It's all done with mirrors - and magnets...

Anyone remember the Magic Robot Quiz game?

I do, from my nines or tens, perhaps a little earlier. I think I first played it at my Auntie Kate’s with my girl cousins Lindsey, Judy, Alison and Sue. It was made by Merit games and it fascinated me - it must have for me to have happily played with all those girls. I don’t remember exactly when I got my own Magic Robot but it has to have been some time in the sixties, so mine was a very early version. It probably had questions about the Empire, steam locomotion, and ‘old money’ – ‘What percentage of the globe is coloured pink?’ – ‘Which is the faster train: The Flying Scotsman or The Mallard?’ – ‘How many shillings are there in a guinea?’…

It was all so different back then as you can see - just take a look at those children on the lid of the box.

Which ‘Aliens have taken over the planet in the bodies of small humans’ sci-fi, ‘B’, movie did they come out of – ‘Children of the superbly coiffured hair’? Nice teeth though and plenty of them – particularly the older boy - bet he needed a brace in his teens. I also bet that the girl did ballet… ‘Crippled in a terrible pony trekking accident, would poor Mary Fontaine (‘Fonty’, as she was known at the orphanage where she’d been placed by her wicked stepfather) ever dance again?’ Of course she would - and overcome her disability to become Prima ballerina at Covent Garden – and discover that her mother wasn’t dead at all, but merely a little forgetful where crippled daughters were concerned… And why is the other boy, the small one whose mother probably tells his games teacher that he has ‘a weak chest and a tendency towards migraines’, giving the Magic Robot THE finger? Come to that, what is the goofy boy doing with his hands – ‘Here’s a church, here’s a steeple, open the doors, and here’s the people’? I hope so - I don’t like the overexcited look on his face, nor the over-familiar way that the girl is touching his shoulder.

Were we really like that? I don’t remember wearing school uniform ALL of the time. I bet the older boy grew up to be a second hand car dealer, the girl married an ex-RAF pilot who bought a country pub - then proceeded to drink all of the profits, and the younger lad - the cheeky one with the dubious hand signals - became Julian Clarey.

I remember placing the silvery grey plastic Magic Robot in the tray in the centre of the 'Questions' section – then turning the Magic Robot by his head until his pointer was pointing at the question I wanted answered. It was a sort of an early trivial pursuit for kids with eight sets of fourteen questions. I must have learnt all the answers within a week or so – can’t really remember what they were now though.

Now, here is the magic bit… when you lifted the robot from the question area and placed in the centre of the answers area he rotated himself until he pointed at the correct answer! There was a 'mirror' in the 'answers' section (both questions and answers were in two circles each with half of the board), you stood the robot on the mirror and waited for him to point at the right answer. I used to think the mirror was the secret - that it was full of some powerful force energy that moved the robot to point – as it said on the box, the robot ‘ALWAYS gives the RIGHT answer’.

Wow! How Magical is that? It was incredibly magical to me at the time and I spent hours trying to get the robot to answer a question incorrectly – he never did of course, he was 100% right all of the time. But, even though I found this slightly annoying, I must say that never at any time was I tempted to give the Magic Robot the finger, make odd gestures with my hands whilst thrusting out my front teeth, or put on a blonde wig and dress in a gym slip – well maybe this last one just a little.

Merit also released a "World of Sport" version in the seventies - I think that had an Olympic torchbearer to point to the right answers instead of a robot.
Sport? An Olympic torchbearer?

How… dull.

Of course the mystery has been destroyed by the internet… it tells me that it was all done by magnets. The Magic robot wasn’t magic at all - just a single magnet in the plastic robot and two magnets in the cardboard board. The question area simply set the correct offset on the robot's magnet, and then the robot was allowed to freely rotate in the answer area until the magnets aligned - thus giving the right answer.

How… un-magical. How… scientific. How… very mechanical.

Oh well, what else do you expect from a robot – even a magic one?

By the way, I’m bidding for one on e-bay… can’t quite work out why though.

Big fish eat small fish...

I saw them in the sky the other evening - Breugel's fish. I’d stopped for a loo break on the M6 at the Keele services, only thirty minutes or so from home but I couldn’t wait. Besides, it was a good sky, plenty of cumulus… and there they were, almost too perfect, so perfect I had to look twice.

