The Docwra family have been making rock in Great Yarmouth for over a Century. The Greys paid a visit earlier in the year and here is a photo montage with floating commentary.
Watching lettered rock being made is a fascinating process and I missed it on this occasion. However, there is a very well illustrated explanation from another company here.
Last night we went to see the Morley Operatic performing at Leeds’ new amateur theatre, the Carriageworks. This opened two years ago and this is the second time that MAOS have put on a show there.
The theatre seats up to 349, although several side seats are restricted view and seating capacity drops if the orchestra pit is ued.
The theatre is opposite the Civic Hall on the Leeds Patio Millennium Square and here is a shot of the building from last week.
The entrance at ground floor level has the box office and stairs down to an internal courtyard area that has various bars & restaurants known as the Electric Press Courtyard.
The theatre is actually two venues and several meeting rooms spread across four upper floors. On one of the half landings, I was pleased to find a painting of the former civic theatre which has now been changed back into its original format to become the Leeds Arena within the Leeds City Museum, as mentioned last weekend.
There was some form of private function going on in the first floor foyer (patrons and Councillors) so we went up to the 2nd floor bar that has great views out onto the square.
David spotted that they were selling Revels and as he reckoned he hadn’t had any before, persuaded us to buy him a bag to munch during the show. (He had heard about the “eviction” and definitely suggests coffee flavour to go).
Inside the theatre, it feels very intimate, although the proscenium arch is a full 31′6″, a very good width for most shows. The rows are rather cramped though and the seats bounce when people move in the stalls area as the rows behind the cross-aisle are on put-away bleachers.
I was delighted to see a dozen musicians in the orchestra pit, the standard MAOS musical fare for shows I have previously seen is for three keyboards and a drummer but it never sounds as rich (or unsynthesised) as individual musicians. I noticed that one lady didn’t actually have an instrument and I eventually twigged that she was the prompter!
The theatre has three galleries either side. The tiered stalls area rises to the second level (with extensive control rooms beyond) and the third level becomes a shallow balcony of about five rows. This courtyard style of seating is at its best by papering the walls with people, but as the show wasn’t sold out he side rows were somewhat empty.
I was also delighted to see a rich set of red velvet tabs (tableaux curtains) flown in and used for the interval and curtain calls. They were entirely without embellishment (as was the plain false proscenium above.
The show was Cole Porter’s Anything Goes and it has certainly stood the test of time, with its opening in 1934 and many of the songs still well known today. The set was on the foredeck of an ocean liner, with scenes held within on a selection of (rather wobbly) stage trucks. The show was very well performed, the singing varying from OK to excellent. Yorkshire accents would occasionally infect the trans-atlantic twang however…
MAOS are able to put on a much better show in this theatre than the Morley Town Hall and the lighting is several magnitudes of quality better, having an extensive rig to call on.
The sound was mostly OK, but some of the cast wearing clip-on radio mics managed to catch them on occasions, causing a brief sonic earthquake.
I had heard mixed reviews of this theatre but I decided that I liked it, it felt theatrical and that is what counts.
You can see a Carriageworks 360 degree near-sphere photo-thingy of the main venue here,., from the venue virtual tour. Canadian residents, try and not get too dizzy…
By th way, here is the latest on the Revels…
Rats, I like the coffee ones!
I’m a bit of an anorak about timekeeping. I like my watches and clocks to be spot on so most of the ones in the house are radio controlled. (The only exceptions are the thermostat, the central heating time clock, the cooker and karen’s bedside clock radio).
If a show or a movie is scheduled to start at 8pm, I expect it to do so. If I have an appointment then I will ensure that I try to be there in good time and I expect the others to do the same.
I am also obsessively fussy about technical systems being set correctly. Anyone who has tried to reconcile phone calls where the phone system time does not align with the Management Information time or the voice recorder time and neither map on to telco billing time will probably also end up as insistent as myself that they are all set correctly.
I recall, back in the 80s, we had a problem with a phone system losing time. It was the biggest SL1 system in the world (at the time) and was fully maxed out on the hardware. It belonged to Saudia Airlines and ran a huge compound known as Saudia City in Jeddah. As there was a cable limit on how far the peripheral equipment could be located from the common equipment it was housed in a large circular building to get it all in range.
