Author: Seb Palmer

After watching someone in America build a popsicle-stick house, on YouTube (below), I decided I’d like to make an architectural model myself. Of what? Well, why not try and built our art studio? And why not do so as a complete re-build?

I’ve been contemplating continuing with the bodged repairs to what we inherited for quite some time. But I’ve been lacking any energy or motivation to do so (never mind funds or materials).

All of a sudden I’ve felt the urge to do something creative. So, why not make a model of a totally new art-studio build? Thereby attaining the freedom to try out a completely new design.

I arrived at 1:20 scale partly due to it making a small enough model that it won’t be a problem storing it. And partly ‘cause the lollipop sticks I bought will work best, for me, at that scale.

So far I’ve just drawn up some rough scale drawings of the various carcassing panels for each of the four walls. I’ve labelled them A through D: A is the North-facing ‘front’; B & C are the East- and West facing sides; D is the South-facing ‘back’.

My new design incorporates several doors I’ve collected, via Freecycle (or just general scavenging!), all of which let in more light, via numerous glass panes, than is currently available. And I’ll add lots more natural light via numerous windows. Some of the latter could be floor to ceiling.

*Not according to what’s physically viable. But due to current building regulations.

I’ve also gone for a new dual-pitch roof, to maximise height and indoor space.

It’s interesting how doing this – sketching out a design, building a model, etc. – can help one refine one’s ideas. For example, my first drafts of the carcassing panels immediately needed amending, or just plain re-drawing.

First of all I’d forgotten to allow for four 4”x4” corner posts, and second, I initially used dimensions taken from the current shed. I’m staying with the footprint, size wise. But I’m making the new design significantly taller. Both in terms of wall heights, and the height of the new pitched roof.

Yesterday I bought raw materials for the model, and started on the scale design drawings. Today I intend to finish those drawings, and make a start on the model itself.

The latter will entail prepping the (jumbo) lolly-sticks; cutting off rounded ends, and gluing/laminating some of the sticks to create scaled down 2”x4” carcassing timber. I have some balsa that’s the right size for the 4”x4” corner posts.

I’ll need a stable and secure base for the model. And I might also need to create a jig or two for prepping all the ‘timber’. Hmmm…

It seems the glue-up I did, gluing pairs of sticks together, so I can get proper 1:20 2”x4” ‘timber’ worked. I tried three different ways, of gluing. They all appear to have glued fine.

I also tried two ways of cutting off the ends. Individually, and en-masse. The en-masse method worked surprisingly well. You can see the contrast in the images below.

I also sanded all faces. To try and get everything ‘regular’. It’s a lot of little repetitive steps. But it’s fun.

One end squared off.

My final work on this tonight is to square off the other end.

The next step is to cut the lolly sticks length-wise. I wonder, will I be getting two or three beams per stick? I should be able to get three per stick. But we shall see.

I’m not a great fan of fizzy or canned drinks. But I did notice that I no longer saw the above Ginger Beer, in our local shops or supermarkets any more. Which is a shame, as it’s one of the only canned fizzy drinks I kind of liked!

I googled ‘old Jamaica ginger beer’, to find out what’s up. And got the following contradictory results:

So, the above is on a website with the registered domain name, oldjamaicagingerbeer.com. It looks both official and categorical. But I could find no dates. And there’s so much fakery online… who knows?

I also found this:

Admittedly that’s on Reddit, which seems to be a cesspool of drivel, by and large. But when I search for the product itself, it does seem to be available. And that includes from all the places – Tesco, Sainsburys, etc. – that I couldn’t find it myself, in store. It’s also online, via Amazon, etc.

Most perplexing. And gassy… 🫧

Well… I’ve just come upstairs, to go to bed. And it’s not even 6 pm! I slept till midday as well. But I am ridiculously exhausted. I have to confess, I think it’s depression exhaustion, as much as anything else.

It might also be this lingering cold? I’m over the worst, at least in terms of when I was producing rivers of snot. But I’m finding it hard to- or rather next to impossible – to shift the irritable throat cough.

But I’ve had something g in that line almost permanently since just before Covid officially hit. I’m still no wiser as to what that’s all about. But a general raspy tickle crackly wheeze SS has become almost the norm.

I had a single bottle of Perlenbacher 4% lager today. Surely that can’t be the reason? It’s certainly not the sole reason. But, I suspect, very sadly, that at present, any alcohol is just a bad idea.

