Peter's Blog

Aren't all artificial pitches Astroturf?

2012-02-02T12:54:00.001Z

Something I learnt the other day. Astroturf is a brand name for one make of artificial pitch. I learnt this when chatting to a leisure centre about their website. Their artificial pitches are not Astroturf ones and so cannot use the name Astroturf on their website. This will of course mean they loose out on hits to their website, loose out on bookings for their artificial pitches and thus loose money. Why, because so many people think Astroturf is just another name for an artificial pitch and will Google Astroturf when trying to find an artificial pitch to play on and so they might never discover their local leisure centres artificial pitches..

Rhod Gilbert and Becky Betts

2012-01-26T10:51:00.001Z

Whilst I don’t know the full story or what they are proposing but I have read headlines in the media about proposed changes to BBC Local Radio. Now I do hope it doesn’t affect Local Radio too much. I’ve only just re-discovered Local Radio thanks to the internet.

Used to listen to my local station a lot as a child, but became less interested in their Middle of the Road music. There was other stations with output more directed at late teenagers. And I of course I was restricted to just one station. BBC Radio Solent in my case. I of course always listen to their football coverage, especially when travelling home by car from an AFC Bournemouth home game.

Nowadays things have changed due to the internet and digital TV. Via the web you can listen to any BBC radio station, anywhere in the country. This opens up many more programmes. However you’ll need to do a bit of research to find out when the best programmes are. Unless you buy copies of the Radio Times from every area around the country,

I have two favourites at the moment.

Saturday 11am BBC Radio Wales - The Rhod Gilbert show.
I love Rhod Gilbert and love his off-beat programme. Very funny.

Sunday 9am BBC Radio Norfolk – Treasure Quest
Do you remember the Treasure Hunt with Anneke Rice, well this is BBC Radio Norfolk’s version. A huge following from ranging from ‘The People of Norfolk’ as often the over excitable Norfolk ‘Anneka’ (Becky Betts) calls everyone, to people as far away as Tenerife and Canada. Being from Hampshire I think I’m one of the more ‘local’ non-locals is that makes sense. They have a facebook group which we all discuss the clues and the programmes (social media in use there – great stuff). I’ve learnt more about Norfolk. A place I have family and as a result visit a lot. So overall it’s a jolly fun way to spend a Sunday morning.

What to write about (#weeklyblogpost week 3)

2012-01-19T14:48:00.001Z

Those who have followed my blog over many years might be surprised by me suddenly starting to blog again and with strange subject matter to… please let me explain.

There was a conversation amongst my twitter friends about blogging and how it was difficult to maintain the enthusiasm to blog and was anyone reading them anyway. It was my old mate Dan Slee that suggested that we form a weekly blog club. We would all blog once a week and submit it to the blog club for all to read. The idea quickly spread and there are many of us who are now members.

So now I have three sets of readers of my blog. Well I think I may have more than three people reading this but sometimes I do wonder. ;)

First group are all my regular readers who have know me for years. Second group are mostly the people who I have know on twitter for a while, who know me but not as well as the first group. Then of course there are people who have only just met me through the blog club.

I like the idea of the blog club but don’t want to alienate my regulars. Do my new friends want to read about how I eat too much carbs on Monday and made myself ill. I think it was that, I must have forgotten that I’m a diabetic. Of course there are just getting a first impression of me.

Similarly do regular readers want to hear my rants on social media stuff…. Maybe but I’m sure they want to hear about how I am etc.

Or maybe I’m trying to please all the people all the time. I should just stick to blogging what I like and hope that all of you find something of interest at some point… maybe.

Twitter bringing the world together?

2012-01-12T09:24:00.003Z

When I first started using Twitter, I soon got very bored of it. This was in the very early days of it before it became a bit more mainstream. I wasn’t following many people and I wasn’t being followed back. I gave up.

Then went to a conference and met up with some guys from Stratford-upon-Avon council who were raving about Twitter. I gave it another go. I followed them. They followed me back. I saw they had followers from other councils and so my network increased. I now have two accounts, (one normal and one for my beer friends) and I'm loving it..

But I do feel that I may not be making the most of it. The people I follow and follow me all have something in common with me. Either we both work for Councils, or we both love technology, or both have a love of aircraft, trains, buses or beer. And all on them are UK based.

When I was younger I had a pen-friend in the Netherlands, we used to chat about things in our respective countries. OK we were both aircraft buffs as well, but I hope you get my point. I was learning about other cultures etc. Twitter is used all over the world. There are many people from many different backgrounds and cultures but yet I still have only followers who are like me in some way. I'd be interested in know the break down of your twitter followers. Do you play "safe" like me or take the plunge and try and make friends with people from lands far, far away

Open letter to the National Trust

2012-01-05T11:54:00.001Z

This is my first blog for the #weeklyblogclub on twitter. More of which later.

I thought I’d start with an open letter to the National Trust. I love the National Trust and think they have some of the bestest places in the whole country. However I do have a problem with the membership fees. Let me explain

I used to be a member of the NT. I join under their get 12 months for the price of 9 offer, which they still have for direct debit membership. So an initial £62.63 (current price) was paid). However the next year the price went up to the full amount (currently £83.50). Now I do not begrudge paying this amount for myself and my fiancée to become members of the NT. However it is a lot of money to fork out in the one month the membership is due. Especially as my membership was due in December. With Christmas as all that it was a tight month money wise anyway. So unfortunately I did have to eventually cancel my membership.

Since then I have spoken to a couple of people in the National Trust about doing some sort of quarterly direct debit. I already pay for a few magazine subscriptions this way and the National Trust already have a direct debit system in place but this is only paying annually rather than quarterly. However I appreciate that there are issues with a quarterly direct debit scheme. Extra admin and the possibility that people will only pay for the two quarters covering the summer months and cancel their membership for the winter months. So I have though of a solution.

People joining the National Trust pay for their first years membership up front. For me and my fiancée that’s £62.63. Then in 12 months time, people can opt to go on to either half-yearly or quarterly direct debit payments. Thus ensuring people don’t just join for six months at a time as they pay for the first year up front. Also in the case of half-yearly payments it could be done that the first of these payments comes out in the autumn. Thus ensuring that in order for people to make the most of this money they have to join for the next 6-months as well. National Trust get extra members like myself with not much admin overheads. Everyone’s a winner?

Historic Churches of Great Britain

2011-10-20T08:39:00.003Z

It started a few years ago. Travelling round the country in search of aircraft and trains etc like I do. I was noticing old churches more and more. Some very grand others modest but still pleasing on the eye.

Later on Sue and I stayed at the Travelodge at Fourwentways in Cambridgeshire. Not to be repeated as there was too many boys racers racing round the local roads during the late evening. However during the early evening I got bored and went out for a drive taking my camera with me. I stumbled across a rather pretty looking church, St Mary’s at Little Abington. Looking across the fields I say another church. Drove round and it was another St Mary’s this time at Great Abington. These were the first churches I had photographed. More were to follow.

It took me a while to get the idea of going into the churches and seeing what was inside. This opened up a whole new chapter. The objects, the symbols the history. Most churches have a guide to them written by a local historian. I started to collect them and so far have four box files full of them. Books on churches were soon bought and given to me as Christmas and Birthday presents. Sue will say I have far too many of these.

I built a website to display my photographs of the churches I had visited. Thanks to Ordnance Survey (referred to an OS from now on) I added mapping to it. I know that other mapping products are available but I have a great deal of respect for the OS and think their mapping is second to none. Having spent 35 years with OS Landranger maps I’m more than brand loyal.

The website is powered by an Access database and to date I’ve visited about 100 churches in about 10 or so different counties. Then I thought it would be good to at least add in a reference in the database to the churches listed in all my books. It was frustrating to read up about a church after I’d been there and realise that I’d missed something interesting. So a second database was added, ‘churches not yet visited’. I built little admin pages so that I could update each database and move a church from not visited to visited after I had visited each one. I then had a quest to add more and more churches into the not visited databse with a view of maybe added them to the website. Maybe letting people comment on the church and so adding to the information I had on them. So when I do visit I knew what to look our for.

Chatting to our GIS team at work, they pointed me to the OS Open Data site. In OS’s Vector Map District mapping is a category called ‘Places of Worship’ Data is free and available on CD or download. I started to download each grid square and process in to fit into my database. Plus I ordered the CD with all the data on it. Again this was totally free.

The data comes in ESRI shape files, specialist GIS software was needed to extract the data. SQL queries written to just select the Place of Worship. My website if split down into Counties and I wanted the OS data to also have counties. Again OS Open Data came to the rescue. Boundary Line data having a ‘Counties’ element. However. I could do an entire blog on the issue of counties. In fact I do plan to add something to the website to explain why I chose the counties I did. Many an hour was spend getting counties sorted. Basically I’ve gone for a mostly pre-1974 county map. I had no idea of any Welsh or Scottish Counties, so plenty of research and the like went into them. It was a long process sorting out Counties. Parts of Essex being now in Greater London. Should City of Bristol be on its own? Are people aware of the area that Middlesex used to cover, or do they think of it as just London? Birmingham? Again and entry on its own or part of a county.. or just West Midlands? I settled on the latter in that case.

Now with OS boundary line data they use current ‘Counties’, So Bournemouth being a unitary authority isn’t in the Dorset. Indeed many parts of the country aren’t in any ‘County’ area on the OS boundary line data. So I had to bring in Borough/Parish data to give me some idea as to where the churches were, Again this was free data from the OS.

So I ended up with text files with Co-ordinates of each place of worship with some County data and some borough data. So far this had taken several weeks to sort out, working a couple of hours each day.

As I wanted each ‘Place of Worship’ to have at least which county it is in. started processing the borough/parish information on all those not in a ‘County’. I turned to Wikipedia for help. On ever town/parish/borough page I looked at had something along the lines of ‘This place was in the historic county of whatever. Or ‘For ceremonial purpose This place is in the county of Whatever. Wikipedia was invaluable in helping me fill the missing gaps in my which county is that place in list. That took another couple of weeks looking up stuff, checking maps and doing find replaces on the text files. Quite a chore but so pleased when it was finished. .

One last thing I could now add before uploading the data to the database. Each download was one OS grid .E.g. SZ, TH etc. I had the Easting and Northing co-ordinates of each location and so I could create an OS grid reference for each Place of Worship. E.g. SZ 347623 . This I thought would be useful to put on the site. However I did make the mistake of rounding down all value, Means my 4th and 6th digits might be one out. Oh well, People should still be able to find the church on a Landranger map or sat nav – hopefully!

So I now had, Co-ordinates (Easting / Northing) Grid ref and County for every Place of Worship in Great Britain or so I thought.

I uploaded the files to my database. Came to over 23,000 places of worship. Built a test page in my site, hidden at the moment, to show each county with churches marked on an OS map. Was pleased with the efforts until I zoomed in. None of the Bournemouth Town Centre Places of Worship were marked. I know that they are there I can see two of them from my office window. Christchurch Priory wasn’t marked, Romsey Abbey, not marked. Blimey even Westminster Abbey didn’t make it onto the Ordnance Survey Places of Worship List. Are you going to tell William and Kate that or shall I? So the OS data as a very good starter for 10 but is no way complete.

