By: silver fox
- 2nd October 2013 at 21:38Permalink- Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
Chas, You hit the nail on the head, EX, being the operative word. Now be honest, wouldn't you?.
You would be gobsmacked to see just how much food that has not been picked,, is ploughed back into the fields around here, you would think they would donate it to Charity, or some other good cause.
As the old saying goes, "Waste not, wan't not".
Jim.
Lincoln .7
Crops being chopped up and ploughed in always looks nonsensical, but if the grower hasn't got a buyer for the crop then no more money will be wasted on the crop, it's only value is fertiliser, having said that one large grower near to us has invited the charities who handle food to come to the farm and take away anything not harvested or not the "right size" for the supermarkets. Featured on our local telly just two weeks back when he was giving away cauliflowers which the supermarkets deem too big.
By: Lincoln 7
- 3rd October 2013 at 00:26Permalink- Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
A lot of the excess food, could be donated to various Food Banks, for which the number is growing daily. At least it would help those who are on low incomes etc.to get fresh veg.
Jim.
Lincoln .7
By: TonyT
- 3rd October 2013 at 00:56Permalink- Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
The problem is, donate one spud is another spud not sold.. So if has a knock on effect, in that those crops you can sell are reduced further. You will soon go bust with that business model.
I used to watch truckloads of cornflakes going to landfill, the reason, the boxes were slightly underweight so couldn't be sold and opening them to put them back into production system would be prohibitively expensive, hence they were dumped. These days I believe some get donated, but it goes back to the Spud issue.
By: charliehunt
- 3rd October 2013 at 06:00Permalink- Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
But if the donated spud CAN'T be sold then it makes no difference. Linc is talking about veg being given away as opposed to being ploughed back. The farmer will go bust if he is growing more than he can sell. Period.
By: Lincoln 7
- 3rd October 2013 at 08:48Permalink- Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
Quite right Chas, I am sure that this Government, who likes giving, What?, 11 Billion a year in overseas aid, could, especialy around Lincolnshire, set up distribution centers where the Farmers could take their excess produce and the Charities and food distribution Banks, could then send their vehicles to the centre, and pick up said excess food, but oh, that's too simple, and would show them up in a bad light by caring for their own citizens.Same with the Cornflakes Tony, think of the jobs for the unemployed, opening, or even giving the underweight packets to charities or a food bank, I am sure that those who the flakes were handed to, wouldn't give a monkeys as to the weight being over or under. Beggars can't be choosers.
Just my opinion
Jim.
Lincoln .7
By: bazv
- 12th October 2014 at 11:08Permalink- Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
Anyway - after 50 years I was finally reunited with the Shunting Engine that I previously mentioned,it was based at Cupar Sugar Factory (fife) when I was a wee lad.
I visited Brechin a week or so ago - unfortunately the 'steaming' season had finished but she was being prepped for a private run : )
By: victor tango
- 13th October 2014 at 18:45Permalink- Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
I remember having to go to the local hardware store to get a gallon of paraffin for the convector heater, that stinky free standing heater with the wick that always needed trimming .... I think it was 2/6d , b.....dy heavy that gallon can cutting into your hand.
Sometimes had to get a bag of anthracite???? or was it coke.....what was this stuff?
By: silver fox
- 13th October 2014 at 19:19Permalink- Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
I remember having to go to the local hardware store to get a gallon of paraffin for the convector heater, that stinky free standing heater with the wick that always needed trimming .... I think it was 2/6d , b.....dy heavy that gallon can cutting into your hand.
Sometimes had to get a bag of anthracite???? or was it coke.....what was this stuff?
Coke was the stuff left over after gas had been extracted from coal, anthracite is a very hard coal, burns hot and slow with very little or no smoke, the best available came from the Welsh coal mines, in the day.
By: silver fox
- 14th October 2014 at 21:57Permalink- Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
Just had a quiet chuckle reading back through this old thread, one thing I distinctly remember, don't know if this was just a family thing or did others get this?
As a young growing lad with appetite to match, if I turned up between meals on the "verge of starvation" I would very often be presented with a slab of fruit cake between two slices of bread and butter to munch on, always did a good job of filling the hunger and staving off the "imminent collapse".
