Ancient Egypt: How they built the pyramids.

 If you have three and a half hours of time on your hands, then this is an interesting watch.

I did it in three sittings. The last hour and a half became quite speculative, boarding on ` Oh do leave off''. However, having been up the Nile in 2007 and having seen the sheer scale of the temples and statues from Luxor to Aswan, you do have to wonder how on Earth they managed the stone-masonry?

I've seen the great unfinished obelisk at the granite quarry at Aswan, it is truly enormous (allegedly abandoned after an Earthquake cracked it before it was finished). The quarry itself is still working extracting granite and is at a relatively high elevation from the current bank of the Nile, and a fair step inland. In the Temples of Luxor and Karnak, there are Diorite Statues 3mtrs and more high. Everything about all the temple complexes from Luxor South to Aswan is monumental and massive. But there are also tiny objects in the museums so fine and yet so well carved and shiny you are just left wondering; `how on Earth did they do that'?

This film puts forward a theory, both for statues and for the building of the Pyramids. I'll say no more, just watch with an open mind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMAtkjy_YK4

Quitting your job

Last year was difficult. To summarise my personal experience the minimum number of steps looks like this:

January 6^th threat of pandemic clearly visible in advance of everyone else spotting the danger: Prepared for the long-haul.

23^rd of March the whole of the UK gets locked down.

24^th of March my Furlough period starts. I have a guilty Spring, Summer and early Autumn at home, but I get a lot of stuff done.

14^th of August after two meetings, I’m made redundant, my last official week working at Doorlining will be in September, but I’ll be at home anyway. Unfortunately for my ex-boss, his best intentions have cost him a huge chunk of his business. No good deed goes unpunished.

September I have to sign on on-line and start searching for jobs, I have a bit of redundancy money to float me for three months, I’m stressing but not desperate. Amanda and I know how to contract constructively and live within our means when things are tight.

October 26^th I start work again.

The problem with the new job was that it was paying £8000 less than I used to earn, doing pretty much the same job, but with the added responsibility of having to price everything I processed as well as the technical processing. Frankly, it was a liberty from day one. However, `needs must, there is a pandemic going on, millions are out of work. Be thankful you found a new job before the redundancy money ran out’… you would think. 

And I did for three and a bit months.

Jump forward to the 3^rd of February, I’ve had enough of Majestic Windows in Cheddar. This is a company that operates on throughput. If it had time for management systems it would have to have more administration staff, someone to answer the phones to deal with non-essential enquiries and to direct calls, someone to manage, populate and update a production schedule, someone to manage goods in and out and their movement within the facility. The alternative to this massively simplified model is to not have any management systems in place, everyone answers the phone that never stops ringing and nobody ever gets any work done to their satisfaction or with the absolute confidence that what they have done is 100% on point; but instead rely on making sure that there is at least 50% markup because that will offset and costs caused by errors.

I kid you not.

As an aside, a briefing article published in Construction News in July 2019 highlights the average 21% cost of construction industry errors that are effectively built into every construction project: https://www.constructionnews.co.uk/agenda/opinion/cn-briefing/openness-honesty-avoiding-21bn-errors-16-07-2019/.

It’s quite hard to imagine that 21% of your construction cost, goes on fixing things that went wrong, from planning through to implementation. Let that sink in for a moment.

We could also spend a moment contemplating the `bodged around errors discovered UK wide in the wake of Grenfell, and following the deep inspection of properties that have highlighted even more errors that have been papered over. The cost of those errors and omissions includes 72 lives for sure, and billions in putting them right. Never-mind the probable 21% on costs during the original construction/refurbishment phases.

In manufacturing for the general construction industry, making things the wrong size or to the wrong regulatory standard is always a bigger problem than first appears. You may be able to `bodge’ around a problem, but it will always be a bodge. If your window is too small or too large or doesn’t meet fire regulations etc, you have a hole in a wall. A hole in a wall means you aren’t weather-proof; this lack of weatherproofing delays your internal trades and your eventual sign-off. I could exhaust a page on the fallout from this one seemingly simple issue, but let’s summarise with, delays and costs.