So I first wrote an admin page that added Places of Worship to the list. It’s a simple OS map that you can click on where each one is. Its basically very similar to the code I have on the Work website for people to report graffiti etc and have a map where they can click on the location of the graffiti etc. This is fine and I’ve added loads but its going to take time.

I also want to start populating the database with place names and dedications. To help me I’ve written another web page which displays a Place of Worship that I have no place/dedication data for in my database plotted on an OS map. The map gives a useful hint to its town/city/village etc. For dedication I have a link to geograph.org.uk. This is a website that people are uploading photos to and they are trying to get a photo from ever 100m grid square in the UK. My link is to the square my unknown church is in and more often than not, someone has already photographed it, uploaded it to geograph.co.uk and tagged it with the churches dedication. Bingo, I can then add that data to the database. .Again I’m about two weeks into that and I’ve not finished Dorset yet.

In chatting to the GIS people above, we talked about the site becoming one where users can update it. Add data etc. I’ve thought about this a bit but wasn’t fully committed to it. I know it works for geograph and wikipedia but could I do something like that? Also I don’t want to loose the fact that this is my website of the churches I have visited with my photos on it. However, it will take me years to complete the project and so getting other people involved is a must.

I had a twitter chat to my good friends Stuart Harrison (@pezholio) and Andy Mabbett (@pigsonthewing) about this project and they pointed me to

a) openplaques.org. It being similar to what I want to do but with Blue plaques around the world. I have been hugely inspired by that site. It is so much what I want to do.
b) They also pointed me to openstreemap.org as they will have ‘Place of Worship’ data on it.
c) Also going back to Wikipedia, some Places of Worship will have their own Wiki page. I could bring that info into my site…

My head was spinning at all of this, the same excited feeling I get at the unconfrences that the three of us attend. Being bombarded with brilliant ideas. Great stuff.

One thing I love about the blue plaques website is the way they link to photographs, The users upload their photos to flickr and then use a special tag which the site picks up. Thus the site can add photographs with not much work from the admin and the user is still in control of the photos. Brilliant, must learn how to do that.

I’ve never looked at Openstreetmaps that much. That is also on my must learn how to do list. Also learning about how to link to and extract info from Wikipedia is another skill I need to do. I’ve got a bit of a head start on that as I have created and updated a few wikipedia pages, but need to learn more. Much more.

So I’m really excited about using all of the above to push my project forward and dare I say it, make it into something epic. The possibilities are defiantly there.

One final note on 'Big Society' and how I think the above fits into it. Now I when I say Big Society I'm not talking about the stuff Cameron bangs on about. People going to work in Libraries for nothing and all that. People like Stuart Harrison were talking Big Society long before Cameron jumped on the band wagon and is trying to make it his version of it. Here is how I feel the Big Society should be and how the above fits into it. For this project I’ve had help from Ordnance Survey, Wikipedia, geograph.org.uk and getting inspiration from openplaques.org. In return I’ve added data to openplaques.org. Will be adding photos later. Probably get more involved in Wikipedia and as to where my journey with openstreetmaps.org will take me, who knows? To me this is ‘Big Society’. Person A helps person B, Person B helps person C, Person C helps Person A and Person D. Person D helps.. well you get the picture, we all help each other, Open Data, Free Data and we all benefit.

Dealing with Diabetes

2010-07-06T19:01:00.002Z

This might be a one off blog or the title of a new one. Thinking about archiving all my previous postings (well they are on peterandsusan.co.uk. and starting a new blog entitled 'Dealing with Diabities'. Not sure how much info I can blog about though. I have been inspired by a blog by a diabetic.

Now those who know me and haven't seen my tweets or facebook status then this is news to you. Here's what happened.

During a routine health check for Life assurance, my urine had to be tested for various things. The nurse dipped the paper into the cup and immediately said, "oh I see a problem, are you a diabetic?".

"er, no", I said.

"oh, well your sugar level is high, you'll have to get it checked out with the doctor".

So I did. Phoned today for the results of the blood test. Receptionist rang back.

"Doctor has looked at your results, he wants you to come to the diabetic clinic on Monday week."

Right I thought, so I have diabetes then...

"Cant make it then", I said.

"well its very important that you come".

"No sorry, anything sooner" well if its diabetes I want to know about it.

Got an appointment next Tuesday. When hopefully I get more information. Details of what I need to do. Apart from eat better and exercise more etc.

and what is this Diabetic Clinic... is it like Alcoholics Anonymous? My name is Peter and I had a Mars bar yesterday.

Hopefully answers to these and lots more questions next week. In the mean time the internet is my main source of information. What did we do before we it was invented. Seems it not going to be too bad if I make changes to my life style now. As long as its Type 2 diabetes. Type 1, sounds bad with all those injections etc.. I hope its Type 2 I've got... but again I'll have to wait a week until I know...

Its going to be a long week.

This blog has moved

2010-04-19T20:08:00.001Z

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UKGovCamp 2010

2010-01-25T10:30:00.002Z

Writing this blog whilst on the train to work on a cold Monday morning. Normally I'll still be quite dead to the world and running on auto-pilot. But this morning I have a strange buzz about me. The reason for the buzz was an event I went to on Saturday. UKGovCamp was billed as an un-conference and it certainly lived up to its billing. With most conferences you attend, you are given a fixed agenda before hand. You can see exactly what you are going to get out of it and which part of the day you could have a quiet nap in whilst you wait for the bit you are really interested in. We'll this is not like that at all. To start off all delegates were given the opportunity to 'host a session' and talk about some aspect of Local Gov web that interested them or they were having issues with and wanted to chat about it with others that have been or are going through the same stuff. Talks about the future were also discussed. The session leaders then added their sessions to the agenda (post it notes stuck on the wall to you and me ) and off we went. You picked a session you wanted to attend off you went. Laptop in hand so we could tweet about the session, record notes etc. The sessions I went to were

Local Gov Web group - Hosted by Jan from Lancashire Council, seems she was just starting on the Web 2.0 route and was daunted by the road ahead and trying to persude the council that it was correct was to go. Hopefully the advise we gave her was useful.

Then off to one about gov data, but wasn't quite what I expected so off I went and joined one on social Internal Comms, not really my area but interesting to hear that other councils can make a good go at social internal comms.

Goggle Wave - I made a point of attending this session as I feel I should know more about it, but don't. Didn't get as much out of this as I hoped. The session leader was obviously a fan of Google Wave. Another thought it was 'crap', where as most were in the middle. Yes it can be useful but it's too complicated to use, and if us geeks are having trouble with it then what chance have normal people got of using it.

Then off to a session where Michele from Cambridgeshire talked about one of their project to help communities in the north of the county, where there is high unemployment, those that are in employment are in low paid agricultural work. The project is trying to connect communities on-line and raise the status of the area. Interesting stuff.

Finally, how to made Local Gov Web more exciting. Hosted by Liz from Camden Council, who is the most passionate person about Local Gov web of anyone I've ever met. Her enthusiast was infectious. A lively debate ensured about the rights and wrongs of page design, reaching out to the local community etc. It was great to see that others think like me and are facing and have overcome similar issues. We all agreed that the SOCITM reports are good but only look at one aspect of Local Gov Web, data, but don't look at design at all.

To me there were also two other sessions that were equally as important as those mentions about. Lunch and in the pub after the event. Now I know that those of you who know me well will think that I like the former due to food and the latter due to beer, especially as I now write my Beer Blog. But no its wasn't like that. Lunch time I chatted with two guys who I've tweeted with before but never met and we has a great conversation and the ideas for projects I got from them were great. Ideas that I can also use in my other capacity as webmaster for the Bournemouth Aviation Museum. Many thanks to Dan from Walsall and Al from Newcastle. Great stuff.

The evening session in the pub was good. Finally caught up with Sarah from Derbyshire, who again I tweet with but never met, together with Dan and Al again there was more inspitring stuff and just a generally chin wag about council stuff. The beer was nice, Doom Bar (4% ABV) from the Sharps Brewery in Cornwall. A 'perfectly balanced and complex blend of succulent dried fruit, lightly roasted malty notes and a subtle yet assertive bitterness' , so says their head brewer. I agree this, well nice beer, subtle yet assertive bitterness.

But that's not the end of it. Not by a long way and maybe that's what's giving me a slight buzz. I know that when I get to work there will be messages tweeted about the event, blogs written, photos and videos published etc. And those excellent conversations we had on Saturday will continue. I'm sure you are like me and after a conference think of some question you wish you could put to someone at the event. Well I have such questions and now, thanks to the way the event was set up, with blogs, twitter and its own website I can ask those questions, so the conversations will go on and that I what I think I'll gain most from this event. The networking side, cementing friendships I already had on twitter and meeting new people. There is a great community spirit in the group. Thanks to all who organised and took part in the event.

Videos from yesterday

2009-12-06T19:09:00.005Z

Sorry for the long time since I bloged last. Did get a telling off from Lady S-I-L and quite rightly. Sue's blog will give more details of the fabby weekend. One pressie she got me was a video camera. Results are below.

My writing career starts now.

2009-11-13T22:29:00.005Z

Just a quick update. Had a chat with the Bournemouth Echo last weekend. The result, I am now their 'new beer columist' - great job title eh? First article at http://www.bournemouthecho.co.uk/news/blogs/blogs/4736442.What_is_Beer_/?ref=rss. Please leave a comment on thier site. I really want to make a go of this. Thanks

Yougov and the internet

2009-10-22T08:59:00.002Z

Long time since I've blogged folks. Sorry about that. I'll have to do a catch up blog soon.

Reason for this blog is that I'm currently watching the Government 2010 conference being broadcast live from London via the internet. Great use of technology. I can watch the action and post feedback via twitter and see what other twitter users are saying. It's the future.

However a couple of things have got me annoyed. First speaker was the president of YouGov, you know the online polling people. Been a member for ages, spent ages working doing their surveys etc. Now they pay out at £50, so far I got to £46 and guess what? Yes, haven't been ased to do a paid survey for months. And during the talk, he said that YouGov must 'doing things right' otherwise there will be adverse comments on blogs... you mean like this one? (Must point out the there are other online polling companies

He also talked about colleges. Asking why students attend lectures by second rate lectures when they can be taught on-line from a Nobel prize winning lecturer. Couple of points

1) Huge slur there on college lecturers.
2) Is Obama be able to teach all students?
3) What about the one-to-one service college lectures offer, feedback, gearing the lesions to fit the students. Running at their pace, Adding the personal touch.
4) I'd like to see them do some of the courses at Sue’s college on-line. Dog grooming on-line… nah mate, can't be done.