By: Mothminor
- 18th January 2015 at 18:11Permalink- Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
Anyway - after 50 years I was finally reunited with the Shunting Engine that I previously mentioned,it was based at Cupar Sugar Factory (fife) when I was a wee lad.
I visited Brechin a week or so ago - unfortunately the 'steaming' season had finished but she was being prepped for a private run : )
Hi Baz, there is an identical engine to the Brechin-based one on the Royal Deeside Railway at Banchory in Kincardineshire. Called "Salmon" to commemorate the submarine HMS Salmon which was lost off Aberdeen in 1940 the steam engine was built a fair bit later than the Brechin one (1942 as opposed to 1926) but there seems very little difference between them - even the controls seem unchanged.
By: bazv
- 18th January 2015 at 21:23Permalink- Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
Lovely pics thanks MM... yes the controls do seem much the same LOL
Although it seems by 1942 Andrew Barclay & co seem to have concluded that by then people knew that Kilmarnock was in scotland - or maybe it was a secret in wartime :D
By: mike currill
- 26th January 2015 at 14:27Permalink- Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
Just been thinking about the weather on another Post, and got to thinking what else has changed since we were younger.
Before the milk float, I had to take a "Billy Can" to the local dairy about half a mile from where we lived, and the Farmers wife used a measure of a Pint, (S*D the ltrs) out of a milk churn.
I am sure you guys can think of many things you used to do, but times change and we now take those same things for granted.
What do you remember?.
Jim.
Lincoln .7
My mother and I used to walk the quarter mile drive to the farm where Dad worked for milk (also collected in the billy can which seems to have been the standard container for collecting milk in those days. Our milk went from the cow, through the cooler and in to the churn and that was all the messing about that was done with it. I never had pasteurised milk until I was four and a half years old.
By: Meddle
- 27th January 2015 at 11:14Permalink- Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
I'm only 25, but I grew up in rural Scotland and remember the milk being dropped off on the doorstep. A few things spring to mind about this. Firstly, the milk actually had a taste and the cream layer was clearly defined at the top of the bottle. Secondly, In winter the milk sometimes froze and punched up through the foil as a solid cylinder. Come warmer weather, blue **** (censored? You're kidding me!) would attack the foil before anybody was up to collect the bottles off the doorstep. In the hottest weather the milk already had an edge to the taste before the day was up, and would be thoroughly sour by the next day. I'm fairly sure that if I explained this to the youngest of my fellow millenials they would think I grew up in the dark ages.
I'm pretty sure I pay for a pint of homogenised white water from the supermarket. Joyless fare with no perceptable taste. The whole concept of buying locally sourced milk from a cooperative of local dairies, to be dropped off early in the morning, to be paid for to the surly farm youth that appeared on a Friday evening, seems both woefully archaic and, as a concept, something that could do with a revival. I can imagine Kirstie Allsopp or Kevin McCloud, to name but two, losing their collective minds at the quaint idea of small birds harassing your milk bottles in the wee small hours. People care about food miles, supporting local businesses and the sustainability of their food. Local milk seems to deal with all of these concepts.
By: charliehunt
- 27th January 2015 at 15:08Permalink- Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
I can imagine Kirstie Allsopp or Kevin McCloud, to name but two, losing their collective minds at the quaint idea of small birds harassing your milk bottles in the wee small hours. People care about food miles, supporting local businesses and the sustainability of their food. Local milk seems to deal with all of these concepts.
Forgive my ignorance but who are they? I think only a minority do, otherwise the multiple food retailers would be having a far worse time of it than they are. And those that are doing badly are merely losing customers to discount retailers. I doubt if more than 1 in 10 thinks about "food miles" let alone knows what they are. We are really fortunate in having a town with an abundance of independent local food shops and farm shops, but I am sure we are in a minority. It would be heart warming to think that the pendulum was swinging back towards how we bought our food back in the good old days, but I am not hopeful.
