Sorry, very late publishing the puzzle this morning. Late night, blah, blah. Anyway, here it is. I love this picture, and glad to be reminded of Liptons, whose tea we can still buy. Mr. Lipton helped run his parents' shop in the Gorbals and then expanded into just about every town in the country. He bought his own tea plantations so that he could supply his own shops and keep the price down. Fancy that. Which is nothing, once again, to do with the puzzle. Good luck.
Kelsale, Suffolk
2 days ago
40 comments:
The motorcycle's number plates don't match up!
You don't see a lot of motorcyclists with flat caps these days. Not that this is the "fault", I hasten to add.
Yes, of course Gawain's right, but the view from this side of the world (New Zealand) means we only see a one-legged motor-cyclist ...
What an upside-down world we do live upon.
Well done Gawain. Is your surname "Green Knight"?
I love that the bus appears to be run by the Transport Commission or Committee - and is in our beloved blood-and-custard! Is this at all representative of any bus ever in service? (Sits back, opens popcorn)
Cheltenham District buses used to be red and cream, but the red was more maroon than 'blood' and they didn't have 'Transport Com' written on the side.
Funny you should say that DC. I'm so glad to get in before Ron Combo- the bus livery will reduce him to tears over his tomatoes. It bears a remarkable resemblance to Devon General. As was.
Apropos of none of the above,I would like to thank you for mentioning in a previous post,the Jim Stringer railway detective novels by Andrew Martin.I'm halfway through the first one,and its excellent.And-great stuff-there are a number of sequels.
That's my commuter reading sorted.
There was no cream (well not much, maybe a roof line) on the Devon General livery. And the red was much darker. From your loving pedant.
Talking of pedantry, I think you'll find that 'parents' has an apostrophe at the end as it is the shop of his parents. And I take it that's an Oxford comma after 'picture'... standards, boys, standards.
P.s. I agree with Martin about the 'Jim Stringer' books. May I also recommend the 'Erast Fandorin' novels of Boris Akunin which are hugely enjoyable and entertaining.
Since this is turning into a reader's group, how did you get on with your holiday reading? I hope you enjoyed Appleby's End. I look forward to seeing the Cigarette Papers.
Ron: Please forgive me. You're absolutely right, Devon General didn't have much cream. My library assistants have trawled the public transport archive all night and can find no match for our puzzle bus so far.
Wartime Housewife: Thankyou for your admonishment, I will stand in the corner until playtime. But yes, that is an Oxford comma, a device I regularly apply.
Accountant: I started reading Appleby's End but got distracted by the latest Jim Stringer and a scuffed Penguin copy of The Wild Cherry Tree by the masterful H.E.Bates. So the pleasure is still to come, but I did like the train in the snow scene.
I used to have a Golden Cockerel edition of HE Bates short stories, with woodcuts by John Nash. The combination of great words, fabulous images, crisp deckle-edge paper and the deep, black type impression is so much more wonderful than a paperback, even a battered old Penguin. Then in a moment of financial stress I sold it. I can feel tears welling up...gottago....
Buckmaster`s Coaches of Leighton Buzzard were in Blood and Custard livery in the early to mid 1950s and they had some lovely old coaches; Bedford Duples, Leyland Tigers others and I can still hear the wonderfully evocative diesel knock of the Maudslay which took me weekly to swimming lessons.
Fifty plus years later I still can`t hear the solid `chonk` of a nice bit of diesel engineering without remembering stinging eyes and almost overdosing on chlorine.
Bucks: More 'Lost Sounds', thankyou. The one diesel engine that was absolutely unmistakeable were those fitted to Commers. Hear them coming a mile off.
ChrisP: Golden Cockerel, John Nash. Ooh my word. The one Bates that would be very difficult for me to take down to the pawnbroker is my first edition of My Uncle Silas illustrated by Edward Ardizzone.
I echo your sentiments about holding onto that edition of Uncle Silas. Another Edward Ardizzone illustrated favourite of mine is The Otterbury Incident by C Day Lewis....hang on, I'm going misty-eyed, better go....
Lost sound: the shop-bell? Last heard in Open All Hours? Also, the traditional "nee-naw, nee-naw" of the police car or fire-engine; now replaced by nasty American sirens. A dying sound; the "thonk" of the trap coming down near the end of a bar-billiards game. And, maybe, the sound of the rubber stamp authorising or cancelling a document in a Post Office - can't recall the last time I heard this; everything's done by bar codes now.
And now that we have 24/7 TV on all channels (a) the Test Card music (not strictly a sound) and (b) the high pitched noise that accompanied the white dot at Closedown (remember that?).
Am I on FIRE today!
The sound of an old fashioned cash register opening and closing. The noise vending machines for chewing gum made when you turned the knob on the side to release the goods after inserting your money. In the office the bell ringing when the typewriter carriage had reached the end and it had to be returned to start the next line. The sound of manually operated adding machines where a lever had to be pulled or a button hit to enter each number. Offices before computers where so different, if nothing else there were fewer cables to deal with under the desk.
Stop, stop! No, don't stop. I must do something about this. Rubber stamping always reminds me of the book endorsing at the little public library I went to as a child. And then did it myself in what was my very first job.
Ah, the typewriter bell... I first learned to type on a manual machine; the last time I used an (electronic) typewriter, I got through a correction tape in 3 days thanks to slapdash word-processing habits. (Perhaps the solvent aroma of Tippex is heading for 'lost smells'!)