Aviation Museum and SBS

2009-06-25T11:42:00.000Z

Was chatting to my friend Mark the other day and the subject of my blog came up. I said to him that I didn’t know he read my blog. He said that he would if I updated it a bit more often, or words to that effect. So here we are. Grabbing some time on the train heading to work as I type this. At Southampton passed another friends Paul Gottle’s train heading the other way. Paul you must tell me where you sit on the train. I’m in the front carriage of mine. Maybe we could wave to each other every morning. Wouldn’t that be fun. Might get a few strange looks though.

So what have I been up to? Well quite a lot. Working on the new website for the Bournemouth Aviation Museum, which I hope to put live in the next week. Been fun, the museum is an exciting project and it’s great to be able to contribute to it.

As you may have read on Sue’s blog, we had a day out to the Spinnaker Tower, which I highly recommend to everyone. Pick a nice clear day and the view is fantastic. Then off to see Chicago with Jimmy Osmond and Emma Burton (her from Eastenders) WOW both were outstandingly good, as was the rest of the cast. Great show.

Bought myself two new toys recently. On Sunday a new (to me) drum kit. My current one has served me well. It wasn’t that expensive and with it I’ve learnt the basics, admittedly I should be more advanced than I am at the moment, so hopefully the new kit will help. For a start it’s full sized and I’ve now got what I consider the minimum needed to drum, gaining a ride cymbal and now having two rack toms, The kit is also good enough to gig with, not that we ever do,

My second new toy is an SBS box. Basically this picks up signals from aircraft fitted with certain equipment that broadcast their flight number, location and a unique hexadecimal code (yes I knew all the binary and base 16 rubbish we did at school would come in useful one day). This box picks these signals up and displays them on a PC screen, With those broadcasting their location appearing on a radar type display. So I can sit in the back garden looking at the aircraft flying over and know what they are and via the Hex code, which is unique to the aircraft, know which aircraft I’m looking at. Has made spotting easier. But is it too easy? Currently on an average evening I’m making at least 10 new aircraft. Lots of Easyjet and Ryanair, and I’m sure that one day I will get close to fleeting them (ie seeing them all). Which is what I bought the box for - to see planes as it always frustrated me see an airliner trail across the sky and not know what it is. But am I on a level playing field with other spotters. Those with SBS boxes yes. But those without? Ok it is not a competition. We are not trying to out do each other all the time. We all have slightly different rules as to what we count and what we don’t. I would count a lot more that my aforementioned friend Mark. But it is up to us what we count, it’s our hobby and we do it only for ourselves, I guess that it’s no different to those that live close to a main airport and those that don’t. The former will see a lot more than the latter. Anyway, I love my SBS box. Just wish it wasn’t so cloudy so much of the time and more frustration is when I sit at work looking out over blue skies all day and then for it to cloud over in the evening..

Still approaching Bournemouth now, where I get off. Blog entry done, Hope this makes Mark happy, he should be he got three mentions in it!

YouTube

2009-05-07T21:03:00.001Z

YouTube. Well in this case it is MeTube... my first video on the web...

Easter and a few days away

2009-04-20T07:59:00.001Z

Gosh it has been a long time since I blogged hasn’t it dear readers. But I’m back. Good Friday I went off to Barnet to see the mighty AFC Bournemouth play. Though they weren’t so mighty and lost 1-0. Still got some spotting in and it’s a new ground for me. So far I’ve watched matches at 18 football grounds.

Had most of last week off as it was Sue’s birthday. Went and stayed in a Travelodge near Eastbourne. On route we stopped off at a Nature Reserve to see if we could see a rare bird that had been spotted there. Only info I had was that it was sighted near the car park. However and 10-15 bird watchers had set up their scopes/cameras near by and were all looking in one direction. This did make it easy for me. However it was 45 mins until the White Throated Sparrow made an appearance. Nice one. One to add to my life list and in some ways more importantly, it added to my Hampshire list. Whilst waiting for the sparrow also made a blackcap and a marsh tit. Nice one.

Stopped off at Midhurst on route to Eastbourne area and a look at someone’s garden that they had opened as part of the National Garden Scheme. Always nice to look at good looking gardens. Poke around their potting sheds and compost heaps. See how other people do it and I always leave with ideas.

Next day (Thursday) did a little driving tour of Sussex villages. Stopped off to look at five historic churches, one of which was locked (boo), saw the Long Man of Wilmington and the Litlington White Horse.. Both hillside chalk figures. Then the evening spend near a reservoir, just sat taking in the evening sun, watching the birds and the fisherman out on the water. Lovely.

Next day it was a bit rainy, so at Sue’s insistence (well she suggested it) we went to the Bluebell railway. Managed to get on the footplate of two steam locos, whilst they were in steam. A first for me. Really nice of them to allow people up on the footplate. Lovely railway. Would recommend a visit if you are ever down that way.

Back home on the Saturday via Shoreham airport. Which seems to have improved its viewing facilities. Which some airports would take note. Then home. Spend the rest of the weekend in the garden. Really bust at this time of year. I feel that we’ve had the last of the frosts, I hope, so was planting out in Ernest. Spuds, lettuce, onions, spring onions, cabbage, parsnips, runner beans, peas etc. More stuff in the green house. By Sunday evening I was pooped. But really glad that the growing season is finally here. We’ve even started to harvest some of the items as Sue made a lovely omelette with chives from the garden. Nice.

Monday morning now, and back on the train to work. Most of the regulars on board but I notice that one or two are missing. Wonder if any of them notice when I’m not around..

Not my normal blog!

2009-03-12T13:33:00.004Z

Break from my normal blog - Just knocked up a quick table showing how many councils have twitter feeds of their news stories and the number of people that are following those feeds. This is th enew version which updates

Bournemouth Aviation Museum

2009-03-03T17:42:00.001Z

Oh what a good weekend. Sue and I spent most of Saturday afternoon in the Garden. Got some good work done. Clearing out the borders. Weeding. Trying to get my holly bush to have baby holly bushes. I’ve got some cuttings in pots from a branch that I accidentally snipped off and I’ve got another branch, part of which I’ve buried , which I’m hoping will root like one of my other bushes have. The other bush has produced four others, the smallest one I have potted up and hope to grow on.

Sown my first seeds of the season. Might be a bit early but Carol Klein told me to do it (via an article in the Guardian) Fifteen broad bean seeds are now in compost filled toilet rolls in the greenhouse. If they grow they grow, if they don’t well I’ve always got some spare seeds.

Now some of you will know that I used to be on the committee of the Bournemouth Passenger Transport Association, aka the Bournemouth bus museum and was involved in organising their annual rally. Well Sunday I relived those days by helping out my mate Steve and the Bournemouth Aviation Museum. They held their First annual Vintage Transport Day and what a good day it was. I was in two minds as to whether I should help out with the event, doing odd jobs and trying to help the event run smoothly and sort out any problems or to take my stall down there and help out the museum by donating some cash to them from any money I might make. It was really a tough call and I was debating about it right up to when I left home. But I chose to help out with odd jobs and there was quite a few to do in the morning. All skillfully organised by Steve. Yeah it was fun. The museum project is one I would really like to get more involved in. They have a wonderful museum there, which really looks like its heading in the right direction, all they need is a half-decent website. Anyway, the museum itself is all down to the hard work of a handful of volunteers. Well done lads, Roll on the next project?

DC-9 with winglets

2009-03-03T17:39:00.000Z

Gosh I did leave you all on tender hooks last time, didn’t I? I know that you are all dying to know about my six month review thingy with my boss Charlie. Well it went OK. See I told you he was a nice boss. And I’m sure he’s going to be an excellent dad. His wife giving birth to their first child, a son James, last week. Congrats to them both.

So what have I been up to? Last Thursday I went off with a couple of good mates to have a tour of RAF Shawbury and RAF Cosford. A good time was had by all. I would tell you about the hilarious incident coming back at Birmingham when I tried to convince the other lads that the SAS that had just landed looked like a DC-9 with winglets. But I doubt that most of you would get the joke. It turned out to be a Regional Jet on its first visit to Brum. The lads were grateful in the end that I pointed put the aircraft to them.

Friday, I went to Doncaster again for the train. I lived up to its hype. So much so that I stayed all day at the station, leaving briefly to get a KFC for my tea.

Saturday, I went down to the new Bournemouth Aviation Museum site at Bournemouth Airport. They have a bus on site now for use by the spotters. You see, the airport authorities are building a bank of earth all along the perimeter of the airport. There has been some quite bad traffic accidents along that stretch caused by people being distracted by the aircraft. Hence the bank to block their view. So the museum has bought a double decker bus and so we are able to sit upstairs and look over the bank. They have done a lot of work at the museum and it starting to look really good. But, hey why not see for yourself, they are holding a Vintage Transport day next Sunday (1st March). Normal admission rates apply. Lots of old buses, vintage military vehicles, old cars. Going to be a good day out for all the family. Hope to see you there.

birds, snow and nice bosses (creep creep)

2009-02-05T19:13:00.004Z

OK, quick catch up blog here.

Last Friday – Went to Doncaster to do a bit of train spotting. Nice day out, used a free weekend ticket that I get with South West Trains to go up to London. Across on the underground to Kings Cross and then to sample National Expresses service to Doncaster. They have just celebrated their first 'birthday' i.e. they have operated the route for a year. They had some single tickets on offer for just a fiver and I took advantage of this to have a day in Doncaster for just £10 return plus underground fares. Now for the underground I acted like a proper Londoner and used an oyster card. Normally when I go to London I get a travel card but it wasn’t worth it for just two trips across town. So I got an Oyster card. It's cheaper than paying by cash.

Doncaster was good but very cold. Added a couple of churches to my list. St Peterswhich was close to the station and Doncaster Minster which is also just a short walk away. There are a coupled of more churches a bit further away that you can see. I might do these on my next visit to here in a couple of weeks.

Saturday and Sunday – Did a bit in the garden. As much as the cold would let me. Clearing of the border is going well. I also moved the rose buses from the front of garden to the back and made a little display of them.

Monday – Tried to get to work in the snow, but failed. Walked down town and waited for an hour at the train station for a train. When the station announcer said that they were operating a very limited service and that we should listen to local radio for updates I thought that was it. If he doesn’t know when the trains are what hope do they rest of us. I walked home. Visiting Tesco on the way. Buying amongst other things doughnuts. They thought of spending a quiet day at home eating doughnuts seemed too good an opportunity to miss. Just settling down when the door went. Sue couldn’t get to work either. Oh well I guess it would be bad if I ate all the doughnuts anyway. Not that I would have done. Would have saved a couple for Sue. It was nice to have her safe at home rather than trying to drive through all the snow. Doughnuts are for sharing anyway, but was hugely disappointed in the amount of jam in them… You hardly noticed in some of them that they were supposed to be jam doughnuts. Shame on you Tesco.