What has this to do with quitting your job? Simple to answer. I was not willing to be spoken down to for not achieving throughput, because I wanted to keep an electronic trail of everything that came through the office. Because if you don’t have that audit trail or ability to forensically examine errors you can’t apply fixes to systems to trap errors before they manifest in your manufactured goods. 

You invariably become liable for every mistake as a company, because without evidence `he said she said he said’s is the default position for all parties, but stuff still has to be remade. Someone still has to pay. But likely as not, it is going to be the manufacturer if the client sticks to their guns and says `I’m not paying you, I won’t work with you again, I’ll tell everyone you let me down' (that can be private clients via review sites, or commercial customers through the builder's grapevine).

For my part, I looked at how I was being shown how to work from day one and thought immediately that it was too open to error, and that for myself as a cross trainee, bringing relatable skills but without direct experience, I could very easily lose track of what I was doing or had done, and incur costs and create delays.

My solution was to create a calculating spreadsheet, it really was as simple as that. Columns with headings for components, rows with client references, a total on the right, a grand net total at the bottom and a grand total +Vat under that. Some notes at the top, and a legend showing discounts, uplifts and the Quote Number. This critical number is the container for everything that follows including all subsequent orders if you end up with phased work. By the time I resigned the spreadsheet had undergone fourteen major amendments and numerous smaller ones ( it was getting smart, and had helpful tips laced through it explaining how it worked).

The reason for creating the spreadsheet outside the software that presents the quote to the client is that it is just the numbers. The actual quote system only shows a total price and picture of the complete item (t does list the components, colours and options, but it doesn’t show individual prices).

The way small builders and developers and even large builders merchant chains work is frankly very poor and rushed. Badly drawn, poorly annotated bits of paper often photographed from odd angles in bad-light, and or they just turn up at the office with their only copy of their bit of paper, give it to you and as far as they are concerned their job is done. I create a quote they add on their percentage and then they forget about it until their potential client gives them the go-ahead... or not.

In their world pricing is easy, add a percentage to the X for my time and my costs. There is no awareness on their part, of the underlying complexity, because you have done their work for them and not explained it.

I also created explanatory emails to go with quotes rather than just firing out a quote to XYZ with no annotation whatsoever.

The issue here is that my quote could be for £100000’s of widows for an office block to flat conversion. It is in everyone’s interests to ensure that the quote for this is itemised, per window, per component, per regulatory requirement. After all, that is how you price.

If, however, you price by simply writing currency numbers next to items on a bit of paper a builder bumped on your desk, without labelling those items with meaningful terms such as; frame, handle, glass, hinge type, `miscellaneous options numerous'  how do you look back at what you have done in the event of changes to specifications or error?

There is an answer. 

You have to try and reverse engineer scribble. Often other peoples scribble. You also have to find and then trawl through reams of paper that have already been scribbled on to find space for new scribble. This is time-consuming. Time, as we know, is money, equals delay and cost.

However, if you have scanned the crappy bit of paper you were handed, and create a folder for it. Give the folder a quote number the same as the one generated by your design software, and then use a simple spreadsheet to take your headlines figures, in one column, and have some adjacent columns populated with simple equations to work out discounts, you spend considerably less time bashing away at a calculator. And if you get a revision request, you simply copy your original worksheet to a new tab, revise the new and, supersede the old. What you have is history, you reduce your risk of liability for errors, and you remind yourself as you move left to right to check you haven’t missed something.

Nothing described above is rocket science it's not even innovative in the wider world, it’s just BAU. But not at the firm I’ve just walked away from. It was an innovation. However, it wasn’t seen as an innovation, it wasn’t seen as error trapping, and in the opinion of my now ex-boss, it was only useful to me, and it was slower. But everything is slower when you are taking all the calls that come in including all the non-essential stuff. And you don’t have access to an updated production schedule that tells you where in the manufacturing process a project is. When your third-party goods are coming in, and when you expect to be able to deliver those projects… again, I kid you not.

