Train nerds like trains, mostly. It’s pretty much definitive. They might have weird personal preferences, biases or hatreds that normal people can never really understand a reason for, but in general, they think that trains are a Good Thing. Read all
Since the start of the year, I’ve been trying to publish about one post per week, and with ten posts so far (including this one) I’ve come pretty close to the target. Read all
Over some recent posts, I’ve been talking about how easy it would be to build a model of the Brecon & Merthyr Railway towards the end of its life, in N gauge. And specifically, how easy is it if you start with a train set ? For one thing, I’ll need to have more than just one train to play with! But is it easy to get models of the right types of train in N gauge? Read all
One issue with writing this blog for so long—especially given it’s not long since I had a hiatus for a year—there’s a lot of draft posts and ideas-for-posts that I’ve logged, and never done anything with. Write about The Mother being taken to hospital in May 2022, for example, which was overtaken by events when she died a few months later. Some of them I have no context on at all, such as writing…
A week or so ago, I wrote about the train set I’d recently bought , as the nucleus of a model railway inspired by the Brecon & Merthyr line in South Wales. The train set is N Gauge, or N Scale. Is this, though, the best scale for me to build it in? Read all
Ever since I was a wee girl, I loved Forteana. Tales of the unexplained. Creepy stories, earth mysteries, that sort of thing. Read all
A few weeks ago, I posted about how I’d finally made the decision to start building a model railway , because perfection is the enemy of the possible or something along those lines. Read all
When I last wrote an article about how this blog is built , how it is turned from Markdown text into an array of thousands of static HTML pages, over eighteen months ago now, I said that “another big change to how the site is published” was coming soon. It did, indeed, come soon; I just didn’t write about it. Since summer 2024, this site has been published by an entirely new static site generator.…
Occasionally, over the past few years, I’ve mentioned how I’d like a model railway, but there are just too many interesting railways to choose from . In fact, I’ve always wanted a model railway. My father also always wanted a model railway, but never quite managed to do anything about it either. Read all
Folklore is… something we had , right? The things people used to do, especially all those people who lived out in the country and whose lives were devoted to threshing and winnowing and all those sort of rural verbs we just don’t use in the modern world. Folklore is all that stuff, from the ancient Static Past that never changed. Read all
Welcome, 2026! Read all
A few months ago, I wrote about my first exploration into the world of mechanical keyboards , and said, at the time, “am I going to turn into a keyboard nerd?” At that point, I’d found that mechanical keyboards can be extremely practical, that I found them much, much easier to type on than a cheap stock keyboard; but I was very wary of how keyboard nerdery can turn into something expensive and…
For once, I have managed to continue on with the ongoing craft projects without starting any new ones for, ooh, must be nearly a couple of months now. Most of the crafting time has been devoted to the cross-stitch project I mentioned back in July . Despite a break for my holiday—because it’s too large to go in the luggage—I’ve got on quite a way with it. Here’s the progress to date. Read all
Recently I added Aria Salvatrice to the list of links over in the menu, because I’m always looking to find new interesting regular reads, especially ones that use old-fashioned blogging. In this case, I found myself reading one of its posts which I absolutely found myself nodding along to. It was: Video Tutorials Considered Harmful , about how videos are a much worse venue for learning a technical…
Very eagle-eyed regular readers might have noticed that a few days ago I added a new category to the list of post categories over in the menus. It’s quite a rare event, to be honest: most of the categories have been there for many years, and new additions really don’t happen very often. Before this week, the last one I think was Being Crafty , which arrived several months ago. Read all
This year, I’ve tried to hold myself to posting at least one post per month on this site. I’ve mostly , but not quite, managed it. Nevertheless, there have still been so few that at present, with ten posts on the home page, if you scroll down to the bottom you’ve gone back almost a year. The bottom post on the home page right now is this one from last August, about my summer holiday to Hastings .…
Since the Great Pandemic, our lives have changed so much. Being forced to leave the office, we realised that to a great extent we didn’t need to be in offices. Our jobs didn’t even need to be near home, at all, except when we still needed to visit the office for meetings or when we had something to say face-to-face. That’s why I found myself, at 5am on a very dark morning after lockdown had ended,…
There are still numerous craft projects somewhere in mid-flight at Symbolic Towers, and I keep slowly gathering plans for more that I haven’t even started yet. I have enough crochet patterns to keep me crocheting for several years, probably; a very large cross-stitch under way, and several other cross-stitch kits ready to start—and that’s to say nothing of the Lego or the model train kits. None of…
It’s over eighteen months now since The Mother died, and I’ve barely even talked about it here, aside from one piece I wrote about burying her . There are a whole heap of reasons for that. For one thing, the posting rate here has slowed down to one post a month if that, due to all the various other things making demands on my time. For another, a whole heap of the experiences I had around my…
Back in March, I wrote about making my post publishing process on this blog a bit simpler . Well; that was really just a side effect. The main point of that post, and the process behind it, was to find a simple and cheap way to move this site onto HTTPS-based hosting, which I accomplished with an Azure Static Web App. The side effect was that the official way to deploy an Azure Static Web App is…
One stereotypical nerd gadget I’ve never seen the point of, that I always assumed was the nerd equivalent of hand-woven gold hi fi cables, was the mechanical keyboard. I assumed they were, as the phrase goes, fidget spinners for IT geeks. Something that is expensive and makes lots of fun clicky-clacky noises, but doesn’t actually change your computing experience by one tiny bit. Read all
Today, March 31 st , is Transgender Day of Visibility. This year, 2024, it’s fifteen years since the event first started. Event is maybe a big word. It’s a marker, a day in the calendar for trans people to stand up and be loud about who they are. Read all
Regular readers might remember that two or three years back, I visited the Buck Beck Beach Bench , a strange and delightful bench built up from driftwood on one of the remoter stretches of Cleethorpes Beach. I haven’t been back very much since that visit, what for one reason and another, but I did keep following the Bench and its creators on social media. Because of that, I knew that twice since,…
Well, hello there! This site has been on something of a hiatus since last summer, for one reason and another. There’s plenty to write about, there’s plenty going on, but somehow I’ve always been too busy, too distracted, too many other things going on to sit down and want to write a blog post. Moreover, there are more technical reasons that I’ve felt I needed to get resolved too. Read all
They say you can never go back again. Never cross the same river twice. The past is a foreign country, as the famous quotation goes. Sometimes, it can’t be avoided. Sometimes, though, it can be worth doing just for yourself. Read all