Some damnable thing

Today we have had a lark of a very high order. Lady Wilton sent over yesterday from Knowsley to say that the Loco Motive machine was to be upon the railway at such a place at 12 o'clock for the Knowsley party to ride in if they liked, and inviting this house to be of the party. So of course we were at our post in three carriages and some horsemen at the Hour appointed.

I had the satisfaction, for I can't call it pleasure, of taking a trip of five miles on it, which we did in just a quarter of an hour - that is twenty miles an hour. As accuracy upon this subject was my great object, I held my watch in hand at starting, and all the time; and as it had a second hand, I knew I could not be deceived; and so it turned out that there was not the difference of a second between the coachee or conductor and myself.

But observe, during those five miles, the machine was occasionally made to put itself out or go it; and then we went at the rate of 23 miles an hour, and just with the same ease as to motion or absence of friction as at the other reduced pace. But the quickest motion is to me frightful: it is really flying, and it is impossible to divest yourself of the notion of instant death to all upon the least accident happening. It gave me a headache which has not left me yet. Sefton is convinced that some damnable thing must come of it.

From the journal of Thomas Creevey, November, 1829

Balham, Gateway to the South

Thanks to Dieselpunk, my mind's currently on the romance of vintage travel - yes, I know that for all the tribulations of modern-day travel, there never was really a golden age, but some of the machines were things of beauty for all that. Some of the advertising slogans from the 'golden age' stretched the truth just a little bit - think of the re-branding of the Cornish coast as the "Cornish Riviera". But for real suspension of disbelief, I've just come across a rather splendid London, Midland & Scottish Railway poster advertising the delights of "Colwyn Bay, The Gateway to the Welsh Rockies"!

Age of wonders

Top blog discovery of the week. Streamlined steam engines, racing seaplanes, cars with fins, airships, robots, Battersea Power Station - behold the machine-age wunderkammer that is Dieselpunk - it's like an Eagle comic for the 21st Century.

Seasonal confusion and delay

Whilst I was away doing Christmassy things, we had further proof that the Islamists used up most of their competent terrorists on 9/11 and in the early noughties. The the idiotic Christmas special from Johnny Jihad and His Exploding Underpants was about as scary as one of Santa's elves. Predictably, the reaction of the authorities was to impose Ryanair-like levels of misery on airline passengers, in the name of being seen to "do something". It would be more effective to:

a) stop trying to terrify the public about relatively small risks - just point and laugh instead

b) once people have stopped quaking with fear, introduce effective measures to counter the actual level of threat, rather than PR stunts intended to soothe the very people you frightened out of their skins by hyping up the terrorist threat level

Effective measures like these, as highlighted in a much-quoted article in the Toronto Star (via):

Israelification.

That is, how can we make our airports more like Israel's, which deal with far greater terror threats with far less inconvenience....

"Israelis, unlike Canadians and Americans, don't take s--- from anybody. When the security agency in Israel (the ISA) started to tighten security and we had to wait in line for – not for hours – but 30 or 40 minutes, all hell broke loose here. We said, `We're not going to do this. You're going to find a way that will take care of security without touching the efficiency of the airport.'"

Read how it should be done here.

Another transport-related tit bit which caught my eye over the holiday period was an academic take on the Thomas The Tank Engine by one Shauna Wilton, gleefully dissected in the Fora blog:

Ms Wilton has been studying Thomas the Tank Engine. My two children, love the stories and as a result I have some familiarity with them. I have always thought them to represent pretty good values on the whole. For example the catchphrase about the engines wanting to be “really useful” has been thoroughly productive when encouraging the children to tidy up after themselves and, indeed, to do the right thing generally.


I should have realised of course that anything suggestive of discipline, or values of any sort, would get up the nose of modern academics. According to the report:


“She was critical of the fact the show only has eight female characters out of the 49 who feature.

"The female characters weren't necessarily portrayed any more negatively than the male characters or the male trains, but they did tend to play more secondary roles and they're often portrayed as being bossy or know-it-alls," she said.

She also objected to the way the show portrays Thomas, Percy and James slaving away for wealthy bosses like the Fat Controller.

Any attempt to break out of this controlled hierarchy to gain individual power, show initiative or dissent is met with punishment, usually because it goes wrong, she said.”

I would note first of all the supreme irony in her statement that the female characters are “bossy or know-it-alls” when it is hard to think of a female better meeting that description than herself.


I would also invite her to look after two children aged two and four and encourage rather than punish dissent or attempts to gain individual power.

