My Valentine!

She's my Valentine.

She's my poet,
She is the one,
The only one,

She has the key to my heart.

And she makes me feel like this....

And she sets me on fire!




She's my Red Dirt Mule!

(The hearts are pieces by the Dutch artist, Frank Tjepkema)

Walter, Mesmerised by a Cutie.

I've got two scanners, though they're rarely used. But re-commissioning the computer after disc-fail, led to me noticing that I had all this stuff sitting idle, and I've got piles of stuff.... Like these cartoons, by "Cull". My great-uncle Walter worked with Cull, they were both draughtsmen, with the air-ministry, drawing blueprints during the war and throughout the fifties, when I was little, littler than I am now, anyway, visits to Uncle Walter and Auntie Sybil were ofter spent drawing. Walter had an endless supply of drawing paper, mostly of wing-root design on top secret v-bombers, or engine details of delta-wing supersonic fighters.
The Russians would have found a jackpot if they'd ever turned our childish drawings over to see the back.
I drew aircraft, my sister drew horses. She still draws horses, and makes money doing so.
Cull drew wing-roots. And the people he worked with, and mystery buxom cuties. Here's Walt, mesmerised by a buxom cutie in uniform....

Coming Home

Quite a long time ago I used to live in a little town in the middle of the Baltic.

"Fart"

I've Been Rootling Through Old Photos

After I had to close the pottery, after working with Earth, Fire, and Water, I decided to work with Air,  and became a Wind Turbine Maintenance Engineer. It's a very responsible post, as without these things there would be no wind....
The top picture's me and my little brother, fitting a new wind-speed sensor assembly on the top of a turbine.
The dark blobs and streaks on the tower were due to  premature failure of the seals meant to hold grease in.
We had to hire a big cherrypicker to get up there with a hot pressure-washer and scrubbing brushes...
Oh, and the bearings all got replaced, needing a very big crane on site. The cherry-picker guy chickened out because we were getting pushed about so much by the wind, which cost us an extra couple of days.

A Potter's Nightmare

Or "Things That Go Boom in the Night"

Although I often fired that kiln, this did NOT happen on my watch! What happened here was that the kiln was started on small pilot burners, left a couple of hours, then the gas was turned on to the main burners... But three of the four pilot burners went out. And my boss didn't check, or purge the kiln atmosphere before turning on the big gas valve... so it filled with a nice mix of forced air and gas, and... bricks rained out of the sky.

This was in, ahem... 1977. yes, children, when dinosaurs roamed the earth. 

I learned a few useful lessons from that. And after the kiln was rebuilt, I learned that combustion experts are not infallible, and that fire extinguishers only last a few seconds.

The gas valve guys had come and fitted new flame-failure devices to the kiln, and were testing the auto proportioning valve. They'd run the kiln up to red heat, and decided to go for lunch whilst it cooled a bit. 

So without telling anybody, they popped the door, left it open about an inch. Just above the kiln door was a roof with wooden timbers.

Our clay pugging part timer went into the kiln room, let out a shriek, and yelled "We're on FIRE!", so I yelled to everyone (There were twelve workers) to get out, and call the fire brigade, whilst I heroically ran in the opposite direction, toward the fire... (see how brave I am?) (or stupid?). I grabbed the first extinguisher, aimed it at the flames and ""PHOOOOOOF! it said, and went limp. Yep. phoooooof. No foreplay so to speak, just hit the button, a white jet, and a fire extinguisher hanging limply.

What a disappointment. And the fire was still going. Oh. And the air was filled with choking, eye watering, blinding white powder.  The fire was going even better than before, right up to the apex of the roof. I ran back into the main room, grabbed the foam extinguisher, and tried that. Oooh baby.. the fire loved that, gimme some more, she panted.... but that foam extinguisher? Shppurrrtttttt! tt! tt t... And then, that was it. That fire, she was still going, crackling and banging and moaning. Your extremely brave correspondent said "Fuck it", and left the building, coughing and wheezing .
By which time heehawheehaw! the fire engine was roaring in through the gate.

It turned out, don't-cha know, that my technique was wrong.

The firemen went up the roof with axes, ripped the tiles off and blasted about a zillion gallons of water on it. Well, yes, of course, they smashed a couple of weeks' worth of production, but they saved the kiln room and the glazing room.

Just around then, a white van turned up with two gas furnace experts, who'd had a pub lunch. With beer. And missed all the excitement they'd caused. Their company's insurance faced a big claim, and I hope those two were sacked.

After that, I went on a fire training course. I've forgotten most of it now. But my technique is better.

