Modest gliding and knightly kneeling

The weekend was something of a curate’s egg. On Saturday I went skating at the rink at the Natural History Museum. I’ve never been particularly keen on skating but I was worse than I imagined. I spent the first ten minutes working my way around the perimeter railing and then very slowly venturing inwards – shuffling pathetically. Somehow Newton’s laws were working against me and I had no momentum to conserve. After about half an hour I could confidently move round with my eyes fixed four feet ahead; and ten minutes later I was experimenting with modest gliding. I was just getting the hang of turning when some idiot with a video camera skated backwards in front of me and left me in a moist and knightly kneeling position. This event shook the old confidence somewhat and a few minutes later I came a medium cropper after a near miss with a whelp. I now seem to have whiplash. By way of compensation we had a most agreeable lunch at Cous Cous Darna near South Kensington Tube.

Trivial tasks accomplished over the weekend included bar taping and plastering (both acceptable is slightly cack-handed), the re adhesion of wallpaper and the reading of a large chunk of my B713 materials.

Mouse boiling and rocket testing

Julia and I undertook parallel projects on Sunday afternoon.

Having found a deceased young mouse on my doorstep (thanks to the local cat community) we decided to try to extract its skeleton for display purposes – possibly rampant with acorns argent. The methodology was to boil it with caustic soda to remove the flesh and degrease the bones then reassemble it using fuse wire.

We got the unfortunate rodent to a rolling boil and then reduced him to a simmer. After a couple of hours the fur was off and some of the guts were gone but the little gent was otherwise complete. Having run out of bottled gas we had to decant him into pure water so that we could continue the process indoors. A further hour passed and Julia decided to extract our whiskery chum for examination. Weirdly the pan was bare and nothing but mouse stock remained. We had either over boiled him or he had ascended to the happy land of nuts – I choose to believe that latter. More road kill news soon.

I blog this second item with trepidation as my street is probably under observation by ‘The Man’ but our next experiment was genuinely rocket science. The idea was to produce a proof-of-concept rocket for the forthcoming Nelmes Institute of Science moon shot.

I used a plastic bottle (harvested from the guerrilla garden and provided by the Bletchley littering scum) as the body of the ‘rocket’; water as the propellant and a bicycle track pump was used to pressurise and actuate the 'module'. Essentially the bottle is stopped with a cork through which a bicycle inner tube valve has been inserted. 

The track pump is then attached to the valve and the bottle charged with air. Once a critical pressure is reached the cork is blown out and Newton’s Third Law of Motion kicks in.

The bottle rocket ended up stuck under the hedge (about 6m away) but there is real potential here. More news of Nelmes Explorer II soon.

'Remember, Remember...'

Gareth threw a splendid party on November 5^th to celebrate the deliverance of his sovereign majesty James from popish tyranny (and being blown to tiny bits). In line with his royal wishes in the Book of Sports we refrained from bear-baiting, ‘interludes’ and bowling. There was an unfortunate immolation incident involving another noted religious figure of the time but we’ll gloss over that.