Drinking
In praise of red wine
Way back in the 70s or it might even have been the 60s, the French Wine Industry insisted that red wine was really good for you. I took this to heart, forget the butter is [more…]
Science
18th Century
John Walker: The Man Who Gave the World a Light
In 1826 a Stockton chemist scraped a dirty stirring stick across a rough hearth and invented the friction match. He sold fire by the tin for a shilling, refused to patent the idea and told [more…]
Health
Introducing My Giant Spot
May I introduce you to my giant spot? It sits in the middle of my forehead and, upon closer inspection, seems to consist of a little stream, some flowers and a tree. Might it be [more…]
Business
A Landscape of Lies
In 2007 I was the joint owner of a building services consultancy which undertook the mechanical and electrical design and production tender documentation relating to new construction and refurbishment projects. In addition, we also undertook [more…]
18th Century
The Railway’s sleepers: the Patron, the builder and the Polymath
A final journey into history to meet three men whose names never sadly made it into popular memory but who, like all the others, laid the foundations still used by the railways to this day. [more…]
18th Century
Nicholas Wood: The man who wrote the book on railways
He taught Robert Stephenson his trade, judged the Rainhill Trials, and wrote the first proper book on railways, the one that engineers across the world actually used. Not all of us can be gallivanting around [more…]
19th Century
Beamish: the Museum that said yes to everything
You may be surprised to learn that a working time machine has already been invented in County Durham. It exists because one man refused to let the region throw its own history into the skip. [more…]
Health
Medical Musings
This is a warts an’ all musing upon the particular medical state I find myself in as I approach my 86th Birthday. As a soi-disant shortarse (I have lost c. 3 inches in height over [more…]
Engineering
YooKay2026…… A State broken by Corruption (Part 6)
HS2 is one project. What happens everywhere else, across the hundreds of councils and public bodies that spend the rest of the £1.23 trillion, is in many ways worse. In the financial year 2022–23, 467 [more…]