Phenol, bacteria, Consett Coke ovens

An example from my personal experience: At Consett Coke Ovens one of the waste streams was phenolic liquor. Once-upon-a-time it would have been dumped down a disused mineshaft! We treated it in an activated sludge plant (loads of bacteria). Pretty amazing that it worked at all considering that the old name for phenol is carbolic acid and it’s a disinfectant which kills just about anything. We had a “spike” in phenol concentration (the plant was old, some of the processes had problems and the control systems were partly f*cked). As a consequence the bacteria “went to sleep”. They weren’t actually dead, but they weren’t active. As a consequence, even after the phenol levels returned to normal, the activated sludge plant no longer worked. We couldn’t treat the phenolic liquor, we weren’t allowed to dump it and we had only limited storage capacity. In these circumstances the official solution was to get a tanker load of sludge full of adapted bacteria from another coke plant. The nearest one with a suitable plant was in Sheffield (probably Orgreave). Cost at the time – several hundred quid. We chose the cheapskate option: buy a lorry-load of steaming, fermenting farm-yard manure and dump it in the sludge tank. Cost – 50 quid. After a short time (not more than weeks, and within the limits of the buffer storage capacity) the activated sludge plant was back and operating to specification. BTW on that plant they described having too much liquor as being “embarrassed” – as in “an embarrassment of riches”. A nice turn of phrase, with a touch of irony - “an embarrassment of sh1te”.

I doubt there are bacteria in nature which actively use phenol as a food source. Thankfully there isn’t enough of it around. There are undoubtedly bacteria which can tolerate phenol up to a certain concentration. The moral of the tale is that given the opportunity, within a very short time, bacteria can adapt to use something which is an outright poison to them (phenol) and not simply tolerate it, but use it as a food source. How they do it is not clear to me, but they certainly do. That is amazing and scary! The rubbish-dump programme was another example of the same.

Alice

Hello Steve, That was nice! Don’t worry about rambling. I like rambling stories. I’m on my lunch-break now, from doing some interminable course about an Oracle database. Useful, but…

I can’t say I was ever a “fan” of Alice Cooper (or should I say “Vincent Furnier” and try and sound like I know him?). I liked the music. When you’re our age, “School’s Out!” still has a particular ring. I really like the idea of “Eating from the bush”. So much so, that I just walked to the bottom of the garden and picked two of my own apples. The crows have pecked away at most of them but I found two decent ones. They’re now sliced up and sitting on a saucer beside me. Oracle will be just a little sweeter this afternoon.

I like the idea of you and Carol watching and listening from a distance. It strikes me as being just a little naughty, in a child-like kind of way. It sort of reminds me of when Noreen and I were on our honeymoon (gosh that’s a long time ago!) We did a cruise around the Baltic. This particular day, we were ashore in Stockholm and the Swedes had some enormous festival on. Even though we had a cordon-bleu dinner waiting for us on the ship in the evening, we played hookey (at least that was what it felt like) and dined out on ice-cream and hot dogs! (In that order too!)

I know what you mean about Alice being accepted by the establishment. It seems strange. I thought it was odd when I found out that he plays golf as well (and he plays it well, too). I don’t know but I have a feeling that Alice himself considers his situation mildly amusing.

One of the things which I think we’ve lost with the wonders of the internet is some of the idea of “foreign-ness”. Would anyone think of buying an imported disc any more? I don’t know. I don’t buy much music these days. Being a citizen of the world is nice, but I don’t want the world to become homogenous. I want it to be difficult to get some things, just so I can have the fun of finding them and the satisfaction of getting hold of them. And I don’t want to go to the far side of the world and drink Guinness. I know it’s good for the Irish economy, but I don’t want to do it.

When I was in Siberia I had a little money trouble. Nothing serious, but for the first few days I couldn’t find a cash machine that would accept any of my cards (that’s a Pre-pay card and credit cards and debit cards from two different banks, in two different currencies). You can’t buy roubles outside the country, and I’d only got about 50 quid’s worth I’d bought in Moscow airport. I was due to be there for 4 weeks and I was worried I was going to be short of cash. There was a Frenchman on the same course in the same predicament as me. With a little help from the Russians we identified several _different_ banks (no point it trying “Barclays” twice) and one afternoon  set out to try them out. We were successful. We had already agreed that if only one of us was lucky we would do some kind of deal, but we both “struck gold”. He spoke a little English and my French is limited to numbers. In any case we were supposed to be speaking Russian. He looked at me and asked “Pivo?” (Russian for beer), to which my response was, of course “Da. Pivo!” The first bar we found was an “English Bar” serving “Fuller’s”! (Not London Pride, but a made-for-the-market version) It tasted good (especially as an hour earlier I had thoughts of going hungry, never mind thirsty), and it was a blistering hot day, but I didn’t really want to be drinking English bitter in the middle of Siberia. Especially not “…made in Siberia by Britons” bitter!

That’s _my_ ramble over. “Back on your heads.” I don’t know if I should base a philosophy of life on a pop song, but I will try and eat a little more from the bush. I still have my saucer of apple slices to help me with Oracle.

Good wishes to Carol and the family,

Regards,

Tom    

----------------------------------------

Tom,

When Carol and I were young, before we were married, we were keen fans of Alice Cooper.

You may remember a record collection with all his/their recordings from the first 10 years of the career.

But we have never been ones to attend live performances.

Our favourite song by Alice is ‘Apple bush, apple tree’ from their first record (in 1969?), not released in UK until late 70s but purchased in 73 as an import by a boyfriend of my sisters.

Anyway this song has proven to be a philosophy of life that we have stuck with.

‘There’s people who succeed, they don’t try hard, they’ve found a way to live with ease, by eating from the bush instead of the trees’

We have always been modest in expectation and see pleasure in small things that are already around us. It helps if you live in the finest little village in all England, surrounded by National Trust property to which we have free access, so you don’t have to work yourself to death to earn the money to buy it all and then worry about maintaining it.

We have watched Alice’s career with amusement over the years, culminating with his acceptance into the establishment, presenting his radio show on the BBC.

So you wait 40 years and in the end.....he arrives to play in the next village.

‘No Mother he is not playing a wedding at the village hall’ although stranger things do happen around here.

Fairport Cropredy Festival you know, but what are they doing inviting Alice to play to folk fans?

Just because he’s old doesn’t mean the music is any different. ‘We play all the old hits as close as we can get to the original sound’ says Alice in an interview for the festival.

It was almost 2 weeks ago, he was headline act on Thursday evening. Some years we have heard every song quite clearly, we are 2 miles from Cropredy and can almost see into the site if we go to the far side of the church yard. We decided it might be fitting to listen in from there. What time do you think the last act will be on? 11 or 12pm? No this is Cropredy and they all expect to be in bed for 10.30pm.

But disaster, by 9.30pm the wind was in the wrong direction, all we could hear was the motorway behind us. So we got in the car and drove toward Cropredy, stopping at a favourite spot of our girls, beside the Oxford canal at a tiny hamlet called Apple Tree. It’s 3 farms spread over half a mile and a group of shanty shacks along the canalside, clearly built without regulations or planning permission, housing people more dedicated than we are to ‘eating from the bush’.

And there he is singing away, unmistakably Alice Cooper sounding really good, about half a mile over the hedge and across 2 fields. The light is dazzling and that’s just the floodlights around the site, we can’t see the stage. The sound is clear although the wind is still in the wrong direction. Carol says she wouldn’t want to be any closer, she is uncomfortable with it pounding in her chest. We lean back against the side of the car and watch the stars and bats swooping around us. When another car comes past we see the air is thick with moths and bats diving between them.

