief appearances during the day. The hotel being off the main route, only a few today - the couple from day one, and two "hares". Our breath steams in the chill air. Meet the counter-marching guy again. Tells us that Jacqueline with the two dogs - it turns out she's Swiss - is ahead, or in the lead. Unsurprisingly, we don't catch her up, but I do meet him one more time on the way. Two miles down the road, at the only town en route (St. Alban), we have lost the retired couple, and when I get out the other side, the other two have vanished. Second breakfast?

Briefly lose GR65 on reaching the D4, so go to crossroads with D987, and pick up the trail as it leaves the 987 later.

Off road now, on chalk track, just enough brightness to make it sticky, with the promise of rain always in the wind. More of the clear-cut and abandon, with sparse lines of trees around spaces where trunks have been left until they weather to grey. Overtake other walkers, exchange brief greetings. Not too much of the eroded streambeds today, and not so many long descents. Emerge from final long off-road, to find a local entrepreneur has advertised his taxi service ("Allo Taxi") just on the corner - "any baggage, any distance, equipped to handle travel for medical reasons".

Stop at convenient bench at edge of Aumont, eat melon (had the fromage blanc for elevenses), then head on in. Carry on past hotel to locate station for tomorrow, then back. No sign of a grocer, but pass plenty of boucherie/charcuteries, a news agent, a couple of shops selling general tat.

Turn back to hotel to arrive at same time as the Michels.

This far down the line, Chinese whispers seem to have attacked my name, so take a while to locate my reservation in their book (no, I'm not the M. Zeeman due tomorrow) but that sorted, my bag is waiting for me. Poky shower, so sponge bath when hot water finally arrives. This way I give my dodgy toe (slowly healing but only just faster than abrasion) a chance to air and dry.

After a while to recover, set out to locate any sign of cheese vendor, also to check out the station in more detail and do GPS fix. Find a grocer at last, down a tiny side street, then get to station in time to see the evening bus to Clermont arrive. Useful - now I know which side to wait. On the way back to the hotel, the rain belatedly starts. Meet Jacqueline, the dogs and the counter-marching chap, so make my farewells, before dashing for shelter.

Dinner is soup (diced vegetables in clear stock), a puff pastry cheese sauce thing, pork steak on pasta, cheese (Cantal and St Nectaire), and the bread and butter pud, which seems to be a local specialty.

GPS 44° 57.572'N 3° 32.799'E +979m to Les Faux

2002-05-09T20:37:00.000+01:00

More rain overnight, but stopped by daylight.

Breakfast was a buffet so I had three (small) bowls each fruit salad, and muesli+yoghurt, plus plenty of juice and just enough coffee. One of the Michels is sufficiently sleepy that he almost pours coffee into his juice glass.

As I was checking out, he and the rest of the fast crew from yesterday were walking out the door, and after I'd stopped at the p'tit Casino for fruit and fromage blanc, I thought the dots on the horizon would be the last I saw of them for the day.

The weather is cool, cloudy, damp, with some sun breaking thro' to make it steamy. Rain blowing on wind.

After an hour, I pass the others sitting by the side of the track, munching. Later, they pass me, and this happens three or four times, until I just have joke about the hare and the tortoise - having seen one yesterday, I didn't have to look up lièvre. But honestly they were at it like hobbits!

Today the route passes through a lot of rolling terrain with pines, clear cut in places, sometimes with the cut trees just left lying. In places the ground has been cleared of stumps and loosely ploughed, in othes the debris seems to have been left simply for the locals to help themselves to firewood. The trees, gorse, and dull weather reminded me of the journey from New Plymouth to Rotorua.

Ninety minutes in, suffered through what would have been an hour of soft weather, except for the wind bringing the drizzle in almost horizontally. A brolly was very useful - I was already soaked with sweat in the steamy heat, so wearing waterproofs would have been a disaster. Gaiters are useful too!

Sun comes out, so now have parasol as brolly dries. Winding through a little village, with a horrendous steep descent and inquisitive dogs - up to now all local wuffs encountered had been dozy.

There are tadpoles, legless so far, in the puddles!

I am sure that a chap who passes me in opposite direction about half eleven is the same as did an hour or more before.

By noon, I'm halfway up scramble under trees near Chanaleilles. I listen to my legs and stop - peach, yoghurt and an oeuf dur abstracted from the breakfast buffet.

Load thus lightened, stride up to encounter the hobbits again. A stream to cross with interestingly menhir-like bridge, where a stepping stone would have been less precarious. A gate to wrestle with - needed a lot of lifting to fit the bolt back. Now on main road, and decide to skip two miles of detour. Renewed rain rakes this fairly unanimous.

It stops just as I approach the St Roch chapel and refuge, but I stop anyway to have a lunch of oranges and fromage blanc. "Tea time" quips Michel as they pass me for the last time. Off the road now and back in woods. Sun emerges for brief Fangornish ("almost felt I liked the place") moment, before becoming dull again. On home stretch now, where I'm overtaken by two cyclists. One loses (it had come loose, and he simply removed it rather than reattaching it) his back mudguard, which he soon regrets, the path being rather muddy. Guide-book says to take care to take turn off the GR65 to the village a mile or so off to the side where I'm staying, but the only care needed is to not walk into the sign for the place! (I'd expected one as it had been signed on the path before I'd reached Saugues!)

Of course this bit in the open was the only bit of blazing sun, and of course the auberge was the building on a rise that I passed going to the main road, so had to double back! There'll be a serious set of corrigenda this one.

Very much a restaurant on this Ascension Day holiday, so it takes a while to get lodged. The room's not en suite, but at least it's modern (a converted/extended old farm house). Much needed shower. I'd hoped to take a relaxing stroll, but by then chilly rain comes and goes outside, I sit and watch watch "Attack of the killer bees" dubbed into French. Soon I'm rooting for the bees, as the victims' stupid behaviour deserved them a Darwin.

Forecast says rain tomorrow morning, dull later. It is chilly now. Dinner comes with 25cl red on the table, kidneybean, corn tomato and egg salad, pork steak on mountain of peas and haricot verts, so it's likely to be windy tomorrow too :) then fromage blanc, bread and butter pud with plums, coffee. GPS makes this the highest stop so far.

GPS 44° 59.372'N 3° 40.738'E +892m to Sauges

2002-05-08T20:34:00.000+01:00

Miserable breakfast - bread, jam, watery juice, at least coffee was self serve. Got free drinks without needing to ask as I'd had "une surprise".

