Aristotle

Oh no .... I see what you mean now Clearly the term "risk averse" doesn't feature in his lexicon ......

I think no 1 has a feel of a Saxon great hall - it's OK but like all three, not really in keeping with the environment. Criticising the architects is wrong however - after all, according to the article, there were 95 entries received before the deadline, we don't know what the other 92 were like! We should be directing our comments at whoever shortlisted these three, somewhere in the 92 rejections may be some very good designs much closer to what many of us think would be appropriate!

Just watched the first two episodes - abs fascinating! Glad to see he remembered to wear gloves and ear defenders when using the chainsaw ! As someone who has had some chainsaw training it gave me shivers to watch him up the tree ... and those props look a bit minimalist ..... I think my risk aversion is beginning to show .....

from me and Mrs Aristotle.

Oh dear Oh dear: It's Jimmy Young - The Man from Laramie

As Mrs Aristotle is often heard to say - we must make the most of opportunities that present themselves because these times may not come again. On the other hand, I'm not sure I agree that : because I spend a lot of time thinking how lucky I am to be where I am and trying to find ways of not having to be somewhere else .

It's all gone downhill since "Out of Town" with Jack Hargreaves. And such a good theme tune as well - the sun is a big yellow duster polishing up the sky ......

Strangely enough I have to go up into the loft this afternoon to find my fleece and waterproofs ready for my trip to Norfolk in a couple of weeks .

I have a copy of this postcard which I bought at the end of my first Broads holiday - we hired Delight X for a week in May 1964. I've still got a few photos from that holiday somewhere - think it might mean a trip to the loft!

I apologise for the delay in posting the next instalment – this is largely for two reasons: Firstly, we’ve been hit by a spell of good weather so my attentions have been diverted elsewhere; secondly, this instalment is mainly photos, and choosing the right pictures is a lot harder than just writing about them! Anyway –here we go: Cox’s work So just to recap – the work to be undertaken by Cox’s was the elimination of anything rotten (keel, planking, frames) new bent oak ribs, cove line etc. I’ve already described work on the new keel so the next photo shows the stripped out interior before work started: The next photo shows new ribs and two new laminated frames: Actually this picture is a bit out of sequence because it was taken after the starboard planking was completed. After addressing the framing and the keel, next came planking: The majority of the existing planking appeared to be larch but we decided on mahogany because (as Polly has posted) getting hold of good quality larch in quantity is difficult at best and at this stage it was a guess as to exactly how much would be required; Cox’s buy their seasoned mahogany in bulk as complete sawn trees and so have an almost inexhaustible supply at a very good price! I should mention that Cox’s will sell timber as well as using it: http://coxsboatyard.co.uk/top-quality-timber-sale/ And now various shots of the planking in progress. The plan is that the seams above the waterline will be epoxied and those below the waterline will be sikaflexed (as seems to be the fashion nowadays). The following photos cover a period from March 2017 to April 2018. By the end of this sequence the upper planking has been epoxied, the lower planking sikaflexed and the whole given a first sanding down before a second application of epoxy to deal with any remaining blemishes! Coming next – something rotten in that state of the deck and starting work on the interior ….

40ft was just an arbitrary choice of length - as you say - stopping anything over 38ft would be even better . Of course - fewer long hire craft would mean a bit more space at moorings as well - two benefits for the price of one!

Iwould definitely be happy to pay more for more moorings but most of all for a reduction in the number of large hire craft. in my view anything over 40ft LOA should be banned as hire craft - they are just too big to be handled by mainly amateur helms-persons .

And of course the Discworld books are just travelogues about Somerset .

Totally agree with audiobooks. Our problem is that we are of an age that when it's time to do the return journey we can't rememeber what we were listening to or how far through the story we were. In fact I'm beginning to wonder how we manage to remember where home is ...

Wow - I thought our 612 miles was bad enough ........

Stripping the interior It was a great disappointment to me that Mrs Aristotle was so underwhelmed by the new digital Dymo labelling machine that I bought to make her life easier! It has several fonts, multiple font sizes and can print both horizontally and vertically. And, as I pointed out, she could use it to label all the files she is trying to organise at home as well. Anyway, we spent two days stripping out the interior with me photographing and unscrewing bits, Mrs Aristotle labelling each piece as it was removed and bagging up the screws. Most of this was reasonably simple – this photo shows an early stage of work in progress. Berth cushion and drawers removed, the mahogany slats lining the hull are screwed to the frames and the pine bunk boards simply lift out. Some of the bunk boards were taken home for woodworm treatment and close observation to ensure that there was no active woodworm – it had never occurred to me that you could get woodworm on a boat! This left the sides of the berths and the drawer runners. These were fairly easy to remove but I suspect the re-fitting may not be quite as simple! The following photo is an example of the complex woodwork behind the scenes. Note also the repaired plank edges in the top left and the two splints in the area to the right with white and grey bilge paint. The historic invoices record instances of “sorting out” the drawers and drawer runners – I suspect this may be related to movement in the hull resulting from the framing and planking issues discussed above. The photo shows an example of the cross-bracing supporting the bunk sides and drawer runners. It is anybody’s guess quite how everything will fit once the hull has been re-planked and takes on its new shape. It took two days to strip out; I have allowed 10 days to do the re-fitting! I'll know in a few weeks time ...... The Baby Blake The Baby Blake was removed as part of the strip out and taken home to be refurbished. Over the years Brian and Joy had accumulated various spares: two extra toilet bowls, two spare seats and a lid, pump handle, etc. so the chances of getting one solid, working toilet were good. Paint stripper followed by a sulphuric acid bath was used to take all the bronze and brass parts back to clean metal. Some parts were then repainted and others given several coats of Protectaclear to maintain the bright bronze finish without having to keep re-polishing. As far as I can determine, the seat and lid are made of polyoxybenzylmethyleneglycolanhydride (OK, Bakelite if you prefer the dumbed down version). I’m happy for someone to correct me on this – my ability to identify early plastics is limited! Bakelite is formed from phenol and formaldehyde and was developed by the Belgian-American chemist Leo Baekeland in Yonkers, New York, in 1907 (Isn’t Wikipedia wonderful?). Over time the surface oxidizes and forms a dull surface layer which with careful attention can be brought back to something close to the shiny finish it would have had originally. The seat and lid were refurbished by using a fine rubbing compound followed by good quality wax car polish. I began to sense that my energetic polishing of the toilet seat was starting to stretch Mrs Aristotle’s patience and understanding although her only comment was “Please don’t make it too slippy”. I still can’t work out what she was getting at – perhaps she doesn’t realise quite how small the heads compartment is. Everything was re-assembled using a BB service kit -not cheap) and bench tested (the inlet and outlet pumps that is - nothing more than that) by our three year old grandson whose enthusiastic and energetic pumping even exceeded my energetic polishing of the seat! From this point onwards it was very much over to Cox’s ……….

