If you must keep me on hold playing dreary music please don’t keep interrupting to play a recording saying how important my call is and apologise. Every time the music cuts out and I hear a voice I get excited I may be about to speak to a real human…
[Grrrr]
If you hang around an industry long enough all sorts of fluff attaches. One bit of such fluff that dropped onto my desk earlier today was the latest issue of a free magazine that I’ve somehow ended up on the mailing list of. It’s the normal type of such fluffiness, filled with articles written to get a company name out there and thinly disguised adverts in between the real ads. What made me smile is given the name of the publication is “Modern Building Services” it seemed a bit of a strange choice for a cover:
A cover photograph from an issue of Modern Building Services
That’s a picture of 35028 Merchant Navy Class Clan Line, preserved by the Merchant Navy Locomotive Preservation Society and frequently run as the Belmond British Pullman. It turns out, after flicking through twice to find a reference, it’s actually there as part of a small story ad for Ambirad’s Nor-ray-vac system. Cool train though.
BBC News has a piece about railways running right next to the sea. All very fluffy and light but what really struck me were the maps. Here’s one:
A detail map from the BBC, showing sea as white and land as blue/green
Note how they have chosen to represent the sea as white and the land as a blue-green colour (an equal mix—a quick check gives the colour as RGB(191,222,222)). That had the effect I spent a moment or two wondering when Carlisle had been flooded! The detailed view of Carlisle to Barrow-in-Furness line actually sits alongside an image of the whole of the UK:
The UK is much easier to identify in this colour scheme than a close up detail
In that image the familiar outline of the entire country immediately makes the land/sea divide obvious in a way which vanishes in the close up view. In short they’ve got consistency but no sense. Either that or there’s a tunnel going to Dawlish:
BBC map tricking the mind into thinking the railways have tunnelled to Dawlish