It's official. I'm a genius.

I am not bragging, just stating a fact. It is a fact that I have discovered through a myriad of IQ tests on Facebook. These tests prove I am a genius.

First there was one that claimed “Only one in a thousand can find the short-tailed rat.” There was then a collage of around 100 rats, all but one with long tails. I found the short tail rat in less than a minute! Smart, eh?

Then there was a test that said “Only a genius can read this.” The paragraph that followed contained misspelled words, words with numbers instead of letters, and some words that were spelled backwards. I read the paragraph effortlessly! Mensa, here I come.

Most recently I took a vocabulary test where only someone with an IQ of 140-149 could correctly choose the definition of a word from multiple choices 18 times out of 20. I answered all 20 correctly! How about that for brilliance?

That’s it, I am a genius. I must be, as I proved it on all the Facebook tests. And they couldn't possibly be wrong. After all, Facebook is so reliable.

I doubt anyone reading this post could prove that your a genius from any of these tests. You would probably not do better then I. Don’t feel two bad, everyone can’t be a genius like what I be.

So, actually an awesome post, like. Super.

In my humble (humble? moi?) opinion, communicating these days is being made increasingly difficult by the continuing and continuous debasement of our language. Everything seems to be hyperbolic and hysterical. Remember when things used to be 'very' or 'extra'?  If a meal was good you could say "that was good", or if it was better than just good it was "very good" or, even, "extra good". If a meal was pretty much the best meal you have ever had in your life, you could say it was fabulous!

But nowadays everything is super good. Very and extra are now meaningless, which makes 'super' meaningless, and 'fabulous' is just confusing. Is fabulous better than super?  Super used to be as high as it got. Think about it, if you will. Marvel Comics did not create 'Verygoodman' or 'Extragoodman' or 'Fabulousman', they created 'Superman!' Unfortunately, 'Super' has been so watered down, I wonder if a present day Clark Kent could still bend steel with his bare hands or leap tall buildings in a single bound. After all he is still Superman but in a world where everything these days is super. Perhaps he'd be 'no-so-Superman'?

“I’m SUPER tired.” “She is SUPER smart.” “That car is SUPER expensive.” The word has been diluted. It is now meaningless. Sure, you could say something is very SUPER, or extra SUPER, or SUPER fabulous, but that just doesn't work. Once you throw in that “super” adjective, you know that what ever follows could very well only be ordinary, and probably is.

Once upon a time, we used to use 'literally' as a superlative. “He is literally larger than a bus!” Now we know that literally means not figuratively, so when used in this way it is clearly just a sarcastic way to say “He is huge!” It used to work. Today, people use 'literally' willy-nilly to indicate a superlative to virtually anything. “He is literally six feet tall.” Why do this?  Why not just say “He is six foot tall?” “Literally” as a sarcastic superlative has been ruined.

If you, like, say "like" too much, it can, like, weaken the impact of what you're trying to say. The slang interjection is a filler word we're all guilty of using, but it's how often you say it that makes the real difference Do you like "like"? Does it drive you crazy? To me, its overusage indicates a lazy mind.
We used to say “actually” to confirm that what follows is true even though you might think it is an exaggeration. “I actually shot par on eight holes last week.” Hard to believe, but yes, I actually did. (Not actually-actually, this is just in way of an example. Actually, I don't play golf.) Now people say actually to virtually every question. 

“What do you do for a living?” “Actually, I am a teacher.” As if being a teacher is so difficult to believe?  To me that means, “Hard to believe because I am so clearly thick and uneducated, but actually, I am a teacher.” Today, “Actually” actually means nothing.

So many words today have been ruined. Why is everything “awesome?” Is “awesome” better than “super?” Can something be “super awesome?” Why is every event “epic?” Epic used to describe an adventure that is heroic or legendary. How on earth is a night out drinking “heroic” or “legendary?”  If something is “actually” awesome or an event is “literally” epic, how do we communicate that today and still get our meaning across? While I am at it, why does the start to an answer to any question today start with “so.” “Can you tell me where the bus stop is?” “So, you go two roads up and then turn left.” SO! Why SO?

Well, I’m done. This post is literally too long and I am actually tired of writing. So, I am going to just stop. I hope you like this post. I think it's awesome but I am actually literally terrified that you will not.

And for your amusement I can offer Frank Zappa's p*ss-take of the Valley Girls (where the overuse of 'like' originated). It's performed by his daughter, Moon Unit Zappa. Enjoy.

