Author: Mike

It caught my eye… 4 -2025

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This is a map from quite a while ago, 2014 in fact. This was one of the first times that a group of people really tried to gather together a good set of subject data that could be easily searched down to a very local level. It certainly did not try to cover everything, but it was a good source of information for its time. It even spawned a book.

The data sets used covered information from various sources, such as the Office for National Statistics (ONS), The Met Office, Public Health England to name a few. A full list of all the data sources used is available. The project, run by the Small Area Health Statistics Unit at Imperial College London, seems to have come to a close not long after the publication of the book. Time and data collection has really moved quickly over the subsequent 10 years, with Information/Statistics about every conceivable subject at the drop of a hat!

Defence spending is a big topic of conversation at the moment across the whole of Europe and with the next UK strategic defence review due in the Spring of 2025, it will be interesting to see how the UK.Gov intends to spend its scarce financial resources, given the recent comments by the US Trump administration.

Here’s a set of listings of how much various countries currently spend on Defence? Not a subject that is going away.

Britain From Above recently updated its pricing and added some more images to its archive. It’s a fascinating site where you can lose track of time looking through the various historical images.

There are now quite a few other historical aerial mapping sites to visit.

UK Aerial Photos, National Collection of Aerial Photography, Britain from the air: 1945-2009 and the Royal Air Force Museum to name a few.

Books I’ve read – 5

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A heavy seasonal cold/cough/lurgy spread over the last seven days has provided some additional time to catch up with reading, plus a look back at one I read a very long time ago.

The subject of this book is everywhere at the moment with various clips appearing on YouTube Shorts, Facebook/Instagram Reels to name a few places.

It’s an old book (published in 2016) however it’s a great story of just how much effort was required to get the space race going in the early days and how much it relied on ‘Human Computers‘ for accurate calculations.

It’s also a story of the iron will determination to succeed on a chosen career despite all the obstacles thrown at the main characters. It’s a great book; the film was also very good. But I don’t have the T-shirt!

I read this book a while ago but came across it last week while looking for something and it fell off a bookshelf; so, I had to have another look at it.

A great story that brings Hong Kong to life in the mind of the reader – well, it did in mine. I must have visited Hong Kong over 20 times during my lifetime and I never tired of it. Although I have not been there for some 20 years, I never tire of reading stories about the place.

Yes, it has changed and is no more the place I and many others remember. However, books like this bring back fond memories of a time gone by, never to return.

I cannot believe that it is 35 Years since I first read this book and it is still on my bookshelf!

Barbara Tuchmann has written some great books over her literary career, including The Zimmerman Telegram & Note’s from China to name a couple.

I mention this as I choose as part of my Waterstones Christmas gift card another of her books, this time The Guns of August – previously published in the UK as August 1914.

It’s another telling of the early months of WW1; having read several different interpretations of this period, I await with interest her telling of this disaster in the making.

It caught my eye… 3-2025

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Leaving aside the moronic comments made by Trump at the press conference. I have another issue.

Why have many of the headlines and commentary both from the USA news outlets and British news commentators, who in my opinion should know better, kept on saying that the Plane had collided with the Helicopter?

It seems pretty clear to me that the plane was on the final approach to the airport when the helicopter flew into it!

Of course we will have to see what the black boxes say. But I wish there was better and more accurate reporting.

Fire! Fire! Fire! Normally, the main reaction would be to pour water over the fire to put it out. That is true in many circumstances, but the world has become a more ‘complicated’ place, for example, you would not want to use water to put out an electrical fire!

However, over the years, various substances have been created to deal with specialist fires, Foam, Carbon Dioxide, Halon Gas (though banned in the late 1990’s) to name a few. I remember in the navy in the 60’s/70’s the main foaming agent used was Ox’s blood!!!

Well it now seems that there are growing concerns arising from the use of foams containing PFOS and PFOA (perfluorooctane sulfonate and perfluorooctanoic acid), as they have been discovered to be some of the ‘Forever Chemicals‘ that end up (via run-off )in our waterways after a fire has been extinguished. Here’s an interesting report that’ worth reading from the Guardian – 3M knew firefighting foams containing PFAS were toxic, documents show.

