Road (Enthusiast) Rage?

Many years ago, we discovered that audiobooks are a wonderful way to make long journeys seem shorter, and seldom does a motorway junction go by without it being accompanied by a snatch of, say, Jules Verne, PG Wodehouse, Arthur Ransome, Neville Shute or Patrick O’Brian.  

Aside: This is one reason why I’m delighted with my latest Tesla software update: as of last week, my car now includes an Audible app, and a single button-press on the steering wheel will continue the current adventure from wherever we left off.  But more about Tesla software updates will follow in a future post…

But if audiobooks aren’t your thing, and you want alternative sources of distraction en route, perhaps you could ponder the history of the numbers of the roads themselves!  This is the topic of a surprisingly interesting blog post by Chris Marshall, talking about UK road numbers like ‘A14’ and ‘B5286’.  

Have you ever wondered where they come from, what the rules are, or who cares about it when the local authorities get the numbers wrong?  Because they do get them wrong, you know, and then SABRE, the Society for All British and Irish Road Enthusiasts swings into action to try to get things put right!

You may feel strongly about this.  You may want to join them and rattle a sabre of your own from time to time.  Then, perhaps, you could join The Milestone Society.  But even if not, Chris’s post will start to educate you, and then you might try searching for your favourite road on the SABRE Wiki!

But not, of course, while you’re driving.

Well, that seems appropriate.

A couple of days ago, I pointed out that a better name for climate change might be “Global Drenching”.

However, it’s clear that I’m not the only one who is thinking that way.

An article on the BBC website tells me that, in England & Wales, the most popular boy’s name for babies is now, apparently, Noah!

Coincidence? Ha! I think not!

Rebranding Climate Change

As I look out of the window at yet another rainy day, it occurs to me that we missed an opportunity to get climate change taken seriously.  Here in Britain, ‘global warming’ often sounds rather nice. An opportunity to improve domestic vineyards, perhaps, and make wines here like the Romans used to do.  Or to save on air fares to the south of France… I know some have argued that ‘global heating’ is a better phrase, for just that reason: it’s a bit less cozy. 

But since, for many people, warmer temperatures will mean increased precipitation, I think we should also consider names like ‘Global Drenching’ or ‘Universal Drizzle’.  That sounds more like something we would want to avoid in the home counties, and might spur people to action.

Right.  Action.  I’m off to buy shares in Gore-Tex…

How to solve ‘range anxiety’

Rory Sutherland has a nice piece with this title in The Spectator.  Excerpt:

As you are reading this, thousands of the world’s cleverest people are spending billions to increase the range of electric car batteries. The reason for this is to reduce a phenomenon called ‘range anxiety’. I suggest that it might be a lot cheaper to reduce anxiety than it is to increase range.

The truth is there is no such thing as range anxiety…

I’ll let you read the rest.

This also reminds me that if you missed Geoff Greer’s review of a gasoline-powered car last year, do go on to read that afterwards!

Many thanks to Peter Robinson for the link to Rory’s piece.

AI Whitewashing

Yesterday, I asked:

Here’s a question, O Internet:

If I buy full-fat milk and dilute it 50/50 with water, do I effectively have semi-skimmed milk, or is there something more sophisticated about the skimming process?

And if I then dilute it again, do I get skimmed milk… for one quarter of the price?

Now, the quick answer, as I understand it, is ‘no’: milk contains a variety of nutrients, and several of these are water-soluble.  So the process of ‘skimming’ to reduce the fat content doesn’t dilute these nutrients in the way that you would by just adding water: you still get them at approximately the same concentration when you buy semi-skimmed or skimmed milk.

But I learned a couple of interesting different things from asking!

The first thing is this wonderful diagram, found and posted in the comments by Spencer:

Thumbnail of 'Milk products' flowchart

(click for full size)

It looks like something explaining the petrochemical industry, but much, much more yummy.

His comment: “I wonder how many of these I can have with my breakfast today?”

And the second thing is that, as well as beginning “Here’s a question, O Internet”, I could have asked “Here’s a question, O Artificial Intelligence”.  

My friend Keshav did that, submitting my question verbatim to Perplexity, a system I hadn’t previously tried.  Here’s the rather good result (and here as a screenshot in case that live link goes away).

I then went on to ask “Which nutrients in milk are water-soluble?”, and it told me, with good citations, with the comment that “maintaining adequate levels of these water-soluble vitamins in breast milk is important for the health and development of the breastfed infant”.  So I asked a follow-up question:  “Is this different in cows’ milk?”, and again, got a useful, detailed response with references for all the facts.