On the road soon after eight, and met the overburdened woman from yesterday, who'd managed to lighten her load. Introductions, her name is Marie-Claude, most of the blokes in the ad hoc party that has assembled seem to be called Michel. Easy ascent to start, just have to keep an eye out for the often distant or tiny red and white waymarks. Having a team helps, so if I'm looking at the cherry blossom, others can spot a turning, or if one of the leaders misses a mark, I can yell. M-C keeps telling us to go on ahead at our own pace, but she is cracking along faster than I or the oldest Michel with the "ski-sticks" who I was pacing much of yesterday afternoon (until he'd fallen behind while I'd speeded up to tell about the dog's paw).

At Rochegude, we cross from Velay to Gévaudan - avec sa Bête - and have to make a long descent on an eroded path, with exposed rock, all sizes of loose, and tree roots. Michel with the ski sticks has an advantage with his "freins permanentes", but by the bottom we are all giggling with relief. Now in town of Montirol to cross the Allier, and nearly go astray by crossing nice new modern bridge. More descent to an old footbridge, and now a ninety minute ascent, zig-zagging back and forth sometimes with log steps or hand rail.

The slowest members of the group - those behind me - detach to take the main road while the rest struggle on to summit. Lunch as yesterday. Others have been snacking at every pause, but as usual, being in motion - and hot - kills my appetite. I am bombarded with - and have to decline - offers of bread and cheese and ham - despite water in handy carry pack to drink while walking (Platypus brand), my mouth too dry for such foods. I joke with them that I'm supposed to be losing weight, and pat my tummy. "Pas aujourdhui," quips M-C.

From now most of the way is gently rolling, so making a steady pace difficult, changing gears every couple of minutes as the gradient alters. Meet one chap going the other way to retrieve his car, then to collect his wife whose knees have given out. At one place the Belle France instructions talk of the track becoming a footpath - actually it narrows between barbed wire fences and becomes a stream with occasional ponds. Unlike the earlier wadis.

Finally long descent to Saugues. I stop to take a picture of town, with its tower fortified against the Angevins (the Tour des Anglais), and some abstract sculpture on the hillside. The lost Michels arrive on the main road as the main body of the group approach it, and they all head off down into town. Meanwhile I've spotted somethnng, and detour to a viewpoint just up the road where I take a photo of a sculpture carved in red wood of La Bête

(as made famous in the recent film Brotherhood of the Wolf (Pacte des Loups)), then, as it is still only just 2pm, I find a convenient bench to read a "Cat who..." until a sensible time to make the rest of the descent.

No screw-ups this time - the room is spartan, but modern, though it seems that pilgrims eschew the TV, so no weather forecast again. But there was a much needed hot bath. Today was mainly overcast, with a light breeze, and the early morning and noon showing some hazy sunshine, some sullen heat in arvo. Public holiday, so town dead. Hope there's some life tomorrow a.m. for restocking! It starts raining in the early evening, which stops later, but heavy low cloud.

Salmon tartlet w/melted cheese, chicken breast and fancy mash, cheese (St Nectaire and chevre), fruit pie. 1/2 bt Côtes du Rhone red.

GPS 45° 2.431'N 3° 53.321'E to St Privat.

2002-05-07T20:31:00.000+01:00

After a steep climb to the cathedral (45° 2.735'N 3° 53.050E altitude 666m :) ), arriving just at the same time as late Mass begun (at 09:00), so skipped the peek inside, and descended to begin the walk, taking snaps of the town as I went.

On the outskirts, saw a much overladen young lass - I'd thought I'd overdone it by that stage, but she had maybe 3x the load I was carrying! Was caught up by a pleasant couple from Chateauneuf du Pape, who looked to be youngish fifty-somethings, but were retired. Indeed most of the walkers look older than me, and a whole lot seem to be on the whole 1400km shindy! (Apparently there were 30 at the early Mass for pilgrims). Behind us, the tower of Polignac thrust up, giving the finger to the entire district, overlooking the town. Unfortunately, it got washed out in the glare behind it in the photos I took looking back.

Up on the top of the ridge leading from le Puy, it didn't look too much different from the Dales, except for that peculiarly French style of rural dereliction. That and laying in this year's crop of Puy lentils rather than just grazing sheep.

Found out that this week has two public holidays, Wed and Thur, even though they had the first as Mayday.

Stopped for elevenses at St. Christophe, a peach and a yoghurt from the Casino at Le Puy, and was there caught up by overburdened lass, but I was definitely feeling far too loaded to help, now that the sun was blazing down. Hope she got to her destination and can shed some load.

This route very well waymarked, with only one tiny need to retrace where the red and white mark was not obvious on a farm building. Lunched on some bread pud, and more of the usual fruit and yoghurt. I parted company from the couple for a while, as I ate more simply - no thermos of soup, or such.

They caught me up later as we were entering Montbonnet, but just at that point, dived into a wayside church and I didn't see them again 'til supper. By now, four hundred meters above start, despite some descents. And another two hundred loomed. New companions by now, all looking or sounding tired and less banter. A stiff ascent to Lac de l'Oeuf, and cloud cutting sun to leave chilly wind. In pinewoods at top, the wind was blocked leaving a sullen heat in background.

Get caught up by a lass with two dogs who I saw on the local train to le Puy on Monday, and one dog grabs the ankle of my trousers, nearly tripping me. She is clearly the youngest so far I've seen on the trail, and despite being burdened with full camping gear including tin mugs and coffee pot, is striding faster than the older walkers, despite all their ski-pole like walking sticks. Her calls to the dogs, who have too much energy to make comfortable watching, marked her as German, the only non-francophone I meet (discounting the one Quebecker).

Later, the little dog who nearly tripped me started pausing and chewing at her toes on one foot, which I could see as they were all ahead of me by now. Caught up when the girl stopped to pick cowslips, which are plentiful here, and recited some preassembled German to tell her - and dog obligingly demonstrates, so I add "comme ça." Two thorns are duly removed from the paw, and the trio sped ahead down the patella-popping descent to St Privat, which had already detached the two of us from the other walkers. Hollow laughter on emerging from woods from what otherwise seemed a dead end to see a "Ralentissez Enfants" sign. Any kids would have run me over!

Arrive at hotel to find it shut. Find person at local bar down the road to open it. By now desperate for loo, stretchdown and shower. But disaster! Room not beddered! Manage first two, drag on sweat soaked outfit, back down the road to complain. No en suite rooms left, and no bedder to fix this one! Change to what's on offer and sponge-bath. Only thing firm about the bed is the bolster. Feeling v chilled now, so snuggle under covers in cleanish clothes 'til supper. Anonymous pinkish cream-of-veg soup, pallid sausage on huge heap of lentils vanish as fuel, don't really start noticing details until the fromage blanc. Too soon. The cold apple pie was more just fuel. Intend to argue for free wine to offset room downgrade tomorrow. If the lingo will take it. Getting more frustrated with ersatz stylus.

To Le Puy en Velay.