Flooded Pitch

It’s rained a lot over the past number of months and it was sad to see that Worcester Cricket Club ground is flooded again. We lived in Worcester for a number of years after I left the Royal Navy and where we purchased our first house.

I managed to get to a few games during our time in Worcester when Basil D’Oliveira played for them. Will they move to avoid future floods? Who knows? But discussions are moving along.

It caught my eye… 2-2025

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Sometimes, the UK’s confusing legal system still appears to be able to deliver unbelievable mistakes.

This is 78 years old Gaie Delay who was jailed for 20 months in 2022 as part of a UK Government ‘crackdown’ on Just Stop Oil protestors. Last Christmas she was release due to medical issues and was to be fitted with a ‘Tag‘ to finish her sentence at home.

Due to physical issues, a correct size tag could not be sourced to fit her. After a number of days; 20 as it turns out, she has now been recalled to prison for those 20 days to finish her sentence! She must be a very dangerous criminal!!! Full story here and here.

With the rise of keyboard and voice operated devices, it seems that the art of handwriting is on a marked decline. I would admit to being one of those who does not write with a pen as much as I used to, though I still sometimes reach out for my lovely Waterman pen (a birthday gift from my sister a few years ago), to use it to write Birthday/Christmas cards.

One interesting fact I learned from this very interesting article (Long-Read) is that as today’s primary school children are not taught to write cursively (joined up writing to you and me) so they also struggle to read it. Amazingly, Finland removed cursive writing from its schools in 2016!

Having spent some of my secondary education years at a Roman Catholic school where penmanship was drilled into you – even the teachers (Nun‘s) used square chalk on the blackboards – everything handwritten had to be in the Italic script style of writing! It’s a shame to see it handwriting slowing disappearing. I’ll have to give myself some ‘Writing-Lines‘ to keep me using my Waterman, so that I don’t lose the physical and mental ability to handwrite something in the future.

I was sad to see that the British Council is facing a UK.Gov funding shortfall and may be forced to reduce its operations around the world. I think this organising does a tremendous amount of work on behalf of the UK and should be looked on as a good use of ‘Soft Power‘. One effect of withdrawing funding, will be an upsurge in the influence of Russia and China in areas where we once promoted our basic core values.

Books I’ve read – 4

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More of what I have been reading since returning to physical books.

What a great book! It’s really two books in one. Not only covering one of the worst winters the UK experienced in my lifetime, but also a well-documented history of the many social/political changes happening in the UK during the early 60’s including the emergence of the ‘Swinging Sixties‘, the start of the Mersey Beat sound through The Beatles and of course many others.

Some other highlights of the book included revisiting the Profumo scandal and of course, as I found out through internet searches, the author‘s family connection to Sissinghurst – which is worth a separate post – which I have visited a few times. Great anecdotes.

We lived in Plymouth at the time of the ‘Big Freeze‘ (Video) and as a 13-year-old I did not mind at all that the buses could not negotiate the hills to take us to and from school, Extra holidays!! Though, I do remember my father taking us on a trip to Okehampton to see some relatives during one of the easier driving days of the time. My mother was not amused!

I have read a number of Max Hastings books over the year, I read this one last year after watching Ken Burns and Lynn Novick‘s excellent and must watch documentary about Vietnam.

A very detailed book that did add to my already reasonable knowledge about the conflict from the many other books that I have read including – In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, We Were Soldiers Once…And Young, A Bright Shining Lie – and definitely a book to keep for future reference. I especially like the collections of images and maps that helped to understand what happened.

However, I cannot get over Max Hastings not sacking Boris Johnson when he was his boss at the Daily Telegraph newspaper. Perhaps if he had, we might have been spared his atrocious attempt at being UK Prime Minister.

Another book that I read a while ago but came up in a recent conversation. This book, written by Alan Turing‘s nephew Dermot Turing, covers the often overlooked work that Polish Code-Breakers did in the early days of trying to break the Enigma cipher machine codes used by the Nazi Germany during World War Two. It’s a very interesting read and add more detail to that part of history.

History is also a funny thing; early on while serving in the Royal Navy through the various jobs I did, I came across some (then classified) machines that were used for manually encrypting communications much like the Enigma did. It was part of the job to look after them – maintenance etc. Though, there was not a lot you could do in reality. You did what you did with them and really did not think too much about it, as it was just like any other piece of equipment, be it radio transmitters or radar systems.