We listened to 4 or 5 songs, I recognised only 1 of them and that not a great classic, and that was enough for us oldies. Glad that we hadn’t been deafened and blinded. We drove on some more but not past the site, through Cropredy village which was quite lively with people leaving the concert, more oldies all looking a bit dejected in their brightly coloured home knitted jumpers. The pub was very popular, running a festival fringe concert, more like traditional folk, they are welcome to it.

Sorry this has turned into an epic, I only meant to write a couple of lines.

Steve

The overalls - and a wallet

I bought a set of second hand overalls from a stall at an auto-jumble. The were made of sturdier than usual material, almost the sort that are worn by welders. They are (I still have them) a deep blue. Down the front there were a few stains, so they had been used. They also had signs of wear. They had two breast pockets and below the waist had slits so that the wearer could get access to the pockets in whatever they wore underneath.

When I got home, I examined them more closely. In an inner pocket inside the chest, which I had not noticed I found a wallet. Not only that, but the wallet contained what seemed to be a substantial sum of money in three different currencies. Of course, by then in was far too late and the sale had long closed.

I contacted the organisers of the sale, but with the limited information I was able to give them, they were unable to help me trace the stall-holder.

Oops! What happened to the internet?

I thought I’d share this story with a few of you. When I’m not doing anything more useful, I write for fun. Something interesting happened so I thought I would share it. This is not intended to be a piece of polished prose. It’s being written pretty much on the fly, without much revision. I’m sending it by several different methods (some eMail, some;  other  internet, one by “snail mail”). This is the story of what happened on Thursday (30^th August 2012). Enjoy!

Thursday 30^th August

K is a peaceful place. Not that much happens here. We have drunkenness at the weekends and we have had incidents of arson, but compared to London, this is a haven of tranquillity. The people of K would probably regard Feltham as being like a suburb of Beirut (or these days, Aleppo). They would be wrong to think that, but that the grass is almost always greener or scorched somewhere else, never “similar but just a little different”.

If K is tranquil, then F Road is quiter still and the little hamlet where I live, up beyond the cemetery (how appropriate) is completely still. The gentle stream, becomes sluggish. The backwater is like a mill pond and the water reflects the sky. Nothing ever happens, but all that can change quite suddenly! I know you’ve all been here, so it will help of you if you can picture my house and the stretch of road between the house and the cemetery.

On Thursday afternoon I was, as they say “going about my business”.  I’d eaten a sandwich for lunch, and  prepared dinner for the troops so they could eat when they got in from school. A home-made cottage pie was sitting on the kitchen counter, ready to be popped into the oven. Dinner could be ready in less than half-an-hour. It was time to get on with some business related chores upstairs.

Since any of you have been here I have furnished “Bedroom Number Six” as an office. You should be jealous. Even I am jealous! You wouldn’t call it palatial, but it is reasonably tidy (in a male kind of way), the books I want are arranged in an orderly fashion on shelves, I have a desk (home-made), a chair to sit on when I’m typing and an easy chair to sit in and ponder. It’s bliss!

The chores for Thursday afternoon were: do a little job hunting, clear the job-hunting-related-spam and do some “writing”. I’ve been trying to do the Graham Greene thing of having a quota of words to write per day (of course, what you are reading is part of today’s quota). Most of it is rubbish. I’ve been experimenting with different subjects and different writing styles. This is another experiment. Before I settled down to do the writing, I was going to check something on the internet and check my mail. The internet wasn’t working. Oh expletive!

 The internet at my place is pretty reliable. The last time it failed for more than a few minutes was a couple of winters ago when the outside temperature plummeted to an indicated -12 deg C. At those temperatures lots of things stopped working, including the water mains.

The message on the browser said that “my router was unable to connect to the exchange”. Actually, one of the most sensible messages I have read on a computer.  I went downstairs to reset the router – no improvement. The obvious next thing to do is ring up Eircom (the Irish equivalent of BT) and tell them there is a fault with my internet service. I looked up the number and picked up the phone. There was no dial tone. The internet and the phone share the same wires, so absence of dial-tone would explain why the internet isn’t working. For no particular reason, I decided that before I phoned Eircom with the mobile, I would take a look outside, after all, if I could see something obviously wrong, like a wire down, I could tell Eircom and that would speed up the repairs.

I went out to the front gate wearing my carpet slippers. A quick look up and down the road told me that something was going on, because about 70 yards towards K a group of my neighbours was milling about in the road. I waved to them and then I went inside to change into my boots and then joined them to find out exactly what was going on.  

The first thing I noticed was that there were a couple of cars parked in the entrance to the Council yard and the next thing I noticed was that there was a car “parked” on the grass in front of the COPE building. I didn’t take much deduction to work out that there had been a car accident. The strange thing was that nobody seemed to be injured.

The first person I spoke to was my neighbour Lilly. I asked her if there was anyone injured (all those years in the Scouts has had some effect). She said that everyone was alright but that “they” had left on foot! “They” were the driver and passenger of the car. The crashed car was probably stolen. I then saw that Dennie (Lilly’s husband) was pulling some wires out of the road. Not only had “they” crashed the car, but they had demolished a telegraph pole in the process! The car crash was the cause of my internet failure, and I had arrived on the scene probably not more than 15 minutes after the actual incident. I asked around and they said that the criminals had escaped, the Garda had been called, but that nobody had got round to calling Eircom. That seemed fair enough, so while they waited at the scene of the crime, I said I would make it my job to contact Eircom.

I went back inside and phoned Eircom on my mobile (I’d left the number inside). I got through to the fault reporting service immediately. It was a machine. There were times that I felt like screaming, but I went through with the procedure: Machine “I’m going to run a line test on your line”, Me (mentally) “and you’re going to find it’s broken” etc. I knew exactly where the line-fault was and could tell them to within a few yards exactly where to find it. In fact, I could have given them a grid reference which would have go them to within 70 yards of the fault. Still, procedures are procedures, especially if you’re a recording, and it was undoubtedly the quickest way of getting the message into Eircom. Irritated but satisfied that I had done my bit I went back outside to find out if anything interesting had happened in the meanwhile. 

Back outside, K’s finest had arrived in force. There were two police cars, one pulled up at the side of the road, and the other pulled up in the road while they had a quick conference. The car in the road, which was facing away from K, set off, blue light flashing, but without any siren. The man-hunt was on! After exchanging a few more words with the neighbours, I went back indoors. I had things to do, providing they didn’t involve the internet! Shortly after this, N and the girls arrived from school. By that time, the crowd (crowd?) had dispersed, and there was only a single Garda, with an unmarked car parked in the access to the council yard, so they didn’t even register that something significant had happened until I told them.

After dinner, I went back outside to see if anything significant had happened. I guess by this time it would be a little after 5 o’clock. The Garda was still there, taking photographs and measuring things and now there were two women who hadn’t been there before. I wandered over, surveyed the scene and asked if they were involved. The younger woman said that it was her husband’s car (so it was stolen). I told her that if she needed anything she (and her companion) were welcome to come along to my house. They said thanks, but no thanks. Then the Garda asked me if I was a witness. I explained that I wasn’t really. All I could tell him was what he could gather from his own observations; the rest would be me repeating what other people had told me. He seemed satisfied with that and made note in his notebook. I expect he was relieved that he didn’t have to take another witness statement.

As I was walking back home, I met another neighbour. She had come along with her children to view the entertainment and they were all looking at the wreck. We were constantly telling the children to pay attention to the road. Mobile phone cameras have the unfortunate side-effect of making people, especially children, feel remote from their surroundings. They were quite likely to wander into the road while in search of a better shot. None of us wanted to add a secondary accident to the one that we had already! As we talked, it was clear that one thing which had us all a bit puzzled was how the car had got to where it was. It was the right way up and facing in the right direction, but the lawn on which it was standing was between two and three feet higher than the road, and there was no great damage to the surrounding retaining wall. Had it flow there? Even now I don’t know the answer, though I do have a possible, partial explanation but more of that later.

