a heartwarming welcome indeed!

now then, where were we? ah yes, TOWPATH TREASURES.

in my haste or whatever i have clean forgot to show you the first proper bottle i dug out of the towpath. i was walking along and this is what i saw…

i think that’s worth a second glance, don’t you? let’s dig it up…

here it comes! i hope it’s not broken!

hooray! it’s not broken at all!

and what we have here is what’s known as a hamilton. it’s from fleet’s of walworth and would have held lemonade or mineral water. it would have had a cork held in place with wire, like a champagne bottle. it would have gone into the navigation in the pound downstream of the anchor pub at pyrford lock and then had a nice lie down on the bottom for a few decades. then it got dredged up and put on top of the towpath. then the towpath wore away leaving it partly visible and then i saw it and dug it up.

last weekend i magged up a brand new windlass from triggs lock and then i walked about on the towpath a bit downstream of the the new inn at send. i picked up a few odds and ends and here’s some of them…

the little bottle once held lemonade crystals. it is an eiffel tower lemonade made by foster clark ltd of maidstone. my one is in what we call aqua glass although there are a few other colours that they come in. it’s not rare but i like it. i could just see a corner of it sticking up from the towpath and it’s come up in quite good condition.

i put my photographs of my finds on a bottle diggers (out of tips) site and one fellow said that he has been digging for 15 years and never found an unbroken hamilton. i just like touching the things from days gone by. that old metal button is probably victorian. it says ‘t clark - guildford’ on it. i like to think that it was off some kind of boatmanwear garment. the little weight i don’t know. it has ‘1/4′ stamped into it and a kind of dovetail groove below and a hole a the top to hang it by? is it old? i don’t know, it was just there waiting for me to dig it up.

oh, and you remember that windlass? i sold it yesterday for a fiver so my magnet has now paid for itself.

here’s to treasure hunting and welcome to my blog! what do you mean ‘beware of the bullSHIT more like’? that’s not very funny. the dogs won’t bite, they’re just being friendly… wait!… come back… i didn’t mean it… there isn’t really a bull………

i was walking along with my eyes glued to the towpath. i found an 1879 farthing by doing just this the other day. i saw what looked like a jug handle sticking slightly out of the ground and so i dug it up. and look what it was. a grappling hook.

i think that this is the most interesting thing that i have dug up so far. i have dug up lots of broken things and lots of rubbish things and two united dairies school milk bottles and one united dairies half pint milk bottle and even one south suburban cooperative society half pint milk bottle with a great big wide mouth on it. but this is the most interesting thing so far.

this is what it looks like now. i gave it a bit of a scrub in warm soapy water but the sand on it seems to have been glued on as if it had been on the seabed or something. there is some writing on it, either stamped or engraved and this writing has provided a key for the glued on crud. now i will have to research the restoration of objects. i can’t tell what metal it is but it’s not corroded - anyway, it’s my little project for the moment.

now then, dorrie, this smoking malarkey.
i found the allen carr book very helpful. it doesn’t have horrible pictures in or bang on about health issues. you are supposed to keep smoking as you read it. if you would like to let me have your address i will send you my copy. i disobeyed mr carr’s instructions and stopped when i was halfway through the book but i had learned a few things in the windmill that i applied to myself.

i asked myself what really kept me smoking and i decided that it was because smoking made me look cool. how pathetic. after i had finished laughing at myself i was just about a nonsmoker.

all smokers stop smoking every day. every time a fag is stubbed out you have stopped smoking. what is the point of lighting another one? if you light it then you are a smoker again. if you want to be a nonsmoker you just have to stop smoking, how hard you want to make it for yourself is up to you.

apart from the money, what i have noticed about not smoking is not having to go out in the pouring bloody rain, EVERY DAY, just to buy expensive fags. if it’s raining i can just stay in, have a cup of tea and listen to the rain on the window. aaahhhhh, lovely.

good luck!

just some things, nothing important.

today was haircut and beard trim. hair was cut, number 1 all over. aren’t i brown? yes i am. why do people say ‘brown as a berry’ when berries aren’t brown? nut brown is ok though, you can say that.

trouty insisted that my beard got a trimming. she wanted a pointy look like that adopted by tsar nicholas II. i would prefer a mad look like that adopted by viv stanshall, a beard that is so long it can have a knot tied in it. cunningly i mentioned that there was no pirate called ’shortbeard’. trouty replied that neither was there a pirate called ‘longbeard’. touche. the battle of the beards has been left at trimmed sides and only a bit off the very chinular whiskers.

