Symbolic Forest

Train nerds like trains, mostly.

Since the start of the year, I’ve been trying to publish about one post per week, and with ten posts so far (including this one) I’ve come pretty close to the target.

Over some recent posts, I’ve been talking about how easy it would be to build a model of the Brecon & Merthyr Railway towards the end of its life, in N gauge.

One issue with writing this blog for so long—especially given it’s not long since I had a hiatus for a year—there’s a lot of draft posts and ideas-for-posts that I’ve logged, and never done anything with.

A week or so ago, I wrote about the train set I’d recently bought, as the nucleus of a model railway inspired by the Brecon & Merthyr line in South Wales.

Ever since I was a wee girl, I loved Forteana.

A few weeks ago, I posted about how I’d finally made the decision to start building a model railway, because perfection is the enemy of the possible or something along those lines.

When I last wrote an article about how this blog is built, how it is turned from Markdown text into an array of thousands of static HTML pages, over eighteen months ago now, I said that “another big change to how the site is published” was coming soon.

Occasionally, over the past few years, I’ve mentioned how I’d like a model railway, but there are just too many interesting railways to choose from.

Folklore is… something we had, right?

Welcome, 2026!

A few months ago, I wrote about my first exploration into the world of mechanical keyboards, and said, at the time, “am I going to turn into a keyboard nerd?”

For once, I have managed to continue on with the ongoing craft projects without starting any new ones for, ooh, must be nearly a couple of months now.

Recently I added Aria Salvatrice to the list of links over in the menu, because I’m always looking to find new interesting regular reads, especially ones that use old-fashioned blogging.

Very eagle-eyed regular readers might have noticed that a few days ago I added a new category to the list of post categories over in the menus.

This year, I’ve tried to hold myself to posting at least one post per month on this site.

Since the Great Pandemic, our lives have changed so much.

There are still numerous craft projects somewhere in mid-flight at Symbolic Towers, and I keep slowly gathering plans for more that I haven’t even started yet.

It’s over eighteen months now since The Mother died, and I’ve barely even talked about it here, aside from one piece I wrote about burying her.

Back in March, I wrote about making my post publishing process on this blog a bit simpler.

One stereotypical nerd gadget I’ve never seen the point of, that I always assumed was the nerd equivalent of hand-woven gold hi fi cables, was the mechanical keyboard.

Today, March 31st, is Transgender Day of Visibility.

Regular readers might remember that two or three years back, I visited the Buck Beck Beach Bench, a strange and delightful bench built up from driftwood on one of the remoter stretches of Cleethorpes Beach.

Well, hello there!

They say you can never go back again.