Big fish eat small fish - Breugel would have loved it. That's his drawing at the bottom of the post - see the fish in the sky? I love Breugel, always have. Weird drawing isn't it?

I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at the sky since doing my ‘Dali sky’ post thing, and I mean a lot of time. I can hardly take my eyes off the clouds - I’ve even found myself glancing at them when I’m driving which is not good and something I must stop, but it is so hypnotic… watching the clouds as they move and change.

Did you know that the sky is full of dragons? There are dragons everywhere, you can hardly move in the sky for dragons. Take a look. I bet within a few minutes you see a dragon or two popping their horny heads out of the clouds.

I tried it myself just then and got an elephant's head. Look... an elephant! Amazing.

I’ve taken to carrying a camera around so as not to miss anything... is this the start of an obsession? It’s startling what you see. I saw a dog yesterday but the clouds were moving so fast that by the time I’d waited for a plane to move and got the camera ready the atmospheric currents had begun to morph the dog into a splodge. Can you still see it? I think I can just make it out. Is that a dragon above it… or another elephant’s head? I’m not sure, are you?

Doggone!

Dragons and dolphins… go on take a look. I bet you see a dolphin straight away, maybe even a school, slicing their way through a sea of cloud on their way to becoming cloud again.

And fish.

The sky is so full of fish, big fish, small fish, single fish, shoals of fish. They chase and merge with each other, the big fish eating the small fish, sometimes becoming a bigger fish, a dragon, a dolphin, a dog… gone… back to simple water vapour hanging in the air.

Take some time to look. There could be anything up there.

Big fish eat small fish in the sky…Yes, Breugel would have loved it.

My Fisherman friend...

It can’t be that hard. Can it? Fishing?

I’ve never really got to grips with fishing. I never fished when I was a boy and it wasn’t until we came to Wales that I even thought about it - but with so much sea around… well, it seemed like such a waste. After all, isn’t the sea meant to be FULL of fish?

My dad gave me an old beach casting rod which I took to the beach and snapped within minutes – problems with the bail-arm. Well, how was I to know that you were meant to release it when you cast? I’m sure it didn’t say that in the book.

I’m a tryer though, so straight into town to buy another rod… and a new reel, and some line, and weights, and floats, and funny metal things that looked like fish, and some tinfoil hooky things on some line, and a box, and a hat, and a net… I bought just about everything that they had to sell. Surely I could be a fisherman now? After all, I had the gear.

After losing about twenty quids worth of tackle in an hour I was getting pretty fed up. So, perhaps I should have tied the weights on better… and how was I to know that the sea was full of rocks and weed that had been put there simply to grab my tackle so that I had to cut my line and send yet another fiver’s worth of lead and steel down deep to Davy Jones’s locker.

I kept on trying though. How hard could fishing be?

One evening we took our rods to Pwllheli harbour. It was the end of a lovely sunny day and I was definitely going to catch a fish this time. Holly had brought her little rod along with her and was playing at casting into the water a few feet from shore. How sweet. I on the other hand was casting way into the deep water of the harbour channel. I was bound to catch a fish this time, no doubt, definitely, absolutely a fish, and a big one.

“Dad, dad, I think I’ve caught a fish.” Holly screamed excitedly.
“Don’t be silly, you can’t have. It’s probably just some weed.” I replied in my best ‘I know best’ fisherman voice.

It wasn’t weed though. It was a fish - a little Dab. Still at least it proved that there were fish in the water. It would be my turn next and I was going to catch a whopper, maybe a Sea Bass or at least a Huss (whatever that is).

Two hours later I packed away my fishing gear, put it in the car, and later (after we’d arrived home) I stowed it away in the shed.

And there it has remained to this day, gathering cobwebs in the dark whilst I continue with my fishless existence.

Until…

This weekend I met a chap who has offered to teach me to fish (well actually it is his son who has been tasked with teaching me). We popped around on ‘kayak’ business (no, not now – I’ll tell you later – I’m talking fishing here) and I got talking about how I’d love to catch a fish and how I never had - and of course Gaynor filled in all the hilarious details of my disastrous fishing attempts (thanks Gaynor), and the long and short of it (the outcome) was an offer to teach me to fish.

Deep joy! What a nice man, what a very nice man.