Sexual frustration, and my overactive libido, play a part. Anyway, whatever… as folk say these days. I just want to be asleep. Please, please… pleeease… sleep, come and dull the pain of living.

Switch off the world. Please!

Our neighbour Mel has a kitten named Macavity. And, just like his namesake, he often disappears!

I finished this late last night. And I have to confess, I found it a fascinating and compelling read. 

Not sure where I read it (the intro, possibly?), but Parker says this book is part three of a ‘quadrilogy’ on Peiper. Clearly he’s obsessed with his subject! He also states that these works are the result of two decades of research. Impressive!

This is the only one of the authors’ books I’ve read, thus far. He hasn’t quite got the literary polish of your Stephen Ambrose, or Anthony Beevor types. And, like a good deal of specialist publishing, a bit more editorial finessing wouldn’t go amiss. But, all things considered, this is a very impressive and terrifically engaging work, on a sometimes darkly fascinating character, during some of the most awful and exciting times of the tumultuous 20th Century.

As the title says, this is the story of Peiper’s War. And as a prominent and favoured member of the elite Waffen SS – Himmler’s adjutant for a spell – he sees action all over; on both the Ostfront, and D-Day campaigns, in Northern Italy, during the Battle of the Bulge, and even in Hungary, at War’s end. 

The SS were, infamously, not just an equivalent of Napoleon’s Imperial Guard, but, more sinisterly, the oft’ fanatical ideological enforcers of Hitler’s deeply racist ideology. So, as well as the usual (and very compelling) military stuff, we also have to deal with complicity in many atrocities, on all Fronts. 

From Krasnaya Polyana in the East, and Boves in Northern Italy, to Malmedy, in Belgium, Peiper’s SS Men repeatedly – and fairly routinely, it would seem – took their ideological warfare to non-combatants. From helping round up Jews, as part of Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’, to reprisals against civilians, in the horrific tit-for-tat of guerrilla war, SS units, like those of Peiper’s Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, were unremittingly brutal. 

The book covers all of this, with plenty of maps and supporting notes, very well. I was a bit surprised and disappointed that, near war’s end, the blow by blow narrative ceased; for some reason Peiper’s Battle of the Bulge and Lake Balaton stuff isn’t covered here. One suspects Parker will cover it in more detail elsewhere.*

Instead the last two chapters of this book focus on, 1) the infamous Malmedy massacre, and 2) P. O. Box 1142. The latter being a secret location (Fort Hunt) in the US, where German prisoners were bugged whilst kept captive, to gather intel’ for post-WWII war crimes trials. 

What I liked best about this book, if I’m honest, is the ‘ordinary’ military stuff. When Peiper and co. are fighting their armed adversaries. And given that they do so all over the various theatres of war, that aspect is the core of this book. There’s even a very sizeable chunk where we follow not just SS Leibestandarte Adolf Hitler, but the whole disintegration and rout of German forces in France, during which time Peiper was convalescing behind the lines.

In terms of an exciting and compelling read, I’d say this is five star stuff. But, given the nature –  and size and scope – of Parker’s interest in Peiper, on its own this wartime volume has, most notably at the end, some lamentable lacunae.

For this, and an occasional lack of editorial finesse, I go with four and a half stars. Nonetheless, it’s very readable book, and highly recommended.

*This – I discovered it’s existence after writing this review – will be the reason:

I’m on a quest to find the Moquette used in old buses. Preferably in green. It might be a forlorn hope?

*From the Titfield Thunderbolt movie.

In the meantime, here are some moquettes and items made with them…

All very nice. But horrically expensive.

The closest I can find to what I’m looking for is this:

Seen at the Ramsey 1940s show, this summer, in an old bus. But blue, not green. I’ve found it online. And in red as well as blue. But not green, alas.

It’s been a while since I stopped to admire a nice old church. St Mary The Virgin, in Titchmarsh, is a pretty grand looking edifice.

Above, the approach…

Not mind blowing. But worth a look.

There are wall paintings. But they don’t look like old medieval ones. They look more Victorian. Some reasonably nice stained glass. They looked nice today, with the sunlight beaming through.

Above the altar are these two quite fancy carvings. And on the ground nearby, this terrific coat of arms.

The roofs are all rather lovely.

And so, over and out…

Titchmarsh is a very pretty little village.

After the church, driving out of the village. The recent rains have left the rivers overflowing into the neighbouring woods and fields.

Another spectacularly beautiful village, Wadenhoe, has this pretty ivy covered domicile, in addition to large amounts of other gorgeous dwellings.

