The annual Friends of Battersea Park BBQ at the Zoo event took place last Monday 13th June and we were lucky enough to be able to go – the event was sold out.
We enjoyed a private ‘after-hours’ view of the animals and play area, and the BBQ food and entertainment was excellent.
As you can see from the photo, the event was very well attended, thanks in part to the very good weather.
Although there weren’t many children along, there were entertainments laid on, as if the zoo itself wasn’t enough. Here a local facepainter generously gave her time to help the fundraising efforts.
Taking advantage of the sunshine, we took a trip on a Thames Clipper riverboat from the London Eye to Greenwich. The pier at the London Eye serves both this commuter-style service and the tourist boats – the Clipper is significantly faster though even with the extra stops.
At Greenwich, the Cutty Sark is still shrouded in scaffolding after the terrible fire last year. We took the kids to the National Maritime Museum and enjoyed the Toy Ships exhibition currently showing there.
What caught my eye, one pictured here as No.5, are some Stirling-engine powered boats. The description for this example reads:
“Hot-air-propelled warship and box. J William Sutcliffe founded his sheet-metal works near Leeds in 1885. Producing its first toy boar in 1920, the company would pioneer the production of boat hulls from a single pressing. This boat, one of their long-running warship designs, is powered by a simple water-filled engine heated by a small methylated-spirit burner.”
Pop Pop Boat £4.50 at NMR
In the shop on the way out I picked up a pop-pop boat, powered by candle. On test runs in the bath we found it a bit underpowered so changed the candle for some solid parafin tablets. Lots of dire warnings about how it isn’t a toy and not suitable for children, which is a shame as it makes a lovely sound as it chugs around.
For those of you with your own workshop sheds, here’s a great article about how pop-pop boats work and how to build one yourself.
Natural History Museum - Darwin Centre cocoon building
The Natural History Museum seems more popular than I ever remember it. We visited at about 3pm on Sunday and there was a queue from the door right down the ramp to the gates on Cromwell Road. Fortunately the queue was fast moving (no ticket desk after all) so it only took about 10 minutes to get to the entrance.
Just like the Science Museum next door, the Natural History Museum has been updating its layout. Old favourites like the blue whale are still gathering dust but they’ve added a massive concrete cocoon exhibit which features bugs on pins and real live scientists that you can verbally poke as you tour.
What I remember most about the museum from visting as a child, apart from the dinosaur in the main entrance, and the whale, is all the buttons that you could push. These exhibits still exist but of course seem tame by today’s standards. This new exhibit has a host of up to date interactive features, plus if you have ‘lively’ children with you, you’ll be glad of the unclutted outside space they can run around in afterwards.
As Jeanette is in middle of creating a cookbook at the moment I thought I’d list some places you can get a book printed (obviously this is for short runs)
Although I use Textpad editor for search & replace functions generally, it does not extend to changing filenames. At work I needed to replace part of a filename in a number of PHP files. I found a very useful utility for doing a find and replace on large numbers of filenames at once. It’s called FileMonkey and you can get a copy here.
can now ‘lend’ their books to other Kindle users, it was announced today. The new feature allows e-books bought for the Kindle platform to be lent out for 14 days, delivered by email and springing back to their owners automatically after the period is up. The books can also be read on free Amazon e-book readers for PC, Mac and Mobiles. Amazon explains how.
I’ve started work converting my fathers spreadsheets of our family ancestry into electronic (and searchable form).
There’s been a huge amount of interest and development in online tools for tracing genealogy over the last 10 years, indeed it’s something the internet was almost made for. Unfortunately so far, little of the digitised data is freely available online (though freely available in public libraries). It seems as though the agencies which held the data have allowed monopoly providers to sell the data in return for their financial contribution to digitising the data.
The exception I’ve found has been Google Books – digitised versions of out of copyright books.
Searching on Google for unusual names, or a name with a date if you have it can also be fruitful. I found a website about a particular village where an ancestor had been the vicar and there was lots of additional information there.
List of Useful Tools
TNG – software used to build the site. Requires PHP Hosting.
MyHeritage – Desktop software, free version, used to produce printable vertical family trees.
EzeePlan – very helpful printers who produced a 2x A0 size print on a single roll of paper. Very good value too.