Despite my heroism, I didn't even get a medal.

Seriously, potter-friends,  learn what to do in a fire. I know. kilns are good at NOT starting fires. But we can all be stupid at times.
Get the right extinguishers. Your local fire department will often do free training sessions. A fire extinguisher comes and goes in about fourteen seconds.

Google Buzz-Do not Want!

On the ninth of february, Google launched something called Google Buzz. It arrived quietly enough. What's that, I wondered, looking at the new label in my Gmail page.

It seems it's a social networking tool. Oh. Great.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/introducing-google-buzz.html

Read it..,. Found the button at the bottom of the page "Turn off Buzz"* Click! gone.

* Oh, and Google? Shouldn't that be "Turn Buzz Off", Not "Turn Off Buzz"?


Why don't I want it? Firstly, because I don't do twitter or facebook, or myspace,  If I want to communicate I can write an email, or pick up the phone, or go visit, I have used google chat, but my status is set to invisible. I did away with MSN messenger.
I find it disconcerting that Google told me a heap of people were "following" me. I've been looking over my shoulder all day, but every time I do it, they dive into dooways or behind parked cars. The most I see is a glimmer of movement.
Google then made a suggestion of a list of people I might like to "Follow" or might want to invite to join my followers. Some were friends, though rarely contacted, others were strangers. I did not like the idea that Google was proferring me in the same way, to people who might have to scratch their heads for a while before figuring out who I am.


I like my privacy, I enjoy solitude. I like reading emails.
I don't need twitter-like garbage in my inbox.

I would have appreciated it if Google had spent a little more effort on trying to explain to me why this was a good thing. They could try now. So far I see it as a bad thing, as something to be ruthlessly deleted.

On Bricks.

In a comment to my earlier post on the subject of considerable heat beneath the site of a brick-kiln, even several years after it was demolished; Relax Max said:

"I was reading a book recently about the construction of a huge brick hospital in the 1870s and it said all the red bricks were done on-site back then. I guess they just selected a site that had the right kind of clay. Many thousands of bricks. I can't remember how it said they fired them and I can't find the book right now. Today, of course, they would just truck them in. Times change. Here is the building in question. I'll have to look harder and find that book. :)
http://tinyurl.com/yg677co"

Little did he know that he would unleash a post on bricks... quite literally, as you will see later, post, bricks...

I suppose I was interested in bricks, and how things, houses, for instance were made, even before I became a potter and fell in love with the magical transformation of clay when subjected to fire.

As a child, I loved making things, and I'd scoop clay out of the ground, wet it, and model it to make animals, people, buildings, bridges, roads.... and dams, oh yes, dams. on wet days, puddles and clay, what joy. I..... er..still do that, damming streams of rainwater, when I think nobody's looking. I remember hearing the biblical story about the israelites having to make bricks from mud, with straw in them. These were for Rameses the Second's city in 1490 b.c. The Israelites were, (and the archaeological record supports this) deliberately wasting straw, provided for the brick making. Without the fibre reinforcement and water-wicking properties of just the right amount of straw, the fine grained nile clays would crack and distort as they dried, so a certain amount of chopped straw was added. However, archaeologists have found numerous bricks in the region that are effectively just a bundle of straw daubed over with mud. That said, it might have been deliberate, because in the core of a wall, strength could be sacrificed in order to give better insulation. I suppose nobody knows. Anyway, the Pharaoh waxed exceedingly angry and said "Ye shall no more give the people straw to make brick, Let them go and gather it for their-selves, and the tally of the bricks, which they did make heretofore, Ye shall lay upon them.".

These were unfired bricks, we modern westerners were prone to dismiss them as "mud bricks" as if that made them inferior, but in fact there was nothing inferior about mud, or adobe, especially in a mostly dry climate.

Bricks used to build the ancient city of Jericho, ten thousand years ago, can be found today in as good a condition as when they were new. Their shape is similar to a small loaf of bread, but the size, well that's similar to the size we use today. It's not rocket science. A brick's size has to be so that a man can place it, repeatedly, all day, with one hand. Hence the jericho bricks are about 9"x 3" x 3", our modern ones are mostly 9" x 3" x 4".... Moving on, however, the firing of bricks began about 5,000 years ago, in Iraq. 

The Ishtar Gate, built in the reign of Nebuchadnezzar 604-562 b.c. was one of the earliest great works in fired and glazed brick.(I love that name... my grandfather, when I was about four or five used to teach me silly rhymes "Nebuchadnezzar, king of the Jews, bought his wife a pair of shoes. When the shoes began to wear, Nebuchadnezzar began to swear!")....