So imagine my disillusionment when, last evening, I received this picture on my phone from said ‘very nice man’ showing me what his son (his fourteen year old son) had caught that afternoon… two, lovely, fresh, juicy, trout.

What is he trying to tell me do you think? Perhaps he’s simply showing me what my future in fishing terms has to hold… but look at his face… is he gloating? Is he shaking those two fish at me? Goading me? Is he saying - ‘Look at these lovely fish and you’ve never caught so much as a minnow – LOSER’?

No, he can’t be. Fishermen aren’t like that are they? They aren’t competitive, or close, or singularly vindictive. They are all very nice men. I’ve seen ‘Extreme Fishing’, Robson Green seems very nice. Yes, that must be it, I’ve taken the picture the wrong way – not goading… encouraging, that’s all. It isn’t a sneer. It’s an open honest smile. It isn’t a taunt. It’s a gesture of welcome to the fraternity of fishermen.

After all, aren’t all fishermen friends? I’m sure that’s what it says on the packet.

Walking on the Moon...

We took a stroll on the beach at Gimlet Rock yesterday.

The rain stopped just long enough for us to take a quick look around Pwllheli’s new Sunday market (only two weeks old, it’ll be interesting to see if it takes off) where I bought a milk-blue Opaline dousing crystal. Why? Well, so that you can read about the adventures of the amazing crystal douser in the future of course! And afterwards we drove up to Gimlet Rock to see what we could see.

Gimlet Rock (Carreg yr Imbill) was once a very large plateau of granite that dominated the coastline just off Pwllheli town. It was extensively quarried for stone paving by the Liverpool and Pwllheli Granite Company in the nineteenth century and today most of Gimlet Rock is in Liverpool and Manchester being walked upon by Liverpudlians and Mancunians respectively. Precious little of it remains at Gimlet Rock which, as the name suggests, is little more than a large rock now.

You reach Gimlet Rock by driving through a council estate, past the harbour, and then through a holiday park crammed with overpriced holiday chalets. Once there though you could be forgiven for thinking that you’d landed on the moon - if it wasn’t for the sound of the waves. It’s a little desolate. The beach and surrounding shoreline are strewn with chunks of granite (big, small, and huge) left over from the mining days. There’s even a large metal thing that looks a bit like a crashed rocket. We come here sometimes in the winter, park up and watch the waves, crabbing boats, beach-casters, and (if we are lucky) the occasional seal.

Today though, we are here for a stroll. So we scramble down the steep, rocky, shore and onto the steep, rocky beach. Sometimes the beach is littered with huge pink clam shells, washed up by the sea, but not today – today there is just rock. Pity really, I was looking forward to collecting some shells and taking them back. We have lots in our garden, at the front, in the gravel – maybe next time we’ll be luckier. We walk along the beach towards the remains of the old wooden jetty. It thrusts out of the gravel like the weathered ribcage of some long dead, abandoned, sea creature.

The ships that used to collect the huge blocks of granite from the jetty are just memories now, tens of decades gone - Manchester and Liverpool are concrete (not granite) built these days – but the jetty is still here. I’ve read that a quarryman’s life was a hard one, accidents frequent, men giving up their lives for the stone – onshore and at sea.

Watch out! Mind that you don’t trip over that big rock. It’s half hidden by the sand.

Look, what’s that? Are those seagulls sitting on the jetty posts? They don’t look like seagulls. What are they? They seem to be looking out to sea – watching for something, waiting for something maybe? They look like people (creatures) waiting expectantly for someone (something) to return… Are they figures? What are they doing here? Do you thi… Ouch! What was that? Something flashed past me. Did you feel it? It almost hit me. It felt sad. Like an old memory, not my memory though – someone else’s memory… someone else’s sad memory, here on the moon with my new dowser’s crystal hot in my pocket and guaranteed to find all things lost - maybe I should take it out and just... WAIT… Did one of them just move?

Come on, let’s leave. The winds getting up. I’m cold. I don’t think we’re wanted here today. We’ll come back another time. Perhaps next time we’ll find some scallop shells.

Summer is a'coming in...

