Month: January 2024

Pin Post #5

On By brosencrantzIn enamel pinanigansLeave a comment

#43 RIAT ’17
The Royal International Air Tattoo is an annual excuse for many of the world’s air forces to congregate and show their cool stuff off to vast crowds: a full long weekend of fast pointy things, military nostalgia and incredibly loud engine noises. It’s a delight, despite being near Swindon, and the only hard part is choosing just one badge to pick out of the thousands upon thousands on offer. I got this patriotic little Eurofighter after some internal consternation.

#44 HAMPTON COURT PALACE
The second (and last… for now) astronomical clock in my collection! This one, from Hampton Court, is from 1540 and still works. On the Thames upstream of London, Hampton Court is probably the best of London’s royal palaces: a huge, sprawling and extremely engaging architectural pile, half authentic Henry VIII Tudor bits, half Dutch William-era English Baroque (a 1690s refurb was cancelled halfway through owing to the death of Queen Mary II.)

#45-49 WELSH ADVENTURE 2017
I went to Snowdonia with my parents and partner in the summer of ’17 and, well, went a little bit mad.
Cadw, the Welsh heritage organisation, produce custom badges for all their castles, with Caernarfon and Conwy shown. We climbed to the top of Mount Snowdon honestly but rode the Snowdon Mountain Railway down (it was raining and my other half has short legs). No.8 is from Portmeirion, where The Prisoner TV series was filmed, and the train is one of the mini-Garratts from the Welsh Highland Railway (the loco has a fascinating history, having been built to haul crops on South African fruit 5lines that were themselves built from surplus First World War trench railways). After this splurge I started restricting myself to one or two per holiday.

#50 NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM
The National Maritime Museum in Greenwich has been knocked about a bit by a refurb and is quite difficult to navigate (I’ll always be bitter about the loss of the 20th Century Seapower gallery) but is still an unending treasure, especially the new Nelsonian and Empire galleries, which present nuanced and compelling histories of the period when Britain – for better or worse – ruled the waves. This little pewter ship of the line is a first-rate souvenir of the place. Background is NAM Rodger’s “The Command of the Ocean.”#50A
Some years ago I was struggling quite badly with a temporary job posting I absolutely loathed and which made me deeply morally uncomfortable. To cheer me up, my then girlfriend* got some DIY advent calendar boxes and filled them with little gifts, one for each day I had remaining in that job, each with a tiny accompanying letter. One of those was this badge featuring a naval crown – note that it’s made of sails and sterms – which has somehow ended up as a recurring theme in our relationship.

#51 LEAF (Dartmoor)
On a heavily delayed train west to Devon to visit the Reeves, I found myself chatting (as I commonly do on trains) with a lady across the table from me. She turned out to be the chief executive of the farming-environmental charity LEAF, and as I was working on a farming related policy area at the time we had an excellent and (I hope mutually) enlightening conversation about work. She gave me this LEAF badge as a present. Background is Philip’s book A Darkling Plain.

#52 & #53 VENICE & ROME
Back to foreign travel with this lovely pair of pins from a holiday to Italy and Rome. I adore the gold ripples on the water in the Venice badge especially. This is another of the holidays I travelblogged – you can read all about it here.
#54 BRUSSELS
A work trip to Brussels coincided with getting to visit a friend and have a flying visit around the city (cracking army museum, appalling roads, highly advanced chip technology.) This rather lovely pin shows the city’s Brabantine Gothic town hall.

#55 PENIS

Presented without further comment.

#56 BRIGHTON PAVILION
I went down to Brighton to see the opening show of a new run of The Ministry of Biscuits, by Philip Reeve and Brian Mitchell. A good time was had by all, and you can find the soundtrack here: http://thefoundrygroup.bandcamp.com
Before seeing the show, we went to see Brighton Pavilion, the mad oniony architectural fantasia shown on this little badge. Background is the alternative Brighton of the Illustrated World of Mortal Engines, illustrated here by David Wyatt.
#57 ICELAND
I don’t think I’ll ever again have an experience quite so much like visiting an alien planet: the weird palette (black soil, feldgrau vegetation, white snow), the rarefied human existence (small, spread-out towns; geothermal plants draping pipes across the landscape like silver nets; lonely earth-movers toiling mysteriously in the distance; the vast aching emptiness separating all of them); the strikingly hostile, alien landscape, experienced snatches at a time before retreating to the warm safety of a vehicle; the unique letters, the mad pricing, the steam oozing up through cracks in the ground, the otherworldly aurora dancing above.I got this at Thingvellir, a very interesting landscape which is also Iceland’s most historically significant site – and kept travelogues of the whole trip here. (Some have pointed out that the logs sound a bit negative – I had a really good time, honest! Maybe it was just the darkness making me sarky.)
#58 BRISTOL MUSEUM
The city museum in Bristol is a perfect urban museum: it’s a handsome old Victorian building with high ceilings and mosaic floors and holds a little bit of everything. It has historic maps, local conservation, dead animals in glass cases, an incredible collection of shiny rocks, the mandatory Egyptians (and bonus Assyrians!), lots of paintings and interesting ceramics, and of course DINOSAURS. Of which this is one. Backing is a lovely Bristol print a friend gave me for Christmas.