Any academic who majors in Thomas the Tank Engine Studies* is fair game, so far as I'm concerned, although I do still maintain, along with Ms Wilton, that the stories are disturbingly authoritarian. It's fair comment that young children aren't reasonable and need more discipline than adults, but some of the treatment meted out to the engines isn't the sort of thing you'd wish on anybody, adult or child. I've just been reading the story in which the Scottish engines Donald and Douglas come to Sodor and the way they're treated come straight out of some trashy, exploitative reality TV show, with the threat of expulsion hanging over the least successful engine.

Still, at least there's no terrorist angle here - or is there?



*if such a subject existed, my three-and-a-bit-year-old son would be a Phd by now...

Ghost train

As I've mentioned before I don't like the underlying message of the Thomas The Tank Engine stories. Parental disapproval counts for nothing, though, and my son loves them. His collection of die cast trains from the series has become his favourite thing ever - toy cars are so last month. Anyway, here's a sinister mashup of Thomas The Tank Engine and the late Michael Jackson, posted by some creative genius on YouTube.

Steaming aluminium

People who care about such things often have their personal favourite Italian design classic. Not being a petrolhead or a fan of conspicuous consumption, I'm fairly lukewarm to the charms of Ferrari sports cars. I find the Vespa motor scooter more impressive, in the sense that it's easy to build cutting-edge design into something that ridiculously wealthy will pay for, but to give flair to something affordable and mass produced takes a bit more ingenuity. But the Vespa isn't my classic of the moment. Neither are immaculately tailored Italian clothes - I don't know enough about fashion to spend my time coveting la bella figura or eagerly pursuing all the latest fads and trends.

What I do like is the Italian moka coffee pot. It's a modest and easily overlooked object - in fact I'd managed to pretty much overlook it myself until quite recently. I'd seen the little octagonal aluminum pots around before, but hadn't paid them much attention until I actually used one for the first time last year.

Previously I used one of those those glass jugs - normally called a cafetière, French press, or plunger - in which you put your ground coffee, pour on hot water, leave to brew for a few minutes, then push down the filter to trap the grounds before pouring. You can make decent cup of coffee in one of these, so I'd had no reason to look at any other method. In Italy, last year, I found myself in a kitchen, with no other coffee-making equipment but a moka pot. I'd no idea how to use one until I was told how, but when I tried it out, the resulting coffee was as smooth as silk, with a kick like a shire horse. The strength is due to the amount of coffee you put in the filter and the percolating process, which extracts more caffeine than the cafetière method. The smoothness must be due to the filter retaining more of the coffee grounds. The moka is, strictly speaking, for preparing espresso, so it's not surprising that the caffeine dial goes up to eleven. What truth there is behind the stereotype of Italians shouting and waving their arms about probably owes something to the ubiquity of the moka pot.

There's something very satisfying about brewing coffee in a moka. This is partly because it's like a tiny steam engine and makes a satisfying gurgling noise when your coffee's ready. Even the freshly-brewed coffee aroma seems more pungent and enticing than what you get out of a cafetière, although that's just my subjective judgement. Here's a diagram showing how the magic happens:

You fill the lower chamber (A) with water and the filter (B) with coffee. Screw on the upper pot (C). Place the pot on the heat. The water in the bottom chamber gets hot and gives off steam. The steam forces boiling water through the coffee in the filter, so coffee bubbles up into the upper pot. When the lower chamber's almost empty, steam bubbles are forced up through the remaining liquid to produce the gurgling noise that signals your coffee's ready (apparently purists say that by the time the pot starts to gurgle, the coffee's already at too high a temperature and the flavour has already started to spoil - for the perfect cup of coffee, you should be able to anticipate the gurgling and take the coffee off the heat before it starts making a noise).

The moka pot was invented in 1933 by Alfonso Bialetti and there's one of the Bialetti company's coffee pots in the majority of Italian homes (or another manufacturer's design based on the same principle). The simple, octagonal industrial styling seems to go with the moka pot's steam engine-style splutterings and has hardly been changed since it was first introduced. I was recently given a moka pot which works on this principle as a present. It's not a Bialetti, but another brand made of stainless steel rather than aluminum, and not in the original's octagonal shape. I sometimes think a classic Bialletti would be better, but on reflection, I'm not that fussed. It does the same job and, although I like the Bialetti, I can appreciate the design without fetishizing it and getting into that horrible marketing-manipulated state of having "brand loyalty" (it is only an object for heaven's sake). The idea of any branded product being a "must have" seems incredibly superficial and just deeply wrong to me (it really is only an object).

I remember long ago, as a student, being amused to see some American students trying to make tea. They'd put teabags into the teapot and were trying to boil them up on the ring of a cooker. I wouldn't laugh at such naivety in beverage preparation these days. After all, until last year, I'd never used a stove-top coffee pot and didn't know how to without being told. Even worse, many years back, when I started using "real" coffee (as opposed to instant), it didn't even occur to me that it was a fresh product which needs to be kept in the fridge once opened. I was merrily keeping mine in a cupboard, like tea or instant coffee, then wondering why my coffee started tasting terrible after a short while. I've decided that ignorance isn't anything to be ashamed of - it's only failing to learn and correct that ignorance which should cause us to blush.