This stuff really is getting better… at least until the Internet is completely overrun by AI spam and the AIs have to start citing themselves.  But for now,  I think Perplexity is worth exploring further.

Thanks to Spencer, Keshav and other respondents!

Whitewashing?

Here’s a question, O Internet:

If I buy full-fat milk and dilute it 50/50 with water, do I effectively have semi-skimmed milk, or is there something more sophisticated about the skimming process?

And if I then dilute it again, do I get skimmed milk… for one quarter of the price?

And the lion shall lie down with…?

From our “this may help you win a bet in the pub” collection…

If you know the quiz show ‘QI’, you might imagine Stephen Fry asking “With whom will the lion lie down?”, and Alan Davies sheepishly responding “The lamb?”… before the claxons start, indicating a wrong answer.

Because if you look at Isaiah chapter 11, where the concept originates, you find rather different domestic arrangements:

“The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.”

So unless they were all getting cozy around the same campfire, I’m afraid lions and lambs aren’t prophesied to lie down together any time soon.  As is so often the case, someone came up with a snappier version later on, and that’s what stuck with us.

Now, is anyone else now thinking about that scene in Ghostbusters?

A cautionary travel tale

On Monday evening, I had a ticket booked to bring me back on the overnight ferry from the Hook of Holland to Harwich. (Here’s a bit of trivia for you: ‘Hook of Holland’ is actually a mistranslation of the Dutch name Hoek van Holland. ‘Hoek’, in Dutch, means ‘corner’, not ‘hook’. And if you know that Holland is only the north-west part of the Netherlands, then it is indeed the bottom-left corner of Holland, which is enlightening to those who, like me, have perused the map wondering what was quite so hook-y about it.)

Anyway, I duly arrived in the area, in my campervan, a few hours early and saw the ferry at the quay but, since you couldn’t check in before 9pm for the 11pm departure, I headed into the town and killed time buying provisions, taking Tilly for a walk, checking email, tidying things up etc. At about 9.30 we drove back to the ferry terminal, pleased with our efficiency and promptness… only to find the gate closed, the entrance area in darkness, and nobody to be seen.

Eh? what??

I started checking my emails, e-tickets and everything carefully, and discovered to my dismay that the ferry actually departed at 10pm, not 11pm, which meant that, having been pottering around for hours just a mile away, I had managed to arrive 15 minutes after the check-in had closed. How could I have been so stupid? Had I just been remembering the outbound journey, where the ferry did indeed depart Harwich at 11pm?

Eventually I realised that it was slightly more subtle than that. When I had made the booking, I had diligently entered all the relevant times into my calendar… but forgot to specify the timezone on the entries for the return journey. I used to do so much international travel that timezones were a regular part of my life, but since I’ve barely left the country since Covid, I’ve had many years to get out of the habit! The departure time had been correctly entered as 10pm… but in UK time. And so, during the two weeks I had spent in the Netherlands, it had always been helpfully displayed, on my phone, iPad and laptop, as 11pm. Only an hour’s offset, and exactly the same time as I had caught the outbound ferry, so I never thought to question it! Bother!

And so I found myself sitting on the dock of the bay, at 10-o’clock at night, with nowhere to go.

Fortunately, I had bought a Flexi ticket, and even though it didn’t technically entitle me to change my travel plans once the ferry was already sailing off into the distance, the people at Stena Line were very understanding, switching me to the ferry that left the following afternoon. And since I happened to be in a vehicle containing a bed, loo, water supply and heater, I was able to use the wonderful Park4Night to find a nearby spot where I could spend a peaceful night.

The following day actually turned out to be rather a good one! It was sunny, my car park was only a few hundred yards from a nice beach where Tilly ran free, and then with some diligent Googling we discovered a splendid bakery to get provisions for breakfast in a nearby town, and a country park in which to stroll. We hadn’t seen much sunshine for a few days, so it was a delightful way to end our trip… and a lovely contrast to the dark, abandoned ferry port of the night before!

All was therefore well that ended well. But I shall be checking that ‘timezone’ field in my calendar app more carefully in future!

Live together in perfect harmony…

I’m fond of both milk and dark chocolate. Milk chocolate is yummy kiddy comfort food. Dark chocolate is more sophisticated, more bitter, more ‘adult’. It’s also less likely to melt at inconvenient times, so helping you preserve that more sophisticated appearance.

But the problem, I find, is that dark chocolate often has too little taste. Even the better brands can be hard, waxy, slightly bitter slabs that don’t actually give much enjoyment, especially when you get to the higher-cocoa-content variants. More ‘fix’ than ‘fun’. Espresso vs latte. (But espresso, I think, has more flavour. Certainly more variety of flavour.)

