Boom!

By dint of some dexterity with my calendar, I contrived to be in the Minx's vicinity at lunchtime today, so that we could meet up at Astley Park for a bite to eat. We've been before, ages ago, but on that occasion didn't make the mistake of going at lunchtime: the hard wooden floor and bare walls of the large restaurant make it incredibly noisy.

Just outside are a couple of cannons and I stopped to admire them. I love the huge, heavy wooden blocks and wheels, and the way the iron is pitted, not to mention how the barrel is chained into place. It's hard to imagine the visceral experience of being in charge of firing one, hoping it wouldn't blow up in your face or break free of its moorings and slam back into you, while it discharged its projectiles (and and not very precisely at that). It would have been a far cry from, say, launching a cruise missile from the safety of control room somewhere. 

This reminds me of reading one of Richard Bach's books - I started at 'Jonathan Livingston Seagull' but gave up after two or three as they became more hippified - and there was one story of a parallel Earth in which technology had been poured into games rather than weapons. When I look around at our gaming tech (not that I ever use any of it), and our smartphones and household items like the Sonos, I feel like we've fulfilled part of the story he was telling. If only we could stop bright, young people from going into weapon design we could realise the important part, too.