2002-05-06T20:28:00.000+01:00

After last night's parties in the rain, just another Monday morning. Cold, windy with leaden skies, but TV weather forecast says tomorrow will be warmer.

I wander along the river to the Eiffel tower, then back to the station. Cold it might be, with fat, nigh full grown ducklings huddled all together, looking miserable, on the rim of the pond near Cleopatra's needle, but I was still drenched with sweat on arrival, after 2.5 hours walk with all my kit.

Travelled on the top deck of a double-decker TGV to St Etienne. Lunch a couple of pastries from the Upper Crust at Waterloo that would have been too greedy to eat on Saturday. The clouds started to break up into fair weather cumulus, and even gave some glimpses of sunshine! Changed to smelly local train (full of others who look like they'll be walking too) for last leg along the Loire, as clouds gathered again, no sun, some glimpses, getting less frequent, of blue.

Saw a heron on a rock in the Loire about half-way. A brief shower of rain greeted me at the station for the short walk to the hotel. A warm (eventually) shower at the hotel. Am instructed cryptically as I check in to turn up at 7:30 for dinner when manager will explain.

Dinner turned out to be done in mass production for guests, who all look to be doing the trail. Start with puy lentil potage (english sense) with a small sliced beefsteak tomato aux fine herbs and soft-boiled egg, followed by not so nice turkey leg and potato duphinoise. Then a blue and some Pont l'Eveque, finally proper vanilla ice-cream and fresh strawberries. Vin rosé with and coffee to follow. By now it was half eight, and there was some last weak sun, but as Canal+ had Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon on, I decided to watch that rather than wander around a nondescript French town. The walk through the town will do for sight-seeing, and I passed a Casino on the way here, so shopping is sorted. Much repacking. Hope it all works.

Paris

2002-05-05T20:25:00.000+01:00

Walked to Pere Lachaise cemetary and found Oscar Wilde's tomb,

which was covered with lipstick kisses, and Jim Morrison's tiny plot.

The place was gloomy, but with atmospheric avenues of trees.

Detritus includes twig suitable for temporary stylus (including fitting in the carrying slot) after a little whittling by handy Swiss tool. There was rain on the wind and I was feeling rough so headed back to the hotel (Flor Rivoli, Rue Deux Boules, a basic place to crash near the center of Paris) for siesta. Discover that the feeling of irritation by my big toe is a now raw blister. Ugh!

After the siesta, I wandered up the Rue St Martin past Jospin's abandoned campaign HQ, to République, then to the canal and up to Stalingrad, across to Sacre Coeur, down through Montmartre to the Louvre, then the Trappiste again for supper. It very conveniently offers salads as well as beer, so I had a salade Ardennaise with a Leffe brune, then fromage blanc with raspberry coulis and a frambozen lambic. By now it was about 8pm, and a cheer went up all around the place when the TV showed the projection of 17.9% for le Pen! Had another Rodenbach, and so to bed while Paris partied in the rain.

Velay walking : To Paris

2002-05-04T20:22:00.000+01:00

With various domestic crises, I didn't do such a holiday in '01. Now in '02, I turned to a walking holiday of the same "they carry your bags" type along the first section of the St Jacques de Compostelle trail from Le Puy-en-Velay (aka GR65), where Belle France were simply acting as intermediaries for a French concern. While I was the only Belle France person doing the tour, at least this time the popularity of the walk meant that I was not alone as I travelled (as the Auvergne and Dordogne cycling had been). And unlike the other tours, I kept a diary as I went, PalmOS PDAs being useful like that.

It was not an auspicious start when the ticket machine at Waterloo International swallowed my ticket as being too sweaty (carried in an inside pocket, between me and a small ruck-sack carried in front (big backpack on back) and chewed it up. Realised I'd left the decent camera at home - just in time to get another one-use one, and now find I've left my Palm stylus behind, and to cap it all, the hotsync I did before setting out has managed to get the keyboard hacks fighting each other, so I am stuck with the default one, and no way to reset now but wait for the timeout before fixing it. *sigh*

At Calais saw brazen queues of migrants heading to the track side in broad daylight, with no sign of any official presence at all. Lunch was a sausage roll and a pastie from the Oggy Oggy Pasty shop at Euston station.

Paris was much as usual, and, this being the day before the presidential election, I was pleased to see very few pro le Pen posters or graffiti. Had a pint of Rodenbach at the Trappiste (4 Rue St. Denis, a usual haunt for a beer-lover like myself), foie gras and magret de canard en cidre at la Galtouse (a traditional French paysan cooking restaurant in Rue Pierre Lescot near Les Halles). And I really need a stylus!

Movie Roundup, 2001

2001-12-31T21:07:00.000Z

Working in traditional reverse order..

Harry Potter – This was a “take Karen to the flicks” expedition, and not one I'd've gone to see by myself. It was stunningly well cast, and well acted by a sterling cast of British character actors who probably cost between them less than Tom Cruise asks for an appearance. But boring – I was twiddling my thumbs by the time of the quidditch match (a pleasant surprise – quidditch was less boring to watch than read about – I guess they'd choreographed it off some real sports footage). After the Big V had had his come-uppance, I was silently pleading “roll credits now, please” as each scene terminated.
Nitpick – At King's Cross, platforms 9 and 10 face each other across two lines of track in a little annex (along with platform 11) off the side of the main station, and 9¾ would be approached from the railings in front of the buffers; the movie looked like they were going on to platform pi! In the real world, probably as a result of all the tourists coming to see the site, at the start of December '01, platform 9 was decorated with all the Hogwarts banners and such from the movie. I'm still surprised that nothing's been made of the fact that the platform 9/10 area is also the fabled site of Boadicea's tomb!

LotR part 1 - A joy to the eyes, but I was on to trivia scanning immediately, like I did about the 8th time I saw Star Wars, coupled this time with too much of an analysis of how they've gone about realising it within the limited confines of a 3 hour film. You know the sort of thing – “Ah yes, they'll use the birthday party to introduce the hobbit characters, then cut out the 17 years of delay.” “Is that a chunky black ring Gandalf is briefly shown wearing in the first conversation inside Orthanc?” “Spot the elf walking on the snow!” “Isn't the two arrows at once trick shot too reminiscent of some really cheesy 1980's fantasy film,” “Maize and canola are more Sharkey than Shire.” “Aren't the lines ‘They've got a cave troll with them.’ and ‘Let's hunt some orc.’ a little jarring in their delivery.”
We could have done without the crumbling stair in Moria, especially with that magnificent Balrog about to make its entrance with its cunningly ambiguous “wings”. Boromir's death had much of the “Agh, I'm hit! Cue death scene. No, wait, I'm a high level fighter and that only did a d8.” about it along the way.
They were faced with an impossible scene to film (one that so far as I can recall Bakshi wisely dropped completely), and made what I felt was a brave, but ultimately failed attempt at, in the Temptation of Galadriel. Playing it low key would have been better, I feel, as the infinitely beautiful ice queen isn't a one size fits all image.
Yes, of course I'll go see the rest. Unlike with Harry Potter, I didn't feel the time dragging.

