Window set into the corner of a modernist building on Exhibition Road in London.
I haven't posted one of these for four years, but I couldn't ignore this.. what else is there to say?
The Arbitration process itself involved Arbitrators in three
time zones, however the hearing involved very little travel for us.
ArchiFACT’s expert travelled 65 miles by train and taxi from our Head Office in
St Leonards-on-Sea to the lawyers offices in the City of London.
The hearing was conducted entirely via multiple video links
and, if placed end to end, the total length of cables running between the pieces
of tech in each of the individual offices of the arbitrators, clients, experts
and lawyers could well have been greater than the distance travelled by our
expert.
The question arising was, does ArchiFACT, or indeed any consultancy, need separate offices in the North of England and another in the
South, when almost everything except for site visits could be done sitting at
a desk?
Drawing the obvious conclusion, ArchiFACT’s Yorkshire office
is now closed. From 30 May 2024 all business will be conducted from our Sussex
Office in St Leonards-on-Sea.
We can be contacted initially on any matter on:-
01424 259597
07752 175973
via email –
fact@ArchiFACT.co.uk.
On our first and my only trip to the USA, Rob and I spent a week in New York intending to be total tourists, before moving on to visit friends Stan and Jen in Medford Lakes, NJ.
If our original itinerary had worked out, we'd have been in
New York and would probably have done the Twin Towers and the Empire State
Building on the 9th September. Once actually there, the more enigmatic Empire
State came first, but might not have done if it hadn't been closer to our
hotel. This budget hotel had roaches in the shower and smelled mouldy, but that
was ok, it was exciting, we were in the Big Apple!
Luckily, because of various minor complications like Stan
and Jen being on holiday in the West Indies and because BA's discounted
airmiles tickets weren't available when we'd originally planned to go, we'd
reversed the order of our trip and went to Medford Lakes after New York. We never made it to the World Trades Centre and I am
eternally grateful for those minor complications.
Watching the events on live TV, while in the safe living room of Stan and Jen's charming log-cabin home, on the shore of the lake, was terrifying. None of us could believe what we were seeing.
We spent half the day frantically trying to phone home, to reassure our family in England that we were safe. All the mobile lines were completely overloaded and landlines weren't much better. Eventually Rob managed to get an email through to his father in Leeds and asked him to please phone my mother in Hastings to tell her we were safe. We carried on watching the inadequate TV reports while Stan managed to get in touch with his cousins in New York, who thankfully were safe too.
Just as alarming was seeing that there was nobody on top of
this. Politicians were panicking and TV channels had no known pattern, no
appropriate template to follow, on how to report an event of this magnitude
which was actually happening to their fellow American citizens, not people in
far off lands of whom they knew little and cared less.
The pristine, primped and botoxed newsreaders unemotionally
reported on whatever garbled messages emerged from the authorities, (with
jollifying adverts) between distraught and panic-stricken vox-pops. The
reporters were without a hair or tear out of place and the requisite toothy
grins were still plastered on their shiny faces, their body language mocking
the horrors they were failing to report in any meaningful way.
There was no information.
Later in the day I went alone for a swim in the lake, it was
peaceful and temporarily soothing.
*
I don’t deliberately try to mark 9/11. The stress (mine),
the horror (everyone's) and the fear (the victims), is something I'd like to
forget, although I won't. The only events which have come close to affecting me
that much since are the horrific Grenfell Tower fire and most recently the impossibly
hopeless evacuation of desperate people from Kabul. The only earlier event to
have the same effect was, as a child, watching reports from Aberfan. I felt I
was one of those children, experiencing that horror.
According to this website, there have been not five lighthouses and Dungeness, which is how far my research led me, but seven. Two were low lights not the high ones I'd found. The first was constructed in 1884 in metal on a wooden base and included a huge foghorn. The second came in 1932 as a replacement for the metal structure which was by then, unsurprisingly, in need of extensive repairs. The 1930's structure was subsequently demolished to make way for the fifth high tower which was needed so the light wasn't obscured to the west by the nuclear power station.
Both the fifth high tower, which became an unmanned, automatic light, and the Dungeness nuclear power station remain in operation today.
This article is fascinating, do read it! :-
Lighthouses at Dungeness - Romney Marsh, The Fifth Continent (theromneymarsh.net)
This is the Old Lighthouse at Dungeness in Kent. Built in 1904, it is properly known as the High Light Tower and is 41 metres high. It was originally painted in black and white stripes, to make it highly visible in daylight, even in poor weather conditions.
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The High Light Tower, 1904. Behind is the accommodation block built around the base of Samuel Wyatt's 1792 Tower. |
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My 1966 photograph of the new Lighthouse. The car in the foreground was our VW Variant Estate. Behind it are a Ford Anglia, a Morris Minor Countryman and a VW Microbus. |
Mullock could be a handy word when commenting on the activities of certain politicians, eg. those blithering mountebanks have made a total mullock of... (insert official title of latest politicians' balls-up)
Mullock - noun originally describing waste from gold mining activities in Australia. If you prefer non-antipodean words, try slag-heap.