Over the course of the evening I popped out from time to time to see what was happening. First the Eircom engineer turned up. He seemed to spend quite a while on his mobile phone. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but I would guess. When I went and looked later on, he had tied some marker tape on various things to flag the work-site for the follow-up crew. This was a good idea. Large as it is, a horizontal telegraph pole lying along the ditch at the side of the road is easy to miss.

The next person to turn up was the man with the wrecking truck. He too spent a while on the phone, probably explaining to someone back at base:  the car was a write-off, and that he didn’t know how he was going to get the wreck from where it was without doing damage to the COPE’s property. I didn’t know either. He had one of those flat-bed trucks where the flat back can tilt and extend down to the road. Great for picking something up from ground level, but I would have thought it would be hopeless for something “up there”. I thought that he would have to abandon the attempt until he got a crane. I was wrong. I came out a little later and he had got the wreck down onto the road and was in the process of winching it onto the truck. He didn’t cause any additional damage either. Good job!

It was about this time that I finally got round to checking my eMail. I had an enquiry from an agent! That’s the first enquiry I’ve had in ages, and I wasn’t able to reply. Neither I nor any of my immediate neighbours had any internet or phone, and of course the agent hadn’t given me a phone number anyway (all you have to do is reply to the eMail!). Disgusted, I decided that beer was the only solution. I went to the pub.

In the pub, I bumped into B, one of my neighbours who I hadn’t seen so far that day. B had been drinking, he has a thick North Cork accent and I’m deaf. I like B but sometimes we have problems communicating. I asked him if he knew about the incident up at home. He said that he did, and that what’s more, those responsible had been caught. He mentioned the name of a notorious local family of ne’er-do-wells. Someone else came over and B and I had to provide details of the bits of the story which we knew.

Friday 31st August

I got up a bit late (but still before 8) and more in hope than expectation, texted someone I know down in town and asked if I could borrow his internet connection for a few minutes. He was amenable to this, so I set off to do the daily chores of shopping and stuff early and at the same time send a message to employment agency. As I set off for town, the men from Eircom had already arrived. They had a truck with a pile of telegraph poles on the back and a huge auger thing attached to the end of a hydraulic jib.

My acquaintance A runs a small computer maintenance business out of a shed in his parents garden (yes, really). He’s a one man business and he gives really good service. When I explained what I wanted he said that was completely ok. When I explained that the car which did the damage had been stolen, he swore loudly. I think maybe he has had some trouble with car-thieves in He hooked me up to his network and did something else while I typed my note.

Just as I finished my sending my note and collecting the stuff waiting in my inbox, another customer came in carrying a laptop which needed something done to it. The inside of A’s office is a real Alladin’s cave, benches on all three sides with servers under the counter and around the back and it gets a bit “friendly” with three people in there. We all shared the time of day and complaints about the problems of the world, and I went on my way.

Back at home, the men from Eircom were working away. I really can find no fault with them. I don’t say that they were working hard, but they were working steadily. Different people came and went. First there were the pole erecting crew, then there were the people who strung the wires, and finally there was the poor soul (or maybe there were two of them) who was left behind to do the myriad of connections.  I saw no sign of anyone loafing around supping tea. Instead, throughout the day, every time I could be bothered to look, there was something going on. It is quite a shock to discover how much damage taking out just one telegraph pole does. First they had to dig a hole with the auger and erect a new pole. Then they had to string the wires. And finally, as I said there were all the connections to make. My phone made its first chirrup a little before 4 o’clock. Then the phone was working. I know because I checked incoming and outgoing calls with my mobile. Finally the internet connected up. It seemed to be unstable for half-an- hour and it has been normal since. People (including me) tend to criticise the service they get from telecoms companies but this time I can’t find anything to criticise, except perhaps the impersonal nature of the fault reporting process. From incident to fix was barely over 24 hours, and this was a completely random occurrence. The only simplifying factor was that “the fault” was about as simple (if dramatic) as they come.

And when I finally got round to checking my eMail, I found that; yes, you’ve guessed it, the employment agency had sent me an eMail and hadn’t phoned me. That’s after me telling them “I have no landline and I have no internet because some eejit has demolished the telegraph pole which serves me and my neighbours.”  Some people! I’ve sent them a CV, so we’ll see if anything comes of it.     

Saturday 1^st September

There is a rather odd addendum to the factual part of the story. As usual, we went to the “vigil” mass on Saturday evening. During the service the priest made an apology. He said he was sorry if there were any notices missing from the weekly news sheet. The church has a box where people can deposit slips of paper requesting things that they want included in the news sheet. That box had been stolen on Thursday! As the priest said, presumably whoever had taken it had it had thought that there might be money in it. The box and some slips had been found in the cemetery adjoining the church on Friday but this was after the news sheets had been printed and of course the priest could have no idea if any slips were missing.

As N pointed out our way out of the car park on the way home; was it a coincidence that the theft had occurred on the same day, and close to the time that the car was stolen? It is only a short distance, over a pedestrian footbridge from the church to the place where the car was taken from. It is certainly tempting to think that there might be some connection.

Conclusions

The whole affair made me pause for thought. Here are my conclusions:

I went out and paced out the distances involved with the accident (I’ll give the measurements in Imperial, but they were taken by paces, so just substitute metres for yards if you prefer):

• ·         The distance from my house that the car finally finished up is 70 yards.
• ·         I can identify the point where the car first touched the verge from a gouge mark.
• ·         The distance from the gouge mark to the telegraph pole is 15 yards.
• ·         The telegraph pole was snapped off, close to ground level.
• ·         The car finished up on a lawn which is raised about the road level by 2 to 3 feet and surrounded by a dry stone retaining wall.
• ·         The distance from the telegraph pole to where the car finished up is 40 yards.
• ·         The car involved was a Volkswagen Passat.

My conclusions:

• ·         The car must have been travelling at a fair speed.
• ·         I’m not entirely sure how it got up the vertical 2 to 3 feet, but my thoughts are; the driver lost control, careered along the verge, hit the pole which snapped off. As the pole was falling, the car slid up the pole, as if it was a ramp, and flew the last few yards before landing pretty much pancake style on the lawn. I’m not entirely satisfied with the explanation, but it explains most of the facts.
• ·         If anyone had been walking on the road, or even on the lawn, then we would have had a real calamity on our hands.
• ·         Volkswagen Passats are tough. It may have been written off but those inside were in a sufficiently good state that they were able to run away. They do say: “any landing you can walk away from is a good landing!”
• ·         The Garda Siochanna can run a man-hunt and get their man. They did have some advantages, like the fugitives were on foot and in a state of shock, but the Garda got their men.
• ·         Eircom can fix major damage quickly and efficiently.
• ·         Employment agencies don’t read what you send them. 

On an even lighter note…

As it sometimes says at the start of a movie: “this is based (loosely) on real events which really, REALLY took place.”

Paddy and Mick were short of cash so Paddy suggested that they help themselves to the poor-box at the Church. Mick thought there wouldn’t be much in it (“the people round here are too stingy”), but it might get them a couple of pints.

Paddy went into the Church while Mick kept watch. A few minutes later Paddy came out with the box stuffed under his coat. They went into the graveyard to break it open. Mick got out the screw-driver he kept in his pocket and wrenched off the poxy little padlock in a trice. They looked once, they looked twice, there was nothing inside but little bits of notepaper. Mick looked at the outside of the box again. “You eejit!” he said. “You’re after taking the wrong fecking box!”.