OK, now onto the good stuff, in roughly ascending order:

Atlantis, the Lost Empire – This little steampunk/lost world gem felt like an anime scenario that ended up with the Mouse by accident, and certainly wasn't your average cute Disney cartoon – no bursting out into song, no cute slapstick supporting cast. Nothing profound, but it did at least entertain.

Lara Croft, Tomb Raider – This film did exactly what it said on the tin. Well, we could have had dinosaurs, an underwater sequence and the obligatory attack by dogs while in Italy (did one of the game designers have a bad Doberman experience one holiday, we wonder), instead of the dodgy "men in her life" sub-plots, but you can't have everything. A pleasant surprise in that it underpromised and overdelivered within its premise.

Shadow of the Vampire - A secret history of the making of the original Nosferatu, with John Malkovitch as the director. Worth it just for the scene where he demands that Count Orlok feed only on the dispensable members of the film crew.

Ginger Snaps - A pretty damn definitive “werewolf in the modern day” movie, all the better for not being a big budget spectacular. A plot summary wouldn't do it justice - just go get the DVD.

Brotherhood of the Wolf (Pacte des Loups) - The film I made most effort to see all year, eventually finding it on at the late, late show at the local multiplex, presumably because it was thought to be rather recherché in its appeal. For a start it's a French film, with subtitles - And a werewolf(?) hunter movie. Set in pre-revolutionary France. Costume drama meets kick-boxing action. This film has it all, while remaining intelligent, artistic and, well, French.

And at the top of the list? Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, of course. Wuxia done by a serious director. What more can I add about this one? It will be interesting to see what he does with the Hulk

Jemima (June 2001)

2001-06-24T21:10:00.001+01:00

Most recently arrived, surviving her brother, born June 2001 — and they were so tiny and fast at not quite 12 weeks! The other cats had just about gotten used to them by their first birthday — Smoke mainly ignored them, except when they chased his tail, when he wearily moved away; Penny squabbled wrestling with Bleys, but used either of them for warmth if they stayed still.

Jemima (torty) is a mighty huntress (taking squirrels as well as pigeons), but is still very timid about people, and doesn't like physical displays of affection (I bear the scars from my attempts), quite unlike Bleys was.

Lady May (Aug 1984 - 19th May 2001)

2001-05-19T20:41:00.000+01:00

Named after the combat cat from Corwainer Smith's The Game of Rat and Dragon, here she is in her prime, looking suspicious at being disturbed from her beauty sleep by the flash. She was always the most demanding and crotchety of the lot, and it was rare, though not unknown that she would settle with any of the other cats near her.

She was clearly getting to be an old cat - you could feel her spine when stroking her - when she was about ten, but continued to be a feisty, wiry old lady, though her once shaggy breeches became rather threadbare, as her coat thinned with age. In the spring on '99 she went in for dental surgery [same practice as Frank the Cat of cathospital.co.uk fame] at the same time as Penny had was to be spayed, and we were told she had a slight heart murmur - so we expected that we might only take one cat home. She turned out fine (Penny took a long time to recover from a chest infection she picked up) By that autumn, when her check-up came we were told it wasn't worth giving her her boosters, as she had a growth in her mouth and wouldn't last much longer.

The growth did eventually begin to interfere with her grooming, so she needed dribble wiping up, and bathing (for which she seemed grateful), but not with her appetite. She remained a healthy eater until almost the end. Even on the last Friday, she was happy to stalk out into the garden to appreciate the fine spring weather, despite being increasingly stiff and a bit doddery. Perhaps she did not approve of Penny's attempts to play tig, and she worked herself into an apoplexy, but the next morning, we found her neatly posed in the study, but unable to move, save for shuddering. She could not walk, and showed no appetite, even for treats, still purred if stroked, but faded quickly.

Dordogne

2000-07-18T20:20:00.000+01:00

After the Auvergne cycling in '99, I went on the Dordogne single-base holiday in the middle of July '00. The idea was that you got dropped off by van every morning and cycled back to the hotel. Unfortunately I chose the week leading up to the Bastille Day holiday, for which I was punished by rain, a spell of fine weather just having broken as I arrived. This meant that it was cold, wet, and hilly enough to be not fun. Worse, the supplied itinerary booklet was badly enough edited to be nigh useless, and ambiguously worded enough that on more than one occasion I had to exhaustively take all routes out of a village and proceed some miles along each one to be certain it was the wrong one until I found the one actually alluded to (not helped by the French habit of signing random and different habitations at each junction).

That somewhat soured me to the idea (and I swore that next time, I'd take a GPS receiver with me for just such an eventuality)

Auvergne

1999-06-22T20:15:00.000+01:00

This tour was based from a workshop in a hamlet near Paulhaguet, itself a small village on the Clermont-Ferrand to Le Puy en Velay railway line, most of the way to Le Puy. Travel was via Eurostar to Paris, metro to the Gare de Lyon, to catch the train via Clermont-Ferrand to Paulhaguet, which has a stop which barely counts as a station. The Auvergne tour itineraries have since changed, even to using different hotels in the same towns.

The standard tours were 6 nights of either Valleys or Velay; I did an 8-nights combination, slightly customised for the fact that one of the usual hotels was hosting a wedding party one of the nights I was there. The accomodation was generally unpretentious, but comfortable with plenty of good cooking at dinner.

Taking the tour in June '99 I spent the first night in Chavaniac-Lafayette (that's Lafayette as in the American Revolution, back when the two countries were in accord about revolutions and that sort of thing), before being transported to the base workshop. The journey from Paulhaguet came back through Chananiac to Siaugues St. Romain for the night, then on to St. Paulien. From here, I took a side trip to see the "fortresse feodal" as the roadsigns put it at Polignac (see picture).

This view is taken from the minor road that runs through the village of Blanzac, which was the recommended route, but for cycling, the smoother surfaced main N102 which cuts through some of the terrain is actually a better road, especially on a Sunday when it's very quiet.

This is one of many castles in the region, which was really only pacified and integrated into France in the last couple of centuries. Polignac's castle was never taken in siege, and was supposedly run by as wicked a set of Barons as you'd ever expect to find in a historical romance. It still looks impressive, even though within the walls, apart from the one tower, there are but a few crumbling bits of masonry and open grass.

From Polignac, I headed north to Allegre, where the ruined castle has left only a grand gateway and a small tower. As I approached the town (on foot, as my chain had snapped between Polignac and St. Paulien - while I could freewheel some of the way, it was convenient that it was only a ten mile walk, though the heat was something fierce), I had wondered just what that thing that was slowly coming into view was. This view is from about a mile south of the town.

