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Originally published on Photoblog by Gethin Thomas AUGUST. 10, 2020 [4-365] 9th August 2020- I recently rediscovered these tiny toys from my childhood. They are sandalwood boxes with a secret inside. The largest box is 25 mm high, about 1 inch. Inside each box is a tiny red seed about 10 mm across or a 1/4 inch. Each seed is hollow and has a tiny white elephant carving which acts a little like a cork in a wine bottle, which seals a hole in the top. Reputedly inside each seed are 100 ivory elephants so small you need a magnifying glass to see them. Sadly one sneeze and they are gone, and given I probably tipped them out to count them several hundred times as a child more than fifty years ago and then struggled to put them all safely back, it is not surprising that having just recounted them after all this time the most I found in any one seed was 14. Which is still impressive so long as you are not expecting 100. At some point, I will show you the inside and the elephants. I will have to dig out my macro lens for that though.

Those former Scrag Ends of London are probably now the gardens, perfumed by many an exotic street food This is the actual scrag end though, the butt of many a joke or insult, which was the staple food of There has been a complete reversal of foods for the rich and foods for the poor. When processed foods and supermarkets first emerged into the bright lights and colours of the 1960's, Those who earn good money choose to spend it on the better joints.—E. F. M., Saffron Walden, Essex.

called Station Road. Mark presiding over a good audience. (There are four roods in an acre, and in turn a rood contains 40 perches.) James Talman, and are close to good roads. This is caused by the raised route of the new road right next to it.

their Satnav and as we drove along through the countryside I was captivated by the rolling map on the screen Sure enough there in black and white on the road in the rolling map on the screen were the actual words Roman road. It was one of these touch screen jobs with text which gave you the options to change the settings. of guessing and trial and error and red faces we managed to get back on track both virtually on the screen

Huddersfield Chronicle - Monday 21 August 1893 Throughout many parts of England, in moist woods, hedges They are often found mixed with Bluebells as they both like similar conditions, but this particular wood It is illegal to dig the wild garlic plant up by its roots, however much of it there is, on common ground

The artwork looked especially good. This gives baked goods lift. of food that look as if you could actually eat them. In the late Edo period, in the 1800s, food sellers displayed a plate of real food each day in lieu of Durham Cutlets definitely sounds like peasant food or even something devised by the food rationing genius

However I spotted this section of road on the beach which was at least a mile from the nearest spot where The yellow road markings are still clear and uneroded. In the lower photo is the area where in the last twenty years sections of the road were washed away and

The Gravelly Hill Interchange, popularly known as Spaghetti Junction, is a road junction in Birmingham Courtesy Historic England It covers 30 acres (12 ha), serves 18 routes and includes 4 km (2.5 mi) of slip roads If you wanted to drive along every road at the Junction itself, adhering to the Highway Code, you would Junction appears in the Guinness Book of World Records, as “the most complex interchange on the British road

