SOPPY SUNDAY

n or

Morning all. Welcome to Soppy Sunday.  This week we have some pics of Tasmania, sent specially by Munguin’s man in these dark parts, Iain. We also continue with the monotreme theme with some duck-billed platypuses. And as ever some historic townscapes to make you rack your brains, including one from Dave.

n dublin
Dublin
n elephants
Everyone loves an Elephant…
n edinburgh
The capital.
n fingle's cave
Natural Bridges Cave, Calaveras County, California… and not, as I had thought, Fingal’s cave. Thanks to Morag and Andi.
n kermit
Fred the Frog.
n fortingall yew, scotland
Oldest tree in Scotland, the Fortingall Yew.
n patypus3
Duck-Billed Platypus.
n up up
Up up and away…
n tasmania
Penguin, Tasmania (Iain)
n tasmania 3
Koala (Iain). No, it’s not, Tris. It’s a wombat. Pay rise cancelled: signed Munguin!
n tasmania2
Antarctican ambassador to Tasmania resident in Penguin! (Iain.)
nbear
Sunbathing with bears…
nplatypus2
Baby Duck-Billed Platypuses.
nduck
Quack.
n boxer
Baby Boxer.
n happy
Happiness… Le bonheure.
n London
Different this week… where and when?
n dave
Car experts? (Dave)
n for da weedgies
For the Weedgies.
n Loch Morlich Cairngorm
Loch Morlich.
n orangutans-indonesia-deforestation
OK, back to work, slackers. That’s this weekend’s relaxation over! See you next Sunday.

 

 

87 thoughts on “SOPPY SUNDAY”

    1. Property is pretty reasonable in Tassie. $300,000 gets you a three bed cottage. Don’t know if that is too much for Scottish incomes but it is very cheap for OZ. Slightly smaller than Scotland but just as beautiful. In fact I think NZ, Tassie and Scotland share the same style of scenery. Only 500,0000 population so very uninhabited and 45% is National Park or World Heritage area.

      By the way the Wombat is not happy being described as a Koala.

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  2. I suppose it is just sentimentality but if I a won a billion on a lottery, I’d buy land and ground to defend them from Donald – brain dead – Trump and his rich kid friends.

    Given the possibility, I would armour and arm the elephants.

    Just saying, I completely hate big game hunters with a vengance.

    It is they that should be shot as vermin. For vermin they certainly are.

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  3. Tris, re. the trolleybus pic – the red & cream livery and the logo on the bonnet means it’s got to be London transport and judging by the women’s clothing, the pram and cars in the picture, I’d say mid- to late-1950s. As to specific location in The Big Smoke I couldn’t even guess, could be lots of places. A wee bit before my time (just) – in London anyway.

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    1. It’s the corner of the High St and Station Rd South Norwood Andi. Tris is being clever by not including the huge great clock tower in front of the then pub at number 91.

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        1. They have trolley buses here in Zurich. I like them a lot but I have to say that I prefer the trams. Maybe it’s some family trait cos my grandfather worked on the trams but I just like them better.

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          1. Yes, I prefer trams too. The trouble is trams on roads are impossible in today’s traffic. They absolutely have to be on separate track, offroad, at least most of their journey…. as they are in Edinburgh, Paris, Vienna, Budapest, Amsterdam, Dublin… (the places I’ve been recently and can remember having trams.)

            Most of our cities don’t have the space to build tram lines, down the middle or at the side of roads. A trolly bus which can pull over at stops, and which disrupts the traffic far less, is probably a better bet.

            I don’t remember much about Zurich. I stopped over there on my way to Tirana once. All I remember is that it was expensive!

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            1. The trolleybus had one feature which folks weren’t too keen on, Tris. It was practically noiseless. Unlike the bus, it had no noisy diesel engine and unlike the tram, it didn’t clatter along a metal track, so when it swung into the kerb at stops, if you were carelessly stepping off the pavement you didn’t hear it coming until maybe too late. I was only a wee fella when the last trolleybuses were running in Glasgow but I believe they were sometimes nicknamed “whispering death”. Glaswegians really preferred “the caurs”, I think.

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              1. Good point.

                The trams would have been noisy… metal wheels on metal tracks.

                I bet the Swiss have found a solution to that… or maybe noone ever steps off the pavement in Switzerland.

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                1. The trams are a bit noisy here, while the trolley buses are indeed deadly silent. People are quite gung-ho about personal safety at bus and tram stops. No idea why there aren’t more deaths. I’ve even seen people grab on to moving trams on their skateboard and then transfer to another tram at a junction. Terrifying to watch.

