Fortean Times

A good haul from the Raynes Park platform library on the way home.

So anti-clockwise from top right we have:

In the green, a 'Wallpaper* City Guide' to Las Vegas from Phaidon. Quite a nicely produced thing and, oddly, containing about a quarter of its volume as pages on which to make notes. Perhaps Phaidon are losing their original market in art books, largely of a sort which for which the Internet is a more than satisfactory alternative, and are thrashing around for something to put the talents to - while at the same time making a living.

A smartly produced and informative consultation document for airspace and future operations at Heathrow, dated January of this year. As well it might be, given the money and public interests involved. Unclear to me from whom this document comes, with the website that comes with it, reference 1, telling me that it is closed. Perhaps whoever it is that owns this bit of critical national infrastructure these days?

A short document from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission about its cemeteries in Poland, containing around 1,200 graves, mostly Commonwealth airmen who lost their lives over Poland or prisoners of war who died there, during the second world war. I also learn that by the end of the second world war there were nearly a quarter of a million of Polish servicemen and women serving under British command.

And last but not least, two numbers of the Fortean Times - with rather more having been available should we have been that interested. Named, I know now for Charles Fort, from Albany, New York State, of Dutch stock. The scientist and science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke was a Fortean, who started in Minehead and ended up in Sri Lanka. He was also something to do with the Interplanetary Society, whose building at Vauxhall, on the way to Waterloo, has puzzled me for years. While cursory inspection of reference 2 suggests that it runs all kinds or more or less sensible meetings about planetary exploration there. But an odd magazine, a miscellany of all sorts of weird odds and ends, some of anthropological if not scientific interest. Probably plenty of UFO's and visits by Martians & other aliens. Plus a dash of sci-fi porn. Probably all kinds of odd readers. I think my time would be better spent on the Heathrow document.

Reference 1: https://www.heathrowconsultation.com.

Reference 2: https://www.bis-space.com/.

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