Imagine my surprise when in 1974 a book called The Ultra Secret: The Inside Story of Operation Ultra, Bletchley Park and Enigma by F. W. Winterbotham was published as the first book in English that suddenly divulged what until then had been the secret world of World War Two cryptography. I then suddenly realised that I had been working on one of the successors of the Enigma, the Adonis/SEC/KL-7!

It caught my eye… 1-2025

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Enheduanna: The world’s first named author! This person’s name came up in my recent reading of Neil Oliver’s book – The Story of the World in 100 Moments. I must admit that I, like I am sure many others, had not her name before.

However, there is quite a story to tell about this Mesopotamian poet, princess, and priestess from circa 3400–2000 BCE.

The New Yorker – The Struggle to Unearth the World’s First Author

The Morgan Library and Museum – She Who Wrote: Enheduanna and Women of Mesopotamia, ca. 3400–2000 B.C.

Telegraphi – The oldest signed poems bear the name of a woman

They say it’s a mark of time that you can always remember where you were when certain past public events took place, the Kennedy assassination, the first man to walk on the moon, the Falklands War, the death of Queen Elizabeth II and of course the day that Notre Dame Cathedral caught fire!

Having visited it many times over the years while being in Paris on business/pleasure, it was devastating to see and one could only wonder at the time, if it would or even could be rebuilt. Ancient Cathedrals have burnt down before and some have been rebuilt, but was this a task too far?

No, it was not. What an unbelievable job the whole of France has done. It’s taken over 5 years of hard work and amazing efforts to bring it back to life. I followed the progress through the various documentaries that were made showing all the various trades that were collected together to restore the massive structure.

I hope to go back and see it again in 2025, but will wait until the immediate rush of visitor has died down. Yes, it was tragic to witness its demise, but equally, it has been amazing to see it rise again from the ashes.

Map; Pocket Underground map, by Henry C Beck, January 1933
Map; pocket Underground map issued by UERL, 1908
BeckDesign_Today
LondonTubMap-SpiralDesign_Alternate

I came across these London Underground Map images accidentally a while ago while looking for some other information about London history. Its interesting how the design has evolved over the years.

Books I’ve read – 3

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It seems that I have got back to physical book reading in earnest.

I read this first book of the six-book series 18 months ago while on holiday in Spain and got through it in two days!!! What a fantastic tale, I love these sorts of books that meld historial facts with historical fiction. When done well (which this has), it creates a very exciting story line. The Great Fire of London and its aftermath told over the five subsequent books have been woven into a great tale.

Having been born in London and visited many of the places mentioned in this and the subsequent books such as The Monument, St. Paul’s Cathedral, The Tower to name a few, again shows the research that Andrew Taylor must have done to produce these books.

A recommendation from my sister, and what a great story this turned out to be. I had not read any books by Kate Mosse before, but this story centres around people from different sides of the then religious divide during the initial French Wars of Religion affecting the Huguenots and the Catholics.

Set across Southern France, mainly in Carcassonne, Toulouse and the small village of Puivert, it’s a great tale that again shows the huge amount of research that must have gone into the writing of this book by Kate Mosse.

I’m glad I read this book, which also brought back memories of my many travels in France for business and pleasure – though in the 20th century! I will look forward to reading the next one in the series – The City of Tears, which carries on with the story, but this time relocating to Amsterdam and Northern France,

It’s strange how you come across books to read, while reading The Burning Chambers and looking at some online search results about its story content – I do that a lot; up popped a link ‘if you read this, then you might like this‘ and that is how I discovered Phillipa Gregory. Then I found the list that she had put together for the series of The Plantagenet and Tudor Novels to be read in which order.

So this is how I came to read The Lady of the Rivers. I really enjoyed this book, though I was a bit unsure till I got to halfway thought it and then I was hooked. A great story set during the latter years of the Hundred Years War and the various royal intrigues of the time.

Who would have thought that a 14-year-old girl from Luxemburg would end up affecting the history of the next 100 odd years through her marriage and descendants. A great book, I already have the next one – The White Queen – in my stack of books to read. It turns out that there was a BBC adaptation of this broadcast in 2011. Not sure that I remember watching this at the time, so it will have to be either online from Amazon or a DVD purchase (probably not), as it is no longer in BBC iPlayer.