Ishtar Gate, Pergamon Museum, Berlin

 

Detail, Ishtar.

Ishtar Gate Reproduction, Iraq

In Europe, buildings would tend to be made with that which is abundant. In areas of forest, timber houses were predominant, as they are still in many parts of Scandinavia and Russia., timber buildings, however, in cities were vulnerable to fire, and to attackers. So,  where stone was available the wealthier citizens built  with stone. But most countries have areas where there are deep beds of clay and sands, and stone is more costly, having to be transported in. These areas were where the buildings were most often made of brick. European brick-making was strongest in the Low Countries, (Flanders being the centre of the trade) and from the thirteenth century onward, brickmaking became an important part of their economies. Bricks were exported, (over 200,000 bricks were shipped from Ypres for work on the Tower of London in 1278) , but obviously, they were a heavy, and therefore expensive commodity, when shipped far from their site of manufacture, so it became more common for Flemish brick-making crews, whole families, to travel instead, to the customer's site, there to dig clay, mould bricks, and fire them.
They travelled all over europe, and many of them crossed the north sea to britain. Just to the east of where I live, the town of Kingston upon Hull (better known just as 'Hull') became Britain's first all-brick town, even its defensive walls were of brick. Just as Max said all the bricks were made on site. Hull sits at the northern shore of the Humber estuary, on a rich bed of secondary clay. There's nowhere nearby to quarry stone.

Picture from "The Boy's Book of Trades", London, 1871

Soon enough, the knowledge of brickmaking became widespread. Most farms made bricks, often the source of the bricks was left to fill with water and to become a duckpond. These bricks were often rather soft, and underfired, fired in an open stack or "clamp" in which the material being fired formed its own kiln. As we see in Cruickshank's cartoon below.

Cartoon by George Cruickshank, 1829, a protest against the farmlands of Hampstead, north of London, being devoured by the spread of the city, we see bricks bursting from the clamp-kilns, to spring up as new "jerry-built" housing, note the cracks in the walls of the unfinished housing.

Bricks in situ: London is built on a broad expanse of deep clay, and, just as this cartoon depicts, the housing of London was largely formed out of the ground it stood upon. The excavations became cellars. I found an old newspaper for an area of my hometown, advertising in about 1880, building plots close to the railway station saying "The site furnishes good clay for the brick-making, upon a foundation of good sandstone" .

During the 1800s the railways required vast numbers of bricks, one viaduct built in Manchester, over clay ground, has a length of over two miles, and used over fifty million bricks in its construction.

Here in Britain, roads were usually made of broken stone, of "Macadam" construction, (before tar-macadam), but in America, the Dutch settlers built many roads paved with brick. As early as1719 brick sidewalks were being laid in Philadelphia.

And that brings me back to Relax Max's comment. I said I'd write a post on bricks, Post, Bricks, 

well here it is. 

 

This is a Bank, made of Bricks, sent through the Post.

In 1916, Mr W.A Coltharp set out to build a bank in Vernal, Utah, and the bricks he chose were textured bricks made by the Salt Lake Pressed Brick Company, some 127 miles away. The cost of transporting those bricks would be tremendous, the wagon and rail journey would total 420 miles, and the quoted cost of transport was three times the cost of the bricks. But Mr Coltharp had a brainwave, USPS's parcel rate would be cheaper! The maximum parcel weight allowed was fifty pounds, so the brick company parcelled them up in lots of seven, and delivered them to the post-office. Chaos ensued. 80,000 bricks, fourty parcels a day. To say the postmaster and his workers were not impressed would be an understatement. Parcel offices along the way, and the railroads ,all complained bitterly to the Postmaster General of the time, who was so incensed that he rewrote the legislation, to the effect that henceforth, the maximum any one consignor could send to any one consignee in any one day would be 200 pounds in weight. In a letter announcing the amendment to the legislation, he noted that "it is not the intent of the United States Postal Service that buildings be shipped through the mail."

Yes, I know this post is somewhat disjointed. I was trying to curb my enthusiasm, as I haven't got time to write an entire book. So it was more about what to leave out. Roman tile-bricks, and Hampton Court  Palace, for instance...

Oh, very well then... Hampton Court was built for and partially designed by King Henry VIII of England, and it was constructed of red brick. The king had broken with tradition for grand residences, and used the brick in several innovative ways, shaped (rubbed) brick features, contrasting bricks etc. Suddenly brick was fashionable, not just functional.