Monday evening received an e-mail from my boss, telling me not to struggle trying to get into work on Tuesday. Sue had mixed emotions. Pleased that I didn’t have to try to get to work and get into trouble. Not quite sure that I should be given carte-blanch to have a another day at home but realising that Charlie is such a lovely boss to think of me like this… He is a good boss… One could not wish for a better boss…. Top leadership, Wish all the bosses there could be more like him. Yeap – he reads my blog and that I have my 6 month review tomorrow!

Whilst spending time working from home I sat in the conservatory looking out at the bird life, whilst still working hard. Put out plenty of food for them and this seemed to encourage the birds in. Them being unable to get any due to the snow. We had two wagtails in the garden, a species I have seen before in the garden but only on a rare occasion. Two new birds seen in the garden were a Chiff-chaff (a life tick for me) and a Green Woodpecker (a year tick for me) But most importantly they added to the garden birds list as well. It’s great to have birds in the garden. Sit and watch them for hours and I don’t have to travel to see them.

Wednesday was off on compassionate leave to attend the funeral of Sue’s Aunt Marion,. A lovely lady Sue is blogging about that right now on our laptop.

Thursday – back to work – boo hiss..’

What a match!

2009-01-25T13:04:00.003Z

AFC Bournemouth - a team on the brink over being relegated to the football league. A new manager comes in. Well he's an ex-player who was on the coaching staff anyway. He becomes the leagues youngest manager. He makes a signing. Big Steve Fletcher. A player we released a couple of seasons ago, even though he was our longest serving player. He's been playing at Crawly Town in some non-league that will soon include AFC Bournemouth if they don't do something and soon. Could this guy be the spark to re-ignite our season. Well if yesterday's match was something to go by. Yes he can!! I entered the ground about 15 mins after kick off, after selling my half time draw tickets. We were already one-nil down, to top of the table Wycombe Wanderers. You could hear a pin drop in the Bournemouth end. We all knew that if the fact of a new manager and star player returning wasn't going to do anything then that would be it. We might as well give up. Even goading from the Wycombe supporters didn't bring the Bournemouth end to life.

Luckily the players didn't give up. Are these the same players that have been playing so badly of late? They seemed, well interested in playing football again. They wanted to win and a superb free kick, made even better by the booking of a Wycombe player when he was lining up the wall, made it one all.

Goal mouth action again, and joy of joys were two-one up. Now it was our turn to sing. Wycombe just seem to fall apart. Then it was half-time.

Comeon lads we've got to win the second half. Wycombe soon made a double substitution. Sending a message from the bench. Quite what that message was I'm not really sure. But it made no difference. From my angle it was a superb lob that made it 3-1 to Bournemouth, later BBC Sport gave it as a deflected cross that happened to beat the keeper. That was it. Wycombe huffed and they puffed by they could not break down the Bournemouth defence. Who were for once, playing a full 90 minutes of football, rather than the normal 80. Well be played a 4 minutes of 'injury time', don't know how as the trainers weren't on the pitch once during the second half. But final whistle came. We shouted. We clapped. We were happy. Oh it felt good. You know those who don't go to football regulary won't get it. Yes we have had some rubbish games of late. But when you eat nothing but spam all the time. You really appreciate when you have steak one in a while.

My entry for Stu's Weekly photo Challange

2009-01-18T21:42:00.000Z

Good Weekend

2009-01-18T20:57:00.003Z

Gosh, its been such a long time since I last blogged. Sorry about that folks.

Having a good weekend, yesterday was spend mostly in the garden. Got my plan sorted out for the veg plots for the summer. I'll have to blog about that later. Anyway yesterday was spend most clearing areas of the garden. Gave the fir tree a bit of a chop to let more light into the bed below it and visited homebase for spinach seed and another pair of secetours. I've no idea where my original pair have got to.

Today been up to Blashford Lakes to do some bird watching. Highlight must have been the Iceland Gull. First one ever for Blashford apparently. Also saw the Black Necked Grebes together with my favourite grebe, the Little Grebe.

great day

2008-12-13T21:52:00.000Z

Good day today seeing Lady S-I-L, Anne (she writes books you know – and good ones) and my brother Keith. Had a really good day. Good birding and good company. Went down to Titchfield Haven. Saw my 100th different species of bird in Hampshire today. A marsh Harrier. Saw lots of nice birds and really used my scope, which I love. Taken spotting to the next level.

Interview with Sir Alan

2008-12-09T21:48:00.000Z

Took the day off today to go to London. Spent the day doing some train spotting, having a good day. But the main reason for my trip to London was that I had a interview booked with Sir Alan. No, I’m not going on the apprentice, its not that Sir Alan, but Sir Alan Greengross who is chairman of the South West Trains Passenger Panel. Been trying to get on the panel for a while. Would be so interesting to see their work and get to know the workings of a train company better. And of course to try to get South West Trains to give me a better service. Sir Alan seemed a really nice chap. Friendly and passionate about his work. I just hope that I did enough to impress him. He seemed keen especially when I talked about websites, seemed like the passenger panel might want one.

Birthday

2008-12-05T21:41:00.003Z

Yeap its my birthday today. Had lots of books, a brid watching in Norfolk DVD. A hedge trimmer from Sue's parents but my main present was a brid watchers scope. Tried it out this afternoon. Its great. Spotted a scaup today. First time ever. Wouldn't have seen it if it wasn't for my new scope. Doesn't count to my Hampshire list though as we were at Langford Lakes in Wiltshire. Good venue. Good day today.

Book Review

2008-11-26T21:12:00.000Z

First time I have read one of Anne Brookes books and I wasn't disappointed. Rape isn't the nicest of subjects but it how Kate copes afterwards that is the main thrust of this story. She is sometimes her own worst enemy but you really know where she is coming from. She has your sympathy, well most of the time. You do get frustrated with her at times. But the story flows well and you just hope that it all ends happily, but you do wonder at times whether Kate will find peace.

The story questions the friendship between Kate, her best friend Nicky and Nicky’s husband . It explores how close people do get to each other. No matter how close THINK you are to someone, you never completely know them and never completely open up to them.

Thanks Anne for a great read, great story and for making me think.

Quick Catchup

2008-11-10T10:20:00.001Z

Well I hope you are all well. I am. Been a busy chap of late. Seen sister in Norfolk, went to Penshorpe Nature Reserve, lots of nice birds. Went to Norwich beer festival, Drank lots of beer. Very nice. Had a nice weekend. AFB Bournemouth match was good, best for ages. Popped down to Blashford lakes yesterday. Added a couple more birds to my Hampshire list for 2009 (now on 98).

You are feeling sleepy

2008-10-16T13:33:00.001Z

Have work laptop, so blogging on the train. The reason for me taking the work laptop home is that I've been to an Ordnance Survey conference for the last couple of days up in the Midlands. Good event it was too and it was good to see how other councils, plus the emergence services are using geographic data.

However, what I will remember most from this conference and what most people will remember me for(!!) is what happened in the evening after the Gala Dinner. The post dinner entertainment was a hypnotist. I always been a bit sceptical of these sort of acts and to satisfy my own curiosity and to what it was like to be involved in such an act, I was one of 6 to volunteer to be put under the spell. I closed my eyes and it started.

I milked a lovely cow for all I was worth. I rode that horse and won the race. My victory dance was quite a sight apparently. Then I used my shoe as a mobile phone. I got a laugh and a small round of applause for using a shoe lace as an aerial. And that was it, I think. I know I didn't take off any clothes before you ask, apart from the shoe. Apparently I was the star of the show and the reaction I got off stage and the next morning from everyone was fantastic. All wanted to congratulate me. They all wanted to know how it felt. There was at least one person who recorded some of it on his mobile phone. I'll post it on here if I get a copy of it.

So how did it feel. Well the best way I can describe it is that it felt like I was in a dream. I knew where I was. I knew what I was doing. My inhabitations would have still stopped me doing anything dangerous or obscene. But when the hypnotist made a suggestion, you thought, yeah that silly but I'll do it. When I got back to my seat it did take me a couple of minutes to get ‘back to normal', but then I was fine.

Now I hadn't texted or phone Sue all day, mainly because there was no phone signal in the hotel at all. So about midnight I went outside. To the side of the hotel, they have a lake in their grounds with reeds, ducks etc Plus a small seating area. Whilst sat there I received a couple of texts and a voicemail message from Sue that she had sent that day. I sent her a text knowing that if she wasn't awake she'll get it in the morning. I did wait around for a few minutes to see if I would get a response. The hotel was quite hot and stuffy so it was great to sit out in the fresh cool air. It was lovely.

I was soon joined by Roger, one of my bosses. We had a quick chat about the hypnotise and a bit of a laugh. I did ask him when he came out.. Did he see me outside? Did he just fancy a walk in the fresh air or what? He said that one of his ex-work colleagues and someone we met earlier that day had seen me go outside and towards the lake. She went to him worried that something was wrong and I was suffering from being hypnotised that evening, I assured him that I was OK and I promised him that I wouldn't jump into the lake.

Lovely Tits

2008-10-08T18:14:00.003Z

Was sat in the conservatry today having been off work sick, yes I'm feeling a lot better but think Sue might be going down with it. Anyway, Robin normally has the garden largely to himself, plus the odd Collard Dove, pidgeon and blackbird. However today we had a flock of various tits decend on the garden. Robin was going mad trying to chase them off his patch. He even had a go at the collard doves who were taken by surpise.

The tits contained at least 3 long tailed tits, 2 coal tit and some great and blue tits. This was the first time long tailed and coal tits have been seen in our garden. Lovely.

Going to do somecatch up blogs at somepoint, as I haven't bloged for ages. I haven't told you all about my holiday in Austria. It was great. Apologies to all for not getting a postcard. I did buy them and buy stamps but didn't get around to writing them out etc.

Web 2.0

2008-09-11T10:41:00.000Z

Went to a Web 2.0 Conference yesterday in London. Wow, mind blowing. So much to think about both at work and in my non-work life. I can see the way we use the web changing. More social ineteraction. Main speaker for the day was Ewan McIntosh. He's from Edinburgh. Don't know if I siad before but I've started reading, what Sue calls 'proper' books i.e. Novels. Working my way through Ian Rankin books at the moment. Yesterday Ewan made a joke with refernce to Ian Rankin's books and I got the reference. Something I wouldn't have done just a couple of weeks ago...

Ruby, Ruby, Ruby Ruby, Ruuubyyyyy*

2008-09-06T21:27:00.002Z

Apologies to the Kaiser Chiefs for the blog title.

Been a quiet couple of days. Sue's been away at her brothers. I’m sure she'll tell you all about that in her blog. Watched 'Lost in Austin' which Sue recorded on Wednesday night whilst I was at band practice. The other day we read an article in the paper on Janine Duvitski. Apparently, she has made lots of money on property in addition to all her TV work. She always seems to on the box, having appeared in lots and lots of stuff. The article mentioned that her eldest daughter was going to be in 'Lost in Austin'. We thought we spotted her, a young actress who looked like a younger version of Janine. But we had to establish the characters name so we could check that we had the right actress. I initially thought that she was playing Kitty, but the Radio Times said that this was Florence Hoath. Then Sue pointed out that she thought she was playing Mary, but that's an actress called Ruby Bentall. We were expecting someone called Duvitski. Then it stuck me, according to a web site I read the other day - Janine has an English mother and a Polish father, So her maiden name is Duvitski and must have married a Bentall. Sue then Googled away and found a site that confirms it. Phew!!! What we saw of the remaining programme look very good, we missed the first part trying to work out all this stuff with Janine's daughter. Its such hard work watching TV programmes these days.

