Finnish Lighthouses 1909

And because Trollop 23 left a comment about "what about the ones that that were just begun"....... Here's a pic of Start Point lighthouse, in Devon, England, pinched, I confess from Mat Dickson, here .
I'll email and retroask his permission.

Mice, and the Lighthouse -Updated...

At the lighthouse, the cat can rest, -the population of mice brave and intelligent enough to build boats out of lashed-together sardine cans and discarded chopsticks is small. Only a few of these mice land here, most go on, toward the west, the setting sun lures them. They dream of cheese, and rumoured cities where houses tower further into the sky than even lighthouses. A land where cheese is plentiful, where a mouse, a humble mouse has made it big, and has two magic kingdoms. O, brave mice, only a torn-out sail, ripped in the gale, might make them seek shelter on the lighthouse rock....

Once there, they search for a fragment of cloth to remake their sail. The perfect prize would be silk lingerie, (not much hope in the lighthouse of that....) -Lingerie of silk, light, strong, perfumed, it is prized above all others by mouse-navigators, who will recount how, long ago (in mouse terms, about five years in human ones), the great Fernando Mus, scavenging in the bedrooms of a grand Scottish mansion, discovered the grail of silken lingerie.

He was the first to hoist a triangular lateen sail, curved, perfectly proportioned.... The great storm of '02 ripped to shreds the sails of the flotilla, but Fernando Mus, brave leader of rodents, sailed to windward, picking up survivors, and later told how he owed his life to the extra strength of a double-stitched gusset.

A year later, he arrived in New York on his third voyage in record time, with an entirely new silken sail of his own devising, the Powder-Blue "C" Cup Spinnaker.
Sadly, it was at the termination of that voyage that he lost his life to a passing cat, and thus, we will never know if the Fishnet Fish-net was a success, nor whether it is true that he was once catapulted from a heaving bosom from which he was attempting to steal the bra.

Fernando's descendants, it is rumoured, are seeking to build a great new vessel.. A Sardine-can catamaran, twin hulled, twin masted.... see the logic of that?

(I so wish I had an illustrator for this.....)

Updated! Stop Press:

Look! An illustration. I'm delighted! This just in from Minx, to whom much thanks, she's pretty much got the scenario.... I envisaged a slightly more diagonal roll to the foredeck, and a slightly slimmer, more wiry crew, but WOW! Who'd have thought it! wish for an illustrator and Bzzzt! An illustrator responds! She says it's only a rough draft, and being short of a mouse, a hamster posed for the artwork. The full colour 6'X8' oil painting is at sketch stage, and I should receive it in three months or so...

Red Dirt Girl.... (-am I allowed to link?) suggests this may all be just a figtree of my fevered imagination, a fragment of fantasy prompted by cough medicine and cheese sandwich interaction.Nothing could be furthermore from the truth. If you, R.D.G., were to come out here; knock on the lighthouse door, I would take you climbing, up to the lantern gallery, and there we could sit, watching a twinkling myriad of tiny silk sails, catching the evening light, scattered across the sunset sea, all heading west. As the great orb settles on the horizon, and the light of those multicoloured sails goes dark, (From passionate mulberry, chocolate, powder blue, dramatic purple, black lace, flesh, to grubby many-times washed white....), a constellation of tiny sardine-oil lights twinkle upward, we would listen, in the darkness, to a thousand mouse voices, raised in a chanty,

" O shenandoah, I love your daughter
Look away, you rollin’ river
It was for her I’d cross the water.
Look away, we’re bound away
'Cross the wide Missouri

For seven long years I courted sally
Look away, you rollin’ river
Seven more years I longed to have her
Look away, we’re bound away
'Cross the wide Missouri "

Fading away, into the warm ocean night......

p.s. Any takers for further illustrations?

Helium Horses Now Available!

Soubriquet Labs is happy to announce that the new lightweight horses are now available.
We recommend the carrying of sandbags and water-ballast during all long distance rides. Customers are warned against riding over water without wearing suitable flotation aids, as any outbursts of equine flatulence can result in a sudden loss of altitude.

Walrus Gets His Birthday Gift

via: across the board blogspot

Steampunk Zeppelin?