Sometimes, just sometimes, I wish I still lived in Scotland

Chris Riddell: Observer: 22nd August 2020

Since we lived near Edinburgh in the early 1970s, I've always taken an interest in Scottish politics. It's getting quite lively north of the border and it's a useful distraction from what's going on in England. Indeed, there are times when I wish I still lived in Scotland and could take part in what's going on.

Our part time Prime Minister and full time skiver has cut short his break in Scotland after his location was discovered. It was touted in advance that he was going to be spending his holiday amongst the restless Caledonian natives so that they’d feel a little bit better about being ignored down in Westminster. In the event, the best thing that he could think of in order to endear himself to the Scots was to hide away in a remote location where no one could see him. So, just like all his previous visits to Scotland then.

The press, even the normally cravenly partisan Conservative press, have been full of complaints that the Prime Minister was missing in action, again. Johnson decided that the perfect time for him to bugger off was when the UK is in crisis: the coronavirus hasn’t gone away, the economy is tanking, Scotland is increasingly turning to support for independence, and the clock is ticking on Brexit negotiations that aren’t going anywhere fast. For their part, Downing Street sources have retorted that it’s unfair to say that the Prime Minister has been avoiding doing his job. While he was away on holiday amidst the dramatic scenery on the wild and craggy shores of the Applecross Peninsula, he was doing exactly what he would have been doing in Downing Street, drinking wine and sitting twiddling his thumbs as he stared at a cliff edge.

The Tories are blaming the SNP for revealing the location of Johnson’s hideaway to the press. Revealing his location meant that his holiday cottage was at risk of being mobbed by Scottish nationalists, they say. But who knew that the SNP had such a close and friendly relation with that bastion of press support for Scottish independence, the Daily Mail. If the SNP really was going to leak the location of Johnson’s holiday cottage, they’d have leaked it to The National in Scotland.

Johnson is reportedly livid that his holiday has been interrupted. Revealing its location meant that he was vulnerable to a sniper, sniffed the Sun. Ah yes, that infamous Applecross Snipers’ Association, bagging Tories instead of Munroes as they stalk the Gove moors. Maybe Johnson would do a bit better if he realised that people really don’t care where he’s been. They care that he’s got as much interest in doing his job as he does in admitting how many children he’s got.
According to the Tories the real story here isn’t that we have a Prime Minister who isn’t doing his job, it’s that some people had the nerve to complain about it. Of course it had nothing to do with the SNP that Johnson’s location was discovered. It was entirely his own decision to go and spend his holidays in an area where there’s majority support for independence and expect that the locals would simply tug their forelocks and defer to him. Instead one of those locals was irked enough to tip off the press. That’s how we really bag Tories these days.

The Tories are very clearly at a loss about what to do in order to counter the rising support for Scottish independence. This week’s opinion poll which put support for independence at 55% has only deepened their sense of panic. There was a report in the press that Michael Gove had embarked upon some meetings with, ahem ‘senior politicians’ from other parties to cobble together a joint plan to prevent independence. He met with Jack McConnell, George Galloway, and Danny Alexander. Senior politicians? Really?  Gove, McConnell, Galloway, and Alexander, the four horsemen of the Crapocalypse. What an unholy alliance and a sure sign that Nicola really has the Tories rattled.

The independence movement in Scotland and its determination that Scotland has an absolute right to another independence referendum is driven by a simple belief. “Scotland’s inalienable right to self-determination includes the right to decide how to exercise that right… To deny it would be to say that of all the nations of the world today we had no national right to self-determination.” That was George Galloway writing in Radical Scotland magazine in 1983. Now he’s cosying up with the Tories, with the founder of UKIP Alan Sked, and with the British establishment. Always the rebel, eh, George? What a tosser. And I don't mean of the cable variety.

However it’s clear that the Conservatives realise that they cannot prevent Scottish independence simply by saying no to another referendum. That may work as a short term tactic, but ultimately it will prove self-defeating. If Michael Gove was so confident that all his government had to do in order to prevent independence was to keep saying no, then he wouldn’t be meeting with George Galloway. Gove has already implicitly accepted that there will have to be another referendum when he tweeted that gerrymandering (boundary manipulation) the franchise for that referendum was an “interesting idea”. If he really believed that there would never be another referendum, that Downing Street could say no forever, then gerrymandering the franchise for a referendum that was never going to happen wouldn’t be very interesting at all.

