A small 240p 6Mb blog-preview of a new folk music song, “Barrow”.

Also in 720p on YouTube. My original is 1440 x 816px, but YouTube crunched it back to 720p with some loss of quality.

Just published, an academic book surveying the work of our local fantasy author Alan Garner, Alan Garner and the work of time (September 2026). Rather expensive, as academic books are these days. But here it is. Complete with a gloomy picture of local landmark Mow Cop, on the cover.

CONTENTS:

Introduction.

placeworntime.

Alan Garner and folk fantasy in The Weirdstone of Brisingamen.

The view from the vanishing point.

The melancholy matter of Britain.

‘Aback of everything’.

Dancing on the Edge.

‘We both look, but we see differently’.

Boneland.

Are you alright, Colin? Brisingamen to Boneland and back.

Strandloper, Treacle Walker and unified field theory.

Circles in the eternal.

Afterwords.

Stones, bones, Mr Garner and me.

Thin places.

Index.

As the darker wetter mornings once again sweep into the British Isles, it’s time for bicycle fixing-up and winter lubricating.

But… which replacement brake pads for a Halfords Apollo Phaze? I couldn’t discover this from the official manual, or from online sources. I did have what I thought were some replacement pads, from an older bike, but it turned out that the steel posts on them were too thick for the slots on the Phaze.

Go Outdoors had run out of pads today, so fortune took me tromping up the hill to Halfords itself. And there the helpful chap at the bike bay was able to point me to these on the fully stocked racks, as perfect for the Apollo Phaze… Clarks 70mm brake pads / threaded post/ Mtb / hybrid, where ‘Mtb’ stands for mountain bike.

The tool needed for fitting is seen sticking up in the picture. You may also need the same-but-thicker tool to get your old pads off, if the old ones have a larger holding nut. But most Swiss Army-style bike-tool sets should have both tools.

Not all the nuts and washers that fit onto the new steel post will be needed. In order to get my new brake pads on, with space between the wheel and the pad, I needed to leave one off.

Hopefully this information will help someone in the same situation, at some point in the future.

A nice move, albeit one which should have been done decades ago. Stoke-on-Trent old age pensioners now get free bus travel all day and night, any day. Previously their free bus travel was restricted to certain times. The catch is that it’s still restricted in part, to “participating Stoke-on-Trent bus services” and companies.

Good to hear that the Nicholson Institute in nearby Leek is to open its doors again this month, if all goes well — though the town’s Art Gallery needs another month…

“Leek’s museum and library are set to re-open on Monday 21st September following work to modernise and enhance these amenities and bring the lower ground floor back into use. … The art gallery has also been refreshed and will re-open in October.”

I never expected to do local video generation on an old workstation and an entry-level RTX 3060 12Gb graphics card. But the amazing Minimax H3 makes it possible, in a few minutes.

I’ve been (mostly) enjoying watching some of the old British films with Alistair Sim in a key role. Mostly to look for a really good clip of his wonderful voice, in which he’s not too Scottish, to clone for Chatterbox TTS. For what it’s worth, here is my ranking:

**** Inspector Hornleigh on Holiday. 1939. Sim’s breakthrough as a co-star, the best of the three Inspector Hornleigh comedy-mystery movies. A good fun film.
***** Cottage to Let. 1941. Excellent comedy-mystery film, don’t let the dull title fool you. A very young George Cole ‘steals the stage’.
** Green for Danger. 1946. A serious hospital murder-mystery, gripping but the abundant 1940s histrionics get a bit wearing.
***** Hue and Cry. 1947. Excellent children’s ‘bombsite Britain’ comedy-crime movie, Sim is wonderful.
***** London Belongs to Me. 1948. Excellent, but the focus is firmly on Richard Attenborough.
**** The Happiest Days of Your Life. 1950. A fine pre-St. Trinians boarding-school comedy movie, with a strong focus on Sim as the wily headmaster.
*** Laughter in Paradise. 1951. Quite reasonable and watchable comedy, but note that Sim is only a quarter of the movie.
** Folly to Be Wise. 1952. If you like histrionic stage farces, this may appeal. Otherwise skip.
**** The Belles of St. Trinian’s. 1954. The first St. Trinians school movie, and the best of the four.
*** Geordie. 1955. A Scottish drama with fine landscape and touches of comedy. Sim has a low-key performance as The Laird (Geordie’s boss).
**** The Green Man. 1956. An excellently dark comedic part for Sim, as an assassin. Far-fetched, but very watchable and the support from George Cole is perfectly pitched.
* Left Right and Centre. 1959. Tiresome and rather bog-standard local by-election comedy-satire, from what I saw. I gave up half way through.
** The Millionairess. 1960. Strange and rather tiresome adaptation of a George Bernard Shaw play. The focus is not on Sim. Again, I gave up half way through.
*** School for Scoundrels. 1960. Very watchable sprightly 1950s-style British comedy, with Sim and Terry Thomas supporting.

