Llangollen (Part 3)

You may remember I went on a two day break to Llangollen a while ago. Although I’ve done a couple of posts already on the trip (4.9.13 & 18.9.13) there is more to report on so here’s instalment no.3.

Let’s start with a view from the outside decking area of the Royal Hotel looking back towards the bridge.

The Royal Hotel was originally called the King’s Head and after a certain Princess Victoria stayed there in 1832 it was renamed The King’s Head and Royal. (Remember she came to the throne in 1837.) Another famous guest was physicist & chemist Michael Faraday who stayed there in 1819. Well if it was good enough for Faraday it was good enough me!

Just along the road from The Royal is The Hand Hotel and it can boast Robert Browning & his sister as guests in 1866.

We set off to the station just the other side of the bridge as there was a bit of a steam festival thing going on. There were trips on the steam trains but we didn’t have time so we just looked round the stalls and exhibition stuff to do with the restoration of the line. The project began in 1975 to get track re-laid and into a condition in which trains would actually be able to run again. Today the volunteer-run railway has about 8 miles of restored track.

As we entered the station we saw this metal sign

Note the proud boast at the bottom. The chocolate was apparently eaten by the Queen, the King & His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales. Not bad eh? This year one of these signs in a worse condition to the one in my photo was sold for £150! Now in case you’re wondering, the chocolate making business was begun by a Quaker, Joseph Fry, in the mid 18^th century. The Fry’s Chocolate Cream bar (which many of you will know) began in 1866 – it will be 150 years old a few years from now in 2016; Fry’s Turkish Delight began in 1914 and so will celebrate its centenary next year. That’s a long time for any chocolate bar to last! It’s also believed that Fry was responsible for producing the first chocolate Easter Egg in 1873. My favourite used to be the Fry’s Chocolate Mint Cream version (the green one).

Sadly however the Fry company (later owned by Cadbury which was later still taken over by Kraft) closed its Keynsham factory in 2011 and moved production to Poland with the loss of 500 jobs.

Interestingly Quakers were responsible for the founding of many of the household names we know today: Barclays Bank, Lloyds Bank, Clark’s shoes (Cyrus Clark), Bryant & May matches, Huntley & Palmer’s Biscuits (Thomas Huntley), Carr’s Biscuits, Rowntree’s (Joseph Rowntree), Cadbury’s (George Cadbury). Cadbury, as you will know, actually built a village for his workers (Bourneville, a few miles south of Birmingham city centre). The Quakers’ ethical stance on the way they did business was appreciated by the consumers of the finished products and also the producers of the raw materials used in the manufacturing process.

Bizarrely the Quaker Oats company, founded in 1901, has “no formal ties” with the religious organisation of the same name. It just used the picture of a man dressed in clothes a Quaker would have worn on its packaging to give an impression of honesty & integrity. If you didn’t know just how healthy these oats are check out this advert from a long time ago:

http://library.buffalo.edu/pan-am/img/quaker_oats.jpg

More protein than wheat foods & more carbohydrates than meat – so now you know.

Here are a couple of signs.

Bird’s custard powder, first produced in 1837, contains no eggs; the reason – Alfred Bird’s wife was allergic to eggs. It appears from the sign that the gentleman bending down is not asking for the lady’s hand in marriage but for her to make him some Bird’s Custard (see the little box on the floor).

In the second sign underneath see how the Great Western Railway were trying to sell trips & holidays to Cornwall. Yep that’s right because Cornwall has a similar shape. What! You don’t need to go to Italy because we’ve got some land that’s the same shape. Right – what else would you go to Italy for except to see the shape? Oh and Cornwall apparently has a similar climate & similar natural beauties. However I’m thinking that Italy might just win on the Roman ruins front.

Could I just say that we have cancelled our holiday to Italy this year – you’ll never guess where we’re going instead!!

In the post from 18.9.13 I mentioned we had eaten at a converted corn mill; it was originally started by the monks who the abbey, in 1201, a few miles up the road. This is the view from the pedestrian bridge over the tracks at the station and looking across the river.

