Welcome to WilF's Wonderings
Ultra Violet Engineering
Look After Your Hair!
Scenic flight and dinner
Biographical. WilF is a writer and a poet (of sorts) and has decided to publish some of his work on here for the entertainment of his friends (so he hopes anyway). WilF's poetry uses a great deal of poetic license and so he hopes that his verse will not be taken too seriously! WilF and his wife, Vera live in rural Lincolnshire, England's best-kept secret as far as counties go. They have been known to keep Yorkshire Terriers in a previous life in the belief that these dogs have a way of keeping humans sane. At present they are dogless and somewhat lost so they are presently trying for another. WilF and Vera are very much into vegetable gardening and have ambitions to become self-sufficient in edible green things. They have had major successes so far in growing a multitude of salad leaves throughout the 'wrong' seasons and have now become quite used to enjoying salads and 'out of season' fruit and veg all through the year.
The full garden story is here: Garden (Coming soon)
WilF has recently re-discovered poetry. When the children were small WilF used to write short stories and poems to keep them amused (naturally they don't remember much of this so it obviously had a profound effect on their lives). Wilf has not written a single poem for more that thirty years up until the middle of 2009 when he underwent some sort of reawakening of his creative spirit. And he has remembered that emotional state and poetic output are positively correlated (whatever that might mean). Anyway WilF's poems seem to arrive in two distinct ways; firstly when in a bit of an emotional 'state' having perhaps been thinking about something profoundly sad like a war incident or 'third-world' hunger or poverty he finds that a poem will often come into his mind quite spontaneously. Secondly, on waking from a vivid dream, WilF can often take up pen and paper and just start writing; there seems to be no control exercised by him over the output, it seems to 'just happen'. Weird but true!
Another of WiF's passions is technology. His working life has been spent as an electronics engineer and, of course, he was brought up on thermionic valves (well, not literally, they wouldn't taste too good), Strowger telephone exchanges, undersea communication cables, proper wireless (radio) programmes that were actually worth listening to, engines (any sort of motive power), and cars that you could maintain yourself. His all-time favourite job was when he was sixteen and working for Post Office Telephones (God's Poor Orphans), the super-job being out in the countryside with a work gang putting up telephone poles. Ah, that was a job for men (and boys)! The trouble with technology now is that it has become just too complicated; we seem to have to find more and more new ways to make our world more complicated. Does it make us any happier?
No, he doesn't think so, just as the consumer society we live in now does not make us any happier than we were. WilF yearns for a simpler life, a life of make-do-and-mend, a life where love matters more than possessions and where caring and sharing matter more than control and insistence on matching pillowcases and cushions! A world where a radio that works properly is preferred over a television that can get you nine hundred channels of unmitigated rubbish that is unwatchable. A world where you can live your life without being subject to all sorts of petty government restrictions and 'nanny-state' rules designed to keep the population in check. Well, WilF is convinced that we need a revolution - not necessarily a violent conflict between 'us' and 'them' but more akin to 'us' saying 'enough is enough, we are not putting up with all this crap any longer, we want a lot LESS government and and lot MORE caring!' And so we need a government that is prepared to work itself (or most of itself) out of office - we could easily manage with a government and civil service a quarter of its present size and that did not get involved in all of our lives to anything like the extent that it does now. Other countries do it, so why not us? And whilst we are about it, why do we roam around the world getting into new wars and attacking countries we have no business attacking. To reduce terrorism? To make our streets safer? No, I don't believe we 'ordinary' people think so, it's more to do with the death throes of a little country slightly to the west of Europe whose politicians are living embedded in the past and thinking we are still fulfilling the role of the World's police force. Oh, and it might be something to do with control of scarce recources. What it is not about is fairness, justice or the future.
Finally, and most importantly for me, may we please have a World where no one dies from hunger or thirst any more. Surely by now we should have achieved this modest ambition, shouldn't we?
Watch this space, but don't hold your breath! ............... WilF (William Donald Fowdrey)
Last updated: 27th January 2012.
Computers, Huh! If you know WilF, you will be aware that he knows virtually nothing about internet software so he has trawled the Interweb looking for help to build his website. This help seems to be freely available and the only thing asked by most is an acknowledgement of their work and their help. This WilF has been pleased to acknowledge as requested here. WilF was an electronics engineer in a previous existence so feels he knows a bit about technology in general and the workings of computers in particular (unfortunately he is probably wrong about this because virtually no one knows anything much about computers nowadays) They have become just so blasted complicated that the entire technical specification and modus operandum of a modern desktop computer is far beyond the capacity of a single human brain to contemplate. Herein lies the basic problem; in writing a new piece of software, say an operating system for a PC, many people are involved, each writing a portion of the program code. Not only do all these portions have to interact, communicate with each other and not interfere with each other, each of the programmers has a different level of understanding of the machine they are writing the software for. Some of the programmers have no understanding of the machine hardware at all; not like in my day when we had a more-or-less complete mental map of the hardware and we wrote our programs in 'machine code' or something very close to it. It is no wonder that modern machines crash so often!
Poem of the month - February.
Now We are Old .....
Shall I compare you to a Moonlit Sky?
With scudding cloud and jagged hills
Or will you just argue bye and bye
When I say that you must take your pills
When we were wed, we argued not
We thought that life was fine
Now we are old we have found out
That there is little left, but wine
When we first met, we argued not
We thought that we were true
Now we are both advanced in years
And our friends are me, and you
When we first saw each other
Across a crowded floor
And we both had strong feelings
And we knew there was no more
No more the slightest chance of fate
Ever tearing us apart
We knew it truly then, we did
And we felt it in our hearts
But now we're old and wrinkled
And all those years have flown
We know it won't be long now
Until one's left on their own
Which it will be we cannot say
God will not be forthcoming
Life is the trial; we have to pay
It is the price for loving!
Apple Hair UK (well it would be!)
Bognor Regis (Wireless) Museum
Black History
(Intelligent) life on Europa?
The Future of Energy?
Aidsmap
Museum of the History of Science
A Tragedy of Life (and Death)
Gary McKinnon
biofuelwatch
My Dream Car