Anyway, here's to the moka pot - it's only an object, but it's rather a splendid one.

Fear and Loathing on Sodor

Psalm 2:11-12 - Serve the LORD with fear, and rejoice with trembling.

I’ve not been doing a great deal of reading lately, except for bedtime stories. Reading bedtime stories to a child is generally a delight, not a chore (at least up to the moment when you realise that the child’s enthusiasm for one more story has precisely nothing to do with or the merits of the book being waved under your nose, or the skill of your storytelling, but everything to do with postponing bed time). So when junior acquired a book of stories about Thomas the Tank Engine and his friends, I was quite happy.

Thomas the Tank Engine was part of my childhood – as well as some books, I had a couple of records of the train stories (voiced, by Johnny Morris, the man who used to give animals “amusing” voices in Animal Magic, a BBC programme for which I had an inexplicable fondness as a small child). Nostalgic, innocent, wholesome, full of steam trains – what could be more splendid?

Unexpectedly, The Adventures of Thomas has become my least favourite bedtime reading. The main thing I dislike about the current stories is how much the railway network on Sodor resembles a dysfunctional society or workplace. For much of the time, the engines are insecure, anxious, harassed, stressed, thin-skinned, dependent, competitive and jealous. They puff around in mortal fear of being replaced or demoted, desperately trying to please the all-powerful Fat Controller. It’s like watching the baby executives on the The Apprentice jumping through hoops in their pitiful attempts to catch the eye of Alan Sugar, replete from gorging on his power-breakfast. The stories are, I think, intended to be very moral, but the lessons to be drawn from them seem rather limiting – don’t get ideas above your station (that pun was as inevitable as it was terrible), but do respect and fear authority figures.

Children’s stories shouldn’t have a big, clunking, moral, although they can painlessly teach some valuable lessons and ideas about life. These stories have what I see as an anti-moral – a perfect recipe for how not to grow as a human being. Live in fear, respect hierarchies, obey orders without question, don’t have autonomy, don’t question authority, don’t think independently, never be proud of what you’ve achieved, just let your life run on the rails prepared for you by a higher authority.

Years ago, when I read Will Self’s My Idea of Fun, a violent, hallucinatory novel featuring a demented marketing consultant and serial killer whose grotesque mind is moulded by the (imaginary?) influence of a figure called The Fat Controller, I wondered what it was about the Thomas the Tank Engine stories that got Will so worked up. Maybe it was just a piece of calculated gonzo-style outrage from the man famous for doing heroin on John Major’s jet during the 1997 election campaign. But now I’m beginning to see the dark side of Reverend Awdry’s jealous God for myself.

How to avoid huge floating things

There seem to have been a lot of big floating things in the news lately. Like the Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska's mega-yacht for example. As it says here:

Your bog-standard superyacht now costs between £40 and £70 million depending on the interior specification. The running costs tend to be about £5 million a year for the bigger vessels. “It's roughly £1 million a metre,” says Jamie Edmiston, of Edmiston & Co. “For that you get helipads, swimming pools and spas as standard.” The oligarchs want more. “They don't just want a slide for the children, they want a submarine,” says one broker.

Seduced by the jet-set glamour of it all, it looks as if those smart political operatives George Osborne and Peter Mandelson failed to spot the obvious danger signs. As anyone who goes to the cinema could have told them, only Bond villains own that sort of floating lair and people who are unsuspectingly lured on board inevitably find themselves getting hurt. George and Mandy really should have listened to Shirley Bassey.

Such a cold finger
Beckons you
To enter his web of sin
But don't go in!

You said it, girl.

Of course, like most ordinary people, I have nothing to do with big vessels like that. Well, that's not strictly true. Most of the stuff I've ever bought has come here on board something even bigger than an oligarch's yacht. I'm talking about container ships, which have been in the news recently because the shipping lines, like everybody else, are sailing into an economic storm:

Late last year, users of major European container ports kept complaining about one problem. Volumes of containers arriving at ports such as Rotterdam and Antwerp from Asia were rising so rapidly that ports were struggling to cope.

This year, ports can only wish for such problems. Drewry is predicting growth of only 4.1 per cent, and Eivind Kolding, chief executive of Maersk Line, the world's biggest container shipping line and part of Denmark's AP Møller-Maersk, says that volumes are currently shrinking against the same months of last year.