The alternative to a production schedule is to base your delivery system on whoever is shouting the loudest. And the only way to find the information about where a project is?  Is, to leave your seat and ask at each work area around the shop-floor, whether they are working on Job Number X? You may get lucky and find it at the first, you may get unlucky and not find it until you’ve reached the ninth.

Yes, their system worked. It worked on the basis, that so much business came through that it offset the money that got lost in remaking quite simple square holes with glass in…. windows… and doors.

It didn’t work in terms of hours demanded by the system. Costs and delays.

My now ex-boss would make the loud martyr boast that he hadn’t left the office until 11.30pm, had worked Saturday and Sunday at home and had come back into the office on Monday at 6am to try and catch up. The expectation was that I would adopt this modus operandi once I was fully conversant. As it was, over the three months I endured, I’d fallen into the trap of being in a bit early, working through lunch and rolling on for a bit most days.

I was very keen not to fall into the six to seven days a week working trap, especially because the salary didn’t deserve it and the work didn’t require it if everybody worked the same way. And more-so if clients were set a set of standards by which they presented their requirements to us. And would be encouraged to respond to email, rather than trying to dictate their requirements on an ad-hoc basis… when they suddenly remembered something vital that they had left off their bit of scribbly paper from a week ago.

For my part, I would willingly provide them with a simple schedule template to use and provide some simple guidance on its use. There is so much value-add in that process, you have provided a free tool you can support to create a relationship that is both financially agreeable, eliminates risks and educates.

However, it wasn’t to be. There was talk of creating schedules, there was talk of new people in the office to field calls, and to manage hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of goods in and out, but there was also resistance to change, resistance to adopting new technology and methods.

And here is one of the ironies. You’ve bought a new CNC machine nearly five months ago, it got cost over £60000. It’s currently sitting unused because the person who can program it is the person resisting getting new staff, is working seven days a week firefighting, rather than leading, doesn’t share information doesn’t trust his staff or partners and has no time to program his £60000 machine that should be making production more efficient and accurate.

After three months of doing and showing, offering and demonstrating I came to a realisation. My now ex-boss sees the value in the hours worked way above the value of the work done in the hours.

The sad thing about this, having experienced some of Doorlinings clients behaviours (and Lee at Doorlining set client information expectations to avoid these types of time/cost traps), is that general construction has a very long road to modernisation ahead even with the monumental `arse kicking’ it’s going to get at the end of the Grenfell Process.

ChatBots that alternative to people that isn't.

The previous post started out as a response to a comment I’d made on Facebook, the below will become the longtail of the same blog-post and was a response to a post on Linkedin on the same day regarding how rubbish customer-facing tech is in the main.

There is an element of the comedic ridiculous, to the alleged help bots, and even answer phone systems depending on where they have been bought and how they are utilised. Option systems that pointlessly go through a system of gates, rather than just plainly state that you are in a queue and will be answered shortly or give an engaged tone. After all, does my mechanic or the various other mechanics and occasional receptionist ever answer the phone with the words `Hello you’ve reached the Automania MOT reception?’ or in other circumstances, `Van-hire reception’ or `Service Reception’? No. But you have selected these options. Where’s the benefit, for me or the mechanic?

 It’s that same at the doctors. If someone is measuring something as you request appointments, results, cancellations etc, then what is being measured is invisible to me. However, I can understand if you are picking options and the system is obtaining specific statistical markers represented by phrases to number: One Hundred calls were for appointments, ten were for cancellations, however, forty people didn’t turn up. So for seeing clues by measuring what the general activity is, it has utility for BAU planning. Simple.

If on the other hand it has been incorporated, so that it directs your call to speak to a specific function of reception and to give them some form of preparedness, then, whatever that sift relates to, has no influence on how you are greeted or how you are dealt with. Remember you think you are selecting options on a directed path preparing reception for the nature of the call based on your selections. No. It’s just keeping you busy while the reception deals with another call. Then it puts you on hold and then tells you all the things it will do, when it answers the phone, and all the options that you will be presented with which you just went through to get to the point where you are just on hold. It’s a ludicrous mix of good intention, badly implemented, and sold upon the nebulous notion of giving the receiver of the call an advantage in customer service, whether it’s for an MOT or a funny rash. Clearly, it’s deeper than this but this isn’t the point, you need to read to the end.

