h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi Waz
I guess you guessed who this one is supposed to suggest...

If you mean who's speaking on the phone, no. But that's my ignorance. If something's not on the BBC news page or the front page of the Shropshire Star (northen edition mind) I'm unlikely to know about it.

The ! was for bootness though your syllable count is higher.
Waz

No, I just meant boots. I didn't realise at the time that Shazz had added subtitles

Funny...I never told her it was supposed to be boots. Good job it wasn't supposed to be Jodan, really.

I've done a couple of others in various places, too. Doing Waz, though, that would be a toughie. Your idiosyncracies are a bit subtle. A Houseman parody, maybe? Naw. Too precious, and too much like hard work...

Shropshire, yeah. I remember now. Yeah, you're under some kind of delusion that it's rural, I recall, instead of the venerated cradle of the Industrial Revolution...

Pin (rubs flippers gleefully, and waits to see if the wind-up bites)

You're making the mistake of believing that the bit around Telford is in Shropshire when everyone (round this way) knows that it is the hole in the middle.

Waz

I meant Coalbrookdale, but never mind.
So where is your Shropshire, actually?
This here map kind of goes blank between Shrewsbury and Cheshire.

Telford, Coalbrookdale, Ironbridge - they're all 'Telford and Wrekin' (I think), the hole in the Shropshire doughnut! In local authority terms, literally.

The place I work for is about to change its name because it's countywide and Telford etc equate the 'Shropshire' in its current name with Shrewsbury. Where's the smiley?

Anyway, that Industrial Revolution you were talking about? It's been neatly contained and museumed in a setting of greenfields and woodland.

It's odd, Shropshire's not only the place where the industrial revolution started but the birthplace of Darwin and the modern Olympics. Yet it's very rural/old England/backward in all sorts of ways. Market towns ten miles apart regard each other as foreign.

My Shropshire's that blank bit - the northern part of it. I'm not sure about that 'my Shropshire'. I have an affection for it but I can't identify with it.

Have you been to the Ironbridge museums?

I've been to Coalbrookdale and Blists Hill more than once. I've been other places round there too, but they haven't stuck with me. I'm an out-and-out steel guy, I'm afraid, so the mixed-in pottery gets kind of ignored. The iron bridge itself, if you mean that, well, it's beautiful. What Darby started in that valley has blessed the whole world.

I'm not against nature. Wilderness and mountain are uplifting, and landscape seized and transformed by humanity is uplifting too. Rural places do nothing for me. I grew up in north Lincolnshire, in a steel town that set the night ablaze. Twenty miles in every direction from that awesome focus, it was basins of silt sullied by a man-deep patina of indolent irrelevance.

Wooh! Sometimes I surprise myself. That ought to get a retort, at any rate...

I'm not overfond of rural. I want wild. Unmanhandled. Most rural is man-ufactured. In your Blake piece you said thankfully there are no tigers here. I'd like tigers.

It used to depress me, driving by field after field of dead green grass in England. H2g2 actually changed that. Talking to two Tasmanian history enthusiasts made me see the countryside as they'd see it and it wasn't that bad and it's very rich in history. Then talking to Frogbit I realised how short term I was thinking. What man has done to the landscape is nothing compared to what nature has done to itself; earthquakes, glaciers, volcanoes - or just wind and rain. The ironbridge is beautiful. Nature will replace what was taken to make it and can handle the furnaces we build.

So I can handle a bit of industry. It's small potatoes! And I can see the romance in a steel town. What gets me down still is miles and miles of suberb. Is that what your 'patina of indolent irrelevance' is by the way? That's a phrase and a half to chew on. I love the sound of it and can make my own meaning for it, just not sure whether it's your meaning or not.


I meant Blists Hill mainly. I'm not that keen on the pottery either. What I'd like to see and haven't are the Blists Hill furnaces in action. As far as seeing real power goes I've had to make do with watching that little traction engine they have that drives the lift in the mine shaft.

The best evocation of the power of the steel industry I've seen in a museum is actually in Sheffield (or strictly Rotherham), the Big Melt at Magna.
Before I saw it, I was contemptuous, because there was no way that someone could make derelict a 60 MVA arc furnace appear to come to life with household electric power. With a combination of very loud noise, strobe light, showers of sparks and vibrating walkways, they do it pretty well.
The attention to detail is impressive. In the real thing, you've got water-cooled cables two feet in diameter flexing under the force between current-carrying conductors (and that's BIG currents if you remember your physics!) They couldn't do that, of course, so they replaced the cables with what seem on close inspection to be cloth tubes and presumably air-blow them. In the deep shadow, it looks authentic.
Another local must is the River Don Engine in steam at Kelham Island. That used to drive a plate mill as big as any in Britain today. 12000 HP.
You can have the phrase and your meaning. I meant pseudo-agriculture, which I dislike more than suburbs, but come to think of it...

I so don't do botox!
Nice one Pin, see I shall have to sharpen the sword.
take care
boots

I hope you don't think it's meant to be you, boots.

It's only meant to be a homage to your style!

Where's the 'As if' smilie? Homage? think not Pin, think you're far better than I.
Am now a qualified teacher, friend. Been trawling through the job vacancies...Thailand looks fun, Middle East pays better. Perhaps I should drop the Trout a line and see if he knows of any vacancies out there. So, short term plan...work experience on local paper, time: one week. Trip to Portugal to visit oldest friends, time: one week. Finish book, time: every night, deadline: three weeks. Then I think I need another plan.......drifts off into panic mode.
take care
boots

I'm far better than most, boots, but you're one of the ones I'm not far better than.

(now we need a 'smug' smiley as well)

Well done, with the teaching. A great achievement, but more important a deeply admirable aspiration. Some of us tell ourselves we're always trying something new, but it's a cheat when you just play with it for a few hours.

Starting a new life, now, that really is something...