Things of the past: Bakelite

My old iron…

The other day, when I was in the middle of ironing, all the electrical power went off in the house. I assumed it was a power cut and checked with neighbours. I was surprised to find it affected only our house.

I turned the power-supply trip-switches off and back on. Nothing. I switched off the lights, radio, iron, etc and tried again, realising I had missed one of the trip-switches the first time. Hooray! Let there be light!

I switched the iron back on. Bang! Everything went again. But

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From the non-digital archive: The painted streets of County Cork…

Skibbereen, west Cork, Ireland, in 1995…

A couple of posts ago I shared my pictures of the colourful streets of Aberaeron in West Wales. At the time I mentioned that brightly-painted buildings are also a feature of coastal towns in the west of Ireland.

I haven’t been there for a while, but

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Top posts of 2011 remembered…

It’s that time to draw a line under 2011 and announce my top posts for the past year (figures kindly crunched for me by WordPress) – and three out of five were posts I had published in 2010…

I seem to have the BBC’s Frozen Planet to thank for my top two posts this last year, as again penguins seem to have been the big attraction for search engines.

Penguin of Arabia by Ursula Vernon

1. Designer birds: Penguin

From paperback books to chocolate biscuits and much more besides, penguins are iconic birds. Here are some others I have chosen in 2011:

Designer birds: Peacock

Designer birds: Owl

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2. English words from Celtic roots…

English words from Celtic roots were top post in 2010...

This year’s runner-up was last year’s winner – and again it’s all because I used a picture of penguins. The word penguin comes from either the Welsh or Breton
Pen-Gwyn (meaning “head-white”).

I have also posted several other items on the origins of the English language:

The ungothroughsomeness of stuff…

Latin for today

English words from Scandinavian roots

English words from Indian roots

English words from Spanish roots…

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White tiger at Singapore Zoo by David George

3. The sadness of white tigers

This one was new for 2011 and is a memory of the white tigers of Bristol Zoo and some information on other threatened big cats of the world.

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4. Carousel horses – an illusion of freedom

Horse head from the Riverfront Carousel in Salem, Oregon, by Crossmark

This was a wonderful excuse to collect together some beautiful images of carousel horses, unicorns and even zebras and this post was fourth in my top five for the second year in a row.

Another collection of art went with my post
Fairytale bedding: the Princess and the Pea…

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Some 1970s 'sci-fi' fonts from the 1970s

5. Design icons: Letraset

Design and nostalgia combined to make this a popular post. The same elements appeared in
Every poster tells a story

There’s more art and design here
and more nostalgia here

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Old sewing machines in captivity…

The All Saints window in the Hayes, Cardiff

I think I must be in possession of the only old Singer sewing machine still in the wild. All the others have been rounded up and herded into the windows of All Saints fashion stores throughout the land.

My Singer sewing machine - with apologies to Henri Rousseau's Tiger in a Tropical Storm painting of 1891...

My mother’s machine still

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Iconic colours: Purple, white and green…

This teddy in the Wimbledon tennis colours is currently available online for just £14 - click on the pic to go to the Wimbledon Shop...

It’s the Wimbledon tennis championships at the moment, so what better time to look at that iconic colour combination of purple, white and green used by the tournament – and also by the suffragette movement. But

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Scentless crime: Whatever happened to Sweet William?

Sweet William (Dianthus barbatus) from Marks & Spencer...

For many years I have seen the buckets of bunches of Sweet Williams (Dianthus barbatus) at the Marks & Spencer checkouts and thought maybe one day I would buy some – although I usually prefer big yellow chrysanthemums or roses.

Last week I bought some. I had hoped for the heady nostalgic spicy smell I recalled from childhood, when my “Auntie” Margaret grew them in her garden and gave me fresh little bunches. Her lovely second husband was called William (Bill) Baldwin and she sometimes called him Sweet William.

But back to the M&S bouquet. What a disappointment! Nothing! Hardly a whiff of perfume. Is it because they are stale? Or have the plant breeders knocked the odour out of them?

Sweet Williams come in several shades of pink and white...

They are of course

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Great space illustrators: David A Hardy

Forward to the past - interstellar communication visualised by David A Hardy in 1972

This is a sudden posting, prompted merely by reading that Saturn is in opposition throughout the next few weeks, making it at its brightest to the naked eye.

So it’s a good time to recall the small telescope I owned in my childhood and to retrieve from my shelves a book called Challenge of the Stars (published by Mitchell Beazley in 1972 – although mine was a cheaper edition from Book Club Associates).

Challenge of the Stars by Patrick Moore and David A Hardy (1972)

The book is by Patrick Moore and illustrated by David A Hardy, whose images deserve some plaudits, I reckon, as I now realise they are the pictures I still have in my mind’s eye when I visualise the planets of our solar system. More about Hardy later…

Those were the days when a great Planetary Grand Tour of the outer solar system was still on the cards, in a decade when the gas giants were in a conveniently close alignment and could be used as gravitational slingshots to help a probe on its way after taking close-up pictures.

