To thine own self be true
Moving house (this is my sixth time) is always a monstrous upheaval. Last time I re-located, the problems were all in the legal formalities: in the present instance these went off reasonably smoothly and the great headache was the move itself. The two removal men ...lummee, those blokes earn their wages I can tell you... said they'd never known such a job take so long to load. That's how much stuff we had. We might have saved them some of their trouble if we'd known: the house we've moved into is a little (but not much) smaller than its predecessor and we've had to discard a great many of our belongings. I've been running a shuttle service back and forth to the council's CRC (Community Recycling Centre) and there have been some difficult partings with objects I've kept by me all my life.
But this is what I moved for. I like a bit of industrial dereliction and deplore official attempts to tidy it up, "reclaim" it, or otherwise pretend it wasn't there. A kind of dishonesty lurks ...a denial of what you once were ...a trying to be what you're not. "Dismtd Rly" avers the Ordnance Survey "Explorer" map. Not far behind the camera the railway is extant and in occasional use. At any rate the rails are shiny and a modern colour light signal burns through the day. There appears to be an opencast coal operation. I shall have to keep an eye on Realtime Trains. I loathe those OS maps that are printed on both sides. These usually give coverage of sparsely-populated regions. Having moved from an area at the edge of the Fens to another on the rim of the great wet desert of central Wales, I find myself the owner of quite a few. I am on a mission to replace them with older, but recent, equivalents of the 1:25,000 Second Series. The secondhand bookshops of Hay-on-Wye beckon. Even the "Pathfinder" (ugh!) sheets are acceptable.
To thine own self be true
Moving house (this is my sixth time) is always a monstrous upheaval. Last time I re-located, the problems were all in the legal formalities: in the present instance these went off reasonably smoothly and the great headache was the move itself. The two removal men ...lummee, those blokes earn their wages I can tell you... said they'd never known such a job take so long to load. That's how much stuff we had. We might have saved them some of their trouble if we'd known: the house we've moved into is a little (but not much) smaller than its predecessor and we've had to discard a great many of our belongings. I've been running a shuttle service back and forth to the council's CRC (Community Recycling Centre) and there have been some difficult partings with objects I've kept by me all my life.
But this is what I moved for. I like a bit of industrial dereliction and deplore official attempts to tidy it up, "reclaim" it, or otherwise pretend it wasn't there. A kind of dishonesty lurks ...a denial of what you once were ...a trying to be what you're not. "Dismtd Rly" avers the Ordnance Survey "Explorer" map. Not far behind the camera the railway is extant and in occasional use. At any rate the rails are shiny and a modern colour light signal burns through the day. There appears to be an opencast coal operation. I shall have to keep an eye on Realtime Trains. I loathe those OS maps that are printed on both sides. These usually give coverage of sparsely-populated regions. Having moved from an area at the edge of the Fens to another on the rim of the great wet desert of central Wales, I find myself the owner of quite a few. I am on a mission to replace them with older, but recent, equivalents of the 1:25,000 Second Series. The secondhand bookshops of Hay-on-Wye beckon. Even the "Pathfinder" (ugh!) sheets are acceptable.