Meanwhile Scottish Tory MSP Rachel Hamilton has made a bit of an arse of herself on social media by tweeting that Scotland has been “overrun by SNP bigots and separatists”. Yep, that's the way to persuade all those Scottish people who support independence to fall back in love with the Tories. All they’ve got left are insults and the frustrated wails of those who are starting to realise that their Great British castle is built on sand, and the Scottish tide is rising.

How I made our pizza oven/wood burning oven

It's been a long time coming but I've finally got around to detailing how I made our pizza/wood burning oven. A fun project and, after several year's use, it seems to have worked out well. And by popular acclaim, the pizzas it makes are pretty tasty.

I'd spent quite a while researching DIY ovens and the internet is jam-packed with details of many. But none was quite what I wanted. I knew I didn't want to build one in clay as these seem to crack and weather quite quickly and really needed some sort of roof for protection. I wasn't too keen on any construction that needed lots of bricks and formed arches as I knew the limits of my ability. In the end, I decided to cast a dome out of fire-proof concrete. Not the cheapest of materials but not overtly expensive.

Was it worth doing? Yes. Would I do it the same way again? Yes.

Given the weight that the final structure was going to be, it needed a substantial base to sit on. After putting in and levelling some shuttering for the sides, it was a good place to lose some old hardcore we had lying around.

It was all tamped down with a great big sledge hammer to consolidate well.

The slab was made from a concrete mix (oh, how I love mixing concrete by hand) and was probably about 4 inches thick. I put this around the side of our house, so that it was out of sight (it is a big beast) and the opening was well away from the direction of the wind.

On top of this I built a frame with breeze blocks. I can't remember the exact dimensions but the size was based on block size: two blocks long for the sides and three blocks high. I wanted to avoid cutting blocks unnecessarily.

Block laying is not my strong point but, according to my spirit levels, it didn't turn out too badly.

I faced the block frame with standard bricks. As each block was two bricks high, it was easy to build up to the top level of the blocks.

To allow for what was going to be the base of the oven, I put another course of bricks on top of the others. I also built a central pillar with more blocks and this would give some additional support to the base.

The first of the oven base layers was a piece of external plywood, probably 2.5 cm thick. The weight of the oven would be taken up by the 'walls' of the frame so I thought this thickness would be adequate.

Next was a 2.5cm layer of the ceramic insulating mat. Hopefully this would help insulate the plywood from the heat.

What I should have as the base of the oven was not a decision I took easily. I was leaning towards tiles of some sort but, a conversation with someone at a kiln supplies company (Castree Kilns), made up my mind for me and I went for a ceramic batt (base) and set that in 5 cm of insulating refractory cement. Was all this base thick enough for the job? All I can say is that it's been in use for about 9 years and hasn't collapsed yet!

The finished oven will be large enough for bears of varying sizes.

There must have been a reason for my taking these bear photographs but I can't for the life of me remember what it was. Maybe they were part of a 'what am I building' quiz I set some friends in North Carolina?

And this image falls into the same category. Why have I got a wicker (willow) basket on my head and, apart from it being rather stylish head wear, what am I really going to use it for?

Pizza ovens are domed shaped and the question was "how to get this shape? Some people use mounds of sand as a shaper but that struck me as both messy and crude. The alternative I came up with was getting a cheap wicker dome, shaping the oven around this and then burning it out. By chance I was put in touch with a lovely wicker 'artist' who lived on the edge of Bodmin Moor (Carol Horsington of Cornish Willow at Treovis Cross Farm) and she agreed to weave what I needed to my exact dimensions. I think Carol was rather intrigued by the challenge!

Slapping concrete directly onto the dome would result in a lot of it falling through the strands. To prevent this, I wrapped it in paper masking tape.

And here is the finished article in place, centralised over the ceramic batt on the floor of the oven.

The oven needs a door and I got our local blacksmith, Michael Broome, to make me a frame in steel. The width of the steel was 8 inches, which was intended to be the finished thickness of the walls. The width of the opening was about 1 foot, which I reckoned was wide enough to accommodate the largest size pizza I would make. If you want to really get into the intricacies of oven design, you'll soon learn that there are certain ratios between inner oven diameter, inner oven height and oven door height that the experts say you need to have. The most important here, and the only one I used, was that the oven opening height had to be 63% of the inner dome height. The height of the steel frame was based on this calculation.

At the outset I had to decide whether to have a chimney or not and I decided against it. The main advantage of a chimney seems to be to take the smoke out of your face when you are cooking, but if you get the dimensions right (see above), this shouldn't be a problem. The main disadvantage with a simple chimney design, and I certainly didn't want anything complicated, is that lots of heat will go out the chimney instead of heating up the oven. I  could live with anything that didn't add any complexity to my design. After many uses, smoke 'blow-back' has never been a problem but I did put a clay chimney pot on top for cosmetic reasons, and because two friends (John and Rosie) had one going spare.