We eventually worked out what the problem was. As it was maxed out on hardware, there were also times when it was maxed out on software as well. Every 128 miliseconds, the software scheduler was meant to add 128 to a counter and if it reached 1000, to update the system seconds counter by one and subtract 1000 from the counter value. (It needed to carry the value forward as there are not a whole number of 128 milisecond increments in a second).
The trouble was, sometimes the system had so much to do handling calls that it ran out of real-time and effectively missed a tickalong the way. This could result in the clock losing several minutes a week (sometimes in a day) and whilst there was an adjustment figure you could apply to the daily time, it wasn’t big enough and was too coarse.
During the course of the investigation, I exchanged several Faxes with mike Steer, then Chief Engineer at Bin laden Telecommunications. (Yes, that Bin Laden!) As the case progressed, Mike started using more and more flowery language and eventually i sent him a nonsense Fax in retaliation, composed with the aid of a Thesaurus. The Fax memo was headed “Monadic denudation on the horology sub-system“, the most flowery phrase I could come up with for the clock losing time.
Mike Steer was an interesting character and the first Nortel Customer I ever met. I was asked to take him out for a meal on expenses as no-one else was available. Mike was not a happy man as he had had his bottom inspected that morning by the Customs and Excise at heathrow. He resolved never to come to England again and spent his R&Rs in switzerland visiting the gnomes who looked after his money.
I worked out why no-one else was available fairly quickly- he was gnome-like himself and muttered on at great length about all that was wrong in the world. Technically though he was sharp as a razor blade and we exchanged badinage for many years.
Why did this distant memory pop into the brain uninvited? Eddys in the space-time continuum.
Something slightly odd happened on Wednesday morning whilst I was driving to work. I generally arrive before 8am but there had been an accident at the motorway interchange so I was slightly later than normal. As I drove down the ramp into our car park, it was time for the pips but they never came. I glanced down at my watch (which is radio controlled, of course) and saw that it was now past 8am. Suddenly the pips sounded- and there were seven of them, six short, one long. Now normally this only happens when there needs to be a leap second but this flummoxed the presenters slightly as the pips are ever so reliable. Indeed, they will pip at precisely quarter past, half past and quarter to if the fader is left open accidentally. (I even heard then at the same time as Big Ben once in the afternoon).
The BBC gave an explanation on air, which basically boiled down to they hadn’t a clue why it went wrong, but an “Engineer’s Reset” sorted it out. You might be able to catch it if you are quick on listen again for Wednesday’s Today Programme, or just make do with this.
Still on the subject of time, Corpus Christi have a new clock which I heard described on this morning’s today programme (listen again at 7:45 am slot). It sounded rather bizarre and looked it as well. It has a large insect at the top forming a grasshopper escapement and it is known as the chronophage which means a time eater.
Rather than describe it, let me leave it to the wonders of Youtube.
I have installed an interesting application - BlogJet. It’s a cool Windows client for my blog tool (as well as for other tools). Get your copy here: http://blogjet.com
“Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination.” — Albert Einstein
(The above text is just boilerplate, by the way. I’m just playing with it at the moment, its plugin doesn’t seem to work with firefox 3)
Could we have kippers for breakfast
Mummy dear, mummy dear
They got to have ‘em in texas
Cos everyones a millionaire
(Breakfast in America, Supertramp).
You don’t have to be wealthy to have kippers for breakfast, although they aren’t too cheap for good ones and they stink the house out. Apparently they used to be very popular on British Rail dining cars (and in business hotels) based on many suburban housewives refusing to cook them. These days they are less common.
So what is a kipper? Generally a herring, cleaned out, salted and then smoked. Manx kippers are famous worldwide for their quality and flavour, although I have never been an overly fishy foodie. I was curious, however, to visit Man’s sole remaining traditional smokehouse in Peel which advertised daily tours so we assembled in the factory yard for 3:30pm. It wasn’t hard to find, you just followed your nose and then your eyes towards the smoke wafting across the river.
Shortly after the appointed time, the owner Paul Desmond came out (with a respirator round his neck) and apologised because he said that the factory was full of smoke due to the unusual nature of the wind and he was having to give his full attention to the fire. However, he’d waive the usual fee and get one of his lads to talk to us about the process.
