61 thoughts on “ALL OUR YESTERDAYS”

  1. 3rd from last – Vincent Black Shadow 1,000cc – advertised in the 1950s as “top speed in excess of rider comfort”, if I remember rightly – saw a few, sadly too young to ride one. Guy wi’ the guitar – a young Adam Faith – not a bad singer and actor.

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  2. Locomotive 486 on the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad, Colorado. Climbs almost 3,000 ft from Durango to Silverton through the San Juan Mountains of the southwest Colorado Rockies.

    Of ten K-36 class 3 ft (914 mm) narrow gauge, Mikado type, 2-8-2 steam locomotives originally built for the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad, four are owned by the Durango and Silverton…….480, 481, 482, and 486.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durango_and_Silverton_Narrow_Gauge_Railroad

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      1. Something I wrote when the trams were a building. TIE was the company involved.

        Beautiful Road Bridge over the briny Forth

        That lets you visit the village of Queensferry, North

        And hosts a bus service that takes you straight to Deep Sea World

        I am here to tell you of a terrible tale which unfurled

        When the bus tried to leave Edinburgh, where the cold wind swirled

        The passenger’s hearts were light and felt no sorrow

        But TIE in it’s wrath had ploughed a furrow

        From Haymarket to Shandwick Place was a hole in the ground

        Right along Princes Street and away past the Mound

        (Hang on this is not in my plans; I’m writing doggerel, which almost scans

        But heh, I’m only looking for an excuse; to start off McGonagall and end up Suess)

        But back to the bus, the passengers happy

        Not yet knowing how long they would wait for a lavvie.

        So the bus crawled on with all of it’s might

        Keeping ladies with Zimmerframes, just within sight

        At Haymarket; the passengers, bladders in pain

        Got off the bus and on to the train…

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        2. Such stately rhymes anent Edina’s tramways
          Doubtless will enshrine their story always.
          Were McGonagall with us still, I’m certain that without any quarrel
          He would yield to Conan the bardic laurel.

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    1. A young save the earther with a sense of irony!

      The liberals on all cable channels except FOX have been pandering endlessly over the young environmental “activists” who have descended on New York City to tell the adults how evil and stupid they are. In particular, the liberal media fawning over the Swedish teenager who has come out against airplanes knows no bounds. Greta Thunberg will address the UN, and has already put on a show in Congress. I think they’ve let her lecture Parliament too. I have no trouble imagining a crazy liberal place like Sweden taking starry-eyed teenage idealism and fanaticism seriously, but I thought places like New York, Washington, and London were made of sterner stuff.

      About doing away with those damn airplanes:

      https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/7/25/8881364/flying-shame-climate-change-airline-greta-thunberg

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      1. I wonder if, in these days of Facetime, Skype and such-like, if people need to fly as much as they used to.

        As a non scientist, I couldn’t argue one way or the otehr as to whether the climate change we are seeing is caused by man or not.

        Certainly many respected scientists say that it is, and people like David Attenborough seem to agree with them. On the other hand there have been climate changes in the past. Long before jet engines.

        Leaving that aside, however, I can remember years ago what an unpleasant thing a walk in town was with fumes from car and bus and lorry exhausts everywhere, and I compare it with walking to the town centre now, which is something I can recommend for health.

        As a country boy at heart, I highly recommend the purer air we now have in our clogged roads.

        But I do with we could do a bit more of that car pooling!

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        1. Tris……I have no trouble accepting a scientific consensus, and I imagine that it’s more likely than not that climate change is to a considerable extent man-made. Nevertheless, it’s not for me the theological imperative that it is for most of my liberal friends, AND, I’m not about to be lectured to about that or anything else by a teenager armed with pious self-righteous indignation and a fraction of a high school education. As for the ADULT environmental activists, I can’t see how the liberal impulse to take to the streets and the barricades advances their cause in the slightest. I agree that we’ve clearly made great strides in achieving clean air and clean water over the last generation or two, and I have little doubt that reasonable progress will be made on the climate change front. But the people marching in the streets, manning the barricades, and demanding that people cut out airplane travel are only an annoying distraction…..IMHO! 😉

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          1. Danny, I like to see you as my chum on here, but you are 100% wrong on this. You do know that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, that it retains heat and explains the temperature on Venus? This is pretty well known and not a secret. You also know that there is a rising proportion of CO2 and other greenhouse gases such as Methane here on Earth that has been released either directly through the industrial and post industrial reliance on carbon based fuels? Or in the case of Methane as a melting of – particularily – the Siberian tundra. And that that all of that can be directly attributed to us humans? That is the settled view of the scientific community and it is hard to see why anyone without a huge shareholding in an oil company would think otherwise.