So to recap, 'Lost in Austin' stars Florence Hoath, we did make it to my actresses website and Ruby Bentall who is the daughter of Janine Duvitski, who so nearly made my actress website but didn't. Also Pippa Haywood is in the series as well. She did make my actresses list. Talking of which, another actress on my website, Rebecca Callard sent me a note via Facebook the other day. First time I've heard from her for a while, I really must get around to replying to her and updating all these webpages with new info!

Ruby Bentall as Mary Benent in 'Lost in Austin'

Busy Weekend

2008-08-17T17:48:00.000Z

On Saturday went to Aldershot for a AFC Bournemouth match. We got a draw. It was a relief to come back from 1-0 down, but we should have made the chances when we had them in the first half. Used one of my free train tickets I get with my annual season tickets. Made the most of it by travelling on some lines that I’ve never travelled on before, namely Aldershot-Guildford and the two lines from Guildford up to London via Effingham Junction. Didn’t think much of Aldershot as a town. Neither did my friend Gill who was hoping to get some shopping in.

Today Sue and I decided to have a day together and went down to Titchfield Haven. Added a couple of birds to my 2008 Hampshire List, namely Sandwich Tern and an Osprey. Both of which went into my Life List as well. Unusual sighting of the day must go to one of the Kestrels who was attacking a couple of magpies. No idea why it was doing that.

Good weekend

2008-07-20T20:13:00.002Z

Saturday, met up with with some mates for a pub lunch. Met up with guys and gals, some of which I've met in real life before and others have only been on line. After the meal went off with one of the guys and did a geocache. Something I haven't done for ages.

Today, Sunday, been up to Popham airfield and had my stall there. Took a bit of money but not as much as usual. However seeing the lack of people up there today, I'm surprised we made anything at all.

Week in Norfolk

2008-07-14T07:38:00.000Z

The problem, if it is a problem, is that I no longer take my work laptop home on a regular basis anymore. Not since buying my own laptop. Good job as my new work laptop weighs a ton. Therefore I don’t have a laptop to use on the train. Which is when I did most, if not all of my blogging. Ah, you think, that’s why the blogs have been so thin on the ground of late. Well, yes. There is no entry in my daily timetable anymore marked, ‘write blog’ Too busy living my life to write about it. So is it a problem? Well living my life isn’t a problem, However, you dear reader likes to be kept informed of my goings on, plus its nice for me too look back on past events. Reminisce about them, also to see what was important to me then, which may not be so important now, or how some things have grown in importance over time. Anyway. I took the work laptop home over my holiday, hence me having the laptop on the train on this bright sunny Monday morning. So I’m able to blog today. Quite when I’ll blog next, I have no idea.

So last week Sue and I headed off to Norfolk to see my sisters new place. What a change it is from her last place. At least twice the size. Lovely inside and out. The back garden is wonderful. Small patio and seating area. Enclosed, and a nice sun trap. To one side are steps, which lead up and up, through the trees, to an top area, with trampoline (no I didn’t have a go) a huge stone water feature and more seating area, with one corner covered. With tree all around it’s a totally secluded spot. Lovely to sit up there in the summer.

Now that word, ‘summer’ became a bit of a theme during the week. Sue wanted to see Norfolk in the summer. She’d only see it at Christmas or beer festival week (end of October). Hence this visit, which coincides nicely with sisters new house. We were sat in a café in a book shop in Diss. Looking out over the lake and spotting the ducks, gulls and even a great crested grebe. All getting wet as it was lashing it down at the time. This place would look lovely in the summer, commented Sue. It is summer, I replied. And so it went on.

Having said that, it was a really nice week overall. Managed to get in a couple more National Trust properties. Stayed in a new, for us, Travelodge, Ely. Bought some nice plants for the garden, from some house just south of Mildenhall. Spent too much on food, but made up for that by not spending on anything else much.

Back on Friday, so I could got to the Air Tattoo at RAF Fairford, which was cancelled due to rain. So a piecefull weekend is in store. Busy week again. Work today. Farnborough Airshow tomorrow with my good mates Paul and Mark. The going to Reading each day for the rest of the week to do a course on Microsoft SharePoint.

Oh well, next station is mine, so I’d better sign off now

Do you know what it is?

2008-06-28T21:27:00.002Z

This picture has been bugging me for a couple of weeks. Seen in my garden on one of our new fence post. Let me get very close to it to take the picture. Who'll like to guess what it is. I must admit I needed the help of another birder to tell me what it is.

By popular demand

2008-06-26T20:17:00.003Z

So Mel says to Charlie, that according to Facebook, I'm still stiff from gardening at the weekend. I'm update my facebook page, a bit more often than I blog but not much. So I felt that I had change my facebook line. Saying that I was heading to B&Q tonight. This lead to another complaint, this time from Anne, basically saying, forget B&Q, get blogging! So here I am. Trying to please all the people all of the time.

Yes did go to B&Q. Got some compost, some mainsonary paint for a project I'm doing in the summer and a couple of pepper plants. Now watching a film. The Core. It is rubbish, the only reason we're still watching it is that it does get so stupid that it becomes funny. The acting is a bit rubbish as well. The only famous person in it being Hilary Swank and even some of her acting isn't that good, I think that even she can't do much with this rubbish script. Getting towards the end of the film now, and its just get too unbelievable.

Slug City

2008-05-27T10:44:00.001Z

My horoscope in the Metro freeby paper said today that I should do some creative writing. ‘My novel awaits’, it said. I think the nearest I’m getting to a novel is this blog. Not that I take any notice of horoscopes, but I admit that I do read the metro one. Most of the time is gives good advice, such as ‘don’t jump to conclusions’, be a nice person, try to help someone today and so forth. Its more like a public information film, you know, Charlie says don’t cross the street without looking first. What ever happened to horoscopes that predicted that you will receive a strange parcel, or that you destiny links you to the letter C.

Anyway, Tuesday morning and I’m writing this blog on the train to work, having just had a week off. See Sue’s blog for details of that. Will say that I had a fabbo time in Derbyshire. I’ve slept in the same bad a John Noakes you know, but not at the same time.

I’ve come to the conclusion that there aren’t enough animals and birds that eat slugs. Its slug city in our garden at the moment, all the rain yesterday bought them out, I’ve used a whole bottle of salt trying to kill them. Hedgehogs are supposed to eat them, but I doubt that the ones we used to have ever eat them. Some birds are supposed to eat them as well but none that visit our garden. We should create a slug eating monster I think.

Work starts on our front garden today Its only a matter of weeks before I have my own greenhouse..Still a bit bervious having it at the front rather than the back of the house, not that there is any room at the back. Hopefully it will be OK. Will be totally brill to have one, Hopefully I can keep it slug free.

Long time, no blog

2008-05-04T15:28:00.003Z

Gosh, its been such a long time since I last blogged. Sorry about that all. Just haven't felt like putting thoughts down on paper, or screen.

So what's happened since I loast blogged. Well AFC Bournemouth have got themselves relegated. But the way they ended the season was fantastic. Showing such committement and getting into a position where they could have saved themselves. I'm proud of you lads. Unfortunatly the scum (aka Soutampton) didn't get relegated. How unfair is that!

Bought a new laptop PC. Sue and I have been wanting one for ages and I saw a new one for around £200 so had to get it. Working OK. Execpt openatc.com doesn't work, neither does my aircraft database... *sigh* and I've forgotten my password for Ancestry.co.uk.

Talking of famliy tree, been in contact with a releative down in Oz. She has kindly send me copies of quite a few birth,marriage and death certificates of family members.

Had the odd trip doen to Blashford Lakes to do some bird watching. My Hampshire list is now 92. Though the Lessor Spotted Woodpecker that I keep trying to see down at the lakes is still avoiding me. My birdwatchers yearbook also contains lists of British Dragonflies and Butterflies for the first time. As the butterflies seem to be making an appearance of late I thought I'd start to try to identify them. First into the book this year was a 'Green-veined White'. Saw it in the garden today. One down, 58 to go!

Chiff Chaff

2008-03-30T17:25:00.003Z

Headed off this morning to Lakeside Country Park to go on a guided bird walk with a Warden and a 'local bird watcher'. Now who could the mystery 'local bird watcher' be? My friend Simon is THE expert on the birds of Lakeside. Must be him I thought and I was so glad it was. Unfortunately I was the only memeber of the public to turn up for the walk. Unfortunately for the organisers that is but I loved it. Listening to the Warden and Simon chatting about birds, butterflies, flowers etc. Seems that the warden and her helpers are doing a lot of work around the site at the moment. Hopefully it all goes well in a few years time their hard work will pay off and we'll have an even better Country Park to visit.

On to the birds. Highlight was a Kestrel (Simon spotted that one, good job as all birds of prey look the same to me).

Simon could identify loads of birds from their song alone. A talant I wish I had. I must get my bird song CD out! Loads of Chiffchaffs around and Simon pointed out thier distinctive call. Quite how I've managed to not log one until now is beyond be, but another Hampshire tick goes into the book. Together with a couple more means my Hampshire List now stands at 84. For me, that's good, as I only saw 79 for the whole of 2007. So thanks to Simon for this mornings walk. Great to see a true birder in action.

Got home via Homebase (buying Compost, Spuds and Onions for the Garden) and what do I hear singing in one of the trees in the garden. A chiffchaff! (A first for the garden). Hey perhaps some of Simons birder knowledge has rubbed off on me! Thanks goes to him.

Titchfield

2008-03-21T22:17:00.002Z

Went Bird watching today down to Titchfield Haven. Highlight must have been the white fronted Goose. Also saw Med. Gulls, a shag, Avocets and some Turnstones were on the beech nearby. My Hampshire list for 2008 is now at 71! Ok I'm still near the bottom of the league table but seeing as I saw 79 for the whole of last year. Good day. Nice day out.

Birds and camera lens

2008-02-18T08:49:00.003Z

Just a quick catch up blog. Nothing much happening at the moment. Planning out the veg garden for the summer. Looking forward to that.

Bad news is that my telephoto lens on my camera is broke. Don't know how it happened, just tried to use it at the weekend and it wouldn't zoom. Going to have to save my pennies to get a new one.

Spend Saturday at Sue's parent. Whilst Sue was doing her good daughter bit and gave her mum an hour long lession on how to use a PC, Sue's dad and I sat watching the birds. They have a few feeders in their garden which use almost constant use. Even the local male phesant came up to pick up the scraps. What a beatuiful birds when you light shines on it. New birds to add to my Hampshire 2008 list were Marsh Tit, dunnock and partridge.