Just then, Paddy saw, or thought he saw, some movement. In an instant he had vaulted the fence and was off like a hare. Mick dropped the box and was after him, still clutching the screwdriver in his hand.

They ran over the iron footbridge, straight through the park and past the Doctor’s surgery. When they got to the main road Paddy paused for a moment to let Mick catch up. They ran across the road, and then left up F Road. There were always cars parked there, outside the Gym.

In a trice, Mick had spotted a likely car. He tried the handle. He was in luck. A few seconds later, they were inside and Mick was fiddling under the dashboard. They were off.

Off up the road they sped. It’s a winding road, but Mick put his foot down. The police weren’t going to get him. Oh, no.  All the time Paddy kept looking out the back window and yelling at Mick to go faster.

Suddenly the car touched the kerb, and then, in slow-motion, it was in the air, flying like something out of “The Dukes of Hazzard”. Bang! It hit the deck. The airbags went off. Everything was pandemonium. Mick pulled himself together he was out of the car and Paddy was after him. They just kept running .

When he glanced back, Mick could see the locals gathering round the car. Some of them had pitchforks, some of them had blazing torches.

Mick and Paddy kept on running, and then they heard the sound of the bloodhounds…

 

    

Stories my Father told me…

(29th August 2012 Signing on at 18:33)

…about Flying Training at Hanworth Airpark.

Arriving from Glasgow

I do not know what year this was, but presumably it was the Christmas either immediately after, or immediately before, the Britain’s declaring a state of war with Germany. My father had been fired from a job assembling Sunderland flying boats in Glasgow (or maybe Dumbarton) but that is another story.

He arrived at Feltham station on the Greenline bus from Victoria Bus Station, having taken the bus down from Glasgow. He says that he had the clothes he stood up in, a small suitcase and his toolbox. He had been told that he had a job with General Aircraft on Hanworth Airpark. He had nowhere to stay. As this was the late 30’s, the journey down from Glasgow must have taken some time. He said that he arrived in Feltham late in the evening. He checked his toolbox into the left-luggage office at Feltham Station and enquired about somewhere to stay for the night. I don’t know how effective such an enquiry would be now, but then it got him the suggestion of an address down Hanworth Road. This was a time before even land-line phones were common, so he would have had no choice but to walk to the address and ask. Fortunately they had room for him. In fact it at was even better than that.

The house where he had been directed and where he eventually stayed for a while made him very welcome. The “man of the house” had lost his job, and so they were very short of money. The money from his rent made all the difference. It was just before Christmas and my dad said that the wife said to her daughter “now we can have Christmas”. The pair of them went on a shopping expedition to Bentall’s in Kingston a day or so later.

The day after he arrived my Dad went to General Aircraft. He was told that he had a job, but that news of his dismissal had come down from Glasgow. He had a bad reputation and he what going to be watched.

What I don’t understand is how my Father moved from General Aircraft to Flying Training Ltd, but he did!   

Defending the Airpark, with few guns and no ammunition

The war was either under way or just about to start. This could be the period which I believe was called “The Phoney War”.

Hanworth Airpark was a military base. All the instructors in Flying Training had been drafted into the Airforce and the ground maintenance personnel, like my Father were under military orders but continued to be employed by Flying Training. As the Airpark was a real military objective, some means had to be put in place to defend it from attack for the air or the ground. To put this on a formal basis, my Father and all the other members of the staff became members of the Home Guard (or whatever its predecessor organisation was). From some source unspecified they were issued with guns (probably ancient rifles). They were even issued with a small number of machine guns, one of which was mounted onto the back of a truck. In my mind I have a picture of an earlier version of “the technicals” in warring African states, where a machine gun is mounted on a frame behind the cab of a Toyota pick-up truck.

There was just one problem, but it was a significant one. Whoever had organised the artillery had forgotten about munitions! There was no ammunition for either the rifles or especially the machine guns. However impressive it all looked, it was completely useless! As my Father said, thank goodness there was never any question of using the weapons, because it would have been hopeless.

There were some garbles stories about defence exercises at night. It all sounded good fun and chaotic, but I wonder if it really felt like that at the time?

Leaving for Stoke on Trent (Mere?)

At some point it was decided that Hanworth Airpark was not a suitable base for a training squadron, and the decision was made to move the whole organisation to Stoke-on-Trent. I think the destination was “Mere” but I’m not sure. The aircraft were flown up and everything else went up as a number of convoys.

Alan Lavender’s first wife’s parents lived in Victoria Road. Alan had a three-wheeled Morgan sports car. Because the moving was government business, he had fuel to drive it up in one of the convoys. Looking back, I can’t remember my Father ever mentioning how he travelled up to Stoke-on-Trent.

Piss-pot up the flagpole

The pilot students at Hanworth were like many students. They got up to all sorts of wild things. Many of their escapades were fuelled by drink. The officers’ mess for the flying school was located in Hanworth Park House. Behind the house, naturally, there was a flag-pole.

One night, probably after an evening in the pub, an unidentified student climbed up the flag-pole and placed a chamber-pot on the top.

When the time came to hoist the flag the following day, the Commanding Officer was furious when he saw the chamber pot. He immediately ordered someone (presumably Airforce personnel) to climb the flagpole and retrieve the pot. Inspection showed that the flagpole was rotten, and although it had apparently withstood the weight of a student the previous night, nobody was prepared to climb it sober and in the cold light of day!

Not to be defeated, the Commanding Officer then ordered the guard to shoot the pot down. Apparently they had found at least some ammunition by this stage. When the chosen marksman shot the pot they discovered the flaw in this plan: it was an enamelled steel chamber pot! Shooting it made a noise and ruined the pot, but it wasn’t likely to bring it down.

I would like to say that the story had some funny or surprising ending. Unfortunately, it has no ending at all. I don’t remember my Father saying how the chamber pot came down, if it ever did. Of course it must have come down in the end, because there is no flag pole at Hanworth Park House!

Stealing a fire engine

Several of the trainee pilots were a little eccentric. One of them habitually wore a red huntsman’s jacket. I believe it is called “Hunting Pink”. This fellow (I suppose he must have been in his early twenties) took a fancy to one of the barmaids in the Airman public house. The feeling was not reciprocated. This barmaid either lived on the premises or very nearby.

One evening, when drunk the “huntsman” proposed to the barmaid and asked her to run away with him to Gretna Green. He was obviously a romantic. She told him that she would, on sole condition that he drove her there in a fire engine. She thought that would be an end of the matter.

The following day, she was wakened early by the sound of a bell outside her bedroom window. When she looked outside she saw that the huntsman had stolen a fire engine from the local fire station (I presume the one which used to be under the railway bridge at Bridge House). She told him that he was an idiot and that he should go away.

I don’t know what happened to the huntsman or what happened to the fire engine. I have to suppose that the fire engine was returned undamaged and that this kind of madness was exactly what the airforce was looking for in its fighter pilots.

Joe Tollow’s dog

I know almost nothing about “Joe Tollow” except that he was one of my Father’s mates, and that he had a dog.

At that time, The Airman public house had three bars: Public, Saloon and Private Bar or snug. My Father and his colleagues had sort-of taken over the Private Bar. They had no right to do this and the publican didn’t approve, but they regarded it as their territory.

The Private Bar was furnished with small tables (I don’t know what shape, but I imagine little round tables. The important thing is that between the legs of these tables was a small shelf at about “dog height”. I think it was intended for putting glasses on when the top of the table was being used for playing cards or dominos.

Anyway, Joe Tollow’s dog (I know less about the dog than I do about his master) enjoyed having his back scratched. He just couldn’t get enough of it. If someone else had invaded the Private Bar, and my Father and his mates were there, they would sit around one of the tables and scratch the dog’s back. The would also sit with their legs under the table so that the dog could not get under their table. When they stopped scratching the dog, it would look for somewhere else to scratch its back. If it could get under the shelf of one of the adjoining tables then it would scratch it’s back and probably upset the drinks (and the other customers)!

