The Headphones Were Not Working,

so it was along to the Tuk Com center for a new set,

on the way out the Jasmine had just started to open it's flowers,

and very nice they smelled too,

we parked up at the back of the center,

of course we had to go for the pretty in pink ones, 160 baht, whilst there we also bought a number of DVD's

the good news is that there is a shop downstairs selling original National Geographic movies at 89 baht, instead of the marked price of 300 baht+,

then it was on to the trains, I used the Makita to hover up the overspill from the ballasting,

then on to the painting, whilst doing that Steve called from Bangkok,

Diana was continuing with painting the rocks,

a little bit of dark colouring along the tracks,

still a lot to go,

Diana mixing another load of paint,

a 'weathered' look for the sidings,

painting coming on fine,

starting to look better,

but the culverts need to be a bit darker,

we will finish the painting in the next few days, then we can start putting some of the grass and low shrubs on,

for Sunday Diana decided to make a beef roast dinner, well evening meal,

sealing in the flavour, dangerous stuff, hot oil flying everywhere, now I know why I keep out of the kitchen!

also we were going to have Yorkshire puddings,

looking great, the smell was making us really hungry,

Diana carved,

just what the doctor ordered, I had downloaded the cooking instructions from here for the beef and here for the Yorkshire pudding,

we set the table for two, for a romantic evening, the meal was delicious,

"Cheers!" over a bowl of ice cream,

whilst eating we could smell the fragrant scent of the Jasmine from the front garden, it had a bumper number of flowers,

then a few strawberry's for a final desert,

the Yabbie makes another appearance,

after that we watched Gangs of New York, surprisingly enough based almost more on fact than fiction, there really was a place called the Five Points, the names of the legendary Five Points gangs—the Bowery Boys, the Dead Rabbits, the Plug Uglies, the Short Tails, the Slaughter Houses, the Swamp Angels were all gangs that were there at the time that the film depicts,

Charles Dickens called the Five Points "a world of vice and misery." in 1842, the neighborhood was on the edge of an explosion, spurred on by the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s, waves of threadbare immigrants arrived in New York City with the wherewithal for only the most miserable lodgings—the drooping tenements of Five Points, for the next two decades, the Irish ruled Five Points, overcrowding a roughly five-square-block area centered on the intersection of Cross Street (today's Park Street), Anthony Street (today's Worth), and Orange Street (today's Baxter),

moving on in to the 1890s crusading photographer Jacob Riis's unprecedented images of crowded tenements, child laborers, and places like Bandit's Roost (below), incited a public outcry that led the city to raze Mulberry Bend, Five Points' most notorious block,

it's heart cut out, the slum was overtaken by neighborhoods to the north—Little Italy and Chinatown, courthouses and factories replaced its southern tenements, today the Five Points intersection is buried largely beneath Chinatown's Columbus Park and a federal courthouse, I think it is great when a film that I thought was pure fiction has a base in fact, a violent but watchable movie set in troubled times long gone.