The other technology that falls into this poorly implemented or planned help space is the ever more ubiquitous `ChatBot’. The reason for this long-tail is the story on Linkedin about someone being engaged by a ChatBot implemented by an airline.

On the human side of the interface, someone has typed that they want to alter their flight booking. The ChatBot responds that it doesn’t understand the enquiry. The ChatBot has a name as a person does and is pretending to be human. And yet this `thing’ that is pretending to be a human doesn’t actually understand a question relating to it’s designated function relative to the page it popped up on, Flight bookings’.

`They’ want you to think this `thing’, `using the over-arching term AI and their component algorithms’, has your best interests at heart. And as the original Linkedin poster pointed out `Tom Goodwin’, if this blunt stupid instrument (tool) is supposed to imbue you with confidence and loyalty then it has failed spectacularly. 

There are so many of these Ill thought through bots nowadays, they are as intrusive as a pushy shop assistant, or their cousins, Rude and Clueless.

It’s quite difficult to bend your head around 'The Computer says No'. But it isn't funny when it's reality a lot of the time. Some of it, is bells and whistle, where clean lines would do, a splash of décor and bunting that’s supposed to make you feel like the web interface is something other than a gateway to something you want.

Without question, every-time you go on-line it is for something you want more than you need, regardless of that needs actual parameters (goods, services, pleasure, knowledge).

However, I wonder how machines ended up being programmed with almost the same types of human failures as humans themselves?

Does it actually say more about our inability to communicate regardless of industry sector (Retail Meeter & greeter/ person who programmes a Meeter and Greeter) at some deeper level? Or is it that programmers, programme from experience and have the wrong impressions? Which loops straight back to core communication. Not communication skills per se, just that instinctual psychological need to 'step back from the approaching stranger. They are likely to want something... I may not be able to provide that something... this may result in hostility'.

It sounds over-simple once you have thought it through. Even though it took a while to edit this into what looks like a reasonable set of sentences.

Are the systems behaving more like gatekeepers, than gateways, because there is a personal space issue built-in that comes from our deep, not in the slightest bit philanthropic defensive lizard brain? I don't know.

I do know that somewhere in this mix is a relationship, to the making of gods.

On the making of gods.

On grand timescales, you can see how events like the Pandemic, the Californian, Australian and Greek wildfires, Floods, local wars, diseases various, would have once sown the seeds of religions and make gods of men – men who then hide gods power behind an impenetrable wall of `I don’t know why… but he only talks to me… and’.

This is said, very much in regard to ancient knowledge or lack thereof, where clever chancers, see a chance to bend people to their will by using what appears to be `the metaphysical'.

We are in a fearful time and yet there is so much good going on.

For thousands of years, things were not good. We died easily to all potential killers be they, animal, plant, mineral, bacterial, and for any reason real or imagined by others for whatever motivation -never mind what the environment could do just by being the envelope we all live in.

We now see, this metaphysical realm in modern technology expressed as memes, headlines, fakery, chicanery, avarice-generation, control, misdirection, and all the work of charlatans or control freaks since the dawn of time.

But it is so obvious when you step back in the light of that same science and tech and look (madness lies in thinking about that too much). I think looking for this `metaphysical' says more about human nature at the fundamental level.

We look for gods if we are allowed to.

This is a long-winded way of saying, it was probably easier to create greater gods for longer periods if you started two thousand years ago. These new ones don't survive scrutiny. And as for the old ones... it would be nice to see them fade in the face of our better natures, and the subsequently improved personal-nature of our technology.

Broken

 Many years ago, when I was about fourteen and hit puberty I developed Idiopathic Adolescent Scoliosis https://www.sauk.org.uk/types-of-scoliosis/idiopathic-scoliosis.

