Claymore

On 28 December, Morgan and I volunteered at the Roodepoort parkrun so that we could hit milestones together. On 1 January, we ran the New Year's Day Parkrun at Kei Mouth, and I did my 300th parkrun and Morgan did his 100th. The parkrun had not been well-advertised, so there were only 11 people there. Morgan and I came in 3rd and 4th respectively, but despite that, were were both only second in our age categories - the father and son team ahead of us were the same ages, roughly. Afterwards we had cappuccino and toasted bacon & egg sandwiches served by the country club. Kat and my dad were there to cheer us on.

Got these from my sister in Oxford.

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I've always had a soft spot for great ships. I think it started with my grandparents; they had a few books I read, over and over again. One was "The Vasa Venture", all about the discovering and raising of the wreck of the royal Swedish flagship Vasa which capsized and sank only 2km into its maiden voyage.

Another book (still in my bookcase) was "The Queen Elizabeth", published in 1947. It was all about the great ocean liner RMS Queen Elizabeth, voyages and wartime experience. The pictures and descriptions of the QE instilled in me a love of those grand ocean liners, and I'm fascinated by them My father was lucky enough to go to the UK on the QE in 1953, as a child, and he still has pictures of the fancy dress party he took part in at Christmas on the deck. I was very saddened when the Queen Elizabeth was destroyed in Hong Kong; it seemed so ignominious.

In the early 1980s, I won a scale model building competition (with a 1/72-scale Focke Wulf Fw-190D-12), and the prize was two models: the shuttle from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and a model of the SS United States.



I loved that ship - elegant, technologically advanced (the superstructure was aluminium), and amazingly fast. It won the Blue Riband in 1952 on her maiden voyage, both east and west, for fastest transatlantic crossing. The eastbound record was only broken in 1990 by the catamaran Hoverspeed Great Britain, and the westbound record still stands, over half a century later. The United States could even do 20 knots (almost 40kph) backward! To reduce the risk of fire (perhaps the designers saw the gutting of the beautiful SS Normandie in New York), the only wood in the ship was in the bilge keels, the kitchen's butcher's block, and in a fire-resistant piano. Friggin' amazing.

Another beautiful ship I liked was the RMS Queen Mary, still preserved at Long Beach, California, and it's nice to see the pictures of her and the (less elegant) RMS Queen Mary 2 meeting up.

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One bit of trivia about ship's horns that vivian_shaw would probably appreciate: modern horn regulations require ship's horns to be in the 70-200Hz range for large ships, and the larger they are, the lower the frequency, so the QM2 has a 70Hz horn. The original Queen Mary, however, still has a 55Hz horn, designed so as not to be too painful for human ears. I would like one of those in my car, that's for sure.