            Frankly it is neither pious nor self-righteous. It is just true.

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            2. Douglas, I certainly respect your opinion. And I agree with everything you’ve said, except that surely the cycle of global warming and cooling that has given us ice ages and warm periods is overlaid on the effect of man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

              As for how urgently I view all this, I freely admit to my mostly centrist political views, with considerable disdain for what I consider to be the extremists of the far left and the far right. And in this spirit, I’ll not demonize the petroleum industry for pursuing profits in a free market economy, unless and until we have cars and airplanes that don’t burn oil for fuel.

              I will also insist that I’m not going to take seriously a partially educated know-it-all teenager who brings us her epiphany that if we’ll just quit flying in airplanes so much, then it’ll all be a lot better and we’ll have done our part to save her planet. I really don’t know what I dislike more, a smarty pants teenager telling me how venal and stupid I am, OR the environmental extremists of all ages who fawn over these young so-called “activists.”

              BTW, there’s also my feelings about European lefties who periodically decide that the President of the United States is a war criminal, and pass resolutions that he present himself at The Hague for trial. But that’s another rant for another day. In the meantime, I’m hopeful that my steadfast support of Scottish independence and my revolutionary American disdain for the imperialistic English who raped and pillaged half the world…..and burned the White House……will secure my place at Munguin’s Republic.

              All best wishes Douglas! 🙂

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        2. well in layman’s terms, there is a thing called natural climate change which takes place over millennia. Earth has mini ice-ages roughly every 10,000 years with major ice ages much less frequently. What is happening is that human activity is accelerating the rate of change in the natural warming and cooling of the planet AND the amount of heating is also too much as well as too fast. This means life on the planet can’t adapt through natural selection – which requires long time scales- and major extinctions are thus more likely.

          Obvs it’s more complicated than that but that’s a Crib notes version.

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  5. Camay is a fine old soap. But no longer advertised in the States and now hard to find in the stores. Newer and flashier brands have French perfume and face cream these days. Introduced by Procter and Gamble in 1926, P&G sold the Camay brand to Unilever in 2015.

    From 2010:

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  6. All the parked cars off Victoria Road/Meadowside reminds me that traffic went a different route and that Victoria Road started off Bell Street.
    Looking at the sweet collage it has reminded me of some of short lived brands. Nux – yummy indeed.

    Adam Faith

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  7. Interesting to see the title page of Chambers’s Cyclopaedia of English Literature and the following illustration which, I guess, is from the same volume. Of the five authors depicted, three – William Tyndale, John Wycliffe and Miles Coverdale – were Bible translators. Chaucer and his friend Gower were poets. I know what I’d have been reading back then 🙂

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    1. Seems that being a Bible translator was a dangerous business in those years. Tyndale was declared a heretic and burned at the stake. Wycliffe was declared a heretic posthumously, his books were burned, and his bones were dug up and burned. Coverdale survived the Bible biz and died a natural death.

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      1. It was somewhat more complex than that 😉

        Being pedantic Tyndale was dead (strangled) when he was burned to ensure “eternal damnation of his soul”.

        Frankly being English & “christian” was pretty dangerous back then – if it wasn’t Henry VIII destroying the catholic church in England it was his daughter (Bloody Mary) attempting to bring it back and burning everyone in sight. Then Elizabeth and back to the “church of England” – burnings stopped, executions didn’t.

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        1. That business of requiring everyone to be the same religion as the monarch was really tough when the Kings and Queens couldn’t decide what they wanted to be. Even though they’ve given up on the burnings and executions these days, the English, loving bloody tradition as they do, still haven’t managed to give up the state religion thing. Someday, once again, someone in line for the throne will decide that they are Catholic, and the English politicians will have to declare a “constitutional” crisis…….pretending once again that they actually have one (a constitution.) 🙂

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          1. Wouldn’t it be funny if Charlie or Willie decided they wanted to be Muslim?

            That would put the cat among the pigeons.

            To be fair, Charlie said he would rather be crowned “defender of faith”, rather than “defender of THE faith”.

            In a way, it is rather insulting to God or Faith or whatever, that they he/she/it has to have some mere mortal, albeit a royal one, defend them.