Some images of Cornwall’s china-clay mining district, circa the 1920s/30s.

Just a few restorations of scans easily available on eBay. One wonders if a Potteries Museum photography exhibition has even been staged on this theme? If not, could it be? The above serves as a taster.

Durn it. The perils of not being on Facebook. I find I missed another Commando and British Weekly Comic Swap Meet, held just across the valley in Wolstanton. It happened on 20th June. Still, the event write-up on Bear Alley has interesting details of a side-trip to Shrewsbury in search of vintage sci-fi. Apparently the town has several worth-browsing market stalls and the Welsh Bridge Books second-hand bookshop with a… “wall of science fiction from the era I like, A-format paperbacks, painted covers”.

Blimey! It seems the centre of Stoke-on-Trent could have been gassed during the First World War, had things gone awry and the wind been in the wrong direction. A forthcoming local history article has the details, “The Most Dangerous Factory in Britain: First World War Gas Warfare and the H.M. Cylinder Depot, Stoke-on-Trent“. The factory was located a mile or so east of Hanley, at Bucknall…

“By 1916 it was storing some 70,000 defective, dud and partially-discharged poison gas cylinders salvaged from the Western Front [the battlefield frontline in France]. With desperate gas shortages, cylinders were emptied, repaired and sent on to regional manufacturers to be refilled. The factory operated on a 24/7 basis.”

And there were escapes. For instance, William Heath of Silverdale was a worker there and was awarded the Medal of the Order of the British Empire for his bravery. From his citation… “This man, on numerous previous occasions [in addition to bravely rescuing a man saturated with escaped gas], has also displayed bravery and promptitude in dealing with serious escapes of poison gas”.

Working at Mintons, Stoke-on-Trent, in what looks in the late 1940s / early 1950s.

Germany’s Flux2 Klein 4B colorisation of eBay images, processed locally in ComfyUI, with a fix to prevent pixel-drift.

I looked for Stoke-specific items in the new Local Nature Recovery Strategy for Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent (Consultation draft, May 2026).

“Action T12. Appeal for information on orchards”.

They consider it possible that Stoke may be one of three districts in the county that still have a few traditional orchards, or partial relics of traditional orchards with a few old variety fruit-trees left. Let them know, if you know of one locally.

That’s it, in terms of the Stoke-specific Action items nestled among the boilerplate copy-paste and questionable climate claims. Though several other potential Actions seem relevant to Stoke, such as…

– reducing heathland fires in summer
– creating viable new ponds
– create rich new hedgerows
– care for ex-quarry habitats, especially rocky outcrops
– wildlife corners / strips on allotments
– reduce light pollution

No mention of litter and dumping, though, or of keeping dogs out of nature reserves.

Also of note…

According to the latest BlueSky data, [tree] canopy cover in Staffordshire County is currently around 14.5%, whilst Stoke-on-Trent has similar canopy cover of 14.7%.

Nice to think the city is as tree-ish as the county, and I assume the figures were calculated on local council area and not on postcode (the ST postcode ranges far afield). If so, then leafy Kidsgrove would have been excluded from the Stoke tree-count.