429 km

It seems it is quite traditional for me to drive all over this country during the summer while also traversing others. Part one of this manic adventure was out in the south west and gorgeous Cornwall. I had a lovely time. Here are some of my best photographs, just appreciate the lengths I go to show you lovely places and things.

426 km

This quaint fishing village, now mostly tourism, has a lovely old bridge and speedboat rides.

Looe Bridge
Looe Bridge

Also, I don’t think I quite captured just how beautiful this next scene looked in real life, but I only took a quick shot with the phone rather than a proper camera.

Sunglow in Looe
Sunglow in Looe

417 km

Cotehele House is lovely. But, whenever I visit these old houses it reminds me of the blatant and appalling class difference in this country and how this is reinforced by these old “stately” homes. These rich wankers are here “to look after us” and wasn’t life simpler when there was a Lord Of The Manor. Well, fuck you British history, I hate this sub-conscious reinforcement of “place in society”. I dare you to watch Disney stories and spot how they reinforce the order of birth-right.

The house was pretty though. This picture is just the quayside so not even the proper part of the estate!

Cotehele Quay
Cotehele Quay

416 km

Kit Hill is a local Marilyn. There was a road all the way to the top, although I think I would have preferred to park at the bottom and walk up by myself.

Kit Hill
Kit Hill

449 km

Lantic Bay was a lovely secluded bay on the south coast where the blustery wind couldn’t quite reach. The sand was shingle and coarse so it hurt to walk on it, but the views were bloody lovely. The air was warm and the sea was cold. There was a short walk from the car park to the beach down the rugged cliff side and it amused me how much people were struggling on the way back up. I found it too easy and it made me want to go running more!

Lantic Bay
Lantic Bay

496 km

At Godrevy Bay I found muscles. Not undiscovered ones in my body but loads on the rocks.

Mussels
Mussels

397 km

Went on a rainy trip around HM Naval Base to see the warships from the river and a short while later we saw the Dutch Frigate leaving for the open sea. The following ships were alongside: two Trafalgar class submarines, HMS Sutherland, HMS Ocean, HMS Bulwark, HMS Albion and some RFA ships.

Dutch Frigate
Dutch Frigate

396 km

At the National Marine Aquarium I saw sharks and turtles and jelly fish and loads of pretty stuff.

Very Pretty
Very Pretty

This is a carnivore:

Green Turtle
Green Turtle

192 km

Wandered around this stone circle in the rain:

Stone Circle
Stone Circle

My first impression was that the queue seemed quite long and I tried to book tickets online while standing in the queue but the next available session was in three hour’s time. It seemed a slow moving queue to me. Then we went to the restaurant. There were four queues but the food selection was down one side of them and the system wasn’t CLEAR. It was not a pleasant experience.

As it rained we used the bus to drive us the 2km to the stones from the visitors centre. This was the only time my ticket was checked. When we got to the stones we wandered around but I am largely uninspired by them. They seem more impressive from the road as you drive by.

If you want to visit. Pay to park and then walk to the stones. If there’s no one checking tickets just walk through. If there is someone checking tickets you can still get a good view from the free-viewing-area. Don’t pay the money.

God’s Covenant

Because it’s not like me to be controversial but apparently there are people who believe that the rainbow is a direct sign from god reinforcing his promise not to kill everyone [again].

Anyway, here’s a rainbow from this evening.

Rainbow
Rainbow

War For The Planet Of The Apes

I went to the cinema to see a Planet of the Apes film. It is usual for me to travel to Rochester and I did the same thing for this film. I rated it on the IMDB website and you can read a discussion of how I grade films in this communication.

I wasn’t really sure whether to make this a 4 or a 6. I only went for a six because I thought it better than everything I recorded as a four, but I wasn’t that impressed. I wrote about the previous film here.

This film looked bloody gorgeous. It was beautiful. It was computerised. It was 3D which does fuck all for me. The apes looked great.

Now for the story. It was pretty shit. Maybe I missed loads of deep ape-becomes-man subtext with all the staring shots into Caesar’s eyes and face but I’m not sure. If the director was making large philosophical statements then I missed them. I’m really one for deep and thoughtful metaphors.

This was a slow war. The middle 7/8 of this film was slow and boring. Stuff happened but it didn’t really matter. There’s a virus somewhere. There are humans killing each other and apes because if there’s one thing we do really well it’s killing each other. There’s a prison break out and some stupid comedy. Mostly though, this film didn’t really matter. There wasn’t a meaning in there.

It Was Nothing

Literally.

About a week ago I had been playing Crash Bandicoot quite a bit on the PS4 [ I have to say it’s incredibly frustrating] and one evening when I went to play it the PS4 said the disk wasn’t in. Now, I hadn’t taken it out so I assumed that it must be stuck in the drive somehow without the PS4 recognising it was in there.

I turned the PS4 on and off and tried a few things before looking online and finding plenty of pages that could offer tips on when the disk keeps ejecting but not many for when you can’t eject a disk. Eventually I found a page, and many crappy YouTube videos, of how to prise out a stuck disk. After taking off the shiny cover I had to turn a screw and the disk would slide out.

Except it didn’t.

So, the next step seemed to be to removed the optical drive and see if I could get the disk out that way. For this I needed time and screw drivers. So I spent a while following the dismantle instructions and then realised I need Torx T9 screw driver, which I didn’t have. So, I made the short trip to Halfords and picked up a set.

Once I had returned home I started taking away the screws for the power supply but even with the correct screw driver these didn’t really want to come undone. I was getting frustrated at the screws in the PS4.