And so I often think back nostalgically to the days of my youth, when Marks & Spencer sold what was, in my mind, the perfect Swiss chocolate bar.

It was a simple bar of dark chocolate, with a milk chocolate centre.

Bitter and yet sweet. Soft and yet crunchy. Non-melty, and yet easy to bite. Sophisticated and yet yummy. Yin and yet yang.

It seems so obvious: the ‘flat white’ of chocolate. And, as is generally the case with M&S food, it was very good. It could certainly have turned its nose up at anything made Mr Cadbury, and as for Mr Hershey… well, let’s not go there.

Now, we didn’t have anything as smart as an M&S Food store in the little town where I grew up, so this was a special treat which occasionally appeared after my mother returned from shopping in a larger metropolis. Perhaps its rarity, combined with rosy nostalgia, has elevated it to an unwarranted state of perfection in my mind… but there was no doubt it was pretty good!

And yet, at about the time when I graduated from having chocolate bought for me to buying it myself… they stopped selling it! I don’t know why. Perhaps it was marketing: are most customers actually purists who demand either black or white? Or perhaps there were manufacturing challenges of which I am unaware. Not only did Marks and Spencer stop selling it, I haven’t really seen its equivalent anywhere else in the intervening decades.

But if anybody out there knows of a good combination of high-quality dark and milk chocolate, I’d like to return to my childhood, so please let me know…

A load of cobblers

The Dutch, I gather, don’t have a specific word for ‘pothole’ because, well, they don’t need one. Having just returned from a two-week campervan tour there, I don’t think I saw a single one. I knew I was back in Blighty yesterday evening, though, when I had to swerve to avoid them before I even left Harwich ferry port. The UK now reminds me of a saying from my childhood (the first few years of which were spent in Africa):

“Which side of the road do they drive on in Kenya?”
“The best side.”

One thing that struck me immediately in the Netherlands, that I hadn’t noticed on previous visits, was that in cities, towns and villages, much of the ground is paved, bricked or cobbled, rather than tarmacked. This extends not just to driveways, footpaths and pedestrian areas, as we might do here, but to pavements, cycle lanes and many of the roads.

I include a few random holiday snaps (click for larger versions) which just happen to feature them, but, in truth, they are everywhere. (I guess ‘paved’ is usually a better description than ‘cobbled’ for what I saw in most places, but doesn’t make for such good blog post titles.)

I think they look much more attractive than our usual tarmac, water drains off promptly, and they are, of course, well-maintained, meaning they are generally pleasant to cycle on as well. (Though I can’t deny that their tarmacked cycle lanes, not being maintained by British workmen, are an even nicer ride.)

I wonder about the economics of this. Paving is presumably rather more expensive, initially, but may reduce the need for drainage irrigation. An installation probably wouldn’t last as long as tarmac, but when it does go wrong, it can be quickly and cheaply fixed. As I was looking for a parking spot in a residential area of The Hague, for example, one street was closed off as they were re-laying a large section of the nice herringbone bricks. When I returned after lunch, they were gone, and the street looked pristine.

My friend Pauline, who lives in Utrecht, commented wryly that the main effect was to prevent women from wearing high heels! I confess this wasn’t a problem I had considered. But then there are many aspects of paving I had never considered, like the fact that there might be a Worshipful Company of Paviors.

I wonder what their take would be on the current state of British vs. Dutch roads…

Remote Hero?

I know some of my readers will have seen this on John’s blog, but for others…

A wonderful thing has happened. There is a new and marvellous recording of one of my all-time favourite tracks, Mark Knopfler’s Going Home, the theme music from the also-wonderful movie Local Hero.

As if that weren’t enough, it includes contributions by, well, basically everybody famous who ever picked up a guitar… from Sting to Joe Satriani, from Sheryl Crow to Eric Clapton, from Peter Frampton to Joan Armatrading… the list goes on… with Ringo Starr on the drums. I wish there were a video or some sort of annotation so you could see who was playing when.

And then it gets even better… this is a production in aid of cancer charities. You can listen to it, buy it, download it, and the proceeds go to a good cause.

Tilly and I are currently touring the Netherlands in our campervan, and this makes for fabulous road-trip music. I wonder how big a donation I’d need to make in order to be allowed to use it in my upcoming YouTube videos…

Our parking spot last night on the north Netherlands coast. This is very close to ‘Riddle of the Sands’ country: a rather different coastline from the beaches near Arisaig used for “Local Hero” (but we did visit those on a previous campervan trip).

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser