Little Storping-in-the-Swuff: Life in General

Eat your heart out, Adrian Mole.

What’s this? Another one?

In just under three weeks Dufftown, a model narrow gauge railway 4mm scale will be exhibited in Brighton. It’s a layout I’ve designed and help build, and it’s not nearly ready, so I thought it would be fun to record the last few weeks of the race against time on a blog. So I will.

I first encountered one when presented with pomme de terre en deux colours with a delicious lunch served in the square in front of an excellent restaurant in Vence. Now I’m happy to find they’re a regular feature of the Lewes Farmers’ Market.

The final episode of Dave Shelton’s current Bergman and McBoo today, alas. Surely there has to be an anthology published soon?

The thing about the iPhone, right, is that it’s got no zoom. And the thing about seals is they’re rather well camouflaged. So this is not a great pic, but see if you can spot about half a dozen adults and a couple of (rather pixelated) pups. Taken yesterday near Wooltack Point, Pembs.

After an unbelievably wet August, two September weekends in a row have provided absolutely stunning Autumn sunshine. Last weekend the conditions would have been perfect for sailing, if there had been any wind.

The photos I took whilst crewing in the Axe Yacht Club’s last river race of 2008 are here on the website for the Axe One Design class. Or at least the photos which feature Axe Ones are (we were sailing a Miracle). Long may this wonderful weather last.

Humph made life better. I first became aware of him on I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue in the early ’90s, going to several recordings and enjoying his extraordinary dead pan wit. Later, when I got into jazz, I couldn’t believe that this great wonderful trumpeter was the same man. How could he have so much talent? Through The Best of Jazz he enlarged my interest in music and introduced me to a variety of wonderful artists.

Humph died at 7pm yesterday. I will miss hearing him.

After a cross-channel train journey I can’t resist switching into nerd mode. Whilst in France I saw an article in a paper about the next generation TGV, called the AGV for Automotrice Grande Vitesse. Alas I’m not up to google.fr-ing it so I’ll have to try and dredge the facts from memory.

• Automotrice means self-powered, I’m told, but in this instance it refers to the motive power being distributed throughout the train rather than in power cars at either end, much like the EMU commuter units that we see round these parts.
• For the same speed, it consumes 20% less power than the TGV.
• It’ll top 360km/h to the TGV’s 320km/h.
• The Italians have placed an order for the Rome-Naples route expected to start running 2010.
• SNCF are planning to buy 20-30 trains per year for five years from 2014 to replace the TGV, and Alstom are hoping the AGV will be it.
• The Californians are apparently interested. The article appeared to say that Arnie had already ridden on the prototype incognito (can we have translated that bit correctly?)