Here I rested a couple of nights, taking a day off from the road. When I set off, the weather reminded me that the town is at over 1000m altitude (1107m at the base of the archway), with low cloud providing fog cover as I headed north to la Chaise Dieu, (which was annoying at the time, and is now doubly so as the recent tour routes don't go near this side of the valleys) remaining until I dropped below the cloud base as I headed down the painfully long - 20-odd miles - freewheel to Brioude, with the brakes needing to be pumped most of the way.

Brioude is the major town in this region, and the Hotel de la Poste et Champanne where I stayed was the best on the trip (large comfortable rooms, excellent food, and busy friendly atmosphere). I would recommend this as a base for anyone wanting to do an independent tour of the region.

Now it was already time to return the bike and on the way, another magnificent ruined castle described as a Chateau Feodal, this one at Domeyrat. Alas, I passed this one during the long lunch break, so carried on to the base workshop, and waited, sipping water in the scant shade and sultry heat until my lift to that night's hotel. Given that I was travelling from Brioude the next day, that would have seemed the obvious place to stay, but no, I was billeted at a motel somewhere in between, and taxied again the next morning.

Chartres Cathedral

1998-09-05T19:24:00.000+01:00

Various snaps of from a holiday we took in late 98 - staying in Paris, but using the wonders of the 'net to help organise a day trip by SNCF down to Chartres, where we had been briefly about ten years earlier as part of a rather ghastly (friction between a contingent from some Welsh chapel and the coach driver) Paris and environs coach trip. So we wanted to go there in our own time, rather than being chivvied about with not enough time to do one of the guided tours.

Side door at Chartres cathedral

Front aspect

Rear aspect

Detail of one statue in an alcove by the side doorway

Stained glass at Chartres cathedral

Not shown, the Amber-like pattern spiralling in the centre of the interior, mainly because it was obscured by all the chairs set out for services.

Kundalini (4th Aug 1995 - 5th July 1998)

1998-07-05T20:36:00.000+01:00

Sadly run over during her wanderings, Kundalini was a pedigree Asian Smoke ( a Burmese variety with a black outer coat, and white underfur). She grew from this enormously cute phase into a the same sort of rough tough alley-cat hunter as Shen was; though remained ridiculously cute when she wanted to be.

Here she is at about nine months, showing off her bald patch after being spayed; and she kept the habit of rolling over to display her belly when she felt like being cute - as this later photo shows.

She clearly domesticated at least one other household, caught any rodents that attracted her attention, and any bird or insect unwarily flying past, and scavenged where the opportunity permitted. At least she didn't followed Shen in bringing home bits of other peoples' Sunday lunch; but her wanderings did take her across a fairly busy road, alas.

Homeward Bound

1996-12-06T18:26:00.000Z

Pack, visit the aquarium, then catch the coach to Auckland, then taxi to the airport, to find that the plane is delayed several hours with a broken windscreen. Avail ourselves of the business class hospitality suite for the 4 hour delay - which leads to a zero-time stop-over at LAX as we just march from one plane to the next.

And so home again, to early winter and short days.

All in all a wonderful time, despite lousy weather at times. The food is excellent, and by EU standards, very cheap. I would highly recommend it as a place to go (despite the two 12-hour legs of the flight there). Just don't try to see all of it at once. We were there 4 weeks, didn't even attempt the South Island, and hardly had time to catch our breaths while we were being shown a little bit of everything.

Uttermost North

1996-12-05T18:24:00.000Z

Did the obligatory tour up to the utmost north, stopping at the Puketi Kauri kingdom, to admire the huge trees, then up the Ninety Mile Beach, stopping at the north end to body-board down the dunes at Te Paki, and thence to the very tip of the island.

And there it is, Cape Reigna, with its lighthouse, where Indian and Pacific Oceans meet, and the spirits of the Maori make last landfall before heading north into the spirit world.

A bit of a hiccup as the coach runs out of fuel as we start back, and diesel has to be dragged from the stores at the cape and poured into the tank through a makeshift funnel.

Back via purveyors of local honey, and where semi-fossilised (20kyr+ old) kauri wood is excavated and sold (buy a salad spoon and fork set, and a bowl).

Dine at the Saltwater Café again, then wander to a dark part of the beach and show Karen the Magellanic Clouds and other features of the southern sky.

Capsized

1996-12-04T18:22:00.000Z

Lazy morning, then I join a kayaking tour around the estuary, with a guide who has got things figured out just right - spending the summers kayaking in Canada, then the summers kayaking in New Zealand. For myself, I didn't manage too badly in amongst the mangroves, but the pedal steering goes the wrong way according to my intuition, so tryng to catch everyone up on the open water, I ditched and rolled - the escape being automatic and reflexive, and getting back in again simple. I accepted a tow from the guide, but managed to ditch again when I tried steering, so ended up a passive tow, and then walked back home from the falls which were the half-way point of the tour. Meanwhile Karen window shopped, and took a short bush walk.

Dined at Tides, where they served excellent red wine scandalously young - they were already serving the '95 vintage! So we bought a few bottles to see in 2000 with, and by then it had had some chance to mature, and was wonderful.

Dolphins

1996-12-03T18:21:00.000Z

We joined a swim-with-dolphins trip at dawn, under leaden skies. After 3 hours we find a pod, but they have young (one still showing creases in the side where it had been curled up before birth), so we are not allowed to get into the water. We follow them, watching them feed, for about an hour. In the afternoon, while Karen dozed, I went out for a ramble. Dinner at Khushbu, an Indian vegetarian restaurant.

Sunshine!

1996-12-02T18:20:00.000Z

It's enough even to tempt Karen into shorts. We take the ferry across to Russell, where I wander around the hillside, and Karen swims. Dinner at Bistro 40.

Bay of Islands

1996-12-01T18:19:00.000Z

Farewell to Uncle Brian, who is returning home, then we catch the coach up to Paihia, in the Bay of Islands, far to the north. The rain is coming down in the bucket-loads as we wait for the coach, and as we depart Auckland, the roads seriously awash. It peters out into misty drizzle during the day. Dine at the Saltwater Café.

Auckland

1996-11-30T18:18:00.000Z

Wet morning for the drive to Auckland, but has cleared by lunchtime. Wander around the not terribly pretty down-town; decide not to join the long queues at Kelly Tarlton's Aquatic centre, but just take the chance to amble about by ourselves for a change (a family emergency having kept Judy at home meaning that we are no longer being enthusiastically supervised to have a good time).

Rained in

1996-11-29T18:17:00.000Z

Last day at Inglewood, staying indoors against more foul weather, which has abated by the time we go to McFarlanes for dinner.

