Looks and resting

 

The last week has been somewhat cold, temperatures often around the two to three degree mark during the day with wind chill in the minuses so perhaps it might of surprised some that I had bought something from the past.

It took some agonizing over it, but after a pretty long hiatus I bought a "proper" duffle coat with a modern microfibre lining with two deep pockets and zipped small inner ones after being without one from the age of sixteen and three quarters.

My old one had Beatles and Rainbow badges fastened on it on the left top in a  neat line and wooden toggles to which you fasten it up with and was bottle green in colour.

This one is grey with tough plastic toggles and an inner zip to fasten the front right the way up to keep draughts out and still feels hefty and as warm as toast.

It'll go with the reminder of my uniform.

Over the Christmas period I did watch a few Pantomimes on Cbeebies, the BBC tv channel for sevens and under and this, the current one was one of several simply cos with all the groan up noise about Covid, I needed to escape and get back to just following a story getting right in it.

Way back in time certainly at school from the earliest days many of us can recall being introduced to the standards about how we presented and the importance of correcting things like a untucked shirt or socks that were minded to fall down although I still think garters should of been mandatory as they do help.

Sock elastic is weird stuff, I have some socks that seem to stay up for long with no aids and adjustments on my part and yet others that I pretty much have to wear garters with as they'd be coming down within minutes of a brisk walk. 

Portable recorders

The odd time or two I mentioned something that was very much a part of my teenage years cos it pretty well went everywhere with me but only in passing.

The ITT Studio 720 went back and forth to boarding school with me because it was portable stereo cassette recorder that would plug into a stereo to play or record from records or the radio with a simple five pin "Din" connector but would run off batteries as well as mains.

Featuring both an internal speaker and a crazy German five pin 240 degree headphone socket that needed an adapter it was as much at home in the dorm playing back albums or recording live music with a pair of microphones as wired to my hifi at home.

I had this until the mid nineteen eighties but that all in one portable idea remained lodged in my head simply because it's so practical.

Moving on, there were special "field" recorders built for professional uses like news gathering, on the spot music recording etc made to replace the transportable Uher and Nagra reel to reel models used by the likes of the BBC that used cassettes instead.

They were like my ITT but pretty much on steroids, built to survive anything made by people such as Marantz and Sony.

The Sony TC-D5 was originally introduced in late 1978/9 with a special drive system to ensure that even when swung around there was no wobble on the sound and like all professional recorders has a minus 20db limiter in the microphone circuit you can switch in so the input from a loud rock group captured from the microphone doesn't distort before you set the record level.

That is a difference between my ITT that had both a automatic and manual record level but no such limiter and its mechanics were less advanced.

The model shown is the TC D5M which was a revised version from 1980 which allowed for the use of Metal oxide tape which was introduced in that period and as a result had Sendust and Ferrite heads fitted rather than the ferrite ones of the previous model to get get the best out of such tape.

Again my ITT could only handle type I "normal" tapes and using a auto sensor type II "chrome".

Being a Sony it also could handle type III ferrochrome tapes but they tended to be less popular and with tape advances in types I and II when it came to performance, increasingly outdated.

That is one reason why I bought a TC D5M because it does everything that ITT did but better up to and including having Dolby B noise Reduction which to be honest I tend not to be a fan of but is useful for any tapes recorded with it.

The small Sony WMD6 Pro series of pocket sized field recorders of the late 1980's offered the then new Dolby C but apart from having a few peak indicators, dolby C is incompatible with machines without and even more susceptible to audible decoding errors than B when played on one that does feature it.

Mine was bought with a leather carry case that allows full hand control of function with a section that gives access to the cassette tray to change the tape and a European mains adapter for 230 volt .

It has a five centimetre speaker for mentoring and adjustable headphone output apart from standard gold plated RCA line in and out sockets

There is just no comparison between the small and somewhat crude scale on the ITT's and these precise, back light ones that also double up as battery indicator although both machines used Volume Unit or Vu (known to some of us as "virtually useless" because they underread transients) metering rather than peak levels although the Sony has a single peak that flashes at +7db.