I was born on the banks of the Grand Union Canal,and my lullaby was the irregularly distinctive beat of the single cylinder Bolinder hot bulb diesel that powered many working narrow boats.These engines were also fitted to Field Marshal tractors.
Just 5 minutes exposure and I nod right off, even now.
Bucks Retronaut; I hope a doctor or nurse was strolling along the towpath at the time of your nativity!
I'd better offer a lost sound in mitigation for that: the white-noise heard when searching for a radio station on an non-digital radio. And how about the cry of the rag and bone man? We still had one - with Steptoe-esque horse-drawn cart) in the Cleveland area (OK, Middlesbrough) as late as the mid-1980s. Do they still exist? ("Any rag bone, rag bone? Any rag bone?")
The thing about social history is that you don't know you're participating in it at the time. On which 'profundity', breakfast!
Late again! That's the beauty of 'Find the Fault', it leads us to find ourselves -(that's enough navel -gazing. Ed). Young Bucks certainly knows his diesels, and you have excellent taste in the 2 stroke supercharged Commer Mr.A. Boris Akunin's 'Fandorin' novels are great fun for lovers of 'Unmitigated Russia'. Oh and by the way, for wearers of such things there is now available an extremely tasteful badge in support of HE Bates to be worn in support of his work being more easily available in newly published form. Tasteful, that is, if you have a penchant for beer and Pa Larkin...
Sorry, two 'supports'. Sounds like the HE Bates memorial truss.
What an aural feast of lost sounds. Mention of rag and bone men (ours just said, in a forlorn tone of voice, 'Any bones? Any bones?') reminds me of newspaper sellers. Where I am they no longer chant their titles at street corners, but maybe this still goes on in some parts of Unmitigated England. I remember somewhere in the East Midlands trying to work out what one of these newsvendors was saying. It sounded like, and plausibly could have been, 'Hurry up, folks!'. But turned out to be 'Nottingham Post'. And in Oxford, in the 1970s, we had a bloke who used to come round selling the morning papers on a Sunday. He used to announce his arrival in the street with an extended syllable that just sounded like 'Owwww'. I was always too bleary-eyed to work out what it was.
Oh -Wartime Housewife: Talking of Oxford, I am an avid supporter of the Oxford comma. (But I also have a perverse affection for the greengrocer's misplaced inverted comma. I can get away with this because I know my onion's.)
What fun folks. I go to bed and wake up to H.E.Bates, newspaper sellers and rag 'n' bone men. Very odd, we talked about them only last night, and an example was heard only a couple of days ago in neighbouring Hallaton.
Richmond, Surrey is only Unmitigated in a few corners these days, but the newspaper lady at the railway (not "train") station delivers a fine "Standaaard - Evening Final!" to welcome one close to home. Though I remember the hunched, glum, gummy old man who used to walk around Yorkshire's home games at Scarborough CC calling out a doleful "Post!" with more affection/
Or the old newspaper vendors' cry "Ev'nin' Standard - mornin' papers" as if they were individual greetings. Our rag and bone man who travelled the district in a disreputable ex WD Bedford lorry cried 'ragsn'olelumber' or something like that and rang a hand bell. Now we have an electrically powered vehicle to collect our 'recycling' and a bunch of fit young men to load it. Can't see them building up a substantial fire in the yard in order to melt the platinum from the points of aircraft plugs or burn the shrouding from electricity cable to gain the copper core. A much better class of fumes in those days. Probably not too many Spitfire plugs around now.
The Evening Standard does largely consist of the Daily Mail's news, 8 hours on, so there's some consistency to your vendor's cry.
Meow.
You've really got me going now. What the best pocket recorder going? Something the size of a VHS tape I expect and made by Sony.
And do they really go to all that trouble down at the refuse yard. I just cynically imagined they just took it all round to a landfill anyway.
Better ask that "nice man" who recently enjoyed a drink with Alan Duncan!
If you are going to start recording sights and sounds you could make a documentary 'Unmitigated England' rather like 'Metroland' by John Betjeman.
Working on it Accountant. The thing is I have a good contact at the BBC, but everytime you e-mail him you get an automated response that says something like "Sorry, but I'm away until the end of the decade".
Well, the sounds of things moving in slow and mysterious ways is what it's all about, I guess.
Talk of Bedfords reminds me of the sound of those sliding van doors that bread-men and others used to drive around in. Not that they closed them that often, as driving around with the door open was part of the attraction. You can't do that in your Transit or Movano (?sp).
The first vehicle I ever drove was one of those Bedfords, slidin' doors 'n' all. Column change and instructions from my dear old Uncle John who was supposed to be delivering tins of paint and rolls of wallpaper around Northamptonshire, a Player's clamped in his mouth. The boxes were marked mysteriously with letters like 'WICS, KICS and BLICS.' Very slowly it dawned on me that these meant 'Wellingborough Industrial Co-Operative Society' and the same for Kettering, Burton Latimer, etc.
The first vehicle I ever drove,was my Dad's Morris Traveller,with him sitting, under sufferance, in the passenger seat glaring at me and willing me to cock it up. Not the most comfortable of experiences.
Sittng outside, on a warm August night in Napa with my laptop, feeling very far from home, all I can say is I didn't find the fault but I do buy Lipton tea, even here in the States.
If you're looking for 'Blood and Custard' bus liveries, try Wilts and Dorset. Or possibly Brighton and Hove, but that was more white than cream.
Sorry to have been a bit quiet of late - I've moved - very traumatic. Hundreds of boxes of priceless old gubbins to shift, etc.
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