Pause for breath

1996-11-28T18:16:00.000Z

A quiet day; wander around New Plymouth, lunching at the Yellow Cafe in the mall there. We had a brief glimpse of the mountain in the morning, but it is hidden under cloud again in the afternoon. The weather worsens, with torrential rain and thunderstorms at night, and a tornado at nearby Bell Block.

Inglewood once more

1996-11-27T18:15:00.000Z

After another small tremor in the early morning, we journeyed back to Inglewood the pretty way - round the lake, to the south, where volcanic vents wafted steam, over the top of the island, where the physical road petered out beyond Taumaranui into dirt track that was still called State Highway 43. Here we were back into weather, pouring rain that didn't help in the up and down hairpins. At one point we came to a T-junction - and needed the sign telling us which way was a farm track, and which the main highway.

We finally rejoined the metalled road, got out from under the weather, (where the picture of Mt. Taranaki was taken) and arrived at Stratford .

Taupo

1996-11-26T18:13:00.000Z

From Napier it was inland to Taupo on a beautiful sunny day, seeing the Mohaka waterfalls by the roadside, and long views across the plains to the three main peaks, Ruapehu, Ngauranuhe and a third whose name I didn't record, now seeming to have ceased their activity. There are more falls - more rapids - just outside Taupo, at the Haka falls at the bottom of a gorge where hardier souls than we were bungee jumping.

Taupo is built beside an enormous caldera lake, (the Haka falls being its outflow) and we took a cruise on it, seeing the famous modern Maori carvings on a cliff on the lakeside, and Errol Flynn's yacht being sailed on the open water.

Looking north from the lake, the hills behind Taupo can be seen as a female form, the sleeping princess.

Napier

1996-11-25T18:11:00.000Z

On foot to do tourist stuff in Napier - seeing the kiwis, otters and dolphins at the wildlife centre, and paddling in the Pacific, visiting the Clive Square gardens with the enormous palm trees, and the Mission Estate vinery. Shop for dinner.

New Zealand catering has up till recently been mired in the 1950s, but in recent years, the PacRim style of cooking has taken off [though with some quaint hangovers yet - their idea of refried beans is something that looks more like our baked beans in tomato sauce]. Our hosts, being of an older generation, hadn't really caught up with the change, so we were grateful for the chance to take over one self-cater evening and pass up the weaker parts of traditional New Zealand style. OTOH, I did find that the access to older sheep meat (hogget - last year's lambs - and mutton have much more flavour than bland lamb) was one of the better features of the traditional style.

Shocks and surprises

1996-11-24T18:10:00.000Z

Small earth tremor about 09:00. Head out for Napier, via the Manawatu gorge. East of the gorge, the flatter terain is already turning brown as spring fades into early summer. We stopped to ramble in the rose garden at Frimley Park in Hastings, to the accompaniment of a Dixie band performing as part of a wine promotion. Overnight at Telegraph Hill villa on the Te Mata road out of Havelock North - accomodation for two couples with its own private helipad and tennis court, and views over the whole Hawke's Bay area, though not quite as panoramic as from the top of the Te Mata peak overlooking it.

Windy Wellington

1996-11-23T18:08:00.000Z

To Wellington with cousin Matt, spending the day being driven all around the hilly, windy, streets of Wellington (and occasionally getting to stop and look at it from one vantage point or another). Overnight at the Plaza Hotel, where Matt had pulled some strings to get us rooms, ones overlooking where part of the city had been blocked off for street motor racing. Dinner at Red Dog in Blair Street.

"Tiki-touring"

1996-11-22T18:05:00.000Z

"Tiki-touring" around the Wairarapa - Martinborough, with its taxidermy museum; the Te Kairanga vineyard, which, like most NZ vineries, has most of its output bulk-bought by Californian shippers; a mushroom farm; and a paua-shell shop at Carterton, selling mainly kitsch decorated with the beautiful turquoise shell. Overnight at Masterton, where we dined at Tellers - good PacRim fusion food, but relaxed service.

During the day, we ran into one of the local traffic jams - a huge flock of sheep being driven slowly along the road.

Meeting the cousins, part 2

1996-11-21T23:28:00.000Z

After breakfast that included grapefruit picked from the garden (definitely showing we were in warmer climes than we are used to) we made the long drive further south, past Wellington, to join up with other cousins, past the Pinnacles - eroded towers of loess, protected by capping boulders - at Ngawihi, to Cape Palliser, where we overnighted at a bach (pronounced as in bachelor) in the little settlement of Mangatoetoe, near the Black Rocks seal colony, and the rock-sheet faced hill called Kupe's Sail. From here we had our only glimpse of the South Island.

A clear night for once, and dark, but no chance to go out and star-gaze due to mosquito density. Through the windows that evening, the Southern Cross is visible, head down, just above the ocean to the south.

Here I am loading the car for the next leg of the journey.

Meeting the cousins, part 1

1996-11-20T23:27:00.000Z

Driving down, through Whangenui (stopping to feed the ducks), finding a local arts-and-crafts complex that included a seller of home-made full cream ice-cream, with cones bearing huge quantities for (to those used to the pernicious effects of the French-inspired CAP) rediculously low prices. Then from the Kapiti coast, to Palmerston North, to see Karen's cousin Karen and family (plus Kelly the labrador and Popcorn the cockatiel).

Storm warning

1996-11-19T23:26:00.000Z

New Zealand was battered by the largest storm on the planet. 90mm of rain fell. We stayed indoors, and read, being quite chilly as the houses really weren't built for that sort of weather.

Return to New Plymouth

1996-11-18T23:25:00.000Z

First expedition concludes, with a return to New Plymouth, over the gorse moorland and pine forests of the inland plateau, breaking for leg-stretching at the Whakamuna Dam on the Waikato river.

More hot water

1996-11-17T23:24:00.000Z

A lazy day, a little walking around and window shopping, much soaking in the hot pools at the Polynesian Spa (leaving the 40C+ pools to the Korean and Japanese tourists), then an Italian dinner at Zanelli's.

In hot water

1996-11-16T23:23:00.000Z

We visited the Rainbow Springs Wildlife Park and Farm -- plenty of rainbow trout in the streams, all sorts of breeds of sheep, lambs to hold, and a black Porsche with the honest vanity plate "GREED". After lunch, out to the Te Whakawerawera Thermal Reserve - geysers and boiling mud - then trying the hot but relaxing mineral pool at the motel. Rather than doing the touristy thing and eating at one of the places doing a Maori haka, we found a Thai restaurant for dinner.

To Rotorua

1996-11-15T23:16:00.000Z

En route, we visited the glow-worm cave at Waitomo (as described in David Brin's Earth), phosphor-blue dots scattered like stars over the roof of the cave, lunched at Te Kuiti, the self-proclaimed shearing capital of the world (and heroic scale sculpture of a shearer to drive home the point, rather like those Soviet Worker statues).

