18/11/2025
That’s the latest date so far, but I started several months ago in July 2025 recording events since the March of the same year. Summer was particularly good and I was able to improve various bits of the farm infrastructure. The mobile home / caravan / workshop is largely complete and I’m onto the main workshop lighting, power and wood burning stove. Winter is hindering my efforts, especially any involving roofs
It has been a while so I’ll ramble away; a forte of mine while continuity is not. I’m not going to integrate the time-line, you’ll just have to work it out. Back in July on one particular morning I awoke when it was light. Wondering whether to stay comfortable, (there being no cat on my legs) I guessed at the time as I can usually tell to within the quarter hour. Strangely I had no idea, so turning over was the only practical option beyond asking Fiona. Since she was apparently fast-asleep I thought that was probably unfair and quite possibly dangerous. At that time of year dawn is shortly after midnight unless there’s heavy cloud cover so the light level doesn’t really help much. I looked at my Echo (aka Alexa) bedside device and it told me it was 11:40 which meant I’d either been asleep for 10 minutes and the sun had come up early (which I considered unlikely) or we had both overslept by 4 ½ hours. More likely but still improbable. Eventually I found it was actually 4:30 am. The Alexa smart speaker thing had suffered some kind of nervous break-down so I ran the standard protocol for things electronic, switch off and turn on again which worked, and I went back to sleep. I think as devices become smarter they also become more human, that is to say fallible. ‘Go back to clock-work’ you might suggest. That would be fine but I tend to forget to wind it. Eventually artificial intelligence should become indistinguishable from natural stupidity. Hopefully the more important equipment like nuclear power stations and hospital generators have more resilient self checking programs, but it does make me wonder, occasionally, if our electronic slaves are as reliable as we expect. Having said that I guess any complex tool can fail, even simple levers like pole vaulting sticks, stairs and doors. It’s a matter of whether the things have ‘fail safe’ built in. Some of the more relaxed regimes leave out safety features as they tend to be expensive and complicated. It becomes obvious when a failure can kill, as Boeing keep finding out, but I think cheap imports are a greater danger to most of us. I don’t think it’s the fault of the Chinese, it’s more that we keep asking them to drop the price which inevitably increases the danger of malfunction or failure.
Of course errors are only part of the problem. Some are actually built in, like programmed or planned obsolescence. My (MacBook pro 2011) laptop failed, as mentioned last time. The motherboard lost contact with the keyboard and trackpad. I put it in for repair and, thinking it was rather out of date anyway, started looking for a replacement. I guess I’m a bit of a laggard if the tools are functional, it worked until recently but Apple had told me it was no longer ‘supported’. The repair firm said it probably wasn’t worth repairing and I found a reasonably priced relatively modern MacBook Air at a site I’ve used before for renovated phones and laptops. (Backmarket) After a couple of rejects (not quite the right kind or the wrong keyboard) I received a fully operational one at a total cost of £225 which I consider much less painful than the new option at a tad short of £1000. Mostly I use a desktop Mac for newsletters and car club magazines but I think I’ll be pushed into using the phone for everything sooner or later. The only problem is the small screen which can lose the small print on adverts. I ordered the wrong size irrigation tube and fittings twice last week, but to be fair, as with the laptop suppliers, Amazon refunded immediately and the Loanhead Farm polytunnel has a proper sprinkling / irrigation system. Extrapolating current trends, mobile phones (an archaic term now) will in turn be replaced by something more convenient like wrist watches and earphones and then implants once we find out how to feed audio/visual signals directly into the cortex. About 10 to 20 years I think (2035-45) but as usual I’ll be waiting for the first few million beta testers to go first and the price to come down. I’d expect some variation on smart glasses as a precursor. I should apologise to my Uncle Tom who was supporting the Google Glass idea. I laughed at the time considering it to be centuries ahead, but he was right on the ball. If you have ever seen Star Trek then the metallic eyebrow on ‘Seven of Nine’ should be pretty close to what I expect, although I’d expect something less steam-punk. Obviously there’s a huge market so one of the tech giants will work it out. Moving in the wearable tech direction I finally decided on the choice between digital and analogue wrist watches and simply bought a fairly cheap smartwatch which can display either kind of face and perform a few other functions. As with most upgrades there are a few backward steps as well as the forward ones. Having to wind up a wristwatch every day or so was changed to a new battery every few years. Going over to a smart watch means recharging every day or so, but that is by an induction coil so it happens when I’m not wearing it at night, just like the car. After a few weeks of acclimatisation I swapped the cheap smart watch with an apple watch (refurbished by Backmarket again) so if anyone wants a cheap smartwatch compatible with iPhones there’s one going free.