Way back then there were no proactive mitigating treatments, it was just allowed to develop and was monitored, if by the late part of the pubescent growth period it looks like it may have life limiting effects, you have surgery. Nowadays if it caught early it’s both monitored and mitigated. In retrospect its ludicrous that I wasn’t braced early. Had I been, I wouldn’t have had to undergo five major spinal operations in my life.

In order from March 1986, it started with an Anterior release, followed a fortnight later by a long spinal fusion incorporating Harrington rods. The anterior release part involves breaking the ribs on the deformed side and off-setting them a little. You then spend a week in ICU having four hourly doses of morphine, you are encouraged to drink, and when you can finally make two litres in a day without vomiting and eat and hold down solid food you can go back to a regular orthopaedic ward (we’ll ignore the particulars of the specialist orthopaedic ward). Once back on the ward you are turned every two to four hours in an arbitrary fashion, left side, right side, back, rinse repeat. This goes on for just over week.

ICU I believe was around five days, though it may have been six. The morphine doses mentioned above take care of the time in the main. The following seven or eight days between anterior release and the main fusion, do eventually involve you mobilising. However, nothing can prepare you for how quickly the ligaments tendons and muscles in your legs shorten and how much they complain when you are finally stood up and told to take your own weight.

Again, it’s a different world today, nowadays you’re back on your feet asap, and if not, you receive in bed physio. In any event they wouldn’t just man-handle you to a sitting position and ask you to stand. And if they did, they would warn you that is likely to hurt and you may fall or may not be able to get your feet flat to the floor… but I digress.

At around the fourteen day mark you go back to theatre for your second operation. During this surgery your spinal bones are fused, your disks are removed, and metal rods are installed to hold all the bits together. Then you are back on ICU for five days or so. The second stint on ICU is harder. The morphine is the same, but you’re acclimatised to it, so it doesn’t have the same effects. Or put another way there’s a lot more pain.

Eventually, you go back to a ward and you go through much the same process as before. Dressing changes, being turned, being mobilised, and finally having your stapples removed (the is scarring is still something to behold).

Around a week before you’re discharged, you are put in plaster. The cast extends from your chin to your hips, just past your coccyx at the rear and in a line from hip to hip at the front. The cast stays on for six months. After wearing the cast for six months (it was changed after three months), you wear a spinal brace that looks like a skin-coloured tailored corset made of rigid plastic for three to four months.

After about three months, you start removing the corset at night and sleep without it. At the same time I started to first re-build of me from scratch. There was no follow up physio. I’m not kidding about that. You literally go home, wear a plaster, wear a brace, get on with it. The rebuild involved swimming. I remember phoning the Royal National Orthopaedic hospital to ask if it would be okay to go swimming while still wearing the brace during the day and being told by the consultants’ registrar that it sounded like a good idea and couldn’t hurt. That was the entirety of my convalescent physiotherapy advice.

Thank fuck I’m not an idiot. And thank fuck I’d spent years being a swimmer, being active and being busy, because If I hadn’t been, I can’t imagine the state I’d be in now.

I had worked out that I only had a couple of working disks left and that I’d have to look after them. I also worked out that swimming was without a doubt going to be the perfect route back to cardiovascular fitness, back to having muscle and maybe being able to `embellish’ the scars so they didn’t look so catastrophic.

Eventually I got back on a push bike, and some time after that I started running. Eventually I was running five miles three times a week, going to a running club, pounding a treadmill, walking, climbing, scuba diving.

All my own work.

Jump forward to 1996. I’ve broken the Harrington rods in a at least two places between my shoulder blades, and all the metalwork needs to be removed. Major surgery three, almost ten years today from the first one in 1996.

This is a long recovery, rebuild two… it’s more difficult this time I’m older have less time to myself, and my now ex-wife is about as understanding as a thing that doesn’t understand, doesn’t want to understand and really wants to be the one at the centre of attention. I get mostly back to where I was and I’m still relatively speaking young… still mostly invincible.

