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Monday, July 14, 2008 --- 139 days ago http://gritsday.blogspot.com/2008/07/loving-marconi-and-hating-bt-goonhilly.html
| We are learning a lot about communications in Cornwall. It's quite the place to be, this end foot of England, kicking the ocean waves of the Atlantic. If you want to do a home education project on communications, I can recommend it. I can recommend the whiskery chaps, members of the Poldhu Amateur Radio Club, tipped up at the top of the Lizard peninsula, in the shed there now, at Poldhu. In this place, Marconi sent his first wireless dot dot dot to Newfoundland, across all those waves of the Atlantic Ocean, and in doing so scared the knickers off the cable company down the road who'd just spent the economy of England dropping cable lines on the sea floor, to be chewed at by sharks and sat on by barnacles. In these days, the radio amateurs hang around in a rebuilt version of Marconi's shed. They seem a decent lot of eccentrics in their coastal sweaters and breezy sea salt faces. Admittedly, one or two of them look like they might've been living in Marconi's shed since 1901, and are as likely to be enticed out of it, blinking into today's bright world, as they are to be enticed to sit inside a burning car, but no matter to us. After all, we home educators actually seek out people like this. These are the lost and best of British eccentrics. In this world of pin numbers, bar codes and steam rollering normality, we actually think these wonderfully mad people have something to teach us. And, we tell the children, there is mad talking to tre ... |
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