Well sat in my seat/bed(posh end!) on the Jumbo as we jet our way back to Orlando is as good a time as any to reflect on my last leave and get my head around the requirements of the next contract.
The most significant event for a lot of us must have been the passing away of NigelD which certainly put a halt on the usually upbeat mood of just arriving home. It took the wind out of my sails and affected me more than I would have ever thought possible. Nigel was an integral part of this forum and I still find myself writing notes and postings thinking about what his reaction would be to it when he read it. There always was one, and I was usually not too far off the mark with my expectations. Nigel was a gem and his generosity, enthusiasm, drive and energy will be missed.
I even bought a copy of a magazine by the name of Model Aircraft Monthly which contains a very in depth review of Nigel’s favourite plane, the Sea Fury, including some superb colour drawings of it. Nigel would have loved it.
I also had to finish off this leave with another sad bit of news more personal to me. A friend I have known for nearly fourty years and who has been a part of my life for all that time had a stroke a few weeks ago and I went to see her in hospital the day before yesterday. To see someone who has always been such a lively and energetic character, full of chat, stories and news reduced to a semi paralised helpless person, confined to a hospital bed and not able to even speak leaves such a powerful memory that I now find it hard to shake off. Only last leave she took myself and Annette out to a new local park for a walk around the beautifully manicured beds after a pub lunch and an update on the family gossip. Life goes on but it certainly does not seem to get any easier. Her daughter now spends a lot of her time travelling up and down the M6, in this weather and at this time of year and with the arrorant and aggressive drivers sharing the road with her I find it all to easy to slip into “Why are we here” mode. I am sure there must be a reason but it escapes me at the moment.
On the modelling front the Ben Ain progressed nicely although not a tremendous amount to show for it at the end of the day. I sincerely hope that when I get off the detail work of the bridge area it will actually progress a bit quicker but it seems to be a bit of a slow progress at the moment. I keep telling myself I want to put it on the water again for a run and to generate some enthusiasm but there is rather a lot of bare wood on it at the moment and if it was to get wet and warp I could end up destroying weeks of work. I must be patient. I did try the boiler plant on the bench at one point but the engine was very sticky and uncooperative so that obviously needs a bit of attention before it ventures out into the middle of the pond!
My three yachts proved to be an interesting purchase. One, an Ebay win for £77.00, is huge and won’t see water for a long time. It is basically sound but it does need a lot doing to it before it goes on the water. I don’t want anything else to distract me from the steamer at the moment so it is back of the queue for now. Another Ebay item was a restored Whitby Gaff rigged Sloop. A bit of a struggle on the water as it has been carved from solid pine and the restoration job hasn’t produced the best sail configuration so she needs some attention to get her running well. The final purchase was from a fellow club member and that is a beauty. It is a plank on frame Bermuda rig, just over 29 inches long and sails superbly. It is a perfect boat to learn the intricacies of sailing and has opened my eyes to the differences between sail and motor.
Finally just before I left the cooler climate of Yorkshire I also bought a ready made and RC converted Revel Snowberry Corvette. I will probably do a bit of a paint job on her but not much more and then sail her with the U-boat. They should look good together on the pond but, once again I don’t want to take on another big distracting job.
I actually did get around to doing one job in the house that has caused a certain degree of merriment for the last six and a half years. When we had the house built we asked for all sorts of additional electrical fittings, one of which was two cables on the alcove walls in the lounge to fit wall lights to. Since then ideas have changed and we are now only going to use one as there is a flat TV in the middle of the other wall so that cable will now have to be buried. Doh!! The thing that put me off, of course, was the fact that the cable exited the wall far too low so I had to channel out the wall to relocate it then fill it all in again and smooth the job over. However I finally got around to fitting a picture light to it and we went to a local art shop to sort out a set of three pictures to display below it. Now all I have to do is bury the cable on the other side and bury the cables that feed the flat TV. Now that isn’t going to be quite as easy.
Just an interesting note on ‘Sod’s Law’. We didn’t get the last two pictures until the last day of my leave, Tuesday, and I make a point of never doing any work on the last day. Putting a picture up can’t harm anything though can it? The first went up perfectly but on the last tap of the picture hook nail a spark shot off it and the house went dead. I could have wept!!! What the hell is a cable doing slap bang in the middle of an alcove wall? IEE Regs clearly state that sockets should be fed from below and lighting circuits should be fed from above. There should be no cable running the length of an internal wall. Unfortunately we have a nice neat idea in our house whereby in the lounge and dining room we have a number of sockets which look like the old type of 5 amp round pin plug socket. The idea is that they are to be used to supply light fittings only as they are fed from the light circuit and switched from the door. Consequently the cable for these goes the length of the wall to feed the socket. What is the chance of putting a 0.5mmsquare pin into 100 square feet of bloody wall and going into the cable? Anyway I pulled it out and everything is OK so it can stay like that. I am certainly not pulling the thing out of the wall to repair it!! So that picture got two hooks!!
So back to the ship tomorrow and back to work as though I have never been home. Another leave that passed so quickly I blinked and missed it. At least this time we have Christmas to get our heads around and with Annette and my Mum joining me for the festivities the time should pass reasonably quickly at the beginning of the trip. I guess it’s time for a couple of Christmas quizzes again. It doesn’t seem like two minutes since the last ones though even though they were a year ago.
