Neodymium

After a small tray of sushi and a cup of chicken vegetable soup, we took a 5.5 km walk along the Grand Union canal, dodging overgrown hedging blowing in the gusts of wind. Our discussion covered house prices, tenancy and repossession stories. We also covered the ITV program last night that asked How Safe is Your Pension. Pension fraud is rampant - something the UK government has been slow to address. Meantime, some 11 million people are targeted each year by pension scammers. It's not a simple story. Pension deregulation in 2015 was but another step in the continuing asset stripping by government of cautious savers. It's as if the government are becoming the farmers who intensively farm cows, chickens and pigs, rather than let them roam free range. The wealth in pensions is being redistributed to benefit the masses at individual expense.

Snapseed has added a double exposure option which is how I combined the mallard family with a road sign.

We met a man magnet fishing under a bridge on the canal. He was casting and dunking a strong magnet from the tow path into the canal. At first, I thought it was a hook and asked what he was looking for. He showed us his haul for the day so far: a boat hook he was convinced was over 100 years old, a sword blade, some old bicycle parts, odd scraps of iron from cars and boats. He'd also lifted a bag of at least ten unused shotgun cartridges. We left him as he was lifting some more iron and I could see he was using a neodymium magnet - small and very powerful. Did you realise that there's about a kilo of neodymium (Nd2Fe14B) in the electric motor of every Toyota Prius? Don't panic: rare earths should be have been called diffuse earths because there's more Nd than Cu accessible to us on this planet.

Today I learned of a new word to express something I knew but could only describe with a pen and paper. Boustrophedon describes the surveying system used for land grids in most of the US. Positions on the grid can be hard to visualise for the nonprofessional. Ox turning for ploughing is the etymology and it described an early way of writing such as found on Mycenaean tablets from Knossos (Crete), a script form called Linear B. Printers tend to be boustrophedous, the head printing in one direction, then backwards in the other. 

The chart below is the order of our Yorkshire Three Peaks walk. The steepest bit is first. Aarghh, our rucksacks will be heaviest for the steepest bit. I'll have to practice now as if it was the real walk. I'll have to pack everything I'll carry at the start of the day. Spare socks. Survival blanket. Tissue. The camel-bak. Perhaps a spit roast chicken (joke) or whatever I intend to eat on the day. Like a refugee, everything on my back except not like a refugee at all (let's face it, I had sushi for lunch). Care sends packages to real refugees and others in crisis. That's the point. Please help us help them by sponsoring this challenge using the link at the top of this page.

Lake

GoogleEarth time lapse screen shots

There's a new lake nearby and it came up in conversation when I visited a 3P teammate whose office overlooks the site. And the lake is a site; a lake being built in advance of the HS2 project, an amenity as compensation before those rail works obliterate other local lakes.

So there are lakes about to disappear. And their local flora and fauna will relocate to accommodate the need for northern expansion of London's workers dormitories.

The area around this stretch of the Grand Union Canal has changed considerably over the last 20 years. Factories have been demolished and replaced by office space as manufacturing has yielded to services. Does HS2 reflect that change: are factory workers inclined to commute the huge distances that service workers seem to tolerate?

With so much fresh water on the surface locally, I wonder about how few life-belts I see. There's an interesting thread of articles on the the theme of "Drowning doesn't look like drowning" that's probably worth a read every year as we prepare for summer.

I've been resting my knee this week though still climbing stairs rather than using the lifts. So this short canal walk served to verify my recovery. And I didn't walk the canal alone. Our walking conversation ranged across many of the topics of the day: May, Trump, Alzheimer to name an unjust few.

Help: can anyone advise me how to make gif animation work on blogger (because this gif picture is animated but not animating).

Kingfisher

A walk done many times and this time I was accompanied. Which gave me reasons to look and remark on things I take for granted. The tree, for example, in Harefield Golf Course that was killed by lightning a few years ago and now has become covered in countless woodpecker holes. The invasive parakeets who noisily go about their business overhead. The dismantled gravel loading points for the much touted great transport transfer from road to canal barges, during Olympic venue construction, now occupied by coots and moorhens. The honking of four Canada Geese flying above us, hidden by the tree canpopy. The swans seeming to stand on water to do neck calisthenics, doubltless impressing the twenty tufted duck close by. And then at Denham Deep Lock, where the Colne joins the Union Canal, there was a kingfisher perched on the NO FISHING sign; it saw us, there was a flash of blue and the moment was gone.

My 13th walk in this campaign, another 6.5 km walked off and I have thus exceeded my distance goal for March. This means I'm walking down the deficit of 25 km I carried from February. So I should be back on track by the end of March which will leave 350 km to be done by June 23.

Our fundraising continues well too. We had an office pot-luck lunch last Tuesday that brought out some excellent dishes and raised another sensible amount of money. Money? Are there any readers? Is it yet time for them to donate here?