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            1. Tris…..YES, seems at first glance a sensible thing for Charlie to say, but an excellent observation on your part about God actually needing a mere mortal defender on the British throne in the first place.
              And about your suggestion that a future King might declare himself to be a Muslim, I’m under the impression that there’s a law on the books that forbids a Catholic from becoming King. I wonder if parliament had the foresight to draft the law to preclude from the throne any and all religions EXCEPT C of E. If not, perhaps parliament should make up such a law, and immediately declare it to be a part of the famous unwritten British constitution. 😉

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              1. It is perplexing, Danny.

                I don’t think that there is anything that actually forbids a Brit King being a Muslim. I’m not sure that it is written anywhere that a Catholic can’t be King.

                I can’t imagine many in Scotland giving a flying whatsit what the head of state is.

                I’m not one for conspiracy theories, but I never totally dismiss the possible ones.

                When Diana died in that car crash at Pont Alma,she was having a relationship with a Muslim. She was the mother of a future king.

                No, seriously I don’t really think that the Brits had her murdered for that, but the establishment is awfully fussed about this religion thing.

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                1. Even though the USA is a secular constitutional republic, religion has always been a big deal in American politics, and the English and Scottish churches have traditionally dominated. Almost half the presidents have been Episcopalian or Presbyterian, with the largest single group being high church Episcopalian. (The American Episcopal Church became separate from the Church of England in revolutionary times when the word “England” in its name became problematic, and, after July 4, 1776, laws were passed making prayers for the king and British Parliament acts of treason.

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                  1. It always makes me laugh that in churches here they pray for the queen and the royal family.

                    Heavens sake. If there is one family in this land that doesn’t need any help from god it’s the Saxe Coburgs.

                    They should be praying for people who are hungry, cold, homeless, ill … not a bunch of fabulously wealthy benefits scroungers.

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                    1. Tris……I can see how such prayers for the royals would have been tricky in American revolutionary times.

                      The history of the Anglican/Episcopal Church in America in revolutionary and early republican times is sort of interesting. Apart from the split with England, there was the theological matter of Apostolic succession to take care of.

                      Wiki says:

                      “When the clergy of Connecticut elected Samuel Seabury as their bishop in 1783, he sought consecration in England. The Oath of Supremacy prevented Seabury’s consecration in England, so he went to Scotland; the non-juring Scottish bishops there consecrated him in Aberdeen on November 14, 1784, making him, in the words of scholar Arthur Carl Piepkorn, “the first Anglican bishop appointed to minister outside the British Isles”.”

                      “In 1787, two priests – William White of Pennsylvania and Samuel Provoost of New York – were consecrated as bishops by the archbishop of Canterbury, the archbishop of York, and the bishop of Bath and Wells, the legal obstacles having been removed by the passage through Parliament of the Consecration of Bishops Abroad Act 1786. Thus there are two branches of Apostolic succession for the American bishops: through the non-juring bishops of Scotland who consecrated Samuel Seabury and through the English church who consecrated William White and Samuel Provoost.

                      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Episcopal_Church_(United_States)#Revolutionary_era

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                2. Its only in the last decade or so that its been legal for a practicising catholic to be Prime Minister of the UK. Blair “converted” after he was PM and others in the past have apparently hidden their beliefs (that was before 24/7 news though).

                  You have to be a member of the church of england to be King/Queen of England as you automatically become head of that church, so no muslims/catholics/anything else need apply.

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            1. Indeed. I think the bright ones were clever enough to say… to hell with it. I’m whatever old Tubby, or Warty Nose or whoever, wants me to be.

              If my life depended upon it I’m pretty sure I could do a fair impression of an Ayatollah !

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                1. And it was, we are told, Mary I of England (who I’d never heard of because the knowledge was dumped from my overfull brain in favour of more important things) who said “When I am dead, you will find Philip and Calais engraved on my heart.” Philip being her hubby. The first time I heard that, I figured that having “Philip” and “Calais” engraved on one’s heart would be a useful first diagnosis of cause of death.

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    2. John, who sent them, suggested that really only Chaucer was his choice.

      I didn’t much care for Chaucer until one night I had to drive to the Borders. Searching for something to listen to, I happened upon some adaptations of Canterbury Tales on Radio Three (get him!!!). They were absolutely fascinating.

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    3. Agreed, Andi. Hadn’t looked at it for years till taking a pic of the title page and frontispiece for AOY. Other than Chaucer, I wouldn’t classify those illustrated as ‘literature’. There’s been so much great writing produced since 1881 but there must have been stronger candidates than the bible translators before then.

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