dreamt the factory dream again

On By brosencrantzIn UncategorisedLeave a comment

I’ve decided to kick off a long-on-the-backburner creative project in earnest this year, after spending much of last year wondering if I can teach myself to draw (leading to all sorts of private notepad-and-Clip-Studio related tomfoolery.) It turns out I have a really bad mind for the sort of abstract mental shape-rotating I need to draw vehicles and buildings freehand. But I can get decent passable results if I make myself props and work from those.

I’ve forgotten pretty much everything I learned about Blender last year, and really just needed a prop that I can wiggle into place to get the rough proportions of a 3d object. So I had a go with Magicavoxel, a very easy-to-learn free open source bit of software that lets you plonk and colour cubes, essentially Lego-style, and it was exactly what I wanted.

Here is the stuff I’ve created to actually use so far: a little one-person cargo trike, and a set of Imaginary Lorries (loosely based on the Alvis Stalwart).

*

even the air is fluff to some extent

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On Fancy Cat Breeds
or, why this little man absolutely deserves to be thrown in the river but hasn’t been

Eagle-eyed followers of my silly narcissism posts will note that in the last couple of years I’ve been joined by two white fluffy creatures. Let me share my usual point by point explanation of why we have ragdoll cats (for non cat enthusiasts: a type of overengineered soft toy that screams and shits).

  1. My partner wanted cats.
  2. We live on an estate full of foxes in central London, next to a road full of buses, and all of her childhood cats met sticky and premature ends outdoors.
  3. Thus, we looked into indoor cats, mainly for the welfare of the cat but incidentally for the local wildlife (none of which we want killed or brought indoors as a present).
  4. However, while the “indoor” thing is getting much more popular, it’s not nearly as popular or widely understood in the UK yet as it is Stateside. So shelters would not let us have healthy kittens unless they had access to the outside world, and would only offer cats with various seriously debilitating health problems.
  5. I am sympathetic to sick cats but I’ve never lived with cats and we agreed it would be a bit challenging for a first cat to already be on death’s door.
  6. Considerable research went into UK cats who would be good for our circumstances. Maine coons, the largest street-legal cat in the UK were ruled out on the basis they simply wouldn’t fit in our flat, leaving us with the choice of ragdolls or British shorthairs.
  7. I took one look at the shorthairs and said “no, they look like merchant bankers”.
Absolutely not

And I stand by that! Look, all cats are at some level snooty aristos, but there’s a difference of degree here. Ragdolls are the equivalent of tsarist-era princesses, so utterly out of touch and cocooned in wealth that they don’t even understand the extent of their privilege. Meanwhile, I look at a shorthair and I know it has opinions on the welfare budget and nods along to Telegraph articles about how tough it is to be a buy-to-let landlord.

And we live not far from the river, and I know enough about living with cats to accept that it is simply a longer or shorter period of waiting for them to commit some sort of heinous crime against a possession of significant financial or sentimental value. And I know that on that day, if I saw that bland, snotty, jowly face above a half-eaten baby photo album or widdled-on graphics card, I would have great difficulty not taking the little sod for a swim.

So we got these little fellas, and named them Leopold and Ferdinand because they’re posh and inbred, and they have been three years of very nice, surprisingly affectionate, company.

The punchline? Well, recently Ferdy went and bit clean through the screen of my laptop in a thoroughly terminal way. And, full credit to both of us, was not immediately delivered to the Thames for drowning practice.

(Disclaimer because that’s the sort of place the internet is these days: if this ever gets in front of someone inclined to whip up a self-righteous hatestorm, please note that this is a joke post, I love my fluffy idiots and have no intention of ever drowning them, and also you need better hobbies.)