Aquilegia Vulgaris - Mauve

o
o
o
o
o
oo
o
oo
o
oo
o
o
oo
oo
o
o

… Loud now sing cuckoo…

Summer is a’coming in? You’d never guess – yet another wet weekend. Oh, well I suppose that it’s good for the garden, and the garden does seem to be doing pretty well despite the ravages of the winter frosts. I’ve lost both of my Passion Flowers – which is a shame as one of them was almost ten tears old and huge. It was the first thing I planted when we bought the cottage - I bought it from Woolies, so no chance of getting another one from the same place. I also lost my big Marguerite, which I’ve replaced – I wonder if this one will last five years like the other one did? I’ve lost all sorts of stuff. Of course, it’s still very early in the season so there are lots of surprises still to come through… potentially at least – Snake Lilies, Cannas, Begonias, the more slow growing Dahlias - underground things that take a little more warmth to break through. I guess that the warmth will come eventually but not just yet… another wet weekend - and cold, brrrrrrr.

Summer is a coming in? We’ll have to wait and see. I have an old terracotta pot that used to belong to my aunt Nellie. She’s been dead fifteen years or so, but each year the most beautiful Begonia shoots out of the dusty earth in the pot and by mid-summer it’s a tumbling mass of tiny, delicate salmony orange blossoms and light green foliage. It’s survived just about everything – even being shoved inside a hedge for two years and forgotten about until I rediscovered it one day like a long lost friend you bump in to at a motorway services, full of life and eager to reacquaint.

Summer is a coming in? I hope so - my seeds seem to be telling me that it is. I grow from seed every year. I’ve tried all sorts of things, some easy (nasturtiums, I love nasturtiums, I like the taste of the young leaves), and some hard (the Himalayan blue poppy, not even ever a single seedling). This year I’ve bought lots of packets of seed from Leidl and sown them straight into my pots - nothing incredibly exciting, Marigolds, Cosmos, Californian Poppies, Livingstone Daisies, Ipomea (Morning Glory), Sweet Peas. At under thirty pence a packet I thought ‘Why not’, and I was right! If all the seedlings survive I’ll have enough plants for ten of my little Welsh gardens let alone one!

Summer is a coming in? It is seven forty-five on Sunday the tenth of May and I’m sitting at the kitchen table writing this, listening to a Cuckoo, door open, drinking coffee, longing for a cigarette (I gave up five and a half years ago!), and waiting for the rain to stop so that I can go outside and take some cuttings from my Fuchsias. The garden is full of free plants if you take the trouble, so whenever I buy a plant from a garden centre I generally snip off a couple of small cuttings, dip them in some hormone rooting powder, shove them into one of my pots and wait to see if they strike. They generally do. Hurrah for free plants!

Summer is a coming in? My Aquilegias seem to be saying so. A couple of the earlier ones are in flower and there’s the promise of other beauties yet to come judging by the long flower stems that seem to have shot from the foliage over the last week. That’s the great thing about only seeing a garden at weekends – you really see the progress week to week – last weekend there weren’t any flower stems on some of my Aquilegias… next week they could be in flower. You have no idea how excited I am sometimes when I pull onto our drive… or disappointed when I see what the slugs, Lilly bugs, wind, or too hot sun have done to my plants.

Too hot sun? Fat chance!

Summer is a coming in? It’ll get here eventually I guess.
Aquilegia Pixie - White Chocolate

Misty boxes clever...

Misty seems to have developed a thing for boxes.

Over the last few weeks we’ve had various bits of kitchen ‘stuff’ delivered from Lakeland… you know essential stuff, bamboo steamers, a table top gas burner, battery operated teaspoons. Stuff you really need in the well equipped kitchen. Problem is - each time a box arrives Misty claims it and it becomes a ‘Misty house’. At the moment we have three ‘Misty houses’ of various sizes in our kitchen and it’s beginning to look like a warehouse that’s been pillaged by Attila the Hun – shredded empty boxes everywhere. It has to stop or we’ll run out of space…

“Ha! The collection grows and my master-plan begins to take shape. I shall soon be free! If only they knew what I was really up to… silly keepers, they think that I’m playing with these boxes… they think they are mere toys, playthings for me to amuse myself with. Poor deluded fools – these boxes are my chance of freedom, these boxes are my stairway to heaven.

As the late great Freddy Mercury sang – ‘I want to break free. I want to break freeeee. I want to break free from your lies. You're so self-satisfied, I don't need you. I want to break free. Mu-Mu knows, Mu-Mu knows I want to break free’.

