Is this cheating a little? This pic is actually my dad's house. The ship is one that he and I made together the year I was 15 and is from the age of transition from pure sail to steam, as it had an engine and propellor as well as the usual three masts square rigged. Having slogged through the slow process of making that, from a wooden kit, I then understood how such models worked and made a number of others from scratch over the years, including one from paper and card, on the same frame and plank principle, and another of the Mayflower from the original plans in Plymouth Library.

The cruder wee toy models on top of the cupboards represent two of the sorts of ships I sailed on when I was a merchant navy deck officer, and a traditional Cypriot bus, known to the squaddies there in the 1980s as a Bondu Bus.

Its just been the first dry weekend since May and sods law we had to spend the entire time indoors at the Green party conference. Lets hope for better weather over the holiday weekend.

I was chatting to a fascinating young woman today who makes the high-accuracy wooden 'Patterns' used for making the greensand moulds for casting iron. She does both artistic items and machinery parts but started out as a sculptor. Good to know that such essential skills have not totally died out. However she had not heard of steampunk, which surprised me given that she was arty/engineery and young. Amazing how many people have never heard of the culture, even though it is all over the place in films and so on.