Sunday was pottering around the house. Didn't get anything like I wanted or should have done. Did set up the new bird feeder station that Sue gave me for Valentines day. Put out some Nyger seeds in a feeder. Now I'm not sure if its connectied but within a few hours we had a new visitor to the garden. A grey wagtail. First one ever in the garden that we've seen and a new addition to my Hampshire 2008 list, which now stands at 59. Only 20 below what I'd seen in the whole of 2007!

The Kindness of strangers

2008-02-12T14:41:00.001Z

A funny thing happened on the way to work yesterday. I missed my normal trail (0648 Eastleigh – Bournemouth) and I was cursing my luck when it was announced that there was a broken rail at Brockenhurst and that replacement buses were being arranged. Oh great so I’m going to be well late for work. Caught the next train to Southampton, well OK not the next one as it was full, so I caught the one after. It was only 2 mins behind and joined the waiting throng of passengers stood outside Southampton Central waiting for the bus to take us to Brockenhurst where train were running again down Bournemouth and beyond. There must have been 200+ people waiting. Some getting rather annoyed. I just hoped that there was going to be a fleet of buses as we all wouldn’t fit in one vehicle. Train staff came out and said they were looking for the passengers that was on the 0601 service from Southampton. That’s the one an hour before the one I was supposed to be on but missed. People started to mutter about how those people must have been waiting for two hours for a bus. So maybe us later passengers were not so badly off after all and it made no difference at all that I missed the train Or maybe it was a ploy by the train staff… They are good at that sort of thing these days. One way to calm down a group of disgruntled passengers is to point out that there are other passengers who are worse off? Perhaps? I wouldn’t put this past South West Trains to do this. Did you know that research has shown that if the announcement that the train is late is done using a woman’s voice then there are less complaints. Something South West Trains knows all too well and will try to use a woman to announce train delays. Crafty buggers aren’t they.

Anyway there I was at Southampton when I should have, just wondering when a bus was coming. When a elderly gent in Range Rover pulled up. Wound down his window and said to a group of us that he was heading off to Brockenhurst, we any of us like a lift. The guys either side of me jumped in. I jumped in. Then two people, obviously work colleagues, argued about who was going to fill the last place in the car. I’ll wait said one, no said the other , you go on I ‘ll wait.. I insist that you go, I don’t mind and so it went on. All very British. Still one eventually jumped in and off we went to Brockenhurst. Turns out the guy had just brought his wife up to Southampton to save her waiting for the bus and he decided he might as well give a couple of people a lift back to help them out. Very good of him. Really kind. Top man. Makes you have faith in human nature again.

Anyway got to Brockenhurst where the trains were doing a sort of regular shuttle services down to Weymouth, no hint of a timetable.. I arrived at work only 15mins after I would have done if my later train had run. And nobody at work suspected that anything was wrong and that I had such an adventure getting there that morning..

Viva the revolution

2008-02-03T21:53:00.000Z

Gosh, its been far too long since my last blog. Sorry about that dear reader.

Well my biggest news is that I’ve been out of the country again. Plane spotting trip to Switzerland. The annual World Economic Forum was being held in Davos with visitors coming from all over the world. Most of the visitors flew into Zurich and it was here we stayed two nights. Loads of executive jets were around. We had a spot of bother once when all us spotters got move away from the end of the viewing area. The Pakistani President was just about to get on his place, which was parked very close to the viewing area. So close that when he arrived and got off his plane, a group of people were spitting at him from the viewing deck. So rather than move him and his plane away from the building, its us poor spotter that got moved. I ask you, is that fair? Viva the revolution!

One further night was spend in Geneva, where there was also some great aircraft, but on route we visited the Balloon Festival at Chateaux D’Oex What a great day this was picture at Air-Britain Photo Site . Up in a valley in the Swiss Mountains, some snow on the ground. More snow on the top of the surrounding mountains. Together with lots of interesting Hot Air Balloons all making for a good day out. The action lasted all day, rather than the UK versions where there is a more and evening lift, with very little in between. Also noticed that in a UK event, the balloons are tied to a shed load of 4x4’s which the balloonists insist on. In Switzerland only the retrieval crew had a 4x4, OK they need one.

Apart from that things have been going on as normal. Nothing much to report. Planning out the veg garden for the summer. Looks like we’ll get our driveway and front of the house sorted out, which will give me some extra plots and possible a greenhouse, when I can afford it. Haven’t done any bird watching recently, though I did add a new species to my life list on the aforementioned trip to Switzerland. Just south of Strasbourg was a White Stork. Nice one.

Have you seen it?

2008-01-12T17:08:00.000Z

Spent over five hours today being asked 'Have you seen it?'. The poeple assuming that a) I am a birder and b) that I knew what 'it' was. Luckily they were correct on both accounts. 'It' being a Hoopoe. 'It' being spotted recently in what turned out to be a nice area of land south of Alton. However, 'it' wasn't spotted by me or anyone I spoke to that day.

Catching up (sorta)

2008-01-03T14:07:00.000Z

Well this was going to separate entries for each day but I’m behind on my blogs and really need to catch up. Maybe in the future I’ll revisit these and do full proper blogs for each day but in the mean time here brief description of what’s been going on in my life recently.

Tuesday 18

Dentist & War of the Worlds

Off to the dentist again today. Had the rest of the teeth I needed removing, out. Didn’t hurt as much as I feared it would.

Then off in the evening to see War of the Worlds. Good show. First half better than the second.

Sunday 23

New bird

Been ill the past couple of days but was feeling better today. Sue suggested that we popped down to Lakeside. Saw a new bird to add to my 2007 Hampshire List, a yellow wagtail.

Monday 24

Tuesday 25

Happy Christmas Everyone.

Got lots of fabbo presents today. Books, DVD’s etc. Many thanks to everyone. Spent a pleasant day at Sue’s friends place and then off to Sue’s parents, for a delicious lunch and tea and even more fabbo presents.

Wednesday 26

Had to use the car today to get to the football. And gosh we won! Yippee. Gordon the tramp wasn’t his normal self today. Ignored everyone. Didn’t even haggle with the programme sellers like he normally does. I know that his cult fame does get to him at times. He’s moaned before about everyone keeps pestering him.

Thursday 27

Off to Blashford Lakes.today. Quick visit as Sue wasn’t feeling quite up to it. Few nice birds. Loads of long tail Tits around. Everywhere you looked there were some. Reports of the being a Bittern here but I didn’t see it. But did finally see the Great White Egret. Also saw a strange looking Little Egret fly over. Got us both puzzled at first. I think the lighter coloured beak than normal through us off the scent. Saw later reports that a Cattle Egret was seen in the area that day. And the difference that and a Little Egret? The Cattle egret has a yellow bill.

Friday 28

Saturday 29

Drove down to football again, mainly to stop off at Blashford Lakes to try and see then Bittern. Which I did. Another one to my Hampshire 2007 list. Football was a draw but we should have won. Gordon the tramp was back to nearly his old self today. He was telling Chris the programme seller, how he gets in bad moods from time to time. I guess all celebrities do that from time to time. The price of fame and being constantly recognized by your fans..

Monday 31

Titchfield Haven

Decided to go birdwatching today. Final day to try to improve my 2007 Hampshire list. Sue and I went down to Titchfield Haven. It was shut. Oh no! Sat on the sea wall and eat our lunch whilst working out what to do next, whilst watching Oystercatchers on the shingle bank just out at sea. Decided to go to Gosport and try to see the Ring-billed Gull. The tide was out and so there wasn’t many birds in the park. No ring-billed seen. To console ourselves we headed off to Stokes Bay for a cup of tea in the nice café there. Before heading home. Final check on the notebook and I see that I’ve seen a total of 79 different species in Hampshire during 2007. Checking on the web, I notice that some others have already posted their finial total. Looks like my 79 will make me bottom of the list. A number of birders, including my mate Simon who lives just round the corner from me, made over 200. Oh well it was fun doing the list. Here’s to 2008.

Tuesday 1st

Happy New Year.

Blashford Lakes again

Decided that the weather wasn’t going to be any good for the Popham New Years day fly-in. So my thoughts turned to my 2008 Hampshire birding list. Am I getting obsessed with lists? Or should that be more obsessed.

There are some birds at Blashford Lakes that I don’t think will hange around forever. The Great White Egret will defiantly not stay for the summer. The bittern might stay, but with such a rare bird I didn’t want to take a chance. The perigim might also go any day. So off to Blashford again to get these and see if I could get my 2008 list off to a good start. So many other birders had the same thought and it was really busy there. First of all off to the hide to see the bittern. But first what’s that on the feeders in the car park. Amonsgst the goldcrest, bue and great tits, was a siskin. Gosh that’s one I didn’t see last year. Bittern was showing itself when I got to the hide. I spotted it straight away but other birders were really struggling. Then off to woodland hide and the feeder were full of tits, chaffinches, nuthatches etc. Ivy South hide produced lotsof ducks. Then it was off to Ibsley Lake hides. Bingo Great White Egret showing itself well on the far side and so was the perigine. Great seen the ones I came for, anything else was going to be a bonus. Spend the rest of the day here and with the help of the other birders saw a large number of birds. Bearing in mind my total Hampshire list for last year was 79. Seeing 45 in one day wasn’t bad for me.

Checking me e-mail at home that night and there was a message from a fellow Hampshire birders. He noticed my 2007 year score that I had posted yesterday and offered his help. He says he doesn’t do many list himself but has helped others. He suggests that we do a trip to various places around the coast and he’ll reckon that I’ll break my 2007 year score in one day. Sounds good to me. Let’s go.

2 January

Back to work. Boo hoo.

I'm the good looking one

2007-12-17T21:05:00.000Z

You may have read on Anne’s blog about how she just cannot tell me and my brother Keith apart. Peas from the same pod. We look so alike, Well she’s not the only one. Met up with a friend yesterday, who knows Keith. Well we got chatting about photography and he said he’s send me a link to a some software. Well checking my e-mail today I received the mail. Its starts ‘Dear Keith, Here’s that link you wanted…’

I’ve said it before and so I’ll say it again. I’m the good looking one.

End of the Museum

2007-12-16T21:02:00.000Z

Sad day today. The Bournemouth Aviation Museum is no more. It closed its doors to the public today. The airport authorities want to build a car park on the land the museum occupies. Yes you read that correctly, they want to remove a decent tourist attraction to build a car park! Us spotters are livid. The museums picnic area was ideal for us to watch the planes, many of us have annual membership of the museum. Some of the smaller aircraft should hopefully find homes, but the larger ones I thin will be scrapped. The whole thing just stinks.

