Author Archives: JamesH

10.11.12 – it's time for a party!!!

Cup cakes courtesy of daughter No1

Today we celebrated my Dad’s 80th Birthday at an event organised at Furzey Gardens at Minstead in the New Forest.

Dad spent his early career as commercial artist for the original Selwood company (the plant hire and pump people) and helped design the gallery at Furzey back in the 1970s when the gardens and Minstead Lodge were acquired by the Selwood family.

It seemed a very fitting venue for celebrating his life and work to date and I was delighted when Tim Selwood offered me use of the Gardens and Furzey House for this private event outside of the official opening season. It was fascinating to re-visit a place I remember from childhood outings and also to learn more about the excellent work the Furzey Charitable Trust and Minstead Training project do for those with learning disabilities.

As part of the birthday event I created a small exhibition of Dad’s work from over the years which include a number of paintings he has produced during the last ten years that have rarely been seen outside of the family home. Thanks to my brother’s diligent efforts on a scanner and the masterful photography and album production of Ben Goode, we have captured a selection of Dad’s work digitally that we remember being created over the years.

I have added the output of some of these efforts to a portfolio website to accompany the event and to give exposure to some of the lovely paintings beyond the walls of the family home – http://www.brianhoskins.org.uk/

Thanks again to all those who helped make this a delightful, fun and memorable afternoon and I very much hope to be organising a follow-up event in 10 years time. If Dad has just enough of the family genes that enabled my 98 year old Aunt to attend the event and regale me with tales of how she used tour around the New Forest pubs on a motorbike (as I used to do in my youth) then hopefully I will be writing a similar post in 2022!

Click for larger view

Blast from the past

T minus 13 seconds …

I had a real surprise this week when communicating with an old school friend. He had some pictures I never even knew existed that were taken coming up to 30 years ago.

They are of a space shuttle model that I carved out of balsa wood, painted and then stuffed with parts of dismantled fireworks. It is then apparent from the photographs that we built a metal gantry out of Meccano to hold the shuttle in position and launched it from a friend’s back garden on Friday 12th November 1982 – (which incidentally was the day after the real shuttle programme’s first operational flight when Columbia carried four astronauts and deployed a satellite for the first time)

If I remember rightly, I had created a secondary fuse mechanism that would ignite after take-off which was then designed to blast open the payload doors and release a parachute to enable the shuttle to float back to the ground.

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50 months to save the world …

… as we know it.

This is the stark reckoning from onehundredmonths.org who’s countdown process and excellent updates I have been following for a few years now.

Beyond this point, there is steadily growing scientific conscensus that if we have not taken sufficient action to curb greenhouse gas emissions within this timeframe there is the very serious possibility of runaway global warming. The resulting rise in temperatures will turn our planet into quite a hostile place for the vast majority of the human race in its current form and locations.

As usual, claim and counter claim continue from both sides of the climate change debate and without being blessed with a crystal ball or DeLorean time machine we have to decide as individuals which side of the debate we stand or else take no notice at all and carry on with our lives as usual.

Given the unpredictability of Mother Nature, who really knows for sure whether one event will counteract another in the future and the human race has shown it can rise to challenges when the need is strong enough. However, looking around us in the year 2012, it’s clear that things are changing. The wettest summer in the UK for 100 years and record levels of ice melt in the arctic are just two events relatively close to home that we have felt the effects of. A very tangible example of which I have discovered this last month in my back garden. Continue reading →

When old CMS software happens to good people

One of my current work assignments has taken me into the Public Sector for the first time in my 25 year career. It’s not an easy place to be these days but I tend to favour challenging environments rather than those that are all going swimmingly well, as I personally find it more fulfilling and enjoy striving to make a difference.

Fortunately I am surrounded by a thoroughly likeable and dedicated bunch of people who have clearly been going through times of great upheaval and uncertainty with political change and the major cuts in public spending.

It is refreshing to be working within organisations with good information management processes and practices and I admire the folks who work faithfully and tirelessly to keep everything in order and accurate for local residents – often working to maintain approaches that seemed like a good idea at the time but have since fallen out of favour. Quite often those who are supposed to be supporting them are making their jobs even harder.

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Could playing 'games' help safeguard our planet?

via cycling.com

The success of the London 2012 Olympics shows that our enthusiasm for ‘The Games’ has not waned since our earliest civilisations battled to become Citius, Altius, Fortius (Faster, Higher, Stronger).

As the sun sets on the Games of the XXX Olympiad and we head off to XXXI in Rio, the next 4 years have been deemed crucial by some organisations for addressing potentially one of the biggest issues facing our planet – global warming.

We are just 2 short months from the onehundredmonths.org half way point and the remaining 50 months will take us up to the next ‘Greatest Show on Earth’ in Rio 2016.

London 2012 has been described as the ‘greenest games ever’ and this article debates quite nicely just how true this is. Regardless of the efforts that have gone into building the venues from recycled materials and creating new wildlife habitats, the article points out that …
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