That is one impressive machine Mike - is that you towards the end? I loved all the noise and can just imagine that warm, balmy amosphere that laid a thin film of oil on your skin by the end of the day. There is something solid and real about that sort of thing - it does your soul good.

I used to work by a machine that generated a kind of soporific noise like that, day in, day out. I quit it when I began to form rhythms in the chaotic madness - sometimes I fancied I could hear words and once I swear I heard my mothers voice scream 'Neil!' at me the way she used to when i was a kid and playing up, delighted to be naughty but fearing the wrath of my father when he came home from work. It still makes me laugh the way he used to chase me and catch me by one hand and hold it aloft while trying to smack me with the other as we spiralled round and round, me avoiding the loose hand at all costs. it only made it worse in the end.

The way we hear things (and see things) that are not there has always amazed me. It seems that the brain tries to impart some sort of order to any series of random events. Perhaps it does that as we are in extremis, trying to fend off that dying of the light...

The Wolfs Lair, eh?! I didn't know the roof was blown off, and I used to do a brisk trade in militaria, although I preferred that of WWI to WWII.

Back to the steam engine, you can see the thought that went into making just one small part of it, the way non essential bits were pared down. The rockers that moved the travelling arms up and down or backwards and forwards are good examples. To think that people used to work in amongst all that machinery! I could never do that - not for long anyway. The opportunities to get mangled up look just to great for me to deal with - I fall over concentrating on trying not to fall over...

We used to allow for that principle in building, allowing a 45 degree angle at the footing/plinth for 'shear force' and deeming everything above that as non-essential. We did a lot of elegant work with concrete, stepping it, stub piling supports for it, lining shear faces with polystyrene board to allow slippage to occur - then we covered it all over with gravel and soil and it was rarely, if ever, seen again.

I met old guys in that trade (building, that is - we built up houses from the grassy oversite) who, for instance, would slake a load of lime in an old bath-tub to make lime putty, set a traveller bar up on the ceiling and use the putty and something else (gypsum?) to form the most ornate architraves, all with just a bit of plywood as former moving along the traveller. One had a small hand operated gun that looked all the world like a meat mincer, but which sprayed a decorative, lumpy coating up the wall. The gun looked about as old as him, and he was no spring chicken. They are all dead now, and these days you buy architrave in shops (you did back then, to be honest) and cut it to length then stick it on the wall. Old Cliff the Plasterer would turn in his grave if he saw that... He took a shine to me - I was only a boy then, and I thought he might leave me his tools when he retired. He left them to his 'gofer' or 'plasterers mate' a man he used to hate and wouldn't even speak to. They ate their lunch in complete silence, no small talk. I guess they were like an old married couple who had fallen out of love ages ago but still stuck together because that's the way it always had been.

He did try to teach me a bit, but I was on loan to the roofer and fell off the roof while getting tiles up there. By the time I had recovered he had retired. Another opportunity missed, and the chasm between the old and the new grew that bit wider.

Sorry for the rambling.
Regards,
Neil