Jump forward 2001, something is wrong down in the lumbar, it involves the serious potential of a new surgery. I avoid it, I cut back on activities, things get better, but my fitness has suffered, I have to be a bit more careful, but I am still a fairly a new dad, and life has moved on. I can excuse myself not being quite so super fit..

Jump forward 2007, the thing that was going wrong in 2001 (a herniated disk) has been plaguing me on and off for six years. I’ve had an inverse table to hang upside down in, taken Pregabalin, had numerous but interment three monthly cortisone injections direct into the nerve roots at L4/L5 (lumbar spine), and L5/S1 (Lumbar to coccyx). These are Xray guided injections for obvious reasons. They do work, but degeneration is occurring, and much later I find out I’ve done a classic British thing and compromised my life for probably eight years longer than I should have, and that my surgeon should probably have been a little more forceful, in explaining that procrastinating has a price you pay, further down the line.

In the end the only thing for it is a `bi-lateral, hemilaminectomy, foraminotomy and micro-discectomy L4/L5, and a hemilaminectomy, foraminotomy L5/S1. These surgeries involve shaving bone from the Foramen and the Lamina and clearing disk material from the Annulus which is the hard outer part of a spinal disc. This is a major surgery performed by a Neurosurgeon. The major recovery time is about six months, the initial recovery time is about six weeks. I had been told to get it fused. I refused on the basis of not wanting to be rigid from waist to neck.

Rebuild three. I’m single having divorced sometime ago, and having split up with my most recent partner, now live independently. Recovery is quicker, the surgery while deeply invasive and fraught with danger is modern and clean, and all that bedrest crap from twenty years before is long gone. I am mobilised the day after surgery, I was walking the length of the ward the day after that, two flights of stairs with a physio the day after that.

Jump forward 2011. The L5/S1 disk had been left herniated too long it’s squished back into the nerve canal and I’m fucked for want of a better word. There is no alternative; in August 2011, L5/S1 are fused. It’s major surgery. Six weeks initial recovery, six months to fully fuse, there is new metalwork.

The scar I first had in March 1996, which starts just below my neck, now pretty much runs to the cleft between my buttocks. This is the surgery I should have had in 2007. I feel a bit of an idiot. It’s the same surgeon for 2011, as 2007… he told me so.

Rebuild four, this one is tough, the local pool is a shit hole I can’t swim there, so I find a tiny but useable pool in Leadenhall street under and office block and start swimming lunchtimes. Eventually, I’m in `not too terrible shape for a forty something’, but I’m stiffer and achier and more often.

Jump forward 2019. I’m repotting a big old Acer, I tweak something very badly. I spend three months crippled. It’s believed but never proven that I have probably just torn some adhesions or scar tissue in my mid-back, and lumbar area. It’s a setback but doesn’t require a rebuild, just a lot of care, a lot of anti-inflammatory medication. The pins and rods in the lumbar region are not damaged or dislodged, but it was a very worrying time. My fitness did suffer, but the local pool in Burnham-on-Sea is run by ex-professional Tri-athletes, they are serious about fitness, and making the Sports and Swim Academy about fitness first not leisure, it’s a perfect environment for recovery. The people there aren’t just staff, they are friends.

Jump forward January 2021, I’ve dodged Covid, I’ve avoided any injuries that may involve any kind of interaction with a hospital. And then one Saturday in January, early morning while going out to fill the bird feeders in our car park I step off a kerb, the left foot hits solid ground and is planted, the right however, is on invisible black ice. My right foot slides backwards as far as my leg can extend in a second.

I’ve tweaked my right lumbar somewhere and maybe my hip. I’m not swimming anyway as we are in Lockdown V.3. and the pool isn’t open. My cardiovascular fitness has been affected by that. Now added to that is the fact that I can’t walk more than three hundred and seventy paces…. yes I counted them. It has been six weeks of `laying-down’ sciatica. ‘Laying-down’ sciatica is the worst kind, because you lay-down to sleep, so for six weeks I’ve been getting maybe two or three hours uninterrupted sleep, while super-strong painkillers lay me out. Then, unfortunately, you spend three to four hours sleeping fitfully, tossing and turning and trying to find a neutral position. It doesn’t last, and give it half an hour and the pain will float you back to consciousness. In this state of pained consciousness, your primary concern (other than the pain), is that in a few short hours you have to go to work, in pain, in poor health, and in a terrible mood.