Originally published on Photoblog by Gethin Thomas MARCH. 12, 2021 [223-365] 12th. March 2021- It's been a rocky couple of days. From cairns to gravel. Years ago, when we lived opposite, we had a gravel drive. At least that is how we described it. Today, now that we live opposite to where we lived then, we also have a "gravel" drive, but please note I now put the word gravel in quotes, because we are wiser and older and we have been inducted into the mysteries of the world of Elvan 14. You will notice that Elvan is Blue, but blue is so last decade. So where we were once blue we are now pink. I should add just in case you haven't realised yet that the photo above is not Street Art or Graffitti. No it is far more Street than that and far more serious. This is the local Elvan 14 storage bay and it isn't a radioactive isotope and it doesn't have a half life, it is rock, and it is rock hard. Many years ago in our youth (comparatively speaking) we were naïve and foolhardy and did stupid things like go to the local quarry where there are real quarry types with big muscles and big beards and big machines, and that's just the women. And we wanted a truck load of gravel so that is what we crept in and quietly and shyly asked for. "Can we buy some gravel please?" "We don't do gravel". A very long pause while we wait for the punchline, which doesn't arrive. Which is just as well with her muscles. We had just driven into the yard which was lined with bays full of different attractive pastel hues of gravel. So how do you form your next sentence without sounding facetious? "What is all that stone like stuff in the bays that looks like gravel?" "Chippens". For those of you not from round here, that's chippings. Back then it turned out that what we really wanted was Elvan 14, so we politely asked for a truck full. We also explained that when they delivered it, could it be an itty bitty truck because there is a bridge over a stream on the way in to the property and it is itty bitty and therefore prone to breaking when overly large trucks drive over it. Two days later a juggernaut pulls into the drive loaded with Chippens. Miraculously the bridge it has just crossed is still intact. We obviously have a language problem here, which is puzzling because we both speak English as a first language, even though I am Welsh, and we are still in England, even down here, and we have managed to make ourselves understood, even in rural Japan and up a mountain in Poland and in a souk in Morocco. The juggernaut was the tipper type which was a relief because we had a brainwave which involved the man mountain tipping and driving forward slowly at the same time, in a multi tasking manoeuvre which would have had the effect of doing most of the hard work for us and spreading the Chippens evenly along the drive. We explained this to man mountain and he nodded and got back in the truck giving a convincing impression that he had understood every word. Like when we ended up with miso soup in Japan that we asked for, and an ice cream in Poland that we asked for and a small leather satchel in the souk in Morocco that we asked for. Sadly there was then a thunderous roar as every Chipp of Chippens ended up in one giant heap in front of the garage door, the garage with the car inside. Almost as if he despised us. Upon which he drove the juggernaut over the itty bitty bridge again. At least it was a lot lighter on the way out. Today we are on a different mission though because we have left Elvan 14 behind and a year ago we discovered that we are now a Devon Pink home. We already had a "gravel" drive when we moved in and it obviously wasn't blue so last year we went on a vicennial (that's twenty years later) anniversary visit to the quarry, wiser, but still terrified. This time we went armed in the full knowledge that we needed Chippens, so we fairly swaggered in with braggadocio and flung down our small ziplock bag on the counter. This bag had a handful of the Chippens we now needed to match and they looked muddy and grey. We expressed an interest in purchasing half a truck of the sample enclosed and had to admit we didn't know what it was. BD as I will call her, with the muscles, tears open the bag. I hesitate to mention it is a ziplock and can be simply peeled open quite gently. BD already has the Chippens out on the counter. She shouts through to the back office, something undiscernible as a debate begins between aficionados of Chippens. All is resolved after BD licks the sample Chippens to reveal they are pink beneath the grey and the mud. Licking Chippens is the only definitive way apparently. Having destroyed the ziplock bag with one swipe of her bejewelled fist, BD offers us back our licked Chippens which in these Covid obsessed times we politely declined. Definitely Devon Pink she hisses. But that was a year ago and today we just needed to address a couple of bald patches in the drive, so we needed bags and a shovel and we were on our own. They supplied the bags which we could keep and a shovel which we couldn't. They are very trusting like that around here. So we drove back to the bay of Devon Pink across a great expanse of gritty, muddy, puddled, yard to get our daily exercise manhandling Chippens. We manhandled three bags of Chippens into the boot of the car with our beady eyes on the very useful shovel. It only briefly crossed our minds to drive off with the shovel until we realised BD had put her name on it, so reluctantly we drove back to the prefabricated office, perched on blocks, and guarded by three Alsatians on heavy chains, to return it. We followed what counts as normal procedure in polite society these days and when we got the shovel back out of the car we wiped it all over with anti bacterial wet wipes to hand it back to BD. We needn't have worried, there was no place for Covid in this quarry, as her disparaging look made clear. Covid wouldn't dare. The dogs snarled as we drove off, I mean the Alsatians.

This shot is at the start of the road looking downstream. It is five miles by road to Bigbury on Sea but a lot less on the river, probably half that. This is the shorter section of road that features marker posts. As you can see below, there is not a lot of room for error. It took fright, and pitched the occupants into the road.

