Paul McGhee

@pmcghee.bsky.social

601 Followers 209 Following

Rug repairer. Haunter of car boot sales. Cambridge, UK. Will chat with agents. "How these curiosities would be quite forgott, did not such idle fellowes as I am putt them downe."

A shawl, folded in half, woven with vertical bands of white on a predominantly red background and some green highlights. It is made from five narrow strips woven on a back-strap loom and sewn together, it has tassels where thin embroidered bands cross the main fabric.
A Google search for the word Magenta returns a widely varying array of hues from different websites, including one which promises 50 shades of Magenta.
A hornet mimic hoverfly checking out my shed.
A Jersey tiger moth checking our new apartment.
An antique loom assembled in its new home, a ramshackle extension to a more sensible weaving shed. It's a tight fit. Outside is a flax brake. A window, currently green is made from a silk screen printer's frame.
A woman on a bicycle with a Deliveroo-style backpack is painted in black outline on coarse sacking. She peers at the observer through a screen of red and green open-work cubes.
A picture of a thick felt rug made with two types of undyed sheeps wool - broad brown border and white field with small patches of coloured felt as decoration.
The Title page of "The Woad Plant and Its Dye" by Dr Jamieson B Hurry showing woad seeds, the plant in flowering season in its second year and the its flower.
A map of Parson's Grove showing the location of the Five Bells pub overlaid with a picture of Billy Taylor outside the woad mill during its dismantling in 1914 and one of the Thiepval Memorial to those missing in action on the Somme battlefield.
A map of the route from the woad mill at Church End, via Parson Drove and Murrow Bank and returning by Silver's Lane, showing the six pubs a carter would have passed on the five mile round trip. The Butchers Arms, the Swan Inn, the Jolly Brewer, The Bell, the Railway Inn and the Three Pigeons.
A side by side map of Parson Drove showing the woad mill in an early form in 1887 beside its current location at 52.66028, 0.05132 - an empty ploughed field.
A stand of weld growing nicely on the western side
Text of a recording by Norman T Willie of Arthur Jarvis, the last "waddie" to work at Parson Drove woad mill. He describes how hard the work was for the horses that drove the cutting wheels.
A model of the Parson Drove woad mill surrounded by three paintings and a photograph of it in operation in the early 20th century
A map of Parson Drove in the early 20th Century showing the site of the woad mill in relation to the church. This is overlaid with a painting of the mill itself, women picking woad in a nearby field with the church in the background and a man resting in an adjacent field
A model of the woad mill at Parson Drove, near WIsbech which is housed in the warehouse of the Science Museum. Picture is from "Woad in the Fens" by Norman T Willis published by L J Ruskin and Sons Sibsey Lane, Boston, Lincs in 1970.
Agricultural Workers Gathering Woad by James Doyle Penrose in 1906, held in the Wisbech and Fenland Museum. Church may be St John the Baptist, Parson Drove, where there was a woad mill until the 1930s.
A small shaggy 1970s rug with a design of a sunrise or sunset above abstract forest shapes.
On the ground at the car boot sale is a large room-sized rug with a pale camel coloured ground and dark brown border. It has bands of geometric patterns cross-wise on the borders.
Iloca 2.8 stereo camera from 1955
An aerial view of the University's New Museums Site in Cambridge. Formerly an Augustinian Priory, then a Botanical Garden, then the heart our scientific innovation then a jumble of admin, academic and museum buildings.
A variety of rug fragments including (1) a blue and yellow Caucasian bit from Shirvan and (2 an Afshar medallion, both containing representations of amusing animals. (3) a red and black Turkmen bit with fancy guls and lots of border stripes (4) a wavy border saved from a Naluchi rug (5) a thick flatweave baggage of indeterminate Persian origin (7) a red and yellow Turkish donkey bag with leather bits sewn on.
This technology was modestly popular globally from 2012-2014, and requires a 1080 screen from those exact years, with a particular RF synchronisation chip to work properly. Despite cross-industry standardisation activity between Samsung, Philips and others, it just didn't take off and so the chips were not included in later TVs. Movies using the tech were issued on blu-ray and some people used them for gaming. No other field of human activity has spawned so many cul-de-sacs of innovation, and so many attempts in every generation since the mid 19th century to try to make it scale to popularity, as stereography. This is why it appeals to me, perversely, as a historical study of human ingenuity. The car boot sale is the natural environment for all of these technologies. https://www.samsung.com/my/support/tv-audio-video/which-3d-glasses-will-work-with-my-samsung-3d-blu-ray-player/#4100
A path made from regular square blocks of brick paving leads across a water feature in the brilliant gardens at https://www.porterslodge.co.uk/ Motifs in the picture include a statue of a winged creature, a rusticated arch made of blocks of concrete and a metal seat rising from greewater.
A YETI brander hit drink flask which is too fat to fit in the SKODA YETI cup holder alongside a plastic guttering component from Screwfix that will adapt it to the smaller hole.
An antique Aubusson flat-woven carpet hanging from my vine trellis. It has more holes than Blackburn, Lancashire.
A collection of spinning whorls, all roughly the same in colour but different in shape and material, has been arranged in the cells of an old chocolate box. The eight columns represent their vertical profile graded from flat biconical in the left-most column towards globular in the centre and then towards flat cylindrical in the right-most column. Seen from above, these would look more similar except for their diameters and lose the profile data. Diameters, hole sizes and weights would provide more information about the materials they were composed of (lead, stone or ceramic) which in turn might suggest when they were made as well as the particular spinning purpose they were most suited for. The purpose, a propos your thoughts about memory, was to show that any simplified, incomplete and compressed arrangement of data is suitable only for the tool used to analyse it and you can't know what's missing or why. I think you mostly got that point. A spreadsheet containing that data, linked to the visual arrangement, would provide a richer data experience without providing much more computing overhead. Saving your memories usung multiple different compressed forms might be a way to go.