Donkey who?

Lunchista has been tilting at windmills. Obviously the first thing you need to do in this case is to find a nearby windmill at which to tilt. I happened upon one while perusing a website about general local goings-on, and lo and behold it has a "Friends of" (well, Preservation Society actually) who are busy restoring it to its former glory, including the ability to mill grain. Lunchista paid them a visit today.

It's interesting to look back on the history of this kind of endeavour: a timeline forming part of the display showed two previous attempts at raising a restoration effort, both of which had come to very little. These happened in the 1950s and the 1980s. Lunchista can't remember the 1950s, but from what I can gather people weren't really into older things at the time: wanting to forget stuff like two world wars, they were more into new culture and technology at the Festival of Britain (1951), a brand new Queen (1953), and energy that would be "too cheap to meter" (ongoing, still metered). In the 1980s I guess most people would either have demolished it to make way for a supermarket car-park, or bunged a mobile phone mast on the top. Now, however, it seems we're a bit more clued-up.

The present effort started in 2001 and initially proceeded at glacial pace (I have just been reminded that this remark is unfair to Glaciers, some of whom move quite fast these days). It took til 2005 to raise their first £10,000. Then, though, things began to take off. It's that "everybody loves a winner" thing I suppose. A lottery grant (ironically funded entirely by people who weren't winners) is paying for the restoration, and a lot of the mechanism is already in place. The sails are in kit form in somebody's garage, and they (now hopefully "we") are starting to put them together next week.
Here is the result being aimed for (except it is now painted white, instead of being covered in black tar like a ship). And guess what? Unlike the case with a lot of other wind-powered enterprises, nobody is going to complain that "It doesn't look nice"!