Last footie match before Chirstmas

2007-12-15T20:59:00.000Z

Strange day today. Decided that I wasn’t going to turn up to football two hours before kick off like normal. There isn’t many people around the ground at that time anyway these days. So caught a later train. Sue had already left the house to go and see her friends. Rushed down to catch the train, yep I left it to the last minute again. But made it OK

When I go to football I get off at Pokesdown and have a nice walk through Kings Park. The train I was on stopped at Pokesdown, so I though no more about it. Just settled down for what I hoped would be an enjoyable trip. Pulled into Southampton and noticed that the station sign announced that we were going to Malvern. We’ll they got that wrong, I thought. Then realized that there was a train in front on the same platform, which was the Malvern train. Checked the timetable in my pocket and it would appear that we have 15min wait at Southampton, whilst a faster train overtook us. Just off grabbed a baguette and jumped back on, Safe in the knowledge that my train stopped at Pokesdown, therefore the fast one wouldn’t.

The alarm bells didn’t start to ring until we got towards Brockenhurst. We slowed down unusually early for the station. All was revealed when we crossed over into Platform one. OK it excited me to do this like the last time this happened. The guard then announced that we were due to wait at Brock for 25 mins. Hold on I thought. It was nearly 1pm now. So we were due to leave about 1.25. Twenty-five mins to get to Pokesdown and then a 20 min walk across the park would mean an arrival time at the ground of ten past two. That’s far too late. I’m sure the timetable said we get to Pokesdown at about 1pm. Frantic studying of timetable followed. Oh Bollocks, I should have got on to the ‘fast’ train at Southampton. Oh No.

Legged it across to Platform three and managed to get on the non-stopper to Bournemouth and a longer walk up from there to the ground. Just got near to the ground and a drunk bloke the other way started shouting at me. Obviously trying to pick a fight with someone and I just happened to be there. I managed to skip past him and on to the ground, relived that I got there at 1.30, so that was OK.

Got a pressie from Sandra, Viv and their mum, who buy draw tickets off me each week and are also facebook friends. Kept it to open it on Christmas day. I gave Gill her present of a couple of handwarmers. She was going to keep it till Christmas day as well.

Shock horror though. AFC Bournemouth actually won a league game at home. Our first of the season. Had a Bovril before the match. Haven’t had one of them for years. Quite nice. I think I might have it again.

Then came the journey home. The second half of the match didn’t start till eight mins past four. Then the ref added on more extra time at the end. During which one of our players got injured adding more time. So even though under the new timetable my train home is now 5 mins later leaving Pokesdown then before I still just missed it. The next one was an hour later. Decided to catch a bus to try to get to Bournemouth train station and get on a fast service from there. OK the bus I got on wasn’t the one I was expecting to, but at least it dropped me off right at the station. However it took me past the football ground some hour later than I left it. What a waste of time that was. Got on the train and decided to chill out. When the steward announced that the buffet was open, I headed straight off, quickly downed one can of Murphy’s and went back for another. The steward panicked at this point. He made pains to point out to me that there was only one can left and so next time I’d have to make a different choice. I assured him that I was getting off soon anyway. As I did he wished me a good onward journey and thanked me yet again for my custom. So all in all a strange day, I messed up train times, complexly unlike me. I nearly got beaten up but I got home safely in the end.

Keith and Anne

2007-12-10T09:09:00.000Z

Monday morning on the train for work. Got to be a quick blog. The train is running 45 mins late and to make up time its not stopping at all the stops it normally does. There is a stopping train just behind us that will do that. So the actually journey will be quicker, but still getting to Bournemouth around 30mins late.

Busy weekend. I had Friday off work to go to London and go to a beer festival. The plan was to use my free tickets I get with my annual season ticket. However I can’t find them. Very annoying. I found the envelope that they were it, together with the letter but no tickets. So no trip for me. I did pop out in the morning. Over to Shirley to try and get some earrings for Sue, but failed in that as well. Did take pictures of the local church for my church photos section on this website, but haven’t uploaded them yet.

Sunday Sue and I went off to the London Wetlands Centre to watch some birds. Met up with my brother Keith and his wife Anne. It was great to see them again, which at the moment is only once a year. Had a great day and saw some nice birds as well. I
know that every time we meet I say that we have to meet more often than we do but this time we REALLY must. How about in the spring? Do you want to choose where we meet?

Highlight bird wise must be the Water Rail. A bird you hear more than you see. Anne did great by not only spotting the bird but recognizing it as well. Also added a few more to my life list (ruddy duck plus others). So a good day all round.

Train is just getting towards Bournemouth now. Had an emergency stop just outside of Christchurch. I blame the driver. I suspect he didn’t press a button when he should have.

The Range and BSL

2007-12-03T18:34:00.000Z

Writing this on Monday morning on the train for work, Just approaching Southampton as hit happens. Just about to see my mate Tim and my other mate Gottle’s train heading the other way. Don’t know when you are going to read it as I can’t log in to my web site at the moment. Common Niki, sort it out!

Busy weekend. Wanted to go to The Range shop in Southampton. Which is near to Shirley. So we did the charity shops there. Bought quite a bit of stuff there. Books, videos a Santa hat and some flashing balls head gear for when I’m at football over Christmas.

Bought a book on British sign Language, which I think it’s a very funny language. I’ve blogged about BSL words that have amused me in the past. Sue and I had a quick game of guess what the sign means.

Then on to The Range. Hoping to find Christmas pressies for people but didn’t. Then home for a relaxing afternoon.

Sunday, Sue’s parents visited. After lunch we all went out to Blashford Lakes to see what birds were around. I hunted high and low for the Great White Egret that’s been there for ages. Asked around and no one had seen it that day. I did add some to both my life list and my 2007 Hampshire list. Highlight though was being in the woodland hide and seeing so many birds. 15 species in all. All common birds (apart from a Dunnock – one more for my life list) but so nice to sit so close to so many birds. The ground was just covered with chaffinches. Blue and Great tits a plenty on the feeders, Until they were first scared off by a Great Spotted Woodpecker and then later on by a Pheasant, the latter obviously thinking he was a blue tit as well. Went off on my own to see if I could see the Great White Egret. Found some new paths, leading to hides and a screen that have just been opened up. Didn’t see the Egret but did see a Goosander (another to my life list). Then back home for a nice tea and watching TV. Nature programmes, Top Gear and the final part of Long Way Down. I work with two bikers who love the Long Way Down programme. I think they both want to do something like that themselves.

Oh well, my train is now at Christchurch. So nearly time for me to get off. Nearly all of the usual suspects are on the train. Though was reading my past blogs the other day and there was one about all the regulars on my train. I noticed that out of those that I mentioned, only one still catches that train. Wonder what happened to them all.

Malicious Web Sites

2007-11-29T08:42:00.000Z

We have software at work that stops us looking at sites that we are not supposed to. Omally's blog has been blocked for a while as it says its 'Adult Content'. Perhaps he's posted pictures of his arse too many times. Well today I noticed that Geocaching websiet is blocked. It states that its a 'Malicious Web Site'. Not that we do any caching these days.

Dentist

2007-11-26T12:20:00.000Z

I’ve finally done it. I’ve finally gone to the dentist to get my teeth sorted. I know I should have gone before now but trying to find an NHS dentist in Bournemouth was near impossible. When my fillings dropped out I should have gone to see one. Same again when those teeth that had fillings started to break. But as I wasn’t in pain I didn’t go. I did get pain in one tooth about 8 years ago. I had to go and see a private dentist. He offered to do a full report on my teeth, which I accepted. The pain was just an abscise. Which was treated with drugs at the time. The report came back and he quoted over £1,000 for the treatment he said I needed. He’s already charged me £300 so far and had not actually done any work on my teeth. The first part of the treatment was for me to see the nurse for her to tell me I never went back to a dentist until now.

One of my other teeth started to hurt and hurt badly. Luckily there is a dentist just round the corner from my house that is accepting NHS patients. Lets have a big cheer for Polish dentists coming here to work in the NHS. British dentist seem reluctant to. Anyway managed to book myself in and boy did I get a telling off for leaving it this long. Thing is he was quite right. I have been an idiot for not doing something about my teeth until now. As I expected he gave me pills for the abscise, and told me to come back to have my rotten teeth removed and others filled. First tooth removal was on Friday and it feels so much better. Thursday night was just terrible, pain wise. Luckily the tooth removal was relatively pain free. Why do they have to use such a long needle when giving you your mouth antiseptic?

Since then the tooth has been OK. Get pain when the cold gets to it, but other than that Its OK. At least I, and Sue can sleep easy in our bed now.

Garden bird of the year

2007-11-18T19:50:00.000Z

In my last blog I mentioned about seeing what I thought would be Bird of the year. Well today I saw what must be what be Garden Bird of the Year. Sue say it first and announced that we had a Heron in te garden. I thought she was playing a game, like on QI when they say that there is an elephant in the room. To be honest I did see one flying over a couple of weeks ago. As it didn't stop I couldn't count it in our garden list, but it did today. Nice one.

Bird of the year

2007-11-15T20:34:00.000Z

Had a day working form home today but after checking my e-mail first thing I just had to pop out to the Lakeside Park to see what I think is going to be my bird of the year. A Slovenion Grebe. Local birder Simon Ingram says its the first he's ever seen at Lakeside. It also marks his 150th different bird seen there. Saw a couple of other birders there who's made there way down for it. Lovely.

un-happy commuter

2007-11-14T08:48:00.000Z

My travel home from work options are like this at the moment. I can leave work at 16:15 and scoot up to the train station and try to catch the 16:46 Virgin (now Cross Country) service (to Manchester) and change at either Southampton Central or the airport and get on the Totton-Romsey shuttle train to Eastleigh. These shuttle trains are normally quite full, so I have to stand. Therefore I always change at the airport as its only 5 mins from airport to Eastleigh, so isn’t that terrible. What is bad though is that these trains are normally full of rowdy teenagers who have “gone down to the city to hang around”. Using these trains get me to Eastleigh at around 17:34.

My other option is to wait and catch the 16:59 South West Trains Waterloo service from Bournemouth. Then change onto the stopping service to Winchester arriving at Eastleigh at 17:56. This has its advantages in that I can change trains either at Brockenhurst, Southampton Central, or at the airport, there is always seats available, not may rowdy teenagers, and I gain 15 mins of flexi time at work being able to work until 16:30.

Up to now having both options is working OK. However, the new train timetables were issued yesterday, starting on 9 December and things have changed. Going to work and to/from football on a Saturday is OK. However the Totton-Romsey shuttle is being replaced by a Salisbury-Eastleigh-Southampton-Salisbury circular service and is being retimed as a result. It now longer gets overtaken at Southampton by the 16:46 Manchester service. In fact this service will become the 16:45 service, it getting an extra minute to get to Brockenhurst. This new Salisbury circular service now leaves after the 16:59 train and will get into Eastleigh at 17:47. So I’ve lost 13 mins each day but not having an ‘earlier train’. So there is no point in me leaving work for the 16:45, I won’t get home any quicker. So my flexi would improve working to 16:30. However there is no Winchester stopping service anymore, so all the passengers from that train, heading to all station up to Eastleigh will be on my Salisbury circular service. I said already how busy it was. If they keep it as the normal two-car units as it is at the moment then its going to be chaos. No room for everyone. If I want to avoid this train then the next one to Eastleigh won’t get in till 18:06, thus loosing me even more time. This being the 17:05 from Bournemouth. Advantage is that I don’t have to change train, disadvantage is the it takes longer, but at least its an option if I miss the 16:59.