By: Meddle
- 27th January 2015 at 15:34Permalink- Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
Kirstie Allsopp is responsible forLocation, Location, Location, Relocation, Relocation and Location Revisited on Channel 4. Tiresome shows where Kirstie helps rehome yuppies with unrealistic expectations. She is also responsible for Kirstie's Homemade Home and Kirstie's Handmade Britain, where she patronisingly promotes the plainly obvious concept that a lick of paint on some battered 2nd hand furniture can result in good-looking furniture. She encourages both yuppies and plebs to pick up a power drill and experience some sort of DIY epiphany, though pragmatism is usually sidelined in favour of pretentious badly-designed faux-vintage chic. In any given episode you can expect a beleaguered stay-at-home mum to use a cordless drill for the first time and burst into tears at this sudden empowerment.
Kirstie is landed gentry, so scrabbling around the local Sue Ryder for a kicked about dresser to refinish in distressed Eau de Nil is a jolly good wheez for her, rather than anything approaching a necessity.
Kevin McCloud is responsible for Grand Designs on Channel 4, aka the show in which people demonstrate they have no concept of managing finances. He also had a show where he and his yuppie yahoo mates tried to 'get back to basics in the country', with cringeworthy results. Self-congratulatory drivel for city boys who want to drink their purified **** in a converted barn somewhere in Devon, dressed as Worzel Gummidge, having made their mint in London. The level of smugness is palpable with these self-proclaimed noble savages. "My mate in the next valley just happens to make sustainable blown-glass hemp lampshades, I better give him a ring on my Blackberry"!
I watched one episode in which Kevin and his mates built a crude wooden shack in the woods. They appropriated an old safe to use as a log burning stove. I remarked at that point that the stove, given its advanced age, was probably coated in lead-based paint and was probably not built to withstand the heat. Sure enough, Kevin and his mates come pouring out of their primitive shack in a billow of smoke. Ha ha ha, we hadn't thought of that.
All of these shows claim to offer practical solutions to what is, in fact, an image-driven lifestyle choice for a lucky few. Poverty safari.
Both of them would embrace sour, bird-pecked, frozen solid milk on their doorstep as it represents the humbler and simpler lifestyle that was a chore for the rest of us but a whimsical novelty for them. Without a hint of irony, both of them have built up cluttered, material-driven lives lived in a somewhat vicarious fashion and therefore strive for a bit of grubby reality once in a while. If Waitrose did a doorstep milk service, complete with a 'meet our cows' glossy pamphlet via the local dairy, then it would be an instant hit with those mentioned above.
Posts: 686
By: silver fox - 2nd October 2013 at 21:38 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
Crops being chopped up and ploughed in always looks nonsensical, but if the grower hasn't got a buyer for the crop then no more money will be wasted on the crop, it's only value is fertiliser, having said that one large grower near to us has invited the charities who handle food to come to the farm and take away anything not harvested or not the "right size" for the supermarkets. Featured on our local telly just two weeks back when he was giving away cauliflowers which the supermarkets deem too big.
Posts: 11,141
By: charliehunt - 2nd October 2013 at 21:43 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
That's a good story. We'll done that grower!:)
Posts: 8,306
By: Lincoln 7 - 3rd October 2013 at 00:26 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
A lot of the excess food, could be donated to various Food Banks, for which the number is growing daily. At least it would help those who are on low incomes etc.to get fresh veg.
Jim.
Lincoln .7
Posts: 8,983
By: TonyT - 3rd October 2013 at 00:56 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
The problem is, donate one spud is another spud not sold.. So if has a knock on effect, in that those crops you can sell are reduced further. You will soon go bust with that business model.
I used to watch truckloads of cornflakes going to landfill, the reason, the boxes were slightly underweight so couldn't be sold and opening them to put them back into production system would be prohibitively expensive, hence they were dumped. These days I believe some get donated, but it goes back to the Spud issue.
Posts: 11,141
By: charliehunt - 3rd October 2013 at 06:00 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
But if the donated spud CAN'T be sold then it makes no difference. Linc is talking about veg being given away as opposed to being ploughed back. The farmer will go bust if he is growing more than he can sell. Period.