the next thing to irritate me was the lurpak spreadable. i expect that you, like me, are a very reasonable fellow and that you, like me, want to see the lurpak spreadable being consumed in an orderly fashion. you, like me, would probably use the knife to reduce the level of the lurpak spreadable like the water in your bath when you pull the plug out. what you do not want to see is that some very rough fellow, probably dressed in a sack and with shoes made out of wood has arrived, by time machine, from the middle ages and gouged out the lurpak spreadable with a mattock.

and guess what, yesterday right i had to go to the hospital to see my keyworker who is a very nice man indeed and he makes me very happy. i have to see him at the abraham cowley unit which is a special part of the hospital for mad people and drug addicts and where you can still smoke because mad people love to smoke.
anyway, what happened right is that i was waiting in the waiting area of the boozological section and various staff members came and went and i know quite a lot of them and they know me and everyone that works there loves me and thinks i am so great because i am so great and also because i haven’t had a drink for 6 months and no fags for 12 weeks.
and one of the staff members said ‘oh, hello! you look well, how are you? lovely to see you…’ and then came the unsuspected bit…
‘oh and (staff member x) showed me your website…’

i had no idea that they might have looked for my blog and found it. i sure hope that it doesn’t get me in trouble. that’s the trouble with this blogging malarkey. it’s not that i lie (i don’t. well, not much i suppose) but more like how you might say something to one person that you wouldn’t say to another.
i remember when i was married and had the kiddies and all that and my wife and i had visitors and they were in the sitting room and my wife and i were in the bedroom and she was talking and just when she was starting to say… and i pointed to the baby monitor that was switched on and relaying all this to our guests. as i recall it wasn’t bad, you know. it was just that sudden feeling of being overheard and that’s what it was like realising that staff at the windmill had read my blog because i never gave them the address of the site.

so here’s to the staff at the windmill; i don’t know what you did but it worked for me so far. you worked a miracle and saved my life.

and for that i thank you.

i haven’t blogged for quite a while and have quite got out of the habit. never mind, let me ease myself back into the thing by stealing some stuff from a bottle digging site i visit.
thanks to rick irving all the way from adelaide in south australialand who says that the following are real error messages displayed to unfortunate compluterisers in japan and that these messages are written in the form of a haiku.

i’m not sure whether i believe that or not and i don’t remember having seen these before. if you’ve seen them before well, EXCUUUUUSE MEEEEEEE, and, as rick says, aren’t these better than ‘your computer has performed an illegal operation’?

1. the web site you seek cannot be located, but countless more exist.
2. chaos reigns within. reflect, repent and reboot. order shall return.
3. program aborting: close all that you have worked on. you ask far too much.
4. windows nt crashed. i am the blue screen of death. no one hears your screams.
5. yesterday it worked. today it is not working. windows is like that.
6. your file was so b

how ironic. at this point my fucking useless rasss claaht compluter disconnected and my nascent blog disappeared into cyber space. but i did not cry bitter tears, i used ‘autorecover’ which simong had fitted for me and lo, my blog WAS recovered and i was able to continue. like this:

6. your file was so big. it might be very useful. but now it is gone.
7. stay the patient course. of little worth is your ire. the network is down.
8. a crash reduces your expensive computer to a simple stone.
9. three things are certain: death, taxes and lost data. guess which has occurred ?
10. you step in the stream but the water has moved on. this page is not here.
11. out of memory. we wish to hold the whole sky, but we never will.
12. having been erased, the document you’re seeking must now be retyped.
13. serious error. all shortcuts have disappeared.
14. screen. mind. both are blank.

thanks rick! i feel all full of zen now and am at one with the universe. and i didn’t even cry when i suffered connectivity issues. again.

rick concludes with a quote that he ascribes to an unknown entrepreneur. i guess it’s about progress or something. i like it though, it made me think for a while…

the stone age didn’t end because they ran out of stones.

cheerio, i’ll try not to leave it so long next time.

(p.s. - i’d like to borrow a metal detector, a good one, to see if i like detecting metal. please let me know if you are the sort of person who has a metal detector, does not much care for the detection of metal but DOES like lending things to people on a sort of flanders/simpson basis)