Patrick Moore enthused

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Rushing around like a bluebottle…

The bluebottle (Calliphora vomitoria) is a buzzing nuisance in summer - this picture is by JJ Harrison

Lately I have been “running around like a blue-arsed fly”, a lovely phrase I picked up from my parents during my childhood.

I don’t think there is any doubt about it, the saying must surely come from the buzzing behaviour of the bluebottle, an annoying fly (Calliphora vomitoria) found in many parts of the world.

It’s very much a fly of hot summer weather and rotting food, rubbish and excrement. Even its stop-start buzzing is annoying. Which is all a shame, as it has a pretty metallic blue colour. Here’s a lovely website all about iridescence, featuring the bluebottle and other lustrous marvels.

The bluebottle has a lustrous behind...

Why do we call it a bluebottle? My dictionary has no idea. Although I suspect it may come from the old word bot or bott, meaning the larva (maggot) of a botfly, which infests the skin of various mammals, producing warbles (painful, hard swellings). This particularly affects the stomachs of horses or the noses of sheep.

Bott probably comes from the Scots Gaelic word boiteag, which means a maggot. The word maggot itself may come from a Middle English word maddok/mathek from Old Norse mathkr, all meaning “maggot” and related to that other word mawkish, meaning “maggoty”.

My memories of the bluebottle come from the days before fridges, when we kept food in a larder or metal-meshed meat-safe. Our constant fear was maggots from bluebottles. We had roast shoulder of lamb (a cheap, fatty cut) for Sunday dinner (in the middle of the day, we didn’t call it lunch).

The leftover meat was placed on a high shelf and many was the time it was retrieved only to find the white fat moving with cream-coloured maggots. A bit offputting!

But flies are not the only bluebottles. In Britain bluebottle is also a name for the common cornflower (Centaurea cyanus) – not that I would ever have called it that. Another nickname I wouldn’t have used is “bachelor’s button”. Pretty flower, anyway.

Bluebottle is also a name for the common cornflower (Centaurea cyanus) - this picture is by Adrian198cm

Then there are the policemen…

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Remembering Decimal Day – 40 years on

The booklet every household in Britain received in preparation for decimalisation

On Monday, February 15, 1971, Britain’s currency went decimal. Forty years on, it’s an ideal opportunity for nostalgia about the wonderful coins we had before that Decimal Day.

The £1 remained the basic unit of our currency and in those days we had green £1 notes, rather than the brassy coins we have today – those were introduced in 1983 and the £1 note was withdrawn in 1988.

The £1 note of my childhood – it was changed to a smaller one in 1978 and £1 notes were eventually withdrawn in 1988

But now the £1 was divided into 100 new pennies. Previously there had been 240 old pennies, not that we thought of it like that. There were 12 pennies in a shilling and 20 shillings in a pound.

We had our complicated (imperial) weights and measures tables on the back of every red exercise book and many was the childhood hour we spent memorising them.

Coins were so much bigger then, and the non-decimal system made sure we were good at arithmetic. No wonder our “times tables” went up to 12, rather than the obvious 10 (obvious because we have 10 digits on hands and feet, made for counting on).

Pennies of Edward VII (1906), George V (1933), George VI (1948) and Elizabeth II (1953)

A pocketful of pennies also contained the history of our kings and queens for more than a century. Before decimalisation came in, we were able to amass portraits in copper of Queen Victoria, Edward VII, George V, George VI and Queen Elizabeth II. Of course George VI is much in the news in 2011 with the success of the film The King’s Speech.

As for Edward VIII (of Mrs Simpson fame),

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Stone diary: Memories of flint…

My lovely flint hand axe knapped by Bruce Bradley in the early 1970s at Cambridge

These musings on the stone called flint and its poorer-quality relation chert are prompted by the recent discovery of 120,000-year-old stone tools in the United Arab Emirates. Read more about that here.

This 120,000-year-old chert hand axe was discovered in the United Arab Emirates

Those tools are made of chert, a fine-grained silica-rich microcrystalline sedimentary rock found in limestone. But when it is of fine quality and found in chalk, it is called flint.

Worked flint is beautiful – hard, glassy, grey, touchable. I first held it in my hands when studying prehistoric archaeology in the early 1970s.

At the time Bruce Bradley (now Professor) was studying for his PhD in experimental archaeology at Cambridge University. He was famous even then for his flint-knapping technique – it was said that it was lucky he wore spectacles as they were covered in tiny chips from the flying fragments of stone and he would otherwise have been blinded.

When he left he sold off many of his pieces. I have to admit I didn’t go to the sale myself, but my fellow student Matthew Spriggs picked up some flint tools for me. Thus I acquired the large hand axe, an arrowhead and a small sickle, all of which are pictured here.

And thanks to the miracle of Google, I find Matt is now an archaeology professor in Australia. I wondered what had happened to him!

A close-up of the beautiful flint-knapping on this hand axe by Bruce Bradley

Excellent flint arrowhead knapped by Bruce Bradley at Cambridge, England, in the early 1970s

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