I fixed the door in place with some more masking tape. The tape around the sides indicated to depth of each layer I would be putting on. I was aiming for an overall thickness of 8 inches.

The first layer was of dense castable concrete (from Castree Kilns). This is material designed for hot-facing lining of kilns, forges and furnaces and was suitable for temperatures up to 1400C - more than adequate for a wood-burning oven.  It came in 25kg bags and was mixed with water to get it to the right consistency.    

There was a lot of trial and error in getting the cement to the right consistency. Initially, I had intended to trowel it on but, in the end, putting it on by hand (suitably gloved) worked out best. If the mixture was too wet, it slumped (crept downwards). It was like making a giant mud pie.

Once the first layer was on and dried for 24 hours, I cut through the wicker liner and got ready to burn it out.

My photographic record is incomplete but over the first layer, I put some of the ceramic insulating blanket, held in place with chicken wire. And over this came an approximately 10 cm layer of insulating castable concrete. The rational of the layering was as follows: the dense castable takes up the heat and the insulating ceramic blanket and insulating castable minimises heat loss. It seems to work as, in practice, even after a long burning, the outside does not get unbearably hot.

The finished oven with the liner burned out and the chimney pot perched on the top for effect. I didn't cement it on for a while. As a rough estimate, I'd say that the oven had a metric tonne of material in it and will withstand a nuclear blast. There have been a few cracks over the years but nothing serious and these have been easily repaired by using heat-proof mortar.

To give it a vaguely Tuscan ambience, I painted the outside with masonry paint to give it some protection from the elements. It doesn't get hot enough for it to burn off and, every now and again, I slap another coat on to freshen it up.

The oven in action. A couple of things of note here. To the right is the door I made from a piece of thick oak I had lying around. I'll probably replace this with something else in the near future. At the back of the oven is a semi-circular fire grill and I use this to push ashes to the back of the oven to allow me room to cook the pizzas.

And this is my homemade wooden 'peel'. Dusted liberally with semolina before putting the raw pizza on, they work a treat for getting things into and out of the oven. It takes about 90 minutes or so (and a lot of wood),  to get it up to temperature which I guess is in excess of 400C, and pizzas take about 5 minutes to cook at this temperature. Long oven gauntlets are a must when cooking, unless you don't mind the hairs on your arms being singed.

Here is a time-lapse video of the above slides. I can't remember how long it took to build but it was a fun project.

A walk on Southern Dartmoor

The weather is set fair, very fair, so it's off to Dartmoor for a socially-distanced walk with friends. And a good time was had by all.

It's not often that we walk on the southern edges of Dartmoor and this one started on the outskirts of Ivybridge at Stowford Bridge. No, not of the ancient clapper variety but just a bog standard over-a-railway model. Our route took us up onto the moor, skirting Western Beacon and Butterdon Common to take us to a point just past Hangershell Rock. As the elevation profile shows, for just under 4 miles it was a steady ascent but nothing too strenuous, even in the sunshine. From there we dropped down off the moor to Harford and followed the River Erme back to Ivybridge. At 8 miles, this walk was the longest we'd done for a while. 

Looking back down the track we were on some 10 minutes after starting. And so it continued for the next 4 miles.

Looking due west towards the 'alps' of the China Clay workings at Lee Moor. Kaolin has been worked on Dartmoor since the early 1800s. Although production is much lower than in the past, China Clay still plays an important role in the local economy. The streak on the left is the scar of the open-cast Drakelands tungsten mine (which closed in 2018) at Hemerdon.

About 1 mile into the walk, we came across this track, which we followed for another mile or so. It is the bed of the Redlake Tramway, a railway built to carry supplies and workers between Bittaford and the clay workings at Redlake, near the centre of the southern part of the moor. It was built in 1911 to a 3 ft (914 mm) narrow gauge, and ran for a circuitous 8.3 miles. Although it took materials to the workings, it never carried clay in the reverse direction. This actually came down by gravity in a large pipe and ended up being processed at Bittaford.

I rarely feature people in my posts but this is for someone I know will be looking out for this one. I will point out that I'm only in front because I've got the remote control for my camera. Allowing for the perspective, we were all suitably socially distanced, except for those in a 'bubble'. 