This is going to be re-build five. I haven’t been this unfit since 2011. A part of me (masochistically) is looking forward to the process. I know I can do it, I know it will be as different this time as the previous four times. I know I’m 53 and nine months old, I know I’m not 21 anymore. Doesn’t matter, I can get back on the horse, I can be fit again, I will walk the Quantocks again. I can’t wait for lockdown to end so I can swim again. In much the same way as I can’t wait for my first vaccine dose.

There are things in life, that you orbit perpetually. Mine is a genetic timebomb that went off when I was around 14 years old. I wish it wasn’t and hadn’t, but wishes are just thoughts even if they are said out loud. The fact is it happened. I’m physically broken, I’ve been broken all my life. But with age comes acceptance, wisdom and patience, and a certain grit that in youth was bravado and without wisdom.

Today 07/2/2021, I manged to walk five time around our cluster of houses, two hundred paces per lap, one thousand paces, this from three hundred and seventy a week ago (in between then and now it’s varied up and down dependent on who knows what). Today feels like day one of re-build five. Watch this space.

Burnham-on-Sea

Since returning from travelling we have lived here in Burnham-on-Sea  (technically we are in Highbridge, but Burnham-on-Sea is the larger town and the two tend to blend into each other) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnham-on-Sea. Burnham-on-sea sits facing west at the most Eastern end of the Bristol Channel, south of Weston-Super-Mare. To the north across Brigdwater Bay lies Wales, and to the Southwest extending west is the north Somerset coast 51°14'19.03"N, 2°59'52.08"W. We have been here since May the 1^st 2014.

Burnham-on-Sea is an odd place in the 21^st Century. It hasn’t been commercialised even though it is a seaside town and attracts hordes of tourists in the summer. As a Londoner I am often saddened by the indigenous populations attitude to the place, however, I guess if you have never lived elsewhere it can seem a little dull. But if you come from a vast conurbation like London or Birmingham, then a place like Burnham really can feel like heaven on Earth.

Let’s concentrate on geography for a moment. Looking south past the worlds shortest pier, we see the Quantocks, the gateway to Exmoor and the highest point on Exmoor: Dunkery Beacon. Looking out to sea we have Hinckley’s A and B, and the emerging Hinckley C nuclear power stations, then looking north along the vast stretch of sand past the lighthouse we see Wales. Out of view behind me are the Somerset Levels and the Mendip hills.

Now maybe the reason I say it is a little piece of heaven becomes more apparent. From this tiny spec of a town you can drop onto the M5 motorway or the A38, and reach some of the UK’s great natural destinations in a matter of minutes (or at the least in under an hour). As for the town itself, you couldn’t want for more in terms of facilities and utility. It has its own privately owned Sports and Swim Academy, a cinema, its own High street and access to seven miles of uninterrupted sands. Two of the largest supermarket brands are represented (Tesco and Asda), as are the two main discounters (Aldi and Lidl). These seem like mundanity in the grand scheme of things but they are worth a mention just to give a sense of the completeness of the package that is Burnham-on-Sea.

Of all the places I have lived, Burnham-on-Sea is where I feel most at home. I have only been back to London once since we arrived in Somerset and that was on the day that my dad and all the other people whose family member had donated their bodies to medical research were commemorated at Southwark cathedral. I said a couple of weeks ago that when Covid has passed and we can travel again, I’d like to spend a few days in London to see what has changed around the City of London,  to visit Tate Modern and a couple of the big museums... and maybe spend some time on the Thames waterfront. But my heart now belongs to the West Country, I think it has, ever since I dived along the South Coast of Dorset, Devon and Cornwall in my early twenties… it just took a couple of decades to get myself in a position whereby I could make the move. And I guess that somehow, if destiny is a thing, then it was my destiny to meet Amanda and eventually move here to her place of birth (Somerset).