Here’s one of the steam engines

I saw a metal plate on the front showing it was built in Brighton in 1953 so 60 years old this year.

And inside the cab part where the driver & stoker stand.

From the station we made our way over to the museum. It is only small but I tell you what they pack a load of info into it. There were lots of story boards and it’s well worth a visit.

Here’s an exhibit

You can see the Museum is on two floors and circular.

Couldn’t resist a silly picture with the twisty glass mirrors

Llangollen is a great place to visit and we’d enjoyed our two days thus far. If you get chance to go you have to visit the bookshop (Café & Books) over the café in Castle Street. It’s massive and once you’ve looked at the shelves alongside the staircase and across the top you go downstairs and the shelves just seem to go on for ever. There are literally thousands & thousands of books and they kept us busy for quite a while – and of course we bought some.

After the museum it was time to start heading home but we had one more stop on the way back which we’ll do next week.

O, I do like to be beside the sea

Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday to Danda!
Happy birthday to you!

Hip hip hooray and all that.

As you’ve probably guessed, it was Danda’s birthday yesterday so, in true birthday style, we ran off to the beach for the day. And it was glorious. The weather stayed warm enough to spend all day walking around but breezy enough to not be uncomfortable.

The day started with fancy lunch. I love a fancy lunch, as some of you may already know. I love fancy lunching. I love Michelin stars. I love pretty food.

This lunch did not disappoint.

It started with bread, after which we were presented with calf’s tongue with piccalilli. Did I ever mention how much I love the free extras at nice restaurants?

We had the same starter, a leek and potato soup with white truffle cream. My goodness, do I love a truffle! I love a truffle. I went crazy for this soup. It was really really good with some of the fresh bread dipped into it.

Next up, Danda’s main was mackerel with mashed potatoes, spinach and tomatoes.

Mine was a confit duck leg on a bed of lentils and bacon with cavolo nero and thinly cut, fried potatoes.

It was easily the best duck I’ve ever eaten. It was so soft and fell off the bone without any resistance at all. The skin, which I worried about because it can be quite fatty and disappointing, was crispy and beautiful. The jus was fantastic too. I just ate and ate and hoped it would never end. Sadly, it did so off we went, out into the daylight, to seek our next adventure.

We found it on the Brighton Wheel, looking down at the seaside town from the sky.

We then went for the longest walk ever in search of the Naturist Beach. O, what? Wait. I mean. I meant. I didn’t mean we went looking for it. I meant we were walking and then we saw it. By accident.

There was one bloke with a cap on chatting to a fully dressed couple and that was it. Disappointing.

We headed out to the marina to see what fun could be had there.

There were a lot of generic could-be-anywhere shops near the marina so we decided to wander back to the beach but not after spotting an amazing ‘5D’ ride thing that we just had to go on. It was one of those rollercoaster simulator things and it was really good. We got given 3D glasses and were splashed with water or blown with wind. It was fast and furious and I yelped quite a lot!

We finished the day by splashing about in the water and lying on the beach looking at the sky.

Bird Droppings

It’s over to my guest blogger today for some fascinating facts on this subject:

 

Today I thought I would take a break from the more serious subjects I’ve covered recently. The topic today is bird droppings (or more commonly pooh). Unsightly mess? Spoils public buildings & many other structures – definitely. But how much do you know about it? Will you even carry on reading this because you think it’s boring and uninteresting. Tell you what – I thought that before I started thinking about it. It almost became something “to get excited about” as LLM might say.
I wonder if you’ve ever been hit by bird droppings from the sky as you walked along outside? I have. I was fortunate though, it landed on my shoulder (and therefore thankfully missed my head although it did get some small splashes) and left me with a stained shirt for the rest of the day. Yes, I was on my way to work walking from the train station. Oh well, it gave people in the office a good laugh when I arrived with the mess down the front. (“I see you had some visitors drop in on way to work this morning”, and other such witty remarks.)
So what could be interesting about bird muck? Well, in case you’re struggling, one of our national newspapers came to the rescue recently. It published a survey analysing droppings found on cars in different cities in the UK. It seems to suggest that it’s not just where you park your car that affects whether it gets muck on it but that it is related to the colour of your car. Is there a colour, for instance, which does or doesn’t seem to get hit as much as others? Yes there is but it’s not as simple as that. Before we go any further let’s look at the published table below:

Red – 18 per cent
Blue – 14 per cent
Black – 11 per cent
White – 7 per cent
Grey/Silver- 3 per cent
Green – 1 per cent

This is quite interesting as you can see that nearly 1 in 5 cars that are hit are coloured red. Hmm.. perhaps you won’t buy a red car next time. Before you get too carried away by this revelation just look at those figures again. Now you don’t have to be a maths whizz to see that the figures don’t add up to anywhere near 100%. I make the total 54% (and this is the full table as appeared in the newspaper). (You might have to add 7% if the white/grey means two colours tied on that figure but it doesn’t say.) What happened to the other 46% of the sample? Were they all colours different to the ones specified? If so why not include an “other colours” category? LLM covered “getting excited” about stuff but at this point I was doing “getting angry” (at the quality of this presentation). Why publish such a rubbish table which appears to show only just over half of the number surveyed? Is the paper really that bad at its adding up? (Is this turning into a “Chat 2” blast?)
Ok so let’s look at some more of the detail behind table. They looked at 1,140 cars across five cities: Brighton, Glasgow, Leeds, Manchester and Bristol. Sounds like a fair spread, north, middle & south, but wait a minute, think about this – why no London investigation? (London is noted for its population of pigeons in certain areas so should have been a good area to get a lot of test results.) Seems like a fair number of vehicles but did you know, as of the most recent figures, there are 31 million cars in the UK (and 134 million in the USA). Now take the sample size and divide it by the total number of cars (& times by 100) to get a percentage – any guesses? I’ll tell you it’s 1,140/31,00,000 = 0.00367% – that is 1/272 of 1%! Just take a moment to think about that – not half of 1%, not a quarter of 1%, not even one 100th of 1% or one 200th of 1% but 1/272 of 1%! How small is that? Now come on, since when did a fraction of 1% as small as that represent a big enough sample to make inferences about cars across the whole country. And yet, there in a national newspaper, the survey is given some column inches with no ref to how small the sample is when compared to the total number of cars on the road.
So far, amongst other things, we have: an apparently incomplete table that doesn’t add up to anywhere near 100%; we have a sample size so small that it makes it hard to deduce meaningful data; and we don’t know why the capital of the country has been excluded from the survey.
Steam is (metaphorically) beginning to come out of the ears at this point but bear with me there’s more.

The next bits are what I would call basic. Think about it – we are not told anything about the locations surveyed. Were the car parks on open ground? Were the cars just parked in streets? Were there overhanging branches or even road or rail bridges which often have metal support girders underneath providing many ideal perches for pigeons? (The car park at my own place of work actually has a dual carriageway going over it so has two bridges & therefore lots of girders & therefore lots of pigeons.)
Remember too that the research did not consider the type of birds doing the fouling of the vehicles. (They actually spelt it “fowling” at one point in the article – haha.) Whilst they could not possibly see all the birds doing the deeds it is possible that they surveyed at a place in a city where there is a resident population of a particular type of bird –pigeons, sea-gulls or starlings for example. Btw, did you know that pigeon pooh is more damaging than say seagull pooh? I’m sure you want to know why so I’ll tell you – it’s because pigeons eat seeds and therefore produce grainier pooh and it’s that which causes more blemishes on your car’s paintwork. However what about all those smaller size birds: sparrows, starlings, blackbirds, finches, thrushes etc?
The article also gives you the useful info, from car polish experts Autoglym, that car paint damage is NOT caused by the acid or alkali in the pooh which I always thought – so I did learn something useful from reading it. I won’t bore you with the technical explanation – if you’re really interested you can look it up.
Did you know that insurers estimated that the annual cost of damage to paintwork from bird droppings is about £57 million? Best advice? – just clean it off as soon as possible. Well I’d never have thought of that!
In the car park where I work two people have yellow cars. Why is yellow not in the survey table? Does this mean it’s the safest colour to buy because the survey did not spot one yellow car with bird muck?
Another stat which might have been helpful is the colour distribution of cars on the road. Supposing, for instance, that 18% of all cars on the road are red, it would be no surprise that 18% of the bird muck survey were found to be red cars would it? This again is basic stuff which any normal person would ask. It’s like saying that a survey found that the average age of people going into a particular building was say 68 and you say why so high? Why were there not more younger people going in? Ah well, you see, it’s a day care centre for pensioners. Bigger picture springs to mind here!
It takes about 3 seconds to research colours of cars sold. Here’s the table of colours of cars sold (so not the actual total in the country, but does include yellow) for most of 2010:

1: black Cars sold: 465,249 Percentage share: 24.7
2: silver Cars sold: 402,537 Percentage share: 21.4
3: blue Cars sold: 310,331 Percentage share: 16.5
4: grey Cars sold: 270,863 Percentage share: 14.4
5: red Cars sold: 192,335 Percentage share: 10.2
6: white Cars sold: 188,463 Percentage share: 10
7: green Cars sold: 20,735 Percentage share: 1.1
8: beige Cars sold: 17,237 Percentage share: 0.9
9: yellow Cars sold: 7,621 Percentage share: 0.4
10: brown Cars sold: 6,967 Percentage share: 0.4

These figures do come to 100%. Again simple bit of research – look at the top 3 in the bird dropping sample (red, blue, black) and add up the percentage figures. It comes to 43%. Now look in the table for 2010 sales and add up the percentages for the same 3 colours – it’s 51%. Not that far apart I’d say.

Inference – the more cars there are of a certain colour the more likely they are to get hit! It’s not rocket science but it doesn’t make headlines and you know as well as I do that “headlines” sell papers.
Another newspaper gave the following table apparently for most popular car colours IN THE WORLD! And here it is:
1. Silver – 26 percent
2. Black/Black Effect – 24 percent
3. White/White Pearl and Grey – 16 percent each (tie)
5. Red – 6 percent
6. Blue – 5 percent
7. Brown/Beige – 3 percent
8. Green – 2 percent
9. Yellow/Gold – 1 percent
10. Others – <1 percent
We see that this table also does add up to 100% (you do have to add 16% to the 84% total because two colours were tied in third place).
Black, red, blue comes to 35%. Not that far off 43% really.
Now, apart from the fact that I was “getting angry” about this terribly presented (bird droppings) survey, I was amazed to note what I had come to believe over many years was actually being confirmed. I have on a number of occasions come to my car to find it has droppings on and yet the one next to it has none. When it first happens you don’t notice anything special but when it keeps on happening you begin to wonder: am I parking under a bird’s nest? Is there a tree branch over the parking place? Did I definitely remove the “Pooh here” notice from the roof of my car? Ooh… wait a minute was the notice invisible? – remember “Invisible Art” from 4.7.12. Better check that.

Ok so now you know the facts but will it influence the colour of car you next buy. Will you rush to the research paper and get the info and then decide to buy a GREEN car or even SILVER?
And you thought bird pooh was not that interesting. (Maybe you still do after reading Mr Angry’s rant.) What about readers of this blog sending in the colour of their car and whether it gets “pooped on” on a regular basis.

Last word has to go to the Ornithology experts who were quoted in the article:

“The British Trust for Ornithology is more circumspect on the role of colour in the ‘drop zone’ for birds.

A spokesman said: ‘We do know that birds can be attracted to certain colours during display but droppings on cars are probably more to do with where you park; if you park where birds roost then you are going to get more droppings on your vehicle.’”

Incredible! Would you have thought of that? – and they didn’t even do a survey to back their conclusion up.