Hear that Foodies? Hear that Hisfault? ‘I want to break free from your lies’; no more being told that the vet thing - ‘won’t hurt a bit’ - and you can’t fob me off with fish guts telling me that it's gourmet cat food and prime cod any longer. I don't need you, I can look after myself... once I get out of this prison.

They know that I’m a cat, they know that cats are night creatures - I want to go out at night, but will they let me? Will they Mu-Mu. They’d rather keep me safe and sound indoors at night. ‘It’s for your own good’ they tell me in that self-satisfied ‘we know everything’ kind of way. Stupid keepers. What do they know? They’re keeping me prisoner. They’re no better than the hissing Guards in a second world war POW camp! Perhaps I should call them Adolph and Eva.

I’ve been watching all the essential filmography - ‘The Great Escape’, ‘The Wooden Horse’, ‘Colditz’, and I think I’m about ready. I’ve even got the lingo… ‘Top hole old boy. Gerry won’t snafu this one - I’m not going under… I’m going over! By the time Fritz realises I’m out I’ll be home and dry. Chocks away! Blighty here I come! Tally ho and toodle pip!’ I really must remember never to answer if anyone asks if I want a light for my cigarette – don’t want to give the game away like that stupid Gordon Jackson... Oh, if only I had a motorbike, I could probably jump it out of that open window if I could get enough speed up.

Anyway, good job that they do leave the top window open at night, at least it gives me a fighting chance. They don’t believe that I’ll be able to jump up to get out of it, but once I have enough boxes it’ll be kitten’s play to build a stairway and then up I’ll go and… I'LL BE FREE OUTSIDE AT NIGHT TO ROAM THE DARK STREETS AS I PLEASE.

Freedom to all felines!

Come along everybody; join me in my freedom song - Free Misty! Free Misty! Free Misty! Free Misty!”

... oh well, perhaps all this clutter will put Gaynor off buying any more gadgets. After saying that though, I saw her looking at an electric mandoline in the Lakeland catalogue this evening. I expect that means Misty will soon have another ‘Misty House’ to play with. Oh well, better that she’s happy indoors than wanting to be out all night…

What a day! – three and final

So, as my Sunday post briefly mentioned, first prize in my category at Nefyn show. Wow!

Well maybe not so ‘Wow!’ actually... time to tell you what really happened, time to own up and give you the whole story.

It had stopped raining by the time I got to the craft and produce tent to see how I’d done. There it was that small red card… I’d got a first! Well done me! Wait a minute though, where were all the other pieces of hand-painted glass? I looked around – embroidery, crochet, beading, jewellery - across the way - jam, cakes, biscuits – to the left - flower arrangements, single stems, petal pictures – the right - photographs, pottery, decoupage. No other glass though.

I’d come first in my class, but it was a class of one. I was the only entry.

My spirits became as grey and low as the clouds outside the tent. I hadn’t really won at all. I knew that the judges could have decided not to place me, or give me a second, third, fourth, commended even, but I was still the only entry – it didn’t seem right that I’d got a first somehow. How could I come first when there was no competition?

Worst was to come though. I hadn’t realised that there was an actual ‘step up to the front, big round of applause’ presentation. I thought I’d just pick up my glass and leave… quietly, without any fuss, incognito.

I didn’t want to go up and get my prize. Firstly, I didn’t feel that I should – after all I was the only entry in my class - that wasn’t winning. Secondly, all the other winners seemed to be children and old ladies. There is a story around how and why I got into glass painting which I will relate to you at some point… but glass painting... flowers - how embarrassing… and the room was full of bearded sheep farmers.

I squirmed as I waited for my turn to come. It was too embarrassing. I was about to walk out without my prize when the judge called the winner of the embroidery forward.

‘Hefyn Roberts’ he announced. A big, burley, bearded farmer stepped forward, he was beaming as he took his small, square, brown envelope. So I wasn’t the only man to enjoy doing ‘crafty’ things – and his ‘thing’ was sewing! Thank God for that.

I gave my £2 prize to Holly. She’s doing a sponsored walk in a few weeks. I kept the award certificate though.

So that’s that. Nefyn show over for another year. It took ages to scrub the re-admittance stamp off my hand – they must have used indelible ink.

Perhaps next year I’ll bake some scones – the competition is stiffer.