An early start this morning was required. I'd even had a phone call from a claims advisor to warn me that I had to get out of bed this morning. There was no problem waking up. Punch & Judy saw to that as they left for work, making my alarm clock pretty well redundant too.

As for today, a murky start, but the skies brightened, and ye gods did the temperature drop. Not actually as cold as it gets in Britain, not even frosty, but the effect was accentuated by the relatively mild if somewhat damp weather we've been having lately. It felt as if it was freezing.

As for my all-important claims interview, it turned out to be another pointless exercise in bureaucracy. It seems I now have to write the same information out in triplicate. I'm not joking. Oh well, if that's what it takes to earn my meal ticket in the absence of gainful employment, so be it.

Meanwhile, Back At The Library

Once again I sit down for a couple of hours of free internet access. Same as every other day, but my attention was drawn to the display case on the second floor.

The Science Museum has an annex up the road from where I sit typing this. Wroughton airfield stores lots of stuff, from old aeroplanes to all sorts of documents, and in previous years, my drum kit resided temporarily in one of the hangars by Red Gate (The caretakers son was one of Red Jasper's crowd of amateur roadies).

Occaisionally they let the library display some of their treasures. Mostly old books, some hundreds of years old, and a patent of nobility from Henry VIII's reign was in there for a while. Today, I spotted some ephemera from the golden age of airships. Photos of R100 in flight and construction, but there was something better than that.

A menu, an incomprehensible card document in germanic language and script, and a pair of colour printed tickets from the airship Hindenburg dated to 1936. The sense of occaision these vessels must have engendered, not to mention encouraged by the aviation industry, was almost palpable. A pair of tickets to South America with colour pictures of the Hindenburg illustrated above all else what a big deal it was. Now all gone in a puff of smoke.