Those of us brought up in that era learned to read them, never straying over 0db which is helped on the Sony by a optional limiter that does carefully prevent any sudden peaks from overloading the tape progressively unlike one I knew on a National Panasonic home deck that just just cut the level right back to a very low setting which was both crass apart from being ill conceived.

The transport is wholly mechanical which was common place in the late nineteen seventies before solenoids, touch buttons and remotes came in apart from being top loading which was to lose favour for home decks as people stacked their hifi systems with the turntable on the top.

In terms of performance it approaches on the record/replay cycle a very high standard of reproduction equalling many expensive home decks even if this only has two unlike say most Nakimichi's that had  separate record and replay heads for off the tape monitoring.

As someone who just loves tape technology I hope you can see just why I love these machines.

2021 Review

 A day to go before New Year and I guess it is time to take a bit of look around the crazy world of this year we are actually leaving.

Year started two steps back from where we had left it because of  rises in Covid which resulted in restrictions almost as severe as last year coming in to new year, heck we couldn't officially celebrate new year even at a Public House or with friends in your own cos we weren't meant to have other households indoors.

For much of the first few months of the year of necessity I had to stay local exploring, getting "playtimes" in where I could rather like last year although the vaccination program started in the last days of twenty twenty one got rapidly going with me having my first one in February, a year after contracting it getting second and booster jabs across the year.

If last year had seen a sharp drop in terms of any attempt to fake being "adult" the combination of stress, lack of any real adult engagement and struggling with pre-existing conditions pulled me right back.

A person looking very much as if they'd come from prep school in school uniform and short trousers was vaccinated with Daddy with him and increasingly any notion of being functionally grown up evapourated on the street as people saw a tall schoolboy instead.  

Things started to get better as we got into the Summer to the point we couldn't just travel further but stay with people outside of households so i went exploring in the Lake District four four days neatly all in full school uniform.

Things that kept me just about sane included comics which I had got organized the previous year such as my Beano, Phoenix, Commando and AdventureBoxMax but a new magazine that was in with the Beano when I got back from going away by and connected to Animal Planet tv channel as a sample.

I took out a subscription to that which meant most weeks I had things to look forward to reading and finding out stuff about which keep the worse of the relentless Covid facts and figures everyday, week after week on the news making me feel any more downbeat as many of us found ourselves feeling off.

I mentioned how I became more still just a little schoolboy but one thing did happen was a well know classic uniform shop was able to place a special order for short trousers in more adult sizes with the white lining we had grown up with rather than the now regular black. 

I had two pairs both adjusted and believe me the view of a "boy" with short trousers with an inside leg of just three inches like I had when I was ten left a clear message I had for all intents and purposes left the adult world and was just happy to be a boy subject to them again.

I had never felt strongly "grown up" and just dropping any pretence to anything other than a tall schoolboy of young years felt just brilliant as I could be more mature as him rather than attempting and failing to function as a grown man.

I'm just an adult little boy today.

Christmas Day Edition

This year Christmas is a little near normal even if it was a close run thing just a fortnight ago so so long as we take care we're having one this time that does including seeing a few people.

I'm a adult little boy so Christmas is always Smol, very much like it was as a child  cos in the end I'm still more like that.

The Beano has been a staple of my life from original boyhood, still reading it today but I prefer to read older annuals such as this which no doubt I had and promptly got tossed away a few years later, while having the current Christmas 68 page special for the comic as it is today.

The Dandy is no longer published as a weekly comic as much as I'd love to see a monthly or bi monthly edition published so we make do with a Summer Special and this, 2022's annual with many of the characters from the past in new adventures.

From the sixtieth anniversary of the Beano and Dandy, D C Thomson have produced a number of specials and themed annual compilations from the vaults showcasing cartoonists and characters and this is their latest looking at art and craft based classic cartoon strips from the past.

That Korky strip which I think was in a annual originally is a lovely touch.

