Toddling Along on Thursday

Just a thought

Has it ever occurred to you that when we talk about the bride walking up the aisle we are being inaccurate?  The aisles of a church are the one or two separate parts parallel to the main part of the church.  The bride actually walks up the nave!  

Green Fig Jam

 One of the great things about staying in someone else’s house for a couple of weeks is discovering the foods in their kitchen cupboards (to roam through which I have been given full licence!).  I found some green fig jam.  It sounded as though it had potential.  It did.  I can add it to my list of jams that I enjoy.

Another aspect of staying away from home is finding things in the local shops that aren’t readily available at home.  I love grape nuts – a malted cereal in the form of tiny, hard, crunchy ‘nuts’.  I can’t get them at home but Sainsbury’s just up the road here had them.  Poirot relies on his little grey cells – I rely on my grape nuts! 

No comment

If you think I’m ignoring you at the moment – I’m probably not.  I’ve lost three attempts at commenting (in the first case a long comment that I hadn’t copied) because Blogger is timing out. Who knows why? But all I will say is that no other sites are giving me problems.

Postcrossing

I have been using some of my holiday time to update my Postcrossing blog.  I appreciate that not everyone is interested in that blog so I thought I would show you one on the cards I received in April – from Henry in Finland.  

Sadly, there is no information on the back of the card to show its origins.

An Early Satnav?

How about this for a one hundred year old Satnav system?

“This fantastic contraption, called the ‘Routefinder’, showed 1920s drivers in the UK the roads they were travelling down, gave them the mileage covered and told them to stop when they came at journey’s end.  The technology – a curious cross between the space age and the stone age – consisted of a little map scroll inside a watch, to be ‘scrolled’ (hence the word) as the driver moved along on the map. A multitude of scrolls could be fitted in the watch to suit the particular trip the driver fancied taking.”

The system had several obvious drawbacks including a limited number of available journeys and the inability of the system to respond to sudden changes of direction. There was also no warning of road works, traffic jams or speed traps (yes, they had them in those days - they involved a policeman jumping out of the hedge at you!).   That was the origins of the AA  (Automobile Association) in 1905 - a body initially intended to help motorists avoid police speed traps. The AA's 100 members in 1905 grew to 83,000 by 1914.  Nevertheless, it is said that the Routefinder didn’t take off because there were too few potential customers at that time.   If only the roads were that clear now.

The Routefinder is one of many bizarre gadgets displayed at the British Library.