I’ll have to see what is it going to be like after the timetable change, just I’m not looking Sforward to it one bit.

Pictures to follow

2007-11-12T13:08:00.000Z

It’s Monday morning (boo), I’m on the train heading for work (boo), so thought I’d type out my blog. Yeap it seems that this is the only time in the week that I know I can sit down and blog.

Had Friday off as Sue and I were off to the \Bridgewater Carnival (pictures to follow) . It was very good, thoroughly enjoyable day. Had tea and cake at St Mary’s church in Bridgewater. Then sat in the pews waiting for time to go and see the carnival.

Saturday was spend bird watching. Went to West Sedgewick RSPB reserve. Didn’t see much here. The main attraction here is nesting herons. From the hide we saw where they had nested in the spring high up in the trees, but they had long gone.

Then on to another reserve, whose name escapes me at present. Eventually found one of the hides here. The map at the entrance isn’t very clear. Not much in the way of bird life but we did see two otters which was just fantastic. We left to go to the another hide and took a different route back hoping that is was going to be less muddy. It wasn’t it was worse. One of Sue’s shoes split under the strain of being constantly being pulled out of the mud. When we got back to the main path she said that she had to go back to the car. However we did notice a huge number of people coming into the site. It was late in the afternoon. I knew that the big starling display was around this area somewhere but didn’t realise that this was one of the best places to see it from. This left me in a dilemma. I know how much she wanted to one day see the starling display where millions of starling all form one huge flock, creating patterns in the air before landing for the night. But Sue couldn’t walk up where everyone was going because of her show situation. So I had a choice, should I leave Sue in the car and go back to see the starlings? It means there was no point in us both missing them as we were so close to them. But it just wouldn’t be the same without sue being there. But would Sue have wanted me to miss out on them as well? It wasn’t an easy choice, but I did go back to see the starlings. Saw thousands of them arrive (pictures to follow) but they all flew to the other end of the reserve behind some trees, So still didn’t see the huge spectacle of them. Which in some ways was good. Means that Sue and I can come back and see them together.

Sunday started with breakfast in the Sainsbury’s restaurant, just opposite the Travelodge. Oh I haven’t mentioned yet that it was a new Travelodge for us. We stayed at the one in Taunton. Another one to tick off the list. Before heading back. Did a couple of churches on the way back (pictures to follow) Last of which was the outstanding Wilton Parish Church near Salisbury. Superb Italianate design. Sorry folks yet again, pictures are to follow.

Ringwood and Nuthatches

2007-11-05T15:16:00.001Z

It’s Monday morning (boo), I’m on the train heading for work (boo), so thought I’d type out my blog. Yeap I didn’t win the lottery this weekend either.

Work was busy last week. We had our regular GIS user day and I had to give a small 15 min talk, so I was preparing for that. It’s amazing how much time is needed to put together a decent 15 min talk. I do look forward to the challenge of talking to a group. But realise that I’m not that good at it. Nerves make me sweat, talk faster than my brain can keep up and so miss out points and end up garbling what I’m saying. Still I’m getting better with each one.

Saturday we had a little trip out. Down to Ringwood to visit the charity shops. Had a nice Jacket Spud in the square, Also went to have at look at the church. Passed it so many times but never been in. St Peter and St Paul is a lovely looking church. With interesting brass memorial just inside the door, lovely font and great stained glass windows.

Mooched up to Blashford Lakes. First visit here and glad I got instructions fromone of the locals before hand. Never seen so many herons in one place at one time. Great. Nice hides but two didn’t have opening windows which I can take piccies from. Still got a reasonable one of a Nuthatch. (see below) The Screen overlooking the Mockbegger Lake don’t have any decent parking next to them and so we missed out on them. Star bird I was after was a Great White Egret. Guess which lake it was on… Yeap the Mockegger one.. Will have to go back and get that one soon. Also tried to get to a church at Breamore (pronounced bremmer) Should have realised that it would be next to Breamore house. Oh well when we got and get the Egret we’ll do the church at the same time. Lovely drive back home through the forest.

Sunday was spend pottering in the garden. Filled up both the normal compost bin and the leaf compost bin. So over to the worms to do their stuff and make me some nice compost for me for next summer.

Beer!

2007-10-29T13:58:00.001Z

It’s Monday morning (boo), I’m on the train heading for work (boo), so thought I’d type out my blog.

Was in Norfolk last week. I’m sure that you’ve read all about that on Sue’s blog.

I will add that I managed to do some bird watching whist at the Norwich Beer Festival. At the beginning of the week a Sparrow hawk had flown in the hall where the festival is held and sat quite happily on the beans in the roof of the building. They tried to get it out and even employed the services of the local bird of prey centre, but all to no avail. The bird was quite happy where it was.

Saturday I went to the Poole beer festival. Every year its on at the same time as the Norwich one and so I’ve never been to it. However this year we came back from Norwich on the Friday. So I was free on the Saturday to go down to Poole (well Branksome) to sample the delights of the festival. The thought of going to it only came into my head when I saw that a friend at work had a spare ticket for the festival for sale. So many thanks to Rob for the ticket.

The festival itself was not as big as the Norwich one. But size isn’t everything. For me the sign of a good festival is –

Must have a selection of beers that I haven’t tried before.

Good atmosphere

Reasonable food.

The Poole festival had all three. OK the selection wasn’t as high as Norwich but there was still beers that I haven’t tried before.

Unfortunately I had to leave early as AFC Bournemouth were playing at home that afternoon. But I still had a good time at the festival and sampled more beers than I probably should have done before going to a football match. I even had to smuggle the souvenir beer glass from the festival into the football ground.

Leaves me in a dilemma for next year. Should we come back from Norwich on the Friday, so to go to the Poole festival again next year? Or stay up in Norwich for the Saturday. It would be nice to go and see Norwich FC play again and the home match in beer festival week was always a must. But if Bournemouth is home that Saturday I should really be there for that. Oh the choices.

Dirty Rotten Cheater

2007-10-18T08:23:00.001Z

Had a note from my nephew Kevin the other day. He’s said that he going to be in a TV programme which is being broadcast this Friday. The programme is called Dirty Rotten Cheater. With a title like that I just hope its not a documentary*

*luckily its not – it’s a game show apparently

Phone and Popham

2007-10-16T11:54:00.000Z

So what did I do last Saturday? I stayed at home and did PC stuff, working on a new long term project of a new web site. You may have read about this site in my previous blogs where I was asking for ideas for a name. Well www.planespeaking.net is now being put together.

Latest on my phone. I spoke to Neil at work, who parents live in West Bromwich. They said they’d pop down to New Street station and pick the phone up and then post it to me. Very kind of them. They did go down on Saturday but said that that Virgin Train Staff were most unhelpful. Saying they hadn’t heard about me or the phone and that they needed some sort of reference number. This had never been mentioned to me in the many e-mails sent between myself and Virgin trains. So I’m beginning to think that I may never see that phone again.

Sunday was a choice. Do I go to football or to Popham? Well it wasn’t much of a choice really, Popham! It was their end of season fly-in. Had our stall as per usual. Didn’t make as much as usual but then again the only new stock we had were some notebooks, of which we sold a couple.

Been busy on the bookmooch.com site. Sent off a few books that we didn’t want anymore. Going to list some on our intranet at work. See if we can sell a few. Is this the start of our second hand book empire?

Choices

2007-10-12T19:53:00.000Z

What shall I do Saturday? You see Sue is going off to see her friend Wendy that day. So what shall I do? Options are,

1 Stay at home and do PC stuff (maybe with a trip down town) with some drum practice thrown in as well.
2 Go to London on the train and do some spotting using up one of my free tickets
3 Go to London via a free ticket and then pay to go to Birmingham to collect my mobile phone.

You see I lost my mobile phone. It must have dropped out of my pocket whilst I was on the train. Someone from Virgin Trains must have had it as they rang my friend Charlie on it, (Alphabetically he was the first person who I have on my phone.) Anyway, my phone is at Virgin Lost Property at Birmingham New Street. Apparently, I either go and collect it, or pay for a courier to collect it and delivery it to me. I know someone who’s a train manager for Virgin and he has very kindly offered to go and collect it. However, he only rarely goes to Birmingham as Bournemouth based Virgin staff usually only do the Bournemouth – Reading section. I miss the phone as seeing as I’m off to my sisters soon, it would be nice to get it back ASAP.

Things that fly

2007-10-09T14:33:00.000Z

Apologies for the lack of blogs recently folks. Been a bit busy. Our sort out has slowed down a bit. We have gone through all our books now and weeded out the ones we don’t want anymore. Listing them on bookmouch.com. Sent a couple off already to other people. Been meaning to produce a list of the books to put on our intranet at work to try and sell some of them. Sue has this dream of us setting up our own second hand book shop one day. Anyway every shop has to start somewhere, hasn’t it.

Been on my annual trip up to RAF Shawbury recently. Its where the RAF store all their surplus aircraft that they haven’t got the money to keep flying. Full of Hawks, Tucano’s, Gazelles etc. Nice. Went on to RAF Cosford afterwards to look round the Ground Maintenance School. This is where they train the Staff who look after the planes when they are on the ground. Some nice old aircraft in there. Pictures are available on the Air-Britain Site

Went to Pulborugh Brooks RSPB reserve on Saturday. Not as good as Tichfield Haven, but as RSPB members we got in free. Highlights were a snipe and a green woodpecker.

Football season has started again and have been off to watch AFC Bournemouth play. Hasn’t been good. Keep on loosing. The match next weekend is on the Sunday. They don’t want it to clash with the England match on the Saturday. Trouble is that it clashes with the last Popham Fly-in of the season. Which do I go to??

Titchfield Haven and Hill Head

2007-09-22T18:51:00.000Z

Off to Hill Head/Tichfield Haven today to do some bird watching. Been told that there were a couple of Spoonbills at Tichfield there during the week and so was hoping that they will still going to be there. They were!! :) A new one on my life list. However the Roseate Tern that’s been at Hill Head wasn’t there when we were, though I understand that it was there later. However there was some Common Terns, Little Terns and two Sandwich Terns. The latter two being added to my life list and the first one to my 2007 list. It turned out to be a good day for the lists. Another 17 for my Hampshire List, most of which were Life Listers as well.. Though I upset that the great looking Bar-Headed Goose doesn’t count. It’s an escapee. Oh well can’t win them all.

In a way it was nice to have quite a few experienced bird-watchers in the first hide. Listening in to their conversations helped us spot the birds. However by the end the day we were on our own in some of the hides which was great. Good to spend some quality time together.

Money, Band and Robocop

2007-09-20T09:29:00.001Z

I’m going through a ‘fed up of having no money all the time