At this point my son asked for a torch to see under the chest for some toys. I told him where the torch was and he reported back that he could see a PS4 disk under the chest. Well! That was a surprise. So I went and looked. Obviously it was the Crash Bandicoot disk and I had spend a week trying to get the PS4 to eject a disk it had already puked and somehow left under the chest.

Reasonably cheered by this I went to put the PS4 together again and then test putting in a disk. Check the game ran and then ejected the disk well.

The system is working fine. There wasn’t any need to stress!

CCF Camp ELW

Well, that was a busy week. Even the bonus of sleeping in my own bed for most of it didn’t really help!

So, back to the beginning. We traditionally have a cadet camp around this time and spend a week on an air force base doing loads of lovely stuff. The RAF couldn’t accommodate us when the school expects us to go so we organised our own things.

Our plan was to have day trips locally along with an overnight at Wittering before a day of Air Experience Flying. We looked into visiting many places and the programme was quite fluid until the last moment but we succeeded in delivering a great experience for the cadets.

Climbing Wall
Climbing Wall

Day One was spent at the Swattenden Centre near Cranbrook and we had the climbing wall, low ropes / assault course, a raft building challenge and the telegraph pole of hell. It was a hot day. In fact, everyday was hot. We were quite lucky with all the dry weather.

The second day we visited St Martin’s Plain near Folkestone. We had all day inside the DCCT building along with cadets learning how to cook ration packs. Kent Police came to visit and showed us all their armed response weapons from the BMW X5.

Middle of the week and we had numerous visits planned: a few hours at IWM Duxford, a few hours at the RAF Regiment Heritage Centre and then on to RAF Wittering to overnight there.

As we were approaching the Duxford exit of the M11 two Mustangs flew overhead in formation. They then proceeded to practice their display for the weekend airshow. It was incredibly impressive and great fun to see. If nothing else exciting happened all week this would have made the week worthwhile.

Duxford Flight Line
Duxford Flight Line

After a while to soak up the rays at Duxford we drove to RAF Honington to visit the RAF Regiment Heritage Centre. This was particularly interesting and there was a lot of pretty impressive kit on display. We even managed to bump into the Station Commander and SWO. They gave us permission to have a photo taken at the gate guardian, which we duly did.

Buccaneer - RAF Honington
Buccaneer – RAF Honington

After time looking and playing with kit we drove to RAF Wittering and booked into our accommodation for the night. The showers here were very welcome as spending four hours driving a minibus with no air conditioning took its toll. We had a lovely evening meal in Stamford at the London Inn.

Our original plan was for a day’s worth of AEF with No.5 AEF but this failed for reasons that we don’t know. Fortunately, and with good contacts, we managed to see 5131 Sqn, the Harrier Heritage Centre and then spend a few hours with the Fire Section next to the runway.

Schmokin'
Schmokin’

The firemen a great at showing off and also managed to effectively cool us down on this baking day.

Squirty Stuff
Squirty Stuff and me

5131 had some curious stuff including this:

Bucket Of Sunshine
Bucket Of Sunshine

Finally, we reached Friday and we had sorted out some rocketry for all to enjoy. The morning was spent building the rockets and lessons on the physics and then we flew the masterpieces in the afternoon.

Launching Rockets
Launching Rockets

Overall this was a good week. Not quite as good as a proper camp, but we did well and I am pretty sure everyone had a really good time.

These Will Probably Get Removed

After such a busy week spending time visiting cool stuff around East Anglia, I had to spend a few more hours at work because I was playing in the band. Disaster Area has been going a while and we normally open the Rock Evenings. Last Friday was no exception although normally we have been practising the songs for a few months rather than the two run throughs we managed an hour before the show.

We opened with Crazy Train.

And continued with Learn To Fly. There will probably be official videos somewhere on Faceshit.

Baby Driver

Yesterday, I took the vehicle to Medway Valley Leisure Park to watch Baby Driver. The tide was low. I don’t know how much leisure you need to be a leisure park but there is:

  • Cinema
  • McDonalds
  • Bowling
  • Bingo
  • Hotel
  • Gym
  • More restaurants

That’s probably enough to make it a “park”. I rated this film on IMDB and this communication deals with my system. There are likely spoilers ahead.

My overall thought was that this film suffered from a “bit too much stuff” in it towards the end, all the action became a little too much and I just wanted it to go away.

The opening twenty minutes of this movie was pretty darn good. The car chase was a car chase and nothing particularly seemed above and beyond anything else we’ve seen. I’m not sure there are always cop cars just around the corner, ready to chase and a Subaru like that would have left them standing, easily. But, movie, you can have that one for free, because this was entertaining.

I liked the idea of the music, the soundtrack to this film was brilliant but after this opening part of the film the dancing and lovely movement seemed to die. The main point for this film stopped happening. The choreographed walking and camera work stopped and this became just another heist movie. The heists weren’t even that clever.

The top man of this film wouldn’t have employed the nutter chap, I can’t remember his name. This guy was too much of a loose cannon and so wouldn’t have made the team. The plans were quite meticulous and he would’ve fucked things up straight away.

The last job these guys pull goes tits-up. It’s the aftermath of this that became too much for me and I quite like action movies. Lots of shooting and people being bad shots. Lots of driving that was quite implausible. Lots of “stuff”. And the choreography had disappeared or I failed to notice it.

I normally find that my ratings tend to mirror the meta-score on IMDB, but not this time. This was rated around 8/10 instead of my 6. I’ll probably try and read some reviews to see just what it was the critics liked about this movie. Oh, it also had a shit title.