The good ship Mangelwurzel.
 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Image
Sorry about the long silence.  This is a particularly busy time of the year for us, so blogging has taken a back seat. Busy time or not, we can't control the weather and Storm Darragh caused a LOT of disruption on the Isle of Man.  Most of the beach at Peel was blown into the town - diggers are trying to shovel it all back again - landslides blocked roads and undermined buildings, and large numbers of trees were blown over bringing down electricity wires as they fell.  Loaghtan Books and the houses around it were without power for ten hours. Being without electricity was strangely pleasant!  No work could be done of course, but then we couldn't feel guilty about not working as there was nothing we could do about it.  A log burning stove made sure that we didn't freeze and we had enough food to make sure we didn't go hungry either.  Rather to my surprise, the real bother was only having cold water to drink.  In the evening, when it's dark and, despite t...
Read more
Image
The photograph is our delivery vehicle.  Seriously. W e live and work close to the Manx Electric Railway, the only tramway in the world still operating with its original rolling stock.  Most of the vehicles are Victorian or Edwardian and it’s our public transport. The MER runs between Douglas and Ramsey on the east coast of the Isle of Man.  Laxey is roughly midway.  We have customers in Ramsey, Laxey and Douglas and, what with the lack of parking, we use the MER to deliver to customers whenever we can.  Besides, the MER is fun! Interesting fact:   the main coastal route into Douglas (the capital) from the north only exists because the entrepreneurs building the tramway thought they might as well lay a road next to the rails at the same time.
Read more
Image
Spotted in Ramsey yesterday (20 August) was this Royal Navy Bomb Disposal vehicle. Seven mortars dating from the Second World War were discovered on 18 August near a footpath in the south of the island running between Cregneash and Calf Sound.  Unsurprisingly the Isle of Man does not have its own bomb disposal squad, so the area was cordoned off while specialist help was obtained from across. Bomb Disposal experts from Faslane destroyed the ordnance in a controlled explosion near The Chasms, just round the corner from Cregneash, either yesterday or earlier today. All this is well and good, but what were the Bomb squad doing in Ramsey, forty miles away at the other end of the island?
Read more