Posts: 8,306
By: Lincoln 7 - 3rd October 2013 at 08:48 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
Quite right Chas, I am sure that this Government, who likes giving, What?, 11 Billion a year in overseas aid, could, especialy around Lincolnshire, set up distribution centers where the Farmers could take their excess produce and the Charities and food distribution Banks, could then send their vehicles to the centre, and pick up said excess food, but oh, that's too simple, and would show them up in a bad light by caring for their own citizens.Same with the Cornflakes Tony, think of the jobs for the unemployed, opening, or even giving the underweight packets to charities or a food bank, I am sure that those who the flakes were handed to, wouldn't give a monkeys as to the weight being over or under. Beggars can't be choosers.
Just my opinion
Jim.
Lincoln .7
Posts: 2,536
By: hampden98 - 3rd October 2013 at 09:41 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
When I was a kid we couldn't afford a football so used to kick a pigs bladder around.
These days kids just kick the whole Policeman.
Posts: 6,044
By: bazv - 12th October 2014 at 11:08 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
Anyway - after 50 years I was finally reunited with the Shunting Engine that I previously mentioned,it was based at Cupar Sugar Factory (fife) when I was a wee lad.
I visited Brechin a week or so ago - unfortunately the 'steaming' season had finished but she was being prepped for a private run : )
Posts: 107
By: victor tango - 13th October 2014 at 18:45 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
I remember having to go to the local hardware store to get a gallon of paraffin for the convector heater, that stinky free standing heater with the wick that always needed trimming .... I think it was 2/6d , b.....dy heavy that gallon can cutting into your hand.
Sometimes had to get a bag of anthracite???? or was it coke.....what was this stuff?
Posts: 686
By: silver fox - 13th October 2014 at 19:19 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
Coke was the stuff left over after gas had been extracted from coal, anthracite is a very hard coal, burns hot and slow with very little or no smoke, the best available came from the Welsh coal mines, in the day.
Posts: 107
By: victor tango - 13th October 2014 at 20:09 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
Thanks Silver
Bugga to light though but easy when the grate was cleaned out the next day!
Posts: 686
By: silver fox - 14th October 2014 at 21:57 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
Just had a quiet chuckle reading back through this old thread, one thing I distinctly remember, don't know if this was just a family thing or did others get this?
As a young growing lad with appetite to match, if I turned up between meals on the "verge of starvation" I would very often be presented with a slab of fruit cake between two slices of bread and butter to munch on, always did a good job of filling the hunger and staving off the "imminent collapse".
Posts: 1,299
By: Mothminor - 18th January 2015 at 18:11 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
Hi Baz, there is an identical engine to the Brechin-based one on the Royal Deeside Railway at Banchory in Kincardineshire. Called "Salmon" to commemorate the submarine HMS Salmon which was lost off Aberdeen in 1940 the steam engine was built a fair bit later than the Brechin one (1942 as opposed to 1926) but there seems very little difference between them - even the controls seem unchanged.
Posts: 6,044
By: bazv - 18th January 2015 at 21:23 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
Lovely pics thanks MM... yes the controls do seem much the same LOL
Although it seems by 1942 Andrew Barclay & co seem to have concluded that by then people knew that Kilmarnock was in scotland - or maybe it was a secret in wartime :D
Posts: 8,505
By: mike currill - 26th January 2015 at 14:27 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
My mother and I used to walk the quarter mile drive to the farm where Dad worked for milk (also collected in the billy can which seems to have been the standard container for collecting milk in those days. Our milk went from the cow, through the cooler and in to the churn and that was all the messing about that was done with it. I never had pasteurised milk until I was four and a half years old.
Posts: 1,613
By: Meddle - 27th January 2015 at 11:14 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
I'm only 25, but I grew up in rural Scotland and remember the milk being dropped off on the doorstep. A few things spring to mind about this. Firstly, the milk actually had a taste and the cream layer was clearly defined at the top of the bottle. Secondly, In winter the milk sometimes froze and punched up through the foil as a solid cylinder. Come warmer weather, blue **** (censored? You're kidding me!) would attack the foil before anybody was up to collect the bottles off the doorstep. In the hottest weather the milk already had an edge to the taste before the day was up, and would be thoroughly sour by the next day. I'm fairly sure that if I explained this to the youngest of my fellow millenials they would think I grew up in the dark ages.