Keen eyes are required to make out the line of stones heading up Piles Hill. We didn't venture further to take a closer look at them but this extract from a Dartmoor gazetteer whets my appetite to revisit them: "Stone alignments or stone rows consist of upright stones set in a single line or two or more parallel lines, up to several hundred metres in length. They frequently lead to burial monuments such as small cairns, cists and barrows and are therefore thought to have had a ceremonial function. The 70 or so examples known on Dartmoor were probably constructed in the Late Neolithic period (around 2500 BC). The Butterdon Hill single stone alignment runs for over 2km along the ridge between Butterdon Hill and Piles Hill and is the second longest stone alignment on Dartmoor".

A rather attractive natural collection...………….

A far less attractive unnatural collection. Why, oh why, do people behave so abysmally? It really does p**s me off. A pox upon them and may they be visited by a plague of boils and get suppurating pustules. Serves 'em right.

At this time of year, damp places on the moor are generally bedecked with the seed heads of Cotton Grass, which is neither cotton nor a grass. It's a sedge. If you ever want to distinguish a sedge from a grass or a rush, remember that 'sedges have edges', referring to their triangular shaped stems. Seasoned walkers know that it's best to avoid areas where they are growing in profusion as they are likely to be boggy.And if you want to go a little further into it - grasses are round and rushes are hollow - the stems, that is.

Cotton Grass in its natural state. I don't think the black and white version does it any justice at all. A couple of Cotton Grass facts for you: historically the seed heads would have been used to stuff pillows instead of goose down and were used for wound dressings in the First World War.

What never ceases to amaze me is how you can be ambling along some deserted lane in the middle of deep Cornish or Devonian countryside when a church will spring up from nowhere. The beautiful church of St Petrock’s at Harford is one such church lying in a secluded spot several miles upstream from Ivybridge on the river Erme. Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, the church was closed but we will return for a visit.

Closed the church might have been but the churchyard was still open for a wander around. This one caught my eye: Captain Michael Farr who was in the infamous German POW camp of Colditz. Mr Google tells us: "Michael (Micky) joined up and was taken prisoner early in the (1939-45) war. He was held in Colditz for virtually the whole war. Afterwards he returned to live with his mother at Whingreen in Ivybridge. I understand they ran a self-sufficient small holding. He stayed there after his mother died and eventually died there himself, unmarried and without children. It is thought that his incarceration in Colditz damaged him considerably. The house has since been pulled down and replaced". I find that very sad.
But here's a more amusing anecdote I came across: "Prisoner Michael Farr, whose family ran Hawker's Gin (the sole purveyors of Sloe gin with a Royal Warrant), managed to make a sparkling wine dubbed "Château Colditz". Some prisoners would get black teeth or even temporary blindness from consuming this beverage — a condition known as "jam-happy" — as it contained many impurities. Although the German guards despised the drunken prisoners, they generally turned a blind eye to the distilling".

This headstone was a rather unexpected finding. I was looking closely at the background of some of the photographs I'd taken of the graveyard and noticed this one. I can't find anything about it via Mr Google but I expect a revisit to the church will give something of its history. 'Died of the awful visitation of cholera'. It resonates with our present time. But Mr Google does have this to say about the 1832 outbreak: "Devon suffered from proximity to ports such as Plymouth and Bideford - places where sailors came ashore already infected with cholera. The railways too, brought people from badly-infected areas such as London and Liverpool. But the true cause was the primitive level of sanitary arrangements throughout the county. In 1832, Devon was second only to London in its casualty rate and the Exeter outbreak in that year was well-documented by Thomas Shapter. The port of Dartmouth suffered badly and deaths spread to other places in the South Hams; at the same time, there was a serious outbreak in Plymouth. Another serious outbreak occurred in 1839 but it was the lengthy outbreak between 1849 and 1852 right across the county which killed local people in thousands, not hundreds".

A verdant lane taking us down towards the river. A very green time of year.

And into the very welcome shade of the mixed deciduous woodlands that run down through the Erme valley.

The Erme itself. Quite quiet here but, if you look at the elevation profile in the route map, you can get a good idea of how much it drops on its way down. We had the occasional glimpses of wagtails and dippers.

The gradient of the Erme increases as it approaches Ivybridge and, in several places, cuts its way through a series of 'gorges' and rockpools. It was obviously a spot where the locals came for a dip. But not for me. Just imagine how cold that water was coming off the moor. The power of the water was used for centuries by the Stowford Mill a little way downstream from here. Nowadays the mill is closed and is being converted into apartments.