Rupert is an institution and this is a mixture of reprints from past annuals and new stories for twenty twenty two.

Four Swedes and no broccoli reunited this year for a last album  very much in the style of their 80's albums with no concessions to current trends and this was the lp version I had for Christmas for my collection. I quite like it.

Interestingly there was a pre-recorded cassette version issued too!

Main present this year was a Hornby OO gauge British Rail Class 3F "Jinty" 0-6-0 Tank locomotive to go on the layout which was used by in great boxed condition

That mirrors one of the first Christmas presents I had which was a plastic trainset with locomotive coaches 

I had some money to spend when I next get away and some replacement polo shirts.

The Pause before Xmas edition

It was a more agreeable week in so far as weather went from the previous weeks gales and very cold conditions so as I've been recovering from a poorly spell at least I had been able to out, obviously taking precautions to take in how Christmas here is.

There were some interesting sculpture's about in peoples gardens, a bit less plastic, perhaps being a reflection of the better position variant aside we are in compared to last year.

Santa needs a helper and here he is although it is unfortunate the Gas Meter is a bit intrusive on this property.

The Christmas edition of the Beano dated 17 December with supplement and poster is here as is the Christmas Phoenix plus obviously Decembers Match of the Day, Animal Planet and Adventuremax+ to read between visits and going on errands like we do.

Things aren't much different from when that Scorcher! and Score! was published although that was one I only saw at school in the comic box for wet dinner times that we'd share out between us.

Yesterday was the Blue Peter Crimbo special, which is something I always looked forward to ever since the nineteen seventies.

This blog will be taking a pause until just after Christmas when there will be a Christmas special probably shared with the other blog.

The last order of business here is to wish you all a Happy Christmas and all the best for the New Year.

Regards, Chris.

The season begins...

It is Friday but as it was been both a very stormy and probably will be snowy for good measure midweek this is being typed ahead of publication date.

Another reason is Wednesday is booster rocket injection day so I want to ensure I'll have a few clear days to recover from the grogginess that can bring.

Back to post and it is starting to look more like Christmas about with houses including ours sprouting various lights, seasonal creatures such as Reindeer and posters have appeared for a community church based Christmas show in three sittings no less!

We have our community Christmas tree put and funded by us, the people this year as the Council decided not to for reason too wrapped in political talk I prefer to keep off blog just said they weren't doing it.

Frankly I much prefer reading this which I had pre-ordered not being a regular issue included in my subscription a while back which is the Christmas special rather like the Summer ones with all new adventures.

I usually save them unlike the majority of regular comics simply cos I'd never have the space for all of them.

Before I forget, we will pause briefly after next Friday for a Christmas special which will be synchronized with the other blog.

The long and short bite of it

This weekend I would think is a bit better for not having the snow storms and the minus degree c temperatures although I liked it once it had settled making for great snowballs and snowman building.

It is of course the countdown to Christmas which curiously enough lead to two advent calendars this year, a Paw Patrol one with a colouring book and this that unexpectedly arrived from Dad of all people.  

I quite like white choco, it doesn't seem to give me as many migraines as regular dairy or especially the dark sort.

It appears AP's specially made white lined short trousers commissioned in the late Spring from David Luke are selling so well stocks for certain sizes appear to be close to selling out which does indicate the appeal among the stores users for that lining colour.

Allied that is the whole question around short trouser lengths as those in that exclusive batch are at seven inches which on taller boys still looks more like short trousers rather than say, those of this boy which appear to be touching the top of his knee cap!

Many of modern short trousers tend to be just above or at the knee.

These while a bit longer than some of us wore to me are much more short trousers with a fair bit of skin between the centre of the knee and the leg of them probably around the five to six inch mark.

The only bone of contention I have is those ankle socks which are only suitable for summer,  for the rest of the year at least long socks would make more sense. 

This was how it was when short trousers were uniform items at school, pretty much for the nineteen seventies and early eighties and while for me the pair from AP was taken up to emulate those I wore then and being consistent with remaining that boy today.

For me, it just feels right.