One of the Magnificent Seven

This is what it looked like in Nunhead Cemetery (one of London's Magnificent Seven cemeteries) last weekend:

The Trees around Nunhead on Tour 3: York

August 4th, 2008.
Or should it be the Trains around...

York is famous for lots of different things and is a terrific and quite touristy City (and, we gather, a nice place to live). One thing is for sure: we find it hard to avoid the National Railway Museum. Technically, part of the UK "National Museum of Science and Industry" (NMSI), the railway Museum seems to have a character of its own. Not least, for me, because of the deep and abiding beauty that these huge steam engines have. Astonishing pieces of engineering and technology, they are liveried and polished and cared for to such a great extent that they seem more than just complex machines. Sometimes, looking at the detail of a cab or the side of a driving wheel with its rods and pistons, there can be a real sense of the numinous. If that doesn't sound too pretentious. I have also to say that any Museum that broadcasts videos of "The Night Mail" and has a large model railway gets my vote....

The details of those controls and the richness of the reds, silvers and greens seem wonderful to me.
Some of the engines seem similar at first...

While others are really quite famous...

The NRM also has quite extensive workshops, and while we were there perhaps the most famous railway engine of them all was undergoing what appeared to be a very extensive refit...

...and here is one of the people who made it all possible...

A thought of Chairman Humph

"Britain has the best trees in the world."

It Just Occured to Me, the reminiscences and thoughts of Chairman Humph,

Humphrey Lyttelton, London, 2007, p.149

Catching up...

Its been a while since I posted. Basically a BT problem with our ADSL link - which due to UK regulation - has to be sorted out by going through our ISP. Which is a slow and cumbersome way to get stuff fixed.

It was broke for a while, and then the rest of the family had first dibs on catching up. Sigh.