Anders Hanson

As today was a day off and with nothing planned, I did what all normal people do, and went off to Lincolnshire to look at an oil refinery.

I’ve always had a bit of a fascination with industrial architecture. The more obvious examples are some of the great mill buildings that you get across the north of England that these days seem to be used more for posh apartments than for making anything. But I also find some of the less attractive and still active industrial architecture fascinating.

I’ve posted before about how much I like the coast of Lincolnshire, and so with a whole day free I decided that it would be a good trip out. But for some unexplained reason I decided to drive around the Killingholme and Immingham area to look at some of the oil refineries and power stations that are there. I’ve uploaded one photo that I took, but I will upload the rest to Flikr when they’ve resolved the technical problems that they’ve got today. (12th Sept update - all photos now uploaded)

After driving around that area I decided to visit Cleethorpes as it is somewhere I haven’t been before and it gave me the opportunity to walk along the sea. It was low tide when I arrived and so I saw very little sea, but it is still quite dramatic to see the ships in the Humber Estuary from a distance and nice just to get a change of scenery and some sea air. Although I don’t really do the traditional British seaside holiday, there is something about seaside towns that I really like.

Anders Hanson on Flikr

Yesterday saw the launch of Liberal Democrat Voice, a Lib Dem equivalent of Conservative Home, although it’s a bit unfair to describe it as such.

I’ve only just found the site, but it appears to be something that is long overdue - a replacement for cix. Many people who regularly use cix will not like the suggestion that cix could be replaced, but for the thousands of party activists out there who would join in a (private) debate with other Lib Dems but don’t want to spend the money on getting a cix account, there has to be something else.

For two years working in Eastleigh I had access to cix and I loved it. I don’t deny that there is a lot of rubbish there and it can be frustrating, but now I don’t have it I miss it. It is a great chance to debate with other Liberal Democrats in a private forum and I now feel quite out of what is going on in the party. The other great thing about cix was the ability to put out a plea for help or information on campaigning and get information back quite quickly. I hope Liberal Democrat Voice will be able to do the same in its forum, but it needs to reach a critical mass of people going there regularly for it to work. The problem is that there are so many websites, blogs, discussion groups and so one that you don’t have time to visit them all, but this one looks as though it could be different.

For the record, there is also CentreForum’s FreeThink, which I helped trial, but that is largely policy based discussion and tends to be as a result of someone starting a debate through an essay.

LIBERAL DEMOCRAT VOICE

FREE THINK

Why is Private Eye being so horrid about dear Ming Campbell? I knew him briefly, having been introduced by my old drinking partner, Pamela at one of her elegant soirées in Morningside, and he exerted a powerful sexual attraction that I had experienced rarely before or since.

When I stumbled on this comment whilst randomly searching the internet, I knew I had to find the blog that it came from, and it was worth the effort.

Frog End is a blog by a pensioner from Cambridgeshire and is from the general rambling about life school of blogging. It’s worth a read, and if that quote doesn’t whet your appetite, then try this:

Each of us must build a little cabin at the foot of our ample garden and keep a small family of Young People in it to act as domestic servants, providers of entertainment and maintainers of computing equipment.

Understandably I couldn’t work out how serious the author of the blog is, and I even wondered if it was a spoof, but it is both funny and interesting. It just shows that blogging is done by people of all ages and is of interest to all sorts of people even if you’ve never met the person concerned.

Frog End (Audrey Wylfing)