Cheddaring is a cheese making process, while Cheddar is the cheese, a town, a gorge and a man. Cheddar is a large village and civil parish in the Sedgemoor district of the English county of Somerset. It is situated on the southern edge of the Mendip Hills. Cheddar Gorge, on the northern edge of the village, is the largest gorge in the United Kingdom and includes several show caves, including Gough's Cave. The gorge has been a centre of human settlement since Neolithic times including a Saxon palace. It has a temperate climate and provides a unique geological and biological environment that has been recognised by the designation of several Sites of Special Scientific Interest. It is also the site of several limestone quarries. The village gave its name to Cheddar cheese. The name Cheddar comes from the Old English word ceodor, meaning deep dark cavity or pouch. There is evidence of occupation from the Neolithic period in Cheddar. Britain's oldest complete human skeleton, Cheddar Man, estimated to be 9,000 years old, was found in Cheddar Gorge in 1903. In 1997, scientists were able to sequence DNA extracted from one of the Cheddar Man’s molars, and astonishingly were able to find two people living in the village that shared the same DNA as him, making the Cheddar Man a very distant ancestor! The Cheddar Gorge Cheese Company is the only company to make Cheddar in Cheddar. We join the process after the milk has been separated into curds and whey and the whey has been drawn off. This leaves behind the milk solids which make the cheese. It is what happens next which determines what type of cheese you end up with and many different traditional processes yield many different traditional types of cheese from hard to soft, dry to washed rind, young to mature. In the Cheddar making procedure, most of the moisture is drawn off in a draining and pressing process. This involves cutting the compressed curd into ever smaller pieces. This releases more and more liquid. A giant wheel of cheddar cheese was presented to Queen Victoria of England for a wedding gift back in 1840. It weighed over one thousand pounds. In 2015, around 3.4 billion pounds of cheddar cheese were produced in the United States alone. The caves at Cheddar Gorge in Somerset, England are a constant temperature of 7 degrees, providing the optimum temperature for the cheese to mature – and it still does so to this day. This cheese meister Luke. Originally, in order to claim the name cheddar, the cheese had to be crafted within 30 miles of Wells Cathedral, Somerset in England. In 1901, Scott of the Antarctic took 3,500lbs of cheddar (made in Cheddar itself) on his famous expedition. Due to rationing during the Second World War, and for almost ten years after, most milk in Britain was used for making a single type of cheese – ‘Government Cheddar’ – which resulted in almost wiping out all other cheese production in the country. The curd is being cut yet again. For the 1964 World’s Fair in New York, Wisconsin created a 34,951lbs cheddar cheese from the milk of 16,000 cows. Now the smaller pieces have the salt added. Salt is added for flavour, to increase moisture loss and also for preservation. Eating cheese late at night, the rumour goes, will give you strange dreams. As far back as 1964, a researcher noted that a patient stopped having nightmares when he dropped his habit of eating one or two ounces of cheddar cheese every evening. More recently, the now-defunct British Cheese Board, who funded a study in 2005 and concluded that eating blue cheese causes vivid dreams, while cheddar makes people dream about celebrities. Now those smaller pieces are milled into crumbs. Despite the fact that most people prefer their cheddar to be aged for a year and a half or less, there was recently some cheddar that was 40 years old. This was not intentional however; it was a lucky accident. Ed Zahn had made the cheese years ago when he was still working in an old cheese manufacturer in Oconto, Wisconsin and when he went back in 2012 he found this batch in the back of a cooler. Some people said that this cheese was so old it was barely edible due to the sharp flavour but it was such a rarity to find a cheddar aged for so long that it sold out quickly. Cheddar is made in at least 14 countries worldwide. At this stage any added ingredients can be mixed in. In this case garlic and chives are added and tossed by hand. The curd is then placed in metal drums where it is put under pressure. When removed the cheese is in the traditional truckle shape, wrapped in cheese cloth. The cheese can be matured in different ways and is a complex process. It is the cutting of the curd into smaller and smaller pieces and the stacking of those slabs to drain out the whey that constitutes the Cheddaring process. Mac'n'Cheese is said to be the most popular cheese recipe.

The Jammie Dodgers are the favourite snack food of singer Labrinth and Dr. Who.