We could tell when we were close by Rotorua, with the sulphurous smell in the air, a mix of the smells of salt beef and pease pudding boiling together, eggs, and propane. Arriving mid afternoon, after settling in at the randomly chosen motel on the outskirts, we walked around the lake at Ohinemutu (a Te Awara Maori settlement), then around the hot springs at Kawaka Point park. At Ohinemutu, where the road follows the lake shore, I spotted one of the standard !-in-triangle hazard road signs, with the explanatory text "Steam" - when the wind is in the right quarter, the fog over the steaming waters can blanket the road. Dinner was a curry at the Mr. India restaurant not too far from the motel.

A pause for breath

1996-11-14T23:15:00.000Z

Quiet day at Inglewood, a brief sight of the mountain, hardly distinguishable from the cloud about it, a walk around the neighbourhood, and lunch and the excellent little local café, McFarlanes.

Taranaki

1996-11-13T23:13:00.000Z

Early rain had cleared by after breakfast, so we went into New Plymouth for a for shopping and a walk around the Komaroe aquatic centre. Met Judy's mother for lunch at the at Big Jim's, the very nice restaurant associated with a local garden centre. Despite the cloud, we pressed ahead with a trip up to the Egmont Visitors' Centre, half-way up Taranaki - which was cold enough to get us unpacking the woolies we'd brought along for our return home. There was essentially no visibility uphill from the centre, only brief glimpses of fresh-fallen snow in gaps in the cloud, so after a little walk to stretch the legs, returned to base via a gemstone shop, which had some nice pieces of jade and petrified wood.

Welcome to New Plymouth

1996-11-12T23:11:00.000Z

We were taken on a trip into New Plymouth, to Marsland hill, with the carillon and war memorial, and the views from Churchill Heights. At the lee breakwater, 4m swells were washing over the top leaving standing water on the beach car parking behind. Fortunately there were paths elsewhere high enough above that we could watch the waves - at Paraitutu, to watch the surf crashing against the rocks, and along at the East End.

After lunch at the RSA club, we had a visit to the black volcanic sand beach at Oakuna, and then to a little vinery (Cottage Wines) that specialised in non-grape wines (it has more status there than the home-brew elderflower plonk in the UK), with feijoa being a specialty.

Dinner at the eat-all-you-can buffet at the Devon Hotel - a good place for those who like oysters which, along with green-lip mussels, are a local delicacy.

Another wet and windy night with no sign of the mountain.

A Land down under

1996-11-11T23:05:00.000Z

To celebrate our 15th wedding anniversary, and to placate relatives, we spent most of November and some of December '96 in the North Island of New Zealand. We were based out of Inglewood, near Mt. Taranaki (left). This picture is taken from somewhat south of there (on the dirt track that masquerades as a national highway from Taupo), on one of the rare occasions where it was not hidden by cloud.

The flight out departed late afternoon in the depths of autumn from LHR, and chased the fading sunset up over Scotland, and into the arctic, where a strange wan light glimmered over the ice. Dark fell as we turned south, over the Dakotas, that sprawl of light that is Las Vegas, to LAX. Although we were flying business class (really not a luxury for long haul flight), and could have used the posh lounge, we didn't feel like facing US immigration to get out to it, but just got back on the plane as soon as possible for the long dark flight over the Pacific to Auckland at dawn, to change to a local flight for the hop to New Plymouth. Cloud prevented much in the way of views, but we were pointed out the plumes of ash rising from the central volcanoes that had recently started erupting gently.

We were met by Karen's uncle Brian and his wife Judy at New Plymouth airport to weather that seemed to have come along for the ride with us - cold, windy and raining. After a shower and change, we were taken out to the Pukekora park and fernery to sample the distinctive vegetation that makes the green and rugged terrain look exotic. Forcing ourselves to stay awake until gone 21:00 local, we collapse into bed only to be kept awake by a stormy night of wind and heavy rain.

Azhrarn (24th Feb 1982 - 6th Sept 1996)

1996-09-06T20:34:00.000+01:00

Named after the demon from Tanith Lee's Night's Master who created the first cat (which was of course black) it seemed he would be a permanent fixture in the household.

He was never a well socialised cat, having been born to a semi-feral mother, who was left to rear her kittens undisturbed in a room to herself - he never cared to be handled, was always very timid, and prone to marking out little bits of territory to himself (even indoors, alas). He was also very affectionate, and would dribble while purring ecstatically when stroked, and always wanting to groom the person in return (slobber! rasp! - his tongue was very rough).

He broke a tooth (one of his upper incisors), and found eating painful, and after having the stump removed, quickly went into a decline. Whether the kidney failure that he suffered had been the cause of his problems, or was triggered (or merely exacerbated) by infection of the gums or the anaesthetic for the dental work it's not clear. One problem with an outdoor cat - you can't tell how much they drink.

The picture was taken a little after his 14th birthday.

Camargue

1996-05-31T19:55:00.000+01:00

Having enjoyed the good weather once, we did it again this year, only taking a slightly different itinerary, visiting Aigues Mortes, and then St. Gilles. On the route between, we detoured to the ferry crossing of the Petit Rhône at Bac Sauvage, and to the Parc Ornithologique at Pont de Gau, and assuming there's no Mistral, we'd recommend that route. From St. Gilles, I made a long side trip, via Arles, to Les Baux de Provence (shown here looking south from the crest of the range, with the Rhone delta plain behind the outcrop on which the citadel was built):-

in the Alpilles (inspiration for the town in Robert Westall's The Cats of Seroster), over to St Rémy (where I lunched again at the same excellent crêperie, then back via Tarascon (home of the original tarrasque, for the D&D fans out there), Beaucaire and Bellgarde. [This image has been enlarged from postage-stamp size from a not very good photo, I'm afraid].

On the way from Arles to Les Baux, I nearly got caught in a bull-running event in Fontveille, one of the little towns north of Arles. In fact in late May, the whole area breaks out into bull-fighing and related events, so be warned.

Provence

1995-05-31T19:47:00.000+01:00

Having been caught out by the weather last year, the next time we took an activity holiday abroad we headed south for the Provence cycling tour, starting at Nîmes (an easy journey by Eurostar and TGV). From a base south of Nîmes, we headed south to St Gilles which lies on the fringes of the Camargue. I would heartily recommend the Hôtel Le Cours there, for its cheap, filling, and authentic local meals - the 5 course meal for 92fr defeated me every time, even after long side-trips, such as south all the way to the Med at Stes. Maries de la Mer and back.

From St Gilles to Beaucaire, an unremarkable (indeed mildly squalid) little town, enlivened by falconry displays at the castle. They fly traditional hunting birds, owls (as shown here), eagles and even a vulture.