No, it's The Corn Exchange in Leeds, (Yorkshire, England). In the 1970s the interior was a big open space, with the desks of the corn merchants in rows. Time moves on. Corn selling is by different means now, and this lovely building is now full of shops.
It was built in 1862, and was seen then as a stunning piece of modern architecture. The same architect, Cuthbert Broderick, designed the Leeds Town Hall, an altogether more conventional building. In the Corn Exchange, though, he excelled, using an altogether new technology to create the broad pillarless span of the roof. This was a period where Victorian engineers were creating wide arched railway stations, and also circular domes, but this, an elliptical dome, to me this is a masterwork, before its time. And if Broderick had lived to see the great airships, I think he'd have been well placed to become an aviation designer.

Flood Driving.

I do have reservations about posting this. Truth is, those police officers were probably on their way to some thing that desperately needed their presence.
But then. What muppetry from the driver. It's a Renault van, not a big truck, or Land Rover. It's a diesel engined vehicle, so although it has no water-fearing HT leads, Renault, in the past, have been a bit notorious for low engine air intakes.
The driver should, of course, be trained to cope. And the first rule of flood driving is to know the water depth. He did not wait long enough to properly gauge that. And he should have proceeded at a gentler pace.
If you get the speed right, you minimise the splashing, and form a bow-wave, which sails along in front of you, leaving a lower trough under the front of the vehicle.
This driver, in all probability wrecked the engine. When a diesel engine ingests a lump of water, the results are not pretty. Very strong things bend or break. The engine does not run again.
At half the speed, they would have driven out the other side. Reason for the stop was incompetent driving, no other.
Any emergency vehicle driver should know the adage, "It's better to get there a little bit late, than not get there at all."

Me? A smartypants? Hmm. Well yes. I do drive through deep water, on a fairly regular basis... rather deeper than that. And I've yet to stuff an engine.

The floods were recent. Judging by the voices, I'd place the incident in South Yorkshire, or maybe just over the border in Derbyshire.

Update...
My estimate, based on the video and examination of a similar van is that the water was between seven and nine inches deep.
I note 11 hits on this site from a Police-Net ISP, resolving to Sheffield.... Comments, guys?

On Not Posting.

Sometimes in my life, I've been a prolific writer. People told me I should write.
I do, constantly, in my head, as I go about my daily life.
But give me a keyboard, and I am often struck dumb. Not for me the discipline of a thousand words before lunchtime, every day. J.K.Rowling, you have nothing to fear from me.
I quite like the idea of inhabiting a lighthouse on an island, or some remote headland.
The Lighthouse at Cape Wrath, the northerlymost point of the Scottish Mainland rather appealed to me. What a beautiful place.
I'm not afraid of solitude, I don't need shopping malls and cinemas, and to be honest.... It might be a good idea to leave behind the broadband connection.
The computer is a great tool for eating up time, and allied to the World Wide Web, oh dear.... I get lost in there. I can wander for hours... Days even.
But Write? this blog was at first, a bit of an experiment, I wondered if it might stimulate me to creativity. So far, that has not often happened, instead, I use it, I think, as a scrapbook, where I place things which I like, things which amuse me, leave them here for you.
You.
The mystery reader.
Some of the regular visitors I know, in a way, I read their blogs, wonder at their creativity, enjoy their stories.
Others come by strange routes.Search engines mostly. Some referrals from other blogs. And that intrigues me too.
Who is the person from Ulan Bator, Outer Mongolia, who keeps visiting? I wonder if it was because I posted music by Yat Kha, from Tuva?
Or some other link I don't know?
Recently.
Well, for quite a while, I've not posted anything much, or not anything really requiring much of me. And I'm really busy, and a bad organiser, so I might as well post a few things tonight, in the spirit of..... of.... of?
See, I really still don't have any idea what all this is about. Feel free to enlighten me if you know.

Something or other Shoeday.

A keen blogspot poet and fashionista started something she called 'Fantasy Shoe Day'
I started noticing bizarrities of shoe imagery on my wanderings within the web, and either posted links to her or set them up here.
She, however, for personal reasons stopped blogging, which was a loss to the rest of us, leaving me with a backlog of silly shoe pics....

And of course, I lose track of where I found them, the whys and wherefores.
Here are a few.
There might be more, sometime.