Working on the farm, my practice with our own polytunnel was useful experience, and I think I have produced some acceptable sprinkler pipework for the farm polytunnel. Rather tidier than our own set up in fact, and about twice as big. It’s an odd thing but I usually work out systems for myself and then build better ones for others. Later, if I can, I’ll get it to run on rainwater and that requires solar panels, batteries, pumps, filters and a load more piping. Since I’m building it for others to use it has to be moderately fool-proof and I’ve yet to be disappointed by the ingenuity of people to find the best and fastest way of wrecking complex systems. I’ve put in a rolling hose-cart in case the buttonry baffles anyone when I’m not there. The modern plastic nozzles, pipes and joints are all quite easy to use, but setting them up inevitably gets to a point where swapping a nozzle (above my head) allows the water to run down my sleeve and into my boot. Logically I should turn the supply off, but it takes too long to drain down and impatience takes over. It’s only cold as it goes under my belt and has warmed by the time it reaches my toes. The pressure of the mains supply is quite high here, probably 5 bar although I admit I’ve not measured it again since I fitted an in-line pressure reducer to prevent the joints from popping. At the moment the hose-lock connector tends to pop off if the hose end gun is turned off suddenly. That’s when the full mains pressure strains the joints. I’ll make sure the whole system can withstand full pressure before adding the reducer so that there’s an added layer of safety. The alternative was just having a hose, but that meant somebody had to go and water the beds for 30 minutes every morning or evening. Update on that… you may have some idea of how inventive, devious and oblique people can be. The last trick was to remove almost all of the hose reel and its connections. All for the best of reasons but bits get lost broken and possibly worst of all put back together in the wrong order. This isn’t helped by my not necessarily remembering how I did it last time.
This is quite a lot later, so I’ll try to remember where I left off. I’ve fitted a pressure reduction gizmo to the Loanhead poly tunnel, with some difficulty. Why are all the fittings subtly wrong for old British equipment? I blame the American measurements. I suppose theirs is the biggest market for the Chinese but they always get threads wrong and we have to adapt to their weird variation. Judging by their political system, which must be important to them, I do wonder if they are as tightly wrapped as they should be. I’m hoping they’ll just snap out of it, but at the moment it looks as though a civil war is more likely.
So what else has happened since my last effort, and indeed since my last bit of recall in July? It is mid November just now so this newsletter is somewhat asynchronous.The Midges haven’t moved. I’ll have to sell them as I’ve gone right off petrol, but also lack the time to tidy them up. The time has been taken by various bits of farm work. Guttering, wiring, roof repairs and general fixing. Sadly a lot of fixing things that have been broken by the mechanically impatient. Who takes a crow-bar to a key-safe rather than asking what the code is? This leaves me with a dilemma, I like fixing things, but sometimes it is worth waiting to find out what someone is going to do when a given component fails, and head them off at the pass….. In the meantime we have visited Stranraer, Barnard Castle,Strontian and various other places for various reasons and took Brenda and Andrew along. The MG EV did very well and the added range, compared with the Nissan, was a considerable bonus. There’s no Full Self Driving yet so I can only drink alcohol when we get back to base. It’s not that much of a burden really as I only have a small glass of white wine or a small beer when the option is available and the zero alcohol products are getting better. It’s better for me I guess, but I’d rather have had the chance to decide myself than have genetics pre-empt me.
I blame my parents, and thus my grandparents, since all of my siblings and most of the family are fairly light drinkers.