From there I also made a side trip to Avignon (that's the famous pont d'Avignon), and thence to St. Rémy de Provence, just north of the Alpilles, and van Gogh's retirement place. I would recommend a little crêperie there, but I can't recall its name.

The final stay was at the Pont du Gard, the famous Roman aqueduct, at the Hôtel Le Colombier (complete with dovecote) just half a mile away from the bridge on the outskirts of the town of Remoulins; and whose exquisite menu I would recommend.

Around the Pont itself, the river runs wide and shallow with sandy beaches suitable for swimming and sunbathing (it doesn't seem to matter to the locals even if you've not got a costume).

While swimming, Karen spotted a watersnake here.

Shen Kuei (3rd June 1983 - 30th Jan 1995)

1995-01-30T20:30:00.000Z

A pedigree brown Burmese, who escaped from a life as a show cat by a sprinkling of creamy hairs (his mother was a cream Burmese) on one shoulder.

He was a very human-oriented cat, having grown up in a household with children, dogs and other cats, and acquired from his mother the art of opening door handles. Even when confronted with doorknobs, or sliding doors, he managed to achieve his intent by leaping up at the knob and then glaring at the nearest person. Very fixated on Karen, he would rarely allow other cats to share her lap (though he would curl up with any other cat if there was no lap available), and would scold her upon her return if she was away for any reason.

Being a pedigree cat, he also felt that he had no need to prove himself. Of course he was the boss; and of course he could help himself to scraps at any time - he often brought home bits of other peoples' Sunday lunch. Indeed, one time he tried walking off with a joint of lamb from our kitchen, and to dissuade him I doused him with the first thing to hand - the glass of wine I was carrying. He was a very squiffy puss when he'd finished cleaning himself up, and had acquired a taste for wine afterwards.

He remained the center of attention to the end, deciding to show the symptoms of a cancer the day before Karen's birthday, and expiring the following day.

Sologne

1994-09-28T19:40:00.000+01:00

This tour started out the same as last year's, getting to the same base at Chitenay.

This tour started by heading east into the Sologne. Alas, while in the previous year, autumnal weather at home turned into summer in France, this time we weren't so lucky. En route to Ferté we went past the Gormenghastian bulk of Chambord (above) - those tiny specks by the gate are people and the windows in the outer wall are about 20 foot tall - on the only good day.

The next day dawned fine, and we headed north to Beaugency on the Loire, where we found an excellent place to lunch, the Crep'zeria (just follow the main street north from the bridge, and it's on the right after no more than 100 yards). Hhere I was befriended by M. Bob, who decided that anyone who gave him the rinds from his ham was a friend for life.

But as we cycled back, the heavens opened. Next day we were at least spared thunderstorms, but there was frequent drizzle and rain. With the temperature having fallen from 21C on arrival to under 10C, the thirty mile journey to Romorantin was highly unpleasant (though we found an excellent place for lunch).

With rain and cold continuing, we didn't go far afield during our stop at Romorantin; just wandered around, with frequent stops for shelter. The main feature I remember of the town is its displays of flowers as pictures or more elaborately such as in this topiary peacock.

Loir et Cher

1993-09-01T19:35:00.000+01:00

This tour was based from Chitenay, a small village just south of Blois. We travelled by plane to Paris, then RER and metro to the Gare d'Austerlitz, to catch the train via Orléans to Blois.

The Loire tour went via St Aignan, Montrichard (pictured, on the Cher) and Rilly, (on the Loire), for an 8-night tour, skipping one stop (it differs each year) for a 6-night tour.

August '93 we did the Loire et Cher tour, the shorter version going via Montrichard (right) on the Cher, up to Rilly on the Loire. This tour is geared to chateau visiting, and covers generally easy terrain (the only serious slopes are to be found as you leave the river valleys).

As this was out first tour - and done in a sudden burst of blazing weather at the end of August, we didn't venture too far afield on this tour. The free day at Montrichard we spent heading along the river to the chateau at Chenonceaux, the famous one built across the Loire. On the next day, as the leg to Rilly was only about 10 miles, we made the tour south to the chateau at Montpaupon (pictured) in the first part of the day, spent the heat of the day (3-5pm) on a cruise along the Cher, and only then made the trek to the next night's stay.

At Rilly, we did the obvious day trip to Amboise, where one can visit the house built by Francis I for Leonardo da Vinci on his retirement. The last leg back to base we headed along the Loire, skipping the chateau at Chevignon (we'd rather overdosed on chateaux by this point) crossing to the north through Chouzy-sur-Cisse and into Blois for lunch.

Life before blogging

Carnarvon Western Australia 1965 – 1967

That bloody woman…

What Tarot card...

You are The Hermit

HeroQuest Character Sheets

Genealogy

Introduction

Overview

Outline Pedigree

Kent Family Gilham

North Staffordshire: Walters Family

Kent Walters Family

London Area Gilham Family

Australia Gilham Family

Maternal line

My maternal great2-grandparents and their antecedents

Acknowledgements

My National Service by No.21067688 Signalman Gilham A E

Call-up

Catterick

At Sea

Malta

At Sea

Tripoli

By Air

Egypt

At Sea

Carnarvon Western Australia — 1965–1967 : Project Apollo in Australia

Carnarvon Tracking station

Auxiliary Languages

Esperanto

The very alphabet

The assumptions

The long words

Interlingue

Ceqli

Forgotten Cults

Commentary

Mother Night

Lady Starbow

The Secret Moon

The Blood Moon

Mistress Moon

Mountain Daughter

Sir Sword

Volcano Brother

Thunder Father

Desert Storm

Mothers of the Moon

Emperor Sun

A&E Ig-theme capsule essays

The difference between Old and New campaigns

Working around Combat Patterns (he hits, I parry)

What do you use for genre sources

Kill or stun — which to do

Saintly PCs — what makes them, what game mechanics might they use, and

Why are some players reluctant to GM

Rules that players disagree with

Have you tried hitting PCs with a baby

Creating a home base for PCs

What tips can you give about starting a gaming group

What do the players want the PCs to accomplish

Pulling heartstrings — friends and family as levers

Restarting old games — whether to and how

What rôle does Party pressure play

What helps players stay in character

How do you treat anachronisms like Futuristic Wizards

Does your GMing style vary by the rules set you're using

What to do about occasional players

How have you used game mechanics to explore religion in your games

When is breaking character the right thing to do

What makes for Bad experiences

What's good or bad about Convention games

What makes for a Sense of wonder moment?

(How) do you limit the spectrum of choice of PCs

How would you treat sentient plants?

Should they be mobile? how would they communicate? How would they react to harvesting their fruit?

Memorable games

Role-playing games and me

My maternal great²-grandparents and their antecedents