It's important that we're open minded and not dogmatic in our views - and you'll never convince me otherwise

Ah, now - it's interesting that you mention the great estuary . Vaughan mentioned much earlier in this thread about "the low land we call the Broads was at first land-locked, in the same way as the Somerset Levels". Actually, the Somerset Levels weren't as land-locked as most of us think. A few months ago I went to a talk by Richard Brunning who is an archaeologist with Somerset County Council. The Somerset Levels is (are?) one of his specialist areas: the talk was about the southern area (the bit between Glastonbury and Bridgwater). One of the surprising things he mentioned was the extent to which the coastline has moved around, there were multiple instances of large scale marine ingressions and regressions which came much further inland (and I think lasted longer) than was previously thought. The talk focused on the Mesolithic and Bronze Age but this advance and retreat of the coastline probably applies both before the Mesolithic and post the Bronze Age, for instance, in a web page describing the University of Exeter’s North Somerset Levels project by Professor Stephen Rippon, he states “In the early medieval period the landscape was once again flooded by the sea as most of the North Somerset Levels reverted to saltmarshes.” I wonder if he's referring to the 14th century ? So although the theory of a single large estuary is overly simplistic, we shouldn't write off the possibility that large areas were, from time to time, subject to estuarine conditions.

Once again I've arrived late at the party but I was already aware of the broadsmaker web site. I'm pleased that this thread gives the opportunity to make some observations. My first is how unscientific Shelock Holmes was . "How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?" If you are a follower of Karl Popper you will see the obvious flaw in this! Whatever remains isn't "true", it just hasn't been falsified yet (i.e. proved untrue). I would recommend this brief outline of Popper's thinking: https://www.fs.blog/2016/01/karl-popper-on-science-pseudoscience/ The essence of a scientific theory is that it is testable and falsifiable. Joyce Lambert falsified the theory that the broads had a natural origin by observing the regularity of their form. The broadsmaker website elegantly refutes (falsifies) the theory that the broads were dug as whole pits and flooded in the 14th century. The web site then proposes a better explanation for the origin of the Broads, the question now is whether the new theory is falsifiable and how do we test it?

I think Eric at Cox's Boatyard used to work at Moore's - it's just possible he might know something about it .....

What - even if I'm criticising its use ... oh no ... definitely

I’ve only just come across this posting having joined recently so apologies that I'm a bit late coming to the party! I agree absolutely about how the interpretation of archaeological remains is often embellished (particularly by the “media”) to make things more interesting or more significant than they are in reality. Never let facts get in the way of a good story. Of course, being a philosopher of sorts, I am duty bound to mention the huge philosophical problem regarding the interpretation of historic, archaeological and fossil material, particularly in the absence of good (or even any) contextual information. In the days before I had to earn a living wage, I did research into how to reconstruct ancient environments based on fossil mammals: Our interpretations tend to be influenced as much by our thought processes and the underlying assumptions that we make, as they are by the material evidence we are interpreting – it’s just that we don’t usually recognise this. If you change the assumptions you get a different answer and yet we rarely identify and question these underlying assumptions to understand how they influence our conclusions. As professionals we still make assumptions, it’s just that we think they are more reasonable than those of amateurs and the media, but my heart always sinks when I hear an archaeologist use the word “ritual” as an explanation for things for which we, as 21st century “civilized” beings, cannot find a pragmatic explanation. This is the point where we should be questioning our beliefs and not making assumptions about those of our ancestors! Sorry, rant over, I’ll get my coat and go and varnish something !

We bought this watercolour on ebay last year. For us the interest is that it is of Barton Turf staithe. It's by Charles Mayes Wigg and was possibly painted just after 1900. He lived at Barton Turf for a while although I don't know exactly when. He seems to have painted a lot of pictures that included wherries. Sadly a lot of his work was destroyed when he married later in life - his wife disapproved of him painting!

My Dad, who worked for a brush manufacturer for many years taught me a trick to identify good quality brushes: A good quality paint brush will stand on its bristles. I'm guessing that this is an indicator of the extent to which the brush has been bulked out with shorter bristles. I've struggled to find any brushes that will do this in recent years - event the premier quality Hamilton natural bristle brushes don't seem to meet this quality standard any more.