I'm pretty sure I pay for a pint of homogenised white water from the supermarket. Joyless fare with no perceptable taste. The whole concept of buying locally sourced milk from a cooperative of local dairies, to be dropped off early in the morning, to be paid for to the surly farm youth that appeared on a Friday evening, seems both woefully archaic and, as a concept, something that could do with a revival. I can imagine Kirstie Allsopp or Kevin McCloud, to name but two, losing their collective minds at the quaint idea of small birds harassing your milk bottles in the wee small hours. People care about food miles, supporting local businesses and the sustainability of their food. Local milk seems to deal with all of these concepts.
Posts: 8,505
By: mike currill - 27th January 2015 at 13:48 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
Oh how heartily I agree with you. For every step of 'progress' something better gets left behind.
Posts: 11,141
By: charliehunt - 27th January 2015 at 15:08 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
Forgive my ignorance but who are they? I think only a minority do, otherwise the multiple food retailers would be having a far worse time of it than they are. And those that are doing badly are merely losing customers to discount retailers. I doubt if more than 1 in 10 thinks about "food miles" let alone knows what they are. We are really fortunate in having a town with an abundance of independent local food shops and farm shops, but I am sure we are in a minority. It would be heart warming to think that the pendulum was swinging back towards how we bought our food back in the good old days, but I am not hopeful.
Posts: 1,613
By: Meddle - 27th January 2015 at 15:34 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
Kirstie Allsopp is responsible forLocation, Location, Location, Relocation, Relocation and Location Revisited on Channel 4. Tiresome shows where Kirstie helps rehome yuppies with unrealistic expectations. She is also responsible for Kirstie's Homemade Home and Kirstie's Handmade Britain, where she patronisingly promotes the plainly obvious concept that a lick of paint on some battered 2nd hand furniture can result in good-looking furniture. She encourages both yuppies and plebs to pick up a power drill and experience some sort of DIY epiphany, though pragmatism is usually sidelined in favour of pretentious badly-designed faux-vintage chic. In any given episode you can expect a beleaguered stay-at-home mum to use a cordless drill for the first time and burst into tears at this sudden empowerment.
Kirstie is landed gentry, so scrabbling around the local Sue Ryder for a kicked about dresser to refinish in distressed Eau de Nil is a jolly good wheez for her, rather than anything approaching a necessity.
Kevin McCloud is responsible for Grand Designs on Channel 4, aka the show in which people demonstrate they have no concept of managing finances. He also had a show where he and his yuppie yahoo mates tried to 'get back to basics in the country', with cringeworthy results. Self-congratulatory drivel for city boys who want to drink their purified **** in a converted barn somewhere in Devon, dressed as Worzel Gummidge, having made their mint in London. The level of smugness is palpable with these self-proclaimed noble savages. "My mate in the next valley just happens to make sustainable blown-glass hemp lampshades, I better give him a ring on my Blackberry"!
I watched one episode in which Kevin and his mates built a crude wooden shack in the woods. They appropriated an old safe to use as a log burning stove. I remarked at that point that the stove, given its advanced age, was probably coated in lead-based paint and was probably not built to withstand the heat. Sure enough, Kevin and his mates come pouring out of their primitive shack in a billow of smoke. Ha ha ha, we hadn't thought of that.
All of these shows claim to offer practical solutions to what is, in fact, an image-driven lifestyle choice for a lucky few. Poverty safari.
Both of them would embrace sour, bird-pecked, frozen solid milk on their doorstep as it represents the humbler and simpler lifestyle that was a chore for the rest of us but a whimsical novelty for them. Without a hint of irony, both of them have built up cluttered, material-driven lives lived in a somewhat vicarious fashion and therefore strive for a bit of grubby reality once in a while. If Waitrose did a doorstep milk service, complete with a 'meet our cows' glossy pamphlet via the local dairy, then it would be an instant hit with those mentioned above.
Posts: 11,141
By: charliehunt - 27th January 2015 at 15:44 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
You have given me plenty of reasons to feel relieved I have never encountered either of them and will studiously avoid doing so in the future!!;)