It turned out to be his teenage Son James who had a holiday job there. He explained that for the preparation, the fresh fish were gutted, cleaned out and soaked in brine for about ten minutes. Originally, squads of labourers (generally women) would do the fish preparation but they now had machinery that could prepare the fish at a rate of one a second. The fish were then fixed onto wooden square rods (which had rows of nail heads each side) and placed into the chimney, a brick rectangular tower with wooden wall bars for supporting the rods. This was done by someone standing with their legs spread across the beams half way up the tower, being passed the fish rods to place or pass onwards up towards the roof. At the top of the tower were rectangular vents, one either side of the pitched roof. One or other was opened, according to the direction of the prevailing wind.If the wind changed direction, it was necessary to go up into the chimney and swap over the hatches and this could be very time consuming on a gusty day.
The smoking process typically took about ten hours depending upon weather conditions and there was a definite art to it. The fish needed to absorb enough smoke to get the right level of flavour but they shouldn’t get too hot that they started to cook. The fish needed to be rotated through the chimney so that they were smoked evenly.
We were surprised to find out how they judged the prevailing wind direction without the aid of weathercocks or more advanced technology. The answer was all around- whenever seagulls perch on a roof they face into the wind to avoid getting blown off if they are side on. Once this is pointed out to you then it becomes very apparent, you can even tell which side they will land on a wall when they are trying to steal your chips…
We were taken into the main fish house (lined with white ceramic tiles with the timber fixtures in deep red, the Moores house colour) and were led into an empty chimney. The doors into the chimney were split into four panels As this was on an the extreme right and on an outside wall, it tended to be used the least, particularly in colder weather. The bottom area was simply a concrete floor and soot stained brick walls, the cross-timbers beginning a couple of feet above head height. A latticework of horizontal wall timbers could be seen above us with the roof vent 20′ or so above our heads.
The room was rather gloomily lit by a couple of naked light bulbs and a more modern emergency fitting. Our right hand wall was simply boarded and looking behind it, there was a wooden stair leading up to a mezzanine level.Someone asked why so much timber was used in the presence of a fire and it was explained that the fires smouldered rather than raged and anyway most of the building was brick so if the timber caught light, it could readily be replaced. They didn’t stretch out across the beams any more when loading, laying a temporary false floor for the purpose in the interests of health and safety. The recommendation by the safety elf that smoke detectors be fitted in the building was treated with widespread derision!
On leaving the chimney, we observed the master-smoker at work, sat on a sawdust bale wearing a respirator whilst watching the fires within. He would open and shut the doors to counteract unseen changes and occasionally the smoke would be seen to billow outwards then suddenly get sucked back in again. He had a metal scoop-like shovel that could be used to fling more wood chippings onto the fire and he simply used a fish rod to poke the fire. He explained that there were about 4,000 herring in the chimney and they would be lucky to be gone by midnight that day as it was slow going.
He also told us some other surprising home truths (or his Son did). There weren’t any genuine manx kippers any more- the local fish were too small and not worth catching, even if they were allowed to due to fishing restrictions. (I think he said that load he was smoking were Irish). Whilst the business was still called Moores, he bought it as a going concern ten years ago as a labour of love. Most kippers you buy are machine smoked and they just don’t taste as good as his oak smoked ones. (Karen said the wood chippings were a mixture of oak, pine and something else). They didn’t smoke every day, just enough to meet sales, much of which was over the internet. His bags of wood chippings were £7 each and he would typically use seven or eight of them for a smoking. His Son also had no current desire to go into the business, Karen overheard him telling another visitor.
Afterwards, we went into the shop and bought a pack of four Kipper fillets, being a regular kipper minus head and tail. These only took a minute in the microwave and we tried them for breakfast. I enjoyed mine but one was enough. karen and Dot ate about half of theirs whilst David was adamant that he didn’t want to have anything to do with them. The cottage smelt of kippers for another day or two afterwards!
Interestingly enough, a couple of days later we were back at Peel visiting a museum called the House of Manannan. Here they had a gallery devoted to kippers and a mock-up Moores factory. This gave us a chance to see the simulated kippers in the simulated chimney as the exhibit continued vertically over two levels.
Various thumbnails of the experience can be seen below, hover for words and click for a screen-size picture.
You can buy kippers from Moores at their online store.
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