A nice sunny day, travelling through some really lovely places.

My mum knows I’m suffering with both physical and mental health issues. Every now and then she’ll suggest stuff, intending to be helpful (I suppose?), some of which I have real issues with.

One such occasion, years ago, involved her gifting me a book by Louise Hay. I’ve blogged about this elsewhere. Sadly, another similar instance has come up, just yesterday.

This time it’s ‘earthing’.

This relatively recent fad is based on the idea that modern life disconnects us from nature, and that that’s bad for us. In some ways I agree with this. But as we unpack the ideas peddled under the concept of earthing, we’ll get into separating the wheat from the chaff.

I’ll start with something about modern life that undoubtedly does illustrate how we have learned to manipulate nature such that we can be said to deviate from the natural order: light.

Our ability to control elements of our environment such that we can create light when naturally it’s dark have masses of implications. Some obviously beneficial (we can do stuff at times we couldn’t before, thereby getting more done), some potentially harmful (we might do too much, or at the wrong time, damaging our health by not getting enough or the right kinds of sleep).

I recently read Why We Sleep, which discusses some of the science around these ideas, and how light relates to our sleeping patterns, health, etc. So far so good.

But the trouble with pseudoscience, which we’ll come on to now, is that it conflates genuine science (or sometimes just vocabulary borrowed from science) with pure ‘woo’, or – to be more blunt – bullshit.

And earthing very much falls into this category, along with homeopathy, and the aforementioned Hay’s lunatic ideas on the mental causes of disease.

When I got my mum’s message, suggesting I look into earthing, I did. And this is what I found.

I’m not a scientist, by profession. But I am a rational materialist. And when it comes to attempts to explain reality, I trust science in a way that I don’t trust appeals to the supernatural or pseudoscience.

If my car breaks down, I take it to a garage, not a faith healer. If my body is malfunctioning, I look for help to medical science, not witches, shamans or priests.

This philosophy applies to mind/psychology too. I try to ‘heal myself’ by recourse to hard won knowledge, not airy-fairy superstition.

Language can be used to clarify. Or to confuse and obscure. Specialist languages have the potential to do both simultaneously; they may clarify for the initiated, whilst bamboozling the layman.

Public figures like Deepak Chopra – who is one of the folk billed on the promo material for the film whose poster tops this blog entry – strike me as being fashionable quacks. They borrow the language of contemporary science to peddle ideas that, in actual fact, fly in the face of genuine science.

And earthing is one such idea. Sure, barefoot contact with natural surfaces, as pictured, is a lovely experience. But the pseudoscience of earthing is pure bullshit, as science minded debunkers of the idea make clear.

I can’t be arsed to run the arguments I’ve read over again myself, here. Hence my use of links, to folk who’ve actually done that hard work already.

Speaking of links, and the subject of this post, here’s a more general one on pseudoscientific woo.

NB – A good rationalist review of the movie promoted by the image atop this post can be read here.

I bought us a second set of ‘Pomelo’ yellow/white bed sheets, from Dunelm. They arrived today.

I wanted to have more of the cushions matching. And this was one way to do it. Alas, they don’t seem to sell the cushion covers separately. I think the non-Pomelo ones should all be matching, white or beige/cream. That’s a goal for another time.

One thing that’s very striking is how much brighter the new bed linen is. I wonder, can the old bed linen be washed in such a way as to restore some pizzazz?

On Saturday last I did a short shift. I came home with energy to spare. Very unusual lately. I even started working towards the renewal of the west-facing wall in shed #1

Then, on Sunday, I slipped back into utter exhaustion mode. I’d intended to work in earnest on replacing the side of the shed. But… not a chance!

I was in bed, sleeping on and off, all day. I tried a short spell downstairs. Managed about 45 minutes. Then back to bed. I’m so tired that sleeping a lot on and off during the day isn’t adversely affecting my ability to sleep at night.

The way I see it, I’m back in basic survival mode. Fortunately the depression element has lifted somewhat. So whilst I’m past tired, and not happy to be unwell, at least I’m not suicidally depressed at the moment.

I watched a bit of snooker yesterday, including the live final between Mark Shelby and John Higgins. I do find snooker a therapeutic thing to watch. Calming. And esp’ so when I’m too tired even to read.

It’s Monday now. I had two shifts booked. But I’ve cancelled the second/longer/later one. Frankly it’ll be a miracle, feeling as I do, if I can do the afternoon one.

But economic needs dictate that I work as much as I can manage… so, we shall see what we shall see.