Floyd Buttle

Floyd (Bud) Buttle was one of my Father’s friends. His wife Madeline’s parents lived in Victoria Road. I have seen a photograph of Bud. He had a moustache. I know that after (and possibly during) the war, he worked for Airworks in the Arabian Gulf. He died of lung cancer.

Madeline re-married and moved to the Isle of Wight. I met her there many years later.

Crash

Flying Training mostly used Hawker Hart and Hind Aircraft. I am not sure if it was them, but one type of aircraft was supposed to be very difficult to spin, even if it stalled. This made it an ideal early trainer. However, some of the aircraft were re-engined which changed their handling characteristics. One of them spun out of control and crashed (An electricity sub-station near Cromwell Road) killing the trainee and the instructor.

 (Pages 4+, words 1,690, signing off at 19:37 )

Woops! No internet

(30th August 2012 Signing on at 17:36)

A little earlier today, at about 15:30, I finished preparing tea, and so I came upstairs to do a little “writing.” I can’t remember why, but I went to check something on the internet. The internet wasn’t working. For a change, the error message was absolutely unequivocal; the problem is between the router and the exchange. I went downstairs to look at the router. The indicator lights agreed with the status report. I restarted the router, this did not bring about any improvement. OK, it looked like I was going to have to talk to Eircom. It had all been working perfectly earlier in the day. I wondered what had gone wrong? I picked up the phone, and there was no dialling tone. I thought that was significant. I wondered if I might be able to see anything so I went to the front gate, and looked down the road in the direction of the exchange. There was a small knot of people, some of whom I recognised as my immediate next door neighbours. It was obvious that something had happened or was still in the process of happening. As I was wearing carpet slippers I went back inside and changed my footwear for boots.

When I walked down to the group of people it became clear what had happened: there had been a car crash and the car had demolished a telephone pole before coming to rest in the grounds of the COPE foundation. To get there it had vaulted a two-foot high wall. It must have been travelling at a fair speed. I’m glad I wasn’t walking out there when it happened!

It appears that the car had been stolen and the driver (and at least one other person) left the scene on foot. I’m glad that nobody (especially innocent passers by) has been injured, but I hope that those responsible are caught and punished.

As there was nothing useful to do at the scene I said that I would go and report the problem to Eircom. Their problem logging system is automated, so it was a bit frustrating going through the problem determination procedure when I knew that the problem was broken wires in the road outside (and could even tell them exactly where the pole was down).

Since then the Gards have been. The scene has been photographed and measured. The wife of the owner of the car has been and viewed the carnage and the car has been collected by a wrecking truck. I have even seen an Eircom engineer looking at the damaged pole (which is horizontal). The automated machine said that the normal standard of service was three days. I don’t know how long it will take them to erect a new pole and do whatever is necessary to the wires.

I have a small problem which I will try and sort out tomorrow. Where can I find an internet connection? This is important, because I have been contacted about work, but I can’t reply (eMail) the inquirer, because I don’t have any connection to the internet. What a nuisance!  Still, it’s an opportunity to demonstrate my resilience.

(Signing off  538 words, 1 page)

Characters

(29th August 2012 Signing on at 18:33)

This is something new. I’m going to try writing some descriptions of characters some are real(ish) some are not.

Fionnuala Goggin: The girl in the phone shop. Long blonde hair tied back in a ponytail, piercing blue eyes, light blue uniform shirt and dark blue slacks.

Finbar 1: Short and squat, a powerhouse of a man, with a low forehead topped with a tousled shock of black hair. He has swarthy features to go with his calling. His eyebrows are bushy and meet above his nose, creating a single stroke underlining his brow. He wears a dirty dark blue boiler suit and black steel toe-capped boots. Finbar’s main business is sweeping chimneys but he also does external painting work and works as a volunteer fireman, so perhaps as a sweep he prevents some of the fires he would otherwise have to put out.

Finbar 2: A rotund, unshaved publican wearing a flat cap and round glasses. He is usually seen in a grubby round-neck sweater of indeterminate colour. He has greying brindled hair to match his two wolfhounds. His pub has no till, instead he has a row of plastic tubs containing coins and notes on the back shelf behind the bar. This is the only pub I know which combines the business of a coal-merchant with that of a publican. As a result it is also the only pub I know which has a sticker advertising “Calor Gas” on the mirror behind the spirit optics. I haven’t heard anyone ask for a nip of Calor yet, but maybe someday someone will get that desperate!

Pauline: A large elderly lady with her own little pub. She has a rare gift of getting her customers to talk to one-another. There are no strangers in Pauline’s bar, if they come in strangers they do not remain so for long. She has curly hair which is dyed dark brown. As a result nobody (except for her immediate family) is sure of her age and nobody is impolite enough to ask. She wears a floral dress underneath an apron. As well as running the bar, she sells sacks of potatoes grown on the family farm.

Archie: Tall and lean. Rarely seen with a jacket on during the day. Instead he wears a collarless striped shirt beneath a charcoal grey waistcoat. Across his belly he has a silver watch chain. In one waistcoat pocket is his steel hunter watch, in the other, when it is not clenched between his teeth, is his short stubby pipe. On his head is a dark grey cap. He has a grey boot-brush moustache. He wears his shirt sleeves  rolled up above the elbows showing the muscles of his, still powerful, arms. He wears his trousers short with the turn-ups stopping short of his black, mud-caked boots.

When Archie was a young man he was a farrier.  He was the son of the blacksmith. He used to work stripped to the waist in the forge. In the semi darkness the light of the forge fire reflected on his sweaty torso. That was many years ago. The forge is long gone and Archie hasn’t shoed a horse in fifty years.

Neil: Neil is tall and muscular. He wears a blue nylon boiler suite beneath a shabby, olive-green topcoat. He wears his cap at a jaunty angle. His cheeks are polished and he wears eau-de-cologne.

Willy: Willy is a bear of a man. His huge beard is now streaked with grey, which only intensifies his piratical appearance. He wears a dark Breton seaman’s cap on his head.

Liam: Liam is a big man with a barrel chest. He has greying black hair and big muscular hands. He works as a forester and it is easy to imagine him swinging an axe. He smokes a briar pipe which he fills with fragrant aromatic tobacco.

Len:  A wizened little man. Small built with quick gestures and movements. He is bald except for some tufts of grey above his ears and a little around the dark. His eyes are grey and his eyeballs protrude from their sockets, giving him the appearance of a startled frog. He wears the waistcoat and trousers from a light grey check suit but has never been seen to wear the jacket. He toils away in his garden, still wearing a tie. When gardening he wears leather gardening gloves.

The Doctor: Tall and broad shouldered. His skin has a peculiar complexion, dark olive with an underlying, and surprising, hint of green! The whites of his eyes are bloodshot with an unhealthy looking yellow tint. His hairline is receding increasing the apparent height of his already striking forehead. His hair is completely white, contrasting shockingly with his skin.      

 (Pages 1.5, words 803, signing off at 19:37 ) 

Pressure, friction and resistance

(28th August 2012 Signing on at 14:57)

I tried to do something today and I encountered resistance. As it happens I decided to avoid the resistance and do something entirely different which achieved another long term objective. The “thing” and the nature of the “resistance” are not that important, but it got me thinking about resistance in principle. Resistance in this case means resistance to change or to movement. Other similar words are “friction” and “inertia”, which imply a physical, or physics metaphor. Both “friction” and “inertia” will be felt at resistance to movement. You push against something and you can feel it pushing back. It doesn’t move. Friction and inertia are different though. Once you have got movement, then inertia will tend to continue the movement, whereas friction will bring the movement to an end.

