Fog At Heathrow - Europe Cut Off
This is a paraphrase of a headline from The Times from some time in the 50’s or 60’s. The original was “Fog in Channel - Continent Cut Off“, which I guess speaks volumes about Britain’s sense of its place in the world fifty years ago.
Anyway, although Heathrow’s been fog-bound for 24 hours, the weather here’s been cold and overcast for what seems like ages. Hard frosts every night, and a flat grey sky during the day. This sounds pretty daft, but its had an effect on the decorating we’ve been doing.
To get good enough light to ensure a good paint finish, we’ve had to have the lights on, even in the middle of the day. The problem is that I’ve replaced all our light bulbs with low energy, compact fluorescent tubes. If you’ve ever taken a photo in a room lit with these, using a non-digital camera (i.e. one without cunning white balance functions), you’ll have noticed that the picture has a distinctly green tint.
Normally you don’t notice this, as the human brain is remarkably good at white balance too - spend some time with your face in the blue-tinted swimming pool water, and you’ll notice that everything has a pink shade for a few seconds when you look up.
But when you put carefully chosen paint colours on the wall, their different absorption characteristics become very clear . . . and the paint that looked just great in the shop, or on the sample painted by the window, suddenly looks like you’ve been spreading slurry on the walls. Yuck.
Thankfully we’d only opened one tin, so I saddled up and cycled off to the shop to change the other for something more appropriate for our lighting scheme. Being green is one thing, but I never knew it would affect the way I looked at the walls inside our house!
Workout:
- Type: Cycle
- Date: 12/22/2007
- Total Time: 00:42:00.00
- Distance: 10 miles
- Average Speed: 14.29 mph