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      2. I remember going to see the last tram in Glasgow. We went down to Argyle Street across from Lewis’s and put a penny in the track which got bent and squashed before being retrieved for a keepsake.
        Trolley buses too were around, but they were on wires which spoilt the look of the place, much better with an electric bus!

        O/T Vale Malcolm Young of ACDC born Glasgow Jan 1953. Sorry I can’t put a song in for you.

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      1. Glasgow is bigger than Edinburgh. So Edinburgh MUST be fhe satellite as smaller objects revolve around larger ones. Grrrr!
        There are no Slums in Glasgow just a few places that are in need of a slight tidy up, a touch of paint perhaps.

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      2. Sorry, Conan – I was obviously thinking of the historical slums along the Royal Mile. Of course, I’d forgotten that they (or, more accurately, their inhabitants) were swept away by the tide of benevolent civic improvement when the city graced itself with such breezy, well-planned suburbs of desirable housing such as Muirhouse, Pilton, Sighthill, Wester Hailes. Glasgow ,of course, had similar civic benevolence which took the unfortunate dwellers of the city-centre slums and housed them in the bright sunlit uplands of Easterhouse, Castlemilk and Drumchapel.

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  5. The wee red car – Austin 7 Ruby – a guy just a few streets away had one until quite recently. Don’t know why he couldn’t have got something more modern – maybe stuck for the dosh 🙂

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    2. Dave sent me this information: The car is an Austin Seven Ruby, Mk1, Built in November 1934, registered in Birmingham to Gertrude Fall, a lady pawnbroker.

      I rebuilt the car and it is photographed in the Cotswolds, after visiting the area.

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    3. Here comes the even more nerdish answer, It’s an Austin Seven Ruby, ARQ9188, first registered 25/1/1935, chassis 210250 and engine number 213479. The information is from the Austin seven register. Out of just under 300,000 made between 1922 and 1938, there are 10,895 surviving cars on the register. Not bad for a car that hasn’t been made for 80 years. I was speaking to a man last week who drove an Austin seven from Beijing to Paris (and then on home) in 2008 – the centenary of the original race. Most Austin sevens can’t go faster than 45 mph, (apart from a fellow Dundonian who has a sporty model which will now do 65mph and he finished the Classique Monte Carlo rally last year.) – mine does very well to reach 40mph! The beauty of the Austin Seven is that when they break down (as they do), you just get out with the toolkit, fix it and drive on.

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  6. The trolleybus is on London route 654 which ran from Sutton to Crystal Palace (not that far from where I currently live in Bromley) and the location is South Norwood High Street, at the junction with Station Road (you can just see the base of the Station Road clock pedestal at the bottom right). The Tesco’s premises is now split between a pizza take-away and a dry cleaners. The route was closed in early 1959. My guess is that the picture was taken in the late Fifties towards the end of the route’s operation.

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    1. Hi Gordon.

      Thanks for that. Local knowledge is a great thing. I reckon about that time too. That car wouldn’t have been around until towards the end of the 1950s. Is it a Ford Prefect or an Anglia or something like that?

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  7. Nice pictures, some topical this week. First cute frog I’ve ever seen, and of course the Trump family love elephants so much that they want bits of dead ones to get into America easier than Muslims.
    Did you know that yews were grown in kirkyards to stop coos chewing on them? Two reasons; first of all it’s poisonous, second, a sapling yew having been munched on by a suicidal farm animal would grow up crooked and so useless for making bows.

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    1. Ah. My friend has a small garden pond which on occasions has to be cleaned out. So we were doing that one day and as we got to the bottom we discovered a wee frog. We called him Selwyn (Froggitt).

      So that we could clear it out properly we got a bucket of water for him/her to swim about on while we cleared up his home. He was the cutest thing you ever saw swimming about, coming up for air and looking at us, as if to ask whether we were finished with the cleaning yet…

      Every time I see one of these pictures of big game hunters, from the Trump brothers to the royals, standing proudly with the carcass of some magnificent beat they have killed, I always wish that a herd, pride or swarm… or whatever, of animals could come from behind a tree and see them off.

      Interesting about Yews. Such beautiful trees.

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  8. I did wonder why a koala was on the ground since they prefer trees but seems it’s wombat – so that’s what they look like! No Tasmanian devil picture though! Lovely stuff as per. Gotta love an elephant. Penguin looks a good place to visit maybe one day when I have my Scottish passport. That was the name of an STV travel show – can’t imagine the severity of the Yoon frothing if they brought it back with the same name.

    Lovely Pongo pongo too

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      1. I recognized the wombat, because a couple of weeks ago, Soppy Sunday featured a Numbat and I looked up the difference.

        Tasmania also has Tasmanian Devils.

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      1. That Fortingall Yew is a seriously old tree.

