We’ve had a lot of rain lately. An awful lot of rain, particularly in the Welsh mountains that feed the local rivers, which then flood several days later. The river Severn has been particularly badly affected, and the flood defences have been tested to the extreme. Malvern is too high to be directly affected, but […]
Although my experience with the mutant blue-tit was somewhat off-putting, I had been given a second needle-felting kit for my birthday, so I thought I’d try again. This one was proudly Welsh, and contained undyed raw British wool from Grey Welsh Tops, Dorset Horn, Black Welsh and Brown North Ronaldsay sheep – so it was […]
I have a very steeply terraced garden, with the first terrace nearly as high as the house, and two more levels above that. When we moved in, the so-called “retaining walls” of each terrace were concrete slabs, held in place by friction. I remembered enough of my civil engineering classes to work out that the […]
I’ve not posted recently because I’ve been away, spending the last nearly three weeks in New York. It wasn’t a holiday though – I was there on business, participating in the latest round of equipment trials as part of a big multi-national team. It was the most complex field trial I’ve even taken part in, […]
I am not green-fingered by nature, and neither was Christopher. When we were thinking about buying this cottage, we were very wary about taking on the garden – and rightly so, as we really didn’t know what we were doing. However, one of the last things that Christopher planted in the garden before he fell […]
There is a very interesting old house about 15 minutes from me, which dates back in part to the Norman Conquest, though much of the remaining fabric of the building dates from when one of the owners in the Tudor period married into money and was able to afford to do it up. Unusually for […]
Stokesay Castle is about half way between Ironbridge and Malvern, so it was an ideal place to stop for lunch on the way home from my short holiday. It was one of Christopher’s favourite English Heritage sites, and we used to go there at least annually to look at the wonky gatehouse and solidly-built tower, […]
Just fifteen minutes from the industrial heritage of Ironbridge is the site of the fourth-largest Roman town in Britain. There’s not a huge amount of it visible these days – most of it is under farmland, with much of the building stone recycled into the churches in the local villages. But there is still a […]
Easter seemed very late this year, and after the hectic end-of-year at work, followed immediately by working on a big bid, I really needed a break. The trains were predicted to be chaotic over the Bank Holiday, as usual, so I looked for somewhere interesting within what I consider to be a driveable distance. Ironbridge […]
I had an interesting couple of days in London last week, taking a small team of our software engineers to a “hackathon”. For those who haven’t come across the term before, Wikipedia defines a hackathon as “a design sprint-like event in which computer programmers and others involved in software development, including graphic designers, interface designers, […]
