Victoria Gardens

30 Oct 2011: We went for a Sunday walk in the Victoria Gardens and the Meadows. There's a lot of work going on (to do with flood prevention), so it's difficult to find a way into this secret garden. Here's the statue of Victoria, who I am glad to see still has her bronze Art nouveau panels on the plinth.
  This brings back memories as we used to bring the children here often when they were young and we lived at Elm Tree Avenue... and I remember Henry asking if Victoria was holding a teapot.

Overlooking the Victoria Gardens is the new Green St housing development, by Marsh Grochowski, built by Igloo properties.

We took a detour to look at Julian Marsh's house, a remarkable development on a corner (replacing an old meat factory?) forming a terraced edge to the houses in either direction. It is remarkable... and amazing faith in the area that he should build it there. The walk ended with afternoon tea in the Riverbank pub by Trent Bridge.

Vicki and Paul

9 Oct 2011: We took a trip to the Welsh borders (south of Hereford) to visit Vicki and Paul, long standing friends of Sally. They live in this lovely little John Nash house. The bit nearest the road is as Nash built it, and it has been extended a couple of times (they still get passers by stopping by to admire it). They are interested in doing something to improve the energy balance, so we were discussing heat pumps and PV - over a splendid lunch. The best option for PV could be a grid of PV panels in the orchard south of the house. We also heard enjoyable stories about touring with the Pink Floyd in the seventies.
(PS John Nash 1752-1835, master planner of Regent St, Regent's Park, architect to royalty, including Buckingham Palace and completion of the Brighton Royal Pavilion.... see the Wikipedia entry about him. Apparently, they occasionally get groups stopping in the lane to see the house, on a Nash-spotting architectural tour.)

Steve Jobs

7 October 2011: Steve Jobs died after his long illness, on 6th October 2011, his birthday.
    Anybody who know us is probably aware of how important Apple computers have been in our lives. We had the first Macintosh 128 in December 1984, and had it upgraded to a 512k, then to a Mac Plus, then went through the later models, had the Mac 2, the 2fx, the SE30 and SE and LC. We didn't bother with a Quadra or the first models of the Powerbooks, but came back in when the G3s and iMacs were made. I still have the oldest Mac Portable in the UK, brought over to UK from New York in Concorde on the day of its US launch in 1989.
   I ran MacTel BBS for 14 years, having taken it on from Paul Beaumont (when he went to University) and then it sort of stayed with us till 1999. We had the two MacSeptembers in 1987 and 1989 (with David Thomas), and had a magazine called Clipboard, based on the musings of MacTel. The BBS itself ran through several models of computer, starting with the original Mac, then a Dell PC, then back to Macs (using a Performa with a high pile of CD drives and hard disks, and a stack of modems.)
  Then we started dealing in second hand macs, buying them from a company in East London who redistributed machines for Apple Commercial Credit, and this grew to an authorised dealership, Exmicro, selling new computers.
  Ironically, it was the arrival of Steve back to Apple in 1996 that was the beginning of the end for us, as he toughened up the retail outlets, and small dealers disappeared - but the product line improved so vastly, that much of what he now has been credited with - the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad all came after this date. Thinking back to when the Lisa and Mac came out, few remember what a tedious thing MSDOS and the IBM PC was, and going back further to 1976 (or was it 1977) few remember that when the Apple 2 came out, computers were commonly the size of wardrobes or freezers, and needed more space than that for the air conditioning.

Lambley House

View from the South, back garden
The sloping conservatory members have been replaced

1 Oct 2011: On the hottest October day in weather history! We had the Melton Rd Shoppers market in the morning, and DNC did his stint for Rushcliffe Solar on the WB Transition stand.
    Later Dnc went to the Lambley house, designed in 1981-2, for a visit to the owners Mike and Myrtle Felstead. They've spend quite a lot rebuilding the conservatory, and had borrowed the original drawings for reference. There was an element of thermal storage in the building, and it has whole house MVHR since 1981, which must be one of the first ever fitted! How I wish that I had stayed with that energy efficient design idea after that, it seems like 30 years gone round, and here I am back doing thermal storage and heat reclaim.

View from the lane, the north side. The Vee dormer was
a later addition

Cleopatra Ballet

1 Oct 2011:  In the evening we went to the Northern Ballet production of Cleopatra, at the Theatre Royal. This is such an infinitely sad story, especially when compressed into one evening - although in reality, the mixture of triumphant and tragic events took places over 39 years.
See some excerpts on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auk4Oy-cfzk

The evening was warm and the city centre full of cheerful people. Nottingham seems to have a very latin culture in warm evenings, and the night before, Chapel Bar was entirely full of outdoor tables and seating, and people enjoying the evening, at 11pm!