        One of its branches has changed its sex, BTW. From Wikipedia:

        “The yew is male, however in 2015 scientists from the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh reported that one small branch on the outer part of the crown had changed sex and begun to bear a small group of berries – an occurrence occasionally noted in conifers.”

        An ancient transexual tree!

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    2. Funny claim, the Roman armies under Agricola did not reach the Southern Highlands until the AD 70s, Pontius Pilate would be long dead by then.

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          1. Actually. a Google search says that “weedgie” is an “alternative spelling” of “weegie.”

            Now we have to figure out why people from Glasgow are called Glaswegians. What’s the rationale for just throwing away the “gow” and replacing it with an apparently unrelated series of letters? (Some sort of association with the word “Norwegian?”

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            1. Danny, there doesn’t seem to be much logic to these things. After all, people from Harrow are called Harrovians but people from London, Londoners. Why not Londonians, or why not Harrowers? Folk from Dundee are called Dundonians – why not Dundovians, Dundee-ers, Dunderheads? (oops, sorry, Tris – slip of the keyboard). As to Edinburgh, folks from Glasgow (Weegies, although they don’t call themselves that as it’s not a word meaning “The Chosen”) have many names for them but they’re seldom suitable for publication. Edinburgher sounds terrible, mind you. By the way, I’m not surprised there are the alternatives “weegie” and “weedgie” – Edinbuggers never could spell 🙂

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                2. A wee bit.
                  Glasgow has patter.
                  Edinburgh has an international Festival of the Arts, which brings in hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world every year.
                  The Hogmanay festival does that too.

                  Glasgow has patter….

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                  2. Aye, you’re right there, Conan – Edinburgh needs to bring in people from all over the world because if there were only Edinburgh folk there the place would be intolerable. It’s a great place to visit – because you know you’ll be leaving again soon 🙂 Oh, by the way, I’m not actually a Weegie.

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            2. That’s an interesting thought, Danny. Somehow Glasgoweegians doesn’t sound as warm.

              And warm (not climatically) is how I’d describe them. I mean, it rains all the time there, but the people are fantastic.

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    2. I see what you mean Morag. But when I did a Google search on the photograph, it certainly said it was. Anyone else got an idea?

      https://www.google.co.uk/search?tbs=sbi:AMhZZiu2CFfQ15ylgJqjI2IJpR5j7ls9UMgD1cVrZs-1W96FxWUbZ-OwQaNZRGkoFplgiizTn1hc6aqrLSwX1P4poikPA8bVEDMYoqxaUdIj9a3Kb1TGaD8kqP2zZx6Ri7RQc-9u2hM2HhUK9JVaIvKkEScIMh86y2UUYD6aWcXraggIkdaarxr14JxQ-Ly3l8vWqhwDqypYeBESTdcsyLfepEYP5rrd7sI-0WRnQbR3Yn0Q-Yg2tM_1v8xn35EklrhTXPRV0FzaBkMJkUuK6Bwepo2OedHVWp_1s4Zocd2lfgTEIj6SKxzl_198VB_1kynbxl2nftFoXF90olOlRQ542ZYDQ_1z_1iMP2oA

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      1. I don’t know. I see the claims that it is Fingal’s Cave, but I don’t see any way to verify that. There are two problems with the image. One is the obvious thing that Fingal’s Cave is characterised by these really striking vertical basalt columns which don’t appear in that image, and the other is the reflection. The cave in the photo is reflected perfectly in an absolutely still pool. I do not believe it is possible for the water inside Fingal’s Cave to be so still as to form a perfect reflection like that, ever. It looks more as if it is a pool in a lake, or even a big puddle at the back of the cave.

        Some people know how to trace a photo back to its first appeaance on the internet, but I don’t.

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        1. I’m sure you are right, upon reflection, Morag. I’ve never actually been, but looking at the other photos on line that honestly doesn’t look remotely like FC!
          Apologies all round…

          Add that to the misspelling of Weegies (albeit an alternative) and Munguin will be docking my wages for a month!

          I seriously techy ‘unsavvy’ so I have no idea how to find out the origin of a photo.

          If anyone else knows… feel free 🙂

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              1. Tris, you tell Munguin from me, Thanks for the offer” but I think you’re doing a great job, I’ve done my share of jobs and now want to live a life of leisure (want to, note) and anyway I’d hate to see you redundant and added to the youth unemployment statistics 🙂

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              2. Tris, aren’t you going to change the caption on the picture now that we know where it actually is? Many people won’t read all the way down the comments.

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                1. Aye Morag…sorry, I should ahve done that, but I got caught up with a four letter word… beginning with “W”!

                  I’ll away and sort it now…. but I’ve leave in my mistake sop that all the hard work of finding out where it really is won’t be wasted!

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