On the subject of change I’m tapering off the Midge Club duties after 10 years of secretaryship. The members are getting less communicative from causes like getting too old, selling and forgetting my or their email address so the magazine was getting harder to compile. I’ve deleted the membership fee as it’s mostly facebook now which is largely self sustaining and reasonably healthy. The time that has saved me is going into my efforts to buy up the village and I now have 3 houses, a sort of threshold level property magnate. The banking system wasn’t doing anything with my modest fortune so when a small ‘back to back’ house (93 Crosswood Terrace) in Tarbrax came onto the market I put in an offer. It’s difficult to be certain but I’m fairly sure Mum had something to do with it from the other side. It is conveniently a few hundred yards from our house. It’ll suit an old friend - younger than me but who isn't?- that Mum was fond of and I suspect that was why it dropped into place with reasonable ease. It’ll need an air-source heating system, hopefully before Christmas, some carpet or linoleum and a bit more insulation. The roof of 93, like all the others in Tarbrax is slate, and well over 100 years old, but should be good for a few years while the funds get replenished. New slate looks best but concrete tiles are cheaper and now cover about 1 in 10 of the houses. I thought I might go for some solar panels inset to a new slate roof when it is time, and add a few batteries. Solar is now cheaper than tile or slate per square metre and It cuts down on electricity and roofing costs, looks neater and should make incorporating a few light-pipes easier. Being a mid terrace back-to-back there are only windows on the East side, so it’s a bit dark at the back. A couple of light-pipes might be a good idea. It looks as though the NHS has remembered me at last. I requested a small, if slightly embarrassing, surgical procedure just before Covid lock-downs started but after a promising start it all went quiet. Various attempts at re-starting it over the last 5 years produced some apologetic responses but little else until just last week. It’ll still be a while to turn consultation into action but I am hopeful. Also on the medical side I had an ophthalmic examination to check out a small ‘freckle’ in my retina which showed up at specsavers when the technology advanced enough to see it. Analytical kit keeps getting smarter and I guess I must be getting older but no change was detected. Treatment and medication thresholds tend to keep dropping and I do wonder whether we’ll be medicating wellness soon. Big pharma obviously wouldn't object. My blood pressure was considered normal a year or so back. The ophthalmic anomaly caused me to be put onto amlodipine (like about half the population) in case the freckle was a small bleed. The latest test turned out to be 'no change, come back in 6 months'. Like most of my medical examinations like opticians, dentistry and general immunisations very little has actually gone wrong, so almost all of it is preventative rather than curative, which is exactly what the NHS should be. Some of the waiting times are excessive but that’s better than letting something undetected to become dangerous.
Looking out of my garret window (16:55) it is dark and cold and the cat has settled next to me in the hope that I'll light a fire. I think she may have noticed that walking across the keyboard sometimes gets me out of her favourite chair, and that might result in a fire downstairs. A sensible cat, although not old, she isn't too taken with winter and prefers to dream of spring. The noticeable weather changes over the last couple of decades here must be similar to that experienced by others in the UK and probably most of this corner of Europe. Winters seem wetter and warmer, summer drier and is spreading out into spring and autumn which, at the moment, is fine for me but maybe not so good for farmers and thereby our food supplies. We’ve had a few frosts and a bit of snow in November but the heavy snow falls of yesteryear seem less regular and where we had feet of snow we now get inches. Christmas is usually just wet. The deniers of climate change seem less vociferous and grumble about turbines and EVs less, perhaps because their audience reaction has shifted from counter-argument to mockery. Change, as they say, is afoot and cash, religiosity, oil, coal and gas are going to become curiosities like flat-earthers
On the other hand we now have the re-emergence of the wannabe dictator irrespective of the meaningless 'Left' or 'Right' labels. I must admit I find the US copying our brexit insanity with added bigger, harder, faster stripes rather depressing. It bodes ill for them and the world. The dangerous part is the emperor, not the clothes. Like sunshine and money, a little more is useful, but too much power in one place will burn.
I was thinking a nice little picture of Farage or Trump would serve as a warning, but I couldn't find a nice one so I'll save you the discomfort.
Cheers
Jim