I’m looking forward to reading the whole series of these books.

Back-Up! Back-Up! Back-Up!

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Shock, horror, panic!!!! I was working on some new files in Adobe Lightroom today and after that, I happened to look in a directory of some very old folders of files dating back to 2006 when to my horror all I could see was an empty frame with no preview of the file. Long story, short, the files were missing from my hard drive! However, all the Lightroom info (metadata) etc. was still present.

I have a leftover habit from my many years of IT work and when I latterly worked as an independent IT consultant (with other people’s data) of always having backups of everything. Hence, how could this have happened?

I use the grandfather, father, son backup method where three large USB discs are rotated over a period (currently 14 months) of time. Along with the occasional extra back up to another 2 USB drives which I rotate and keep at a neighbour’s house – backups are no good if your house suddenly burns down/floods/broken into. When I was doing work with clients, it was a condition of the contracts that I also provided off-site secure backups as well. You could say that old habits die hard, so again how could this happen?

There is of course cloud storage in its abundance today and at reasonable prices, but one thing that lets this down is the very variable speed/time it takes to upload files to the various cloud storage options on offer, but that’s a subject for another post.

Suffice to say I have managed to track down the files on a backup disc of June 2024 and restored them, so there is now peace in the world!! I need to investigate why they suddenly disappeared and around what date, and why only some files – the backup software error logs offer no clues at the moment.

Good job that they were only my own files, even so; missing old photographs of memories is not a good thing!

Books I’ve read – 2

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Following on from my return to physical book reading last year, here are a few more of the ones that I have found to be good reads, again more of a record for myself.

What can one say about Robert Maxwell that’s not already been said? This is a great book that sheds more light on his background and eventual demise and sad end. Did he jump or was he pushed? I don’t think we will ever know.

I did meet him once in person, and then had some dealings with him later when I worked for an American Publishing-Software company trying to get its first sale in the UK in the early 80’s. Wouldn’t talk directly to us – he sat in a back room – but negotiated by phone via one of his M.D.’s. He told me that he had been sacked three times by Maxwell for various reasons, HR just told him to ignore it and go back in. However, on the fourth time, he just never went back. I think he then became a teacher; probably less stressful!

I’ve read a number of books about this period in history quite a long time ago, but this one seemed to be a much easier read than the others and full of information I had not come across before or probably had forgotten!

Clearly Richard Huscroft carried out a massive amount of research for this book and covers in quite some detail, all the events that you might think ‘well, it’s just history‘ but, as has been proved over the years, had many ramifications for the present world that we live in today.

With an excellent Index and an eight-page section on Suggestions for Further Reading. This section will keep me going for quite a while. A very good read.

I was given this book as a Christmas present in 2024. To be honest, I was not sure that it was for me. However, what a great book, easy to read and full of astonishing facts that really make you think about everything that has gone before – am I getting old!

As the title says, it’s divided up into succinct stories, some very short and some not. But each a stand-alone event that somehow in their whole all pull a story together that once again tells ‘us’ why we are where we are today.

I’ve not read any of Neil Oliver‘s books before, but have seen him on TV a number of times. I like his writing style, easy to follow and quite humorous in places. Another good read.

Follow-up. I posted before about Hilary Mantels final part of the Wolf Hall trilogy, The Mirror and The Light. This was a great read but I needed to re-read some parts twice to get a real understanding of it.

Now having seen the final season of the BBC TV adaptation of Wolf Hall, I can only say what a masterpiece! The TV programme further explained (for me) some of the passages of the book that I struggled with due to her writing style. But what an epic piece of TV and getting the two main actors to reprise their roles again was also a masterstroke of planning. I shall make a point of watching both series again at some point, and perhaps even buying a disc set! Wolf Hall DVD. The Mirror and The Light DVD (tad expensive!).

Resolute

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I looked this word up in the online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and it provided a response of…

Resolute
adjective: Resolute
admirably purposeful, determined, and unwavering.” he was resolute and unswerving”

So a resolution for me in 2025, is to try and be better at adding more posts, we will see how well I do that!