A Bridge Too Mar

NO! That Is NOT A Typo

<finger hovers dangerously close to the Remote Nuclear Detonator>.  It is an hilarious pun, I'll have you know, making reference to "A Bridge Too Far", and I'm going to add a photograph of same.  Well, actually I'm going to coax Art to do it with a gentle touch of cattle-prod <loud zapping noise>

British tourists causing property damage

     For Lo! we are back with the Severn Railway Bridge again, the one that was closed when a ship collision caused two spans to collapse.  There was a debate about whether or not to repair it, because it would cost £350,000 (we are talking 1960 pounds here, multiply by ten for current prices).  The county council bit the bullet and decided to repair - at which point an oil tanker was carried by the local tides - always dangerously strong on this reach of the river - into the bridge, badly damaging it again.     Art!

     Note the policeman present to stop people throwing themselves o'er the side.

     At this point the council threw their hands in the air and gave up.  Time for demolition!  Which would only cost £250,000, whoopee, and so they put the process out to tender.  The demolition contract was eventually awarded to a right bunch of cowboys called Nordman Construction, who tootled into action with a floating crane capable of lifting 400 tons.  Art!

     Rather than bother to break up the spans, these lazy bottomholes simply dumped them whole into the river, hoping that they'd break apart under their own weight.

     Sadly not.  This was craftsman engineering from the Thirties; the spans remained intact for the most part, lying on the bottom of the river and constituting a navigation hazard.

     We're not done yet!  Nordman vanish from the records after their less-than-stellar performance, and we get another vessel attempting to finish the demolition work: the Severn King.  This was a former car-ferry converted, in the broadest sense of the word, to a demolition vessel.  Bad luck or carelessness struck again and - Art?

Aground and holed

     She (yes 'she' despite being a King) was deemed to be too badly damaged to either salvage or repair and she was cut up for scrap in 1070.

     You can't say the Severn Railway Bridge was blessed with good luck, can you?

More Rails Without Fails

A passing entry on the BBC's website - the font of all that's fit to be writ - piqued Conrad's interest.  Art!

     You might think Conrad would sneer at a nerdy chap who took eight years to build a scale replica of the Calder Valley railway in the 1980s - not a bit of it!  Of course - obviously! - he had far too much time on his hands, yet he's got a practical outcome and the award of Britain's Biggest Model Railway.  It required three trucks to move it all, VERRRRY CAREFULLY, and when assembled - Art?

     

     Our Hero hid the truth from his girlfriend, pretending that he was a wine merchant, as he considered that a lot more impressive than a railway modeller.  I dunno - after eight years a wine merchant would merely have an enormous collection of empty bottles.  Horses for courses and trains for brains.

Conrad Is ANGRY!  O SO ANGRY!

So what's new?  I have a boiling broth of brouhaha, lightly seasoned with mercury and arsenic, all ready to ladle out, because I've gotten a backlog of (entirely legitimate) complaining about Codewords to get through, so big a backlog, in fact, that we'd better crack on with it as of now.

"UMBRAGE": How delightfully ironic! because this is what Conrad takes at the pseudo piffle producers who constantly infest the Codewords with obsolete, archaic, foreign and exotic words.  I cannot use the Remote Nuclear Detonator for the present as I have Repetitive Strain Injury from hammering it so hard so often.  Bah!

A lovely lady and a splendid role model

"DICTUM": NO SNIGGERING AT THE BACK!  Really, what is this defined as in my Collins Concise?  "A formal or authoritative statement."  OR "A popular saying or maxim."  Popular?  When was the last time you heard one of your friends say in conversation " - yeah that's a dictum -" at which point their audience collapses in smutty laughter.  Art!

A victum, which is close enough

"NOESIS":  You WHAT? Defined as "Of or relating to the mind".  Do I mind?  You bet your Kreplach! Dog Buns I do!  Art?

Brothers but no sis*.

     I could go on.  Mind you, if I did then I think a stroke would be in the offing.  Time to let the blood pressure descend from stratospheric levels and the red mist recede to a gentler pink haze.

Cor!  More "Tormentor"

Because nobody's bothered to Comment on this EXTREMELY DARK AND ADULT piece of long-form literature, which is to say that everybody is entranced by it and wants it to continue to a conclusion, which is great for Conrad - ups the word count with next to no effort.

Next he pulled the boy’s head back by the hair.

‘I do not care if I live or die, you ******* miserable worm,’ he hissed.  ‘Get that?  Understand?  You might come at me with knives next time but I promise I will rip your ******* throat out with my bare teeth!’

               He meant it, too.  With a final kick at the bleeding, sobbing youth he started back to his house.

               ‘You are so ******* dead!’ threatened one boy, safe at thirty yards distance.  Louis ran at him with the rock in a blind rage, only for the boy to easily outdistance him, to begin with.  He continued on, chasing the youth up Kensington Avenue, then onto Baytree Avenue, then into back streets and alleyways, where he finally gave up ten minutes later.  By that time the teenager had stopped being threatening, and started to worry about getting his head bashed in, and how to get away from the madman in pursuit to get back home safely, and whether he could keep running any longer, and the stitch in his side.

              

The afternoon promised to be just as empty and dead as the morning had threatened, with the added prospect of more news coming to light about Jennifer.   Hopefully not the collection of cliché’s strung together that the local press felt compelled to construct, in lieu of proper reporting.

               Louis felt a curious and unpleasant duality about Jen.  She had been murdered.  Nobody – yet – had admitted it nor stated it explicitly, but she had been murdered.  That was a fact; he knew it.   He seemed able to accept that she was dead, yet unable to truly admit that, come next Tuesday evening, she wouldn’t come skipping into the house for another session on Shakespeare or Elliot.

               His main task was to hacksaw the battered coffee table into disposable lengths and bin it, ruefully wondering if the police constables would have passed on what he did in a fit of temper to the CID – and answered his own question by stating yes, and it wouldn’t look good.

               The DNA profiling stuff would clear him, however long it took for the stuff to get processed – science wasn’t his forte, that would have been –

     There you go, you can only push a person so far before they snap, and Luma was on the brink of cracking anyway.  Things get stranger before they get better**.

Finally -

We've hit the Compositional Ton, so I'm going to end with another of those astronomy shots that come up in the end credits of "The Twilight Zone'".  Art!

NGC 891

     Here you have another galaxy in the constellation of Andromeda, almost precisely edge-on.

     And with that, Vulnavia, we are very much done.

*  And I'm not remotely sorry.

**  If they get better.  No promises.