Category: General

A few days ago I proposed that corporal punishment was pointless as correction had to come from self-control. I arrived at this decision through my own experiences. This led me to consider our inadequate penal system. Locking people up en masse, irrespective of the reason they are there, controlled by an over stretched and consequently… Continue reading I Write, You Consider, The Penal System

Livingstone, N.Rhodesia I write this to draw conclusions about psychological reactions in children, they and their adults are not aware of, but which have damaging long term consequences; not making a criminal, but disadvantaging and imprinting a permanent lack of self-respect on the child. The final paragraphs are extracts from a previous, general comment on… Continue reading The Results of the African Experience 1928

In spite of what follows, I still stand by what I have previously said, working for the Council is still preferable to direction from Central Government. Not only for the worker who has immediate contacts and sees the work in detail, but for the public he serves When I was looking for my first engineering… Continue reading Chicanery In The Old days

Fishcake McKay First published in August 06. Requested by my Dutch friend, Jan, in Holland In the sailor’s induction course we were taught to handle a whaler, a thirty-foot, double-ended, clinker-built life-boat,. We rowed in unison with cries like ‘Give way together’. Our instructions were laced with colourful language by, the Coxswain, or ‘Chief’, and… Continue reading Sunday Special No 2. A Golden Oldie

PARIS, on the way south we had stayed for a couple of days in Paris. Sophie’s friend had told us of an hotel in the Rue Du Caire, the red-light district, which was closer to our budget than most. Being on a B&B basis we had to take our meals elsewhere. We tended to buy… Continue reading Memories Of France

I realise several things. Having been employed in six different fields, and each time I applied having only a vague idea what the work involved, I believe young people are still in the same predicament. Did the soldiers joining, and more, their wives, ever think of them fighting in Afghanistan in extreme conditions? Do young… Continue reading Civil Engineering as a Profession

Garden Design I am not trying to compete with those brilliant people who run gardening programmes both in the press and on television, but as I have remodelled and rebuilt gardens on at least six different occasions I would like to pass on some of the problems I had to deal with and the solutions… Continue reading Sunday Special No 1

Both are faces of the same coin, derived through necessity. We all design and invent, it is natures way of progress, but what I wish to lay before you are the difficulties, snags and problems in designing and inventing for profit. My own experience. So you can evaluate the advice, in short I quote my… Continue reading Design and Invention

I can’t remember, but I don’t suppose that the word chauvinism featured very much in the vocabulary of the man in the street, in the 30s and 40s. There used to be a silly story, which had more truth than humour, about an Italian who was asked his views on life, and he answered ‘… Continue reading Chauvinism Exposed