It's strange how invisible these fleets of vast container ships are, especially as the ships are among the biggest vessels on the planet. Consider the Emma Maersk, pride of the Maersk Line and the largest container ship in existence. 397 metres or 1,300 feet long, powered by the world's largest single diesel unit (the ship's engine alone weighs 2,300 tons). Yet I was hardly aware of the ship's existence. She's not to, my eyes, at least, a particularly beautiful ship and the photographs I've seen hardly convey an impressive sense of scale, but how can you not be aware of such a colossus? Especially as it was built in little Denmark, known to the rest of the world for beer, bacon, Sandi Toksvig and open sandwiches (although not necessarily in that order) - you'd think if they'd built the biggest object of its class in the world, they'd be shouting their achievement from the rooftops.

A book called How To Avoid Huge Ships recently came third in The Bookseller magazine's recent competition to find the oddest book title of the last 30 years (first place went to Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers) and most of us, it seems, avoid them by not giving the subject a moment's thought. Yet the container ships and their sisters, the oil tankers, which can get even bigger, are the largest self-propelled objects ever constructed by the human race and play a vital role in keeping our civilisation going. There's no practical reason for me to know that the tanker Knock Nevis is the biggest ship in the world by length (the Batillus class supertankers, which have now all been scrapped, beat it in terms of tonnage), but I just feel it's the sort of thing anyone who takes an interest in the world around them ought to at least be aware of.

Maybe it's just me - obscure and perhaps irrelevant facts often delight me, especially as distractions from harsh and uncertain times. I did come across details of another class of vessel this week, which has no relevance to anything in the news, but they just looked so weird I felt I had to share the discovery. Re-reading Neal Ascherson's book Black Sea recently I came across a reference to the Russian Tsarist navy's circular ironclads, shallow draft vessels developed to defend coastal waters around the Crimea in the nineteenth century. They sounded rather extraordinary, so I looked up some details on the Internet and they look as every bit as strange as they sound - flat as pancakes, chugging through the shallows like steam-powered lily pads - see for yourself here and here.

Pick and mix

A mixed bag tonight, rather like the old pick and mix counter at Woolies, First off, all of human life (at least the seedier side) can be found down the Old Bailey. If you had hours to spare, you could waste them pondering the follies and wickedness of mankind at the searchable edition of the Proceedings of the Old Bailey 1674-1913. Strangely compelling stuff.

Over at Dark Roasted Blend there's an interesting article on the S S Great Britain's big sister, that wonder of the steam age, the Great Eastern. The Dark Roasted Blend article draws on an another intriguing article by John H Linehard of the University of Houston, comparing and contrasting the Great Eastern and the Titanic:

Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who designed the Great Eastern, was the greatest artist ever to work in iron. He was remarkably thorough, and the Great Eastern reflected that care. It was to be a passenger liner, and no cost was spared in making it safe. It had a double hull. It was honeycombed with bulkheads that created almost fifty water-tight compartments.

The Great Eastern was overdesigned and inefficient, but it still provided transatlantic service for two years. Then, in 1862, an uncharted rock in Long Island Sound tore an 83-foot-long, 9-foot-wide, gash in its outer hull. But the inner hull held. And it steamed safely on into New York Harbor.

The Titanic was another matter. Transatlantic service was now lucrative business. Bit by bit, safety standards yielded to commercial pressures. The Titanic's hull boasted a double bottom, but it had only a single wall on the sides. It had fifteen sections that could be sealed off at the throw of a switch, but the bulkheads between those sections were riddled with access doors to improve luxury service. It didn't have enough lifeboats. Why did everyone think it was so safe? Well, its luxurious beauty was seductive. Historian Walter Lord said of the Titanic, "The appearance of safety was mistaken for safety itself."

When the Titanic grazed a North Atlantic iceberg in 1912, it suffered nothing like the continuous gash in the side of the Great Eastern. Instead, rivets popped and its plates parted from the hull over a 250-foot length. Without a double sidewall, that let in enough water to sink it within a scant two hours and forty minutes.

Fascinating stuff - the whole of Linehard's article is here.

It is better, I mused a post ago, to be able to elect (and eventually kick out) an idiot than to have no say at all in how you're governed. If you're unfortunate enough to live in North Korea, it seems, you get the worst of both worlds - no vote and a tyrant who's also a world-class idiot. Step forward, the Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il, spoiled brat, ludicrous playboy and serial human rights abuser.

Steam Leviathans

We're going on holiday to Somerset in September. Here's a visitor attraction I'd love to see, time and toddler permitting - Isambard Kingdom Brunel's pioneering iron-hulled steamship, the SS Great Britain. It's a great pity that his later design, the ill-starred but awesome Great Eastern didn't survive into the 21st (or even 20th) Century - that really would be a sight to behold.