Funiculì, Funiculà

Just back from holiday, which in the end involved pootling around the bits of Somerset and Devon within a few miles from our holiday cottage - anything more ambitious would have been a bit too much with a lively two year old in tow. So no visit to Bristol and the S S Great Britain this time.

I did see a bit of nifty Victorian engineering on a smaller scale, though. The little seaside town of Lynmouth, which I hadn't visited before, is connected to the pretty neighbouring resort of Lynton up the hill by a funicular railway, built in the late 1880's. I like the elegant simplicity of the design, powered by nothing more than water and gravity. The railway has two cars, each with a ballast tank filled with water (gravity fed from the West Lyn river). To set the thing going, the ballast water is let out of the bottom car, which becomes lighter than the top one and is pulled up by the weight of the descending heavier car. Once the two cars have changed places, the top one is topped up with ballast water, the bottom one is emptied of water and the process repeats. More technical detail here.

The principle is almost the same as the funicular in Scarborough, where I grew up (the Scarborough funicular was the first to use water as a counterweight), but the Lynton-Lynmouth example is even more elegant as it needs no additional power source - in Scarborough, the water had to be pumped uphill, whereas in Lynton-Lynmouth, gravity does all the work. More on funicular railways of the UK here.

Mention of funicular railways inevitably has me humming Funiculì, Funiculà, that jolly rousing Neapolitan celebration of the now-defunct Vesuvius funicular railway. Here's a stirring rendition by, of all people, the Moscow Male Jewish Capella.

Speaking of curious musical fusions, and for no other good reason, here are the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain with their version of the theme from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

And on one more musical note, as we were driving home from our hols, I caught one Tim Minchin performing on Radio 4's Loose Ends. I wasn't previously familiar with Mr Minchin's work, but his song If I Didn't Have You made me laugh like a simpleton on laughing gas. Warning - if you're of a romantic disposition, stick your fingers in your ears - this ain't Stevie Wonder. If not, snort with unseemly laughter here.