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Standing stone

It’s 50 years since a group of undergraduates from the Cambridge University Astronomical Society had a holiday surveying megalithic sites in Argyll to investigate possible astronomical alignments. It was a lot of fun, and we even wrote it up and the results were published in a paper in Nature 253, 431‑433 (1975) which was probably something of an achievement at the time, though I’m not sure that we realised how much!

We had a great time meeting up and revisiting old haunts in the area.

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Trinity College Great Court

I recently attended the Annual Gathering at my college for those who matriculated in 1972 and 1973. It was very enjoyable, and great to be back with old friends in very familiar surroundings after such a long time.

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After a period of rather sporadic posts on here, I am finally (I think) in a fit state of mind to post a bit more stuff, and catch up with some of the things that might have been posted at the time. The last few years have been hard for many people, and though physically I have been fine, the effect of lockdowns and the abysmal behaviour of many governments in particular depressed me greatly. Let’s hope that people are never daft enough to let it happen again.

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Clock mechanism

After a long pause I have returned to testing the clock mechanism. I have made some repairs to the components that make the chime work at the right time and for the right number of bings of the bell. One lever had been repaired a long time ago, but the repair had failed. A spring was also rather bent and not acting well enough.

I suspect that the original repairs may have been made by my great grandfather who once owned the clock!

Initial tests show that it chimes correctly, but it needs to be run through quite a few cycles to have some confidence that the repair has worked.

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Nyckelharpa and others

Glad to get out to a real session; we’re still moving about a bit due to venue availability which hasn’t settled down post-Covid, since so many venues were clobbered. Many thanks as always to Phil who is now juggling the venue organisation.