Pots of Gold

Yesterday I joined a party of U3A members visiting The Crown Derby pottery factory, in Derby as you may have guessed.

I discovered quite a lot during our tour of the factory. Only a quarter of the china is made up of clay, half is bone ash and the remainder some sort of powdered mineral.

Designs are put on as transfers, moistened with water and eased into place by hand.  Pots go into the kiln five times, twice to bake colours in place.

The last and shortest baking is to fix the gold - almost all Crown Derby wares are gilded somewhere or other. The annual consumption of 16 kg of gold costs them about 2 million pounds, a figure reflected in the prices of goods in the shop.

Fractions in the Media

On Radio 4 this morning someone said that the SNP lost 'almost a third' of its seats in the recent general Election.

In 2015 the SNP won 56 seats. In 2017 they lost 21 seats.

One third of 56 = 18 2/3   21>18 2/3

A Metricated Man

I've just checked today's weather  forecast, on a site that initially gave temperatures in Fahrenheit. I found they didn't convey much to me, and had to change to Celsius to achieve full comprehension.

At one time I could cope with either scale, but no longer!

Web Site updated

My web site now has recent pictures of the front of the house (follow the link on the index page) and corrected versions of my philosophy notes.

Fifteen General Elections

This morning I voted in a General Election for the fifteenth time. I've never missed one since I was old enough to vote, twenty-one in  my youth.

Examination of the various opinion polls has proved an interesting statistical exercise. Assuming the variations between the recent polls are just statistical variations, I think the result of this election will be much like that of the last one, except that the Scottish Nationalists will lose a few seats to the Conservatives and to Labour.