Another possibility is that you are dealing with a mechanism which is jammed. Now this is a difficult problem, because from the outside, it is difficult to tell what the cause of the resistance is. If you apply sufficient force to a mechanism which is stiff with friction, then you will get it to move. If you apply increasing force to a mechanism which is jammed or seized then you may eventually cause movement but you may also break the mechanism.

This brings us on to the means of dealing with resistance. There are a number of techniques which can be used, either independently or in combination: the first and most obvious is the one already referred to, steadily increasing force; the second is shock, the classic “hit it with a hammer” (and maybe progressively bigger hammers!); then we have lubrication, adding oil to a mechanism or perhaps mounting an object on rollers; another approach is to “jiggle it”, if there is any movement at all, then “jiggling”, especially rhythmic jiggling, can create opportunities to  exploit both inertia and lubrication; a last  technique (or maybe rather a pair of techniques) is the application of hot and cold with a blowlamp or ice.

Let’s imagine specific cases where I have encountered resistance in the past. One which springs to mind is undoing nuts and bolts which have become seized with corrosion. In addition to the techniques for undoing them described above, I have also used destructive techniques to remove them. The destructive techniques I have used are: splitting the nut with either a nut-splitter or a chisel, cutting the head of the bolt off with a chisel, removing the head of the bolt or the nut by drilling it or grinding it, and of course, everyone’s  favourite; cutting the head of the bolt with an oxy-acetylene cutter! This last one is best suited to relatively large nuts and bolts in relatively exposed situations.

I’m not going to be able to write quite so much today. I have an task I have to start in about ten minutes time, so the “resistance” and the other things I have had to do today have rather got in the way. But this does not matter that much. I have still managed to make some progress with everything and that is something I find encouraging. If resistance does not bring things to a complete halt, then we must still be moving in the right direction. So long as we are moving in the right direction, we will get to the destination in the end providing the movement can be sustained for long enough,

And that made me thing of calculus and differentiation: distance travelled, velocity and acceleration. For a journey we should not expect to maintain the same velocity for the whole of the journey. An ideal journey would start off relatively slowly, accelerate to an efficient cruising velocity and then decelerate to come to rest at the destination. “Come to rest” that’s a nice phrase in the context. It has given me the idea of completing a journey and coming to rest. Most journeys are not ideal, they involve dealing with obstacles with reduce speed by introducing additional resistance and may even bring us to a standstill for a time. A real journey will have to deal with all sorts of things.       

 (Pages 1 plus, words 708, signing off at 15:28 ) 

The grindstone

(27th August 2012 Signing on at 13:32)

OK. Here we go again. This time I don’t really have a starting point. Let’s see what happens. Yesterday, I started to read “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” by TE Lawrence again. I read it the first time many years ago. The copy I have is a rip-off republication of an out-of-copyright edition. I’m not sure which edition it was, but it looks like it is photo-typeset using the old text. The typeface used looks a little old-fashioned. Anyway, it may by more than 20 years since I read it.  My eye was drawn to it on the shelf, so I thought “why not?”  Picking up a recent catchphrase: “I can and I will!”

I’ve just made a discovery. I think I may have found the solution to the keyboard problem I had encountered recently. Up to now I had been “fixing it” by restarting the computer. Just now I tried restarting Word only and, what do you know? Problem fixed! That would seem to suggest that leaving Word on for a long while (like several hours) may not be a good thing to do. It also suggests that somewhere deep inside of the version of Word I have there is some insidious little bug. Not my problem. I expect Microsoft know all about it and can’t be bothered to fix it.

Back to the Seven Pillars: I was struck by some of the language Lawrence uses at the beginning; beautiful, dense, poetic prose. It sounds to me like a man at the end of his tether, which I believe he was.

As well as reading Lawrence, I’ve started another self-help hypnotherapy course. There is nothing quite like working on yourself.

As an aside, were you aware that the idea of “self-help” originated with Samuel Smiles? (here is a link to a free version http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/935). Maybe I will add that to my Kindle some time. I have more than enough reading to do at the moment, what with hypnotherapy, sociology and Lawrence!

Still, on we go! I will need to set myself an alarm to stop writing so that I can get tea cooked for the workers returning home. OK. Just done that.

I’ve noticed one or two small changes as a result of the hypnotherapy course I’ve started. I’ve already skip-read the book and I recognise techniques being used. Actually, I have done this course before and I found it helpful last time. If “The Artist’s Way” is for breaking the log-jam of being a “stuck” creative, this is more directed towards achieving a particular goal.

Achieving a goal is challenge. The difficult thing can be to decide on what it is you want to do. I have to confess that I find that difficult from time to time.  Right now I feel like I am ready to make some changes. I feel restless and I feel energy. But what am I going to do? I think I know, and this writing is part of it, but I am going to work on the details of the change for a while. There is a great deal written about carefully crafting the way you phrase the goal for an affirmation. I’m sure many of you will have come across SMART:

• ·         Specific
• ·         Measurable
• ·         Achievable
• ·         Realistic
• ·         Timely

And there are several other variations. I am fully in favour of setting the goal in that way, but that is not all. Before I get to the stage of setting the goal (and the inevitable sub-goals which represent milestones along the way) I want to be sure that I have the right goal for me. This needs to be something that I can commit to. Commitment is an important part of the process. However laudable the goal is, if I am not committed to it, then in the end I am likely to make excuses and find a way of wriggling out of it.

What do I mean by commitment? First of all, I need to be doing it for me. Other people may be involved, but the commitment is being made by me, the pain will be felt by me and therefore it needs to be me that makes the commitment. This means that this new goal I am developing is not there just to please other people. If that sounds selfish, then I suppose it is but I’m not going to apologise for that!

Here is an extract from Lawrence, taken out of context, which captures a feeling that I want to use:

We were a self-centred army without parade or gesture, devoted to freedom, the second of man’s creeds, a purpose so ravenous that it devoured all our strength, a hope so transcendent that our earlier ambitions faded in its glare.

I’ve read it. I’ve written it. Quite honestly, I’m not sure I know what it means. Maybe even Lawrence did not really know exactly what it meant. What I want to communicate to myself is emotion. The passage contains some seeds which I feel are important: “self-centred” and “freedom”, I want to be free; and I want the goal to be “ravenous” and “transcendent”. I want this goal to consume me. In the bible the Old Testament repeatedly uses words for sacrifice which are intended to mean “Wholly consumed” (I think the correct Greek rendering is “Holocaust” – holo = whole, caust = fire). That is what I mean.  I what my goal to contain the idea of brightness. (I slipped into editing what I was writing then for just a moment. That is something I do not want to do. I do not want to polish these words. I want to write them. The time for polishing comes later.)

Here is an image: Look back to the Steel-works at Lackenby: imagine that you are standing on the gantry on the West side of the convertor building. This is above the 30 metre level where the convertors are gimballed, but below the 60 metre level where the crane tracks run. Now imagine that one of the vessels has just been blown. Pure oxygen has been blown onto the surface of molten iron. Phosphorus has already been removed from the iron by the Polyseus Plant outside. Here, carbon  has been burnt out of the hot metal from the blast-furnace and the temperature of the mixture in the vessel has risen to approaching 1700 deg C. Imaging the vessel is tilted towards you. Fumes pour from the open mouth of the vessel as the metal and slag are sampled. The vessel remains in the tilted position while the operators await the lab test results and instructions of exactly what quantities of alloy metal and carbon to add. Remember the heat of the metal! Remember looking into the glowing heart of the vessel. The mouth of the vessel is approaching a black body. The surface of the slag is visible in the vessel and through the convection shimmer the hexagonal convection cells are visible on the surface of the slag. The convection currents churn the slag and the metal below it. Remember the heat! Remember the intensity. Remember the brightness in the darkness. Remember the contrast.

I remember polishing metal. Words can be polished like metal. Now is the time for making metal, but the time for polishing will come in the future. Today is a time for creation. Not all that is created will be perfect. Some will not even be good. That is not the point. The point for the time being is to create. The objective of creation is to quieten the inner critic. There will be time to criticise in the future. Shape the stone, first with the gavel, then with the chisel. Knock off all superfluities and then prepare the work for the hands of the more experienced workman.

Polishing! Imagine aluminium freshly polished, buffed with a buffing mop. Imagine metal polished so brightly that it reflects the light. Imagine the different shades you can see when metals are polished brightly: aluminium, stainless steel, carbon steel. Imagine all the different shades.

As well as creating new stuff, I want to tidy old stuff. Each day I am going to make my working environment tidier. Some days the change will be big and some days the change will be small. Today there were some small changes. Tidying will include the physical and the mental environment. Every day I will do some creative work and some tidying. Also each day I will move forward a little and consolidate my position a little. I can and I will!

I do not have to do a lot of everything each day. I can do more of one thing one day, and then more of something else the next. The road is the thing! The journey is the thing! I am establishing habits. Establishing habits can be painful and it can be hard work. Never-the-less the effort is worth it, because once the habits are established, I can use more of my energy on the truly creative.

The process I am undergoing at the present is letting my creativity out. What are the things I want to be doing? I have embryo ideas in mind, but I want to order them and prioritise them. Trying to do too many things at once is counter-productive. It is best to do one thing at a time. It is rarely possible to do one thing exclusively, but if I have one thing which is my priority then that one thing can get my attention.

I like the way that doing the writing is quietening my mind. There is less room for rumination when I am concentrating on writing. Although the writing process is useful at the moment, what I am writing is not as useful as it might be. That will change. As I get more used to writing, as I get back into the habit of writing, I will be able to focus more attention on the content.

Already, I like the fact that I can write continuously. For me it is more productive to split writing into a number of distinct steps. First, plan what I am going to write. At present I am not doing that at all. This is purely stream of consciousness (and therefore, I suppose also free-association in some respects). Second, do the writing. That is what I am doing at the present. That is what I am practising and I am enjoying the process. I am also pleased with the results. I am not editing what I am writing, but even so a great deal of this is coming out in reasonable sentences. At some time in the future I may try doing this step using Dragon. Then, thirdly, there is the editing step. I have spent so much of my life editing things that I tend to interrupt myself to do the editing as I go along. That is what I am going to stop doing.

I look after the quantity. God looks after the quality.

And he does! This is working so much better than I expected. I am going to keep writing until the alarm goes and then copy this text into the blog along with a word count and a number of pages. Based on the three different blogs and other stuff, I must have written more than 5 thousand words today. That is amazing. I time to go. The alarm just went off!

(Pages 3 plus, words 1932, signing off at 15:02 ) 

Errors – I made a mistake

(25th August 2012 Signing on at 10:54)

In “The Morning Pages” yesterday, I started writing something about errors in computer systems. In this instance I’m thinking about data errors, faults that get saved to the files or the database. This is something which (perhaps unfortunately) I know something about. At the time I wrote it, I thought that it was interesting. I’m going to continue with it here. I’m not referring to what I wrote yesterday, this is written from the start.

At the beginning I suppose that it is useful to define errors for this context and then divide them into groups so that I can write about each group independently. After that (if I can be bothered, or get that far) I can compare and contrast the different groups. The world can be divided into two sorts of people: those who divide it into parts and those who do not!

What is an error? In this context it is a value in the database (let’s assume we are using databases) which is incorrect and causes some kind of problem with subsequent processing. Although for the purposes of “stream of consciousness” I don’t usually use bullets, I am going to here. There are no rules here, so I’m not breaking my non-rule, just moving away from a convention which I have followed up till now. In “error” I am not including those values where a value has been entered into the database which complies with all the rules, but which does not actually match reality. This is an interesting case, which I think I will deal with separately.

What are the possible sources of these errors?

• ·         Hardware faults: A sector on the disk is damaged, so what is written there is not what is subsequently retrieved.
• ·         Outside events: External events; power spikes or radiation produce changes to the data as it is recorded.
• ·         Software errors: A fault in a programme results in something other than what was intended being recorded.
• ·         Imports: Data has been imported which by-passed normal validation

Let’s look at the errors themselves. What is an initial classification? Some ways of looking at it is to consider how widely you will have to look in order to detect the error, at what level the error could be detected and what you could do to correct the error once it has been detected.

First of all there are errors which occur at the level of the value of a single field, in a single record. Of course all of these may repeated and be caused by any of the root cause sources above. The simplest is where the value in the storage is something which is incompatible with the definition of the field. At its most extreme this should be detected by the operating system or the database manager. One or other of these will throw some kind of exception. Rectification is going to require work at a low level.

Next level up is when the value which is stored in the field is compatible with the definition which is used by the database manager, but is not valid according to the application which is using the data. An example of this is where a database contains an “integer” field which is used to hold an enumerated value (let’s say “1,2,3,4” are valid, but anything else is not). Of course someone will say that the database should be designed with field level validation to prevent this sort of thing. Yes, it probably should (although that introduces its own problems) but many are not.

Supposing such data has got into the database, how will we find out? If we are lucky, then the application will have practiced defensive programming and when the data is encountered something will throw an error. (Pause at 11:21 resumed 11:36) If we are not so luck, then the application “will carry on regardless” and it is quite difficult to know what will happen. Let’s stick with the case that we can understand: the application, or the database or he operating system throws an error which we catch. What do we do then?    

The first thing to do, is get someone who understands the application to identify which module (term used very loosely) is throwing the error and identify what is causing the error to be thrown (if you see what I mean). The objective of this is to find a “pattern” which can be used to identify the offending data. At this stage, we are not really sure whether the problem is “data” or “program”. We could have a piece of faulty data, or we could have a program which is not handling a valid (but possibly unusual) piece of data.

Let’s assume for the time being that what we have is invalid data. This is something that the application should really be rejecting. There are now two things to be done: first, identify how widespread this problem is, and two, identify how the data came to be corrupt in the first place. Both of these objectives are addressed by finding all the records which suffer from this particular problem. This is done by using the “pattern” which describes the offending data to create a query to identify the affected records. Examining these records will tell us a number of things: is the problem widespread? Is there a pattern to the affected records? By pattern, I mean: do they all come from the same place? Are they all in the same state? Are they updated about the same time? The background information accumulated may help us to identify the root cause.

The number of records affected is a vital piece of information. How are we going to fix the values? First of all: Is it possible to infer the correct value? This can be difficult. At this stage it is well worth taking a moment to remember that with any “data correction” we are going to be “changing the record of reality”. If some action is taken which modifies data, then there should be a procedure for keeping a record of what changes were made (This often takes the form of a log in the database).If it is possible to identify “correct” values, then that is the preferred option. The next possible option is to set the data value to some kind of innocuous default, especially one which will prompt for an update the next time the record is opened. The last options are to mark the field or maybe the whole record as faulty.

So much for faults with individual fields; what about faults which need a wider scope to detect them? An example of this is where the values of two or more fields are not compatible. This is usually associated with denormalisation in the database.

Let’s take two cases: simple denormalisation (the same field is repeated in more than one record) and derived attribute (where one attribute summarises other attributes).

Take the first one first. Someone has decided to repeat the same attribute in more than one place. Let’s not argue about whether this should have been done. Someone has decided to do it! First confirm that the values are always supposed to be the same. If they are, which is what I would expect, then the pattern to use for detecting the error, is “where are they different?”

Now the pattern for handing this is pretty much the same as an error in a single field. Find out how many records are affected, examine the affected records looking for any pattern and try and identify the root cause (in my experience, a root cause which is sometimes overlooked is data which has been migrated into the system).

Now the question is “what do we do about it?” Well, obviously (?) correct the root cause. As for correcting the data, is there one of the records which can be regarded as the “master”? For denormalization, there should be. If there isn’t then this indicates a (possibly serious) fault in the application design. If there is, then update the denormalized copy to match the master. Remember that all these data changes which are done outside the application should be logged.

Now let’s look at the case of which represents a derived value. A typical example of this would be where we had a transaction which consisted of individual line items. The transaction record contains an attribute which contains the total value of individual transactions. It might also contain the number of transactions. An error would occur when the total in the “header” did not have the same numerical value as the totals in the individual “line items”.

Before we go any further, it is worth pointing out that there is a special case root cause which may be at work here. That is the possibility of “rounding” or other “arithmetic” related errors.

The pattern to use for (breaking off 12:23, resuming 12:42 after lunch) for detecting this kind of error is that the value calculated from the individual items is not equal to the value in the header record. Now there is another implicit trap here: if we use the database manager to calculate total of individual items, then we are probably not using the same code as the application, so be careful if “rounding” or similar problems are involved.

Having identified the records involved, the next steps are as before: examine the records, identify the root cause and develop a strategy for correcting the affected records. Someone is almost certain to suggest that all totals should equal the sum of their parts. I know I would consider this as a correction strategy, but it may not be correct! Why not? Consider the following two possibilities: that one transaction has been missed from the total; so the total is correct but a transaction is missing, and a record has been saved twice into the individual items table! Both these problems would be insidious, and difficult to fix reliably. Possible strategies for dealing with them involve careful examination of the records and the code doing the work in parallel.

 Now let’s cast the scope wider: are there cases where we have data errors which are even wider spread? Well, obviously we do, but (until I can think of a better way) I would handle them as variants of the “derived attribute” class. The patterns used to detect them become progressively more complicated and correction strategies become harder.

Can “human error” be detected? Possibly it can be detected, but not always reliably. What we would have to do is develop a pattern for what constituted “human error”. This might be supported by other factors which are not specifically related to the data itself like “particular operators”, “particular locations” and “particular times”.  

Now, this is where it gets interesting for me. I’ve come to the end of what I wanted to say, but I want to write more. This is where the free association comes in. The concept of data can be extended to “memory” and system to the mind or data can be extended to dna and system can be extending to living things. Does the speculation above have any validity? I think it does, moreover, in a strange metaphysical kind of way what I am trying to do at the moment is perform exercises which reshape thinking and habit. I want to get into the habit of writing a certain amount at a sitting. I’m very good at planning what I write, but I don’t always get round to doing the actual writing. Here I am forcing myself to perform the act of writing (well typing if you must) with the intent of developing the habit. Repetition is at the heart of all habit. Habit implies repetition and repetition trains habit. What are the factors which determine strength of learning? Primacy, Recency, Repetition and I think there is something else as well. Of course we have to bring in conditioning factors like reward and punishment and triggers as well.

Back to data errors (see what I mean about rambling?) Programs are data too! I can extend the thinking to other forms of data which are not exclusively record based, such as some files and, of course, programs.

Let’s look at files first. What about a word processing file, is it possible to detect (and correct) errors in a word processing file? Well of course it is! I do it all the time, and at least some of the time Word helps me. A very small portion of the time, Word hinders me, but that is another matter. Remember, right now, my objective is to train myself to write a certain amount. I’m good at planning, I’m good at editing but I want to get better at writing.

How do I detect errors in a word processing file? In different ways, at different levels: I use Word to tell me when words are spelled incorrectly. Where a word is underlined red, I can either use Word to tell me what it thinks the correct spelling is, I can look it up in the dictionary or I can completely ignore what Word is telling me. Word and I are working together. Word does the checking, but I am in control. This is similar to the “single field” class of errors which can be found in a database. Of course, we know in advance what the root cause of these errors is: my typing is a bit dodgy, as is my spelling.

A similar, in fact almost identical approach applies when we extend the scope outwards to sentences and paragraphs. This is a more complex situation which does not really have a corresponding level in the database record model. Word contains a model of English grammar. I actually have no idea how good Word’s model of grammar is. I am sure it is better than mine! Where word flags a sentence as “needing its grammar looked at” I can look at what Word suggests. Most of the time I need to make the corrections myself. These can be simple things, like adjusting the ends of sentences, but can be more complex. In either case Word is helping me to write. I am looking at the screen and concentrating on what I am writing. Writing in this way I can write much more quickly.

One of my objectives here is to reach a “Flow state”. That implies that I try and reduce the amount of interruption. After all, almost my definition, interruption interrupts flow!

What Word cannot do is help me with the sense of the sentences or especially the paragraphs. What I write is sense or non-sense because of what I think, not because of the way it is structured.

What about programs? Is it possible to detect errors in a program? Well of course it is, I do it all the time. It is what de-bugging is all about. But what about it the general sense, as data? Here I think we are into more awkward territory. Some kinds of error are detectable. For example, these days syntactic errors are detected by the parsing editors.  If they are not detected during editing, then they are detected immediately by the compiler. Data errors, references to the wrong objects are likewise detected, but what about “the sense”? I am much more doubtful about that. Sense can only be checked by comparing the results of the program with the original specification.

If I extend that idea to writing for entertainment or even technical writing, then I get the idea that there should be a “specification”. Now I suppose ultimately, there is a debate about whether the specification can be right or wrong. I guess it just “is”, in the sense that it exists. For correctness to come into play, we have to have more than one expression of the same idea. In coding this takes the form (or perhaps the forms) of: the specification, the code itself, and the tests. This is the reason why many people argue for using the tests as the specification. Apart from efficiency (why have three artefacts when you only need two?), there is the point that tests are generally expressed more precisely than specifications (at least in coding).

Hmm. I have to be careful that I don’t talk myself round in circles here. I observed something interesting just then. One was in instance where Word could not tell the word I intended to use. Even from context, it did not seem to be able to tell whether “two” or “tow” was the word that I intended to use. Of course to a human reader that sort of typographical error is fairly obvious. It is also a case where over-reliance of a word-processor spell checker can lead you astray if you allow the machine to make corrections itself.

I remember when I used to exploit the features of the terminal hardware so that I could read spelling corrections (“highlighted”) out of context of the rest of the script (which was in normal brightness). That allowed me to work very quickly and accurately. Strange that using a monochrome terminal was sometimes preferable to using a colour terminal.

When I reach the end of the 5^th page of text I’m just going to stop. Remember, this is primarily an exercise in training. I’m not deliberately trying to write nonsense but the content is much less important than the activity. There is a reason that I am keeping this stuff, and that is that I want to be able to mine the “free association” aspect in the future. I’m not sure what that will yield but it seems like a potentially interesting experiment. Having the text online means that I may be able to use it in some unexpected and unplanned (at least for the time being) way.

I am going to separate this “rambling” stuff from the “reflective” stuff. I’m not sure I care who reads the ramblings (although I may change my mind) but I feel that I care about the reflection. Today seems to have been quite successful. You may find this strange but I do not expect to read what I have written for quite some time.  

And that seems like quite at appropriate place to end. I’ve produced five pages of ramblings. I started with a topic and then went on from there. For a while I am going to take that approach, but I may develop it in different ways. I expect to experiment with all sorts of different things. One of the things I will probably steer away from is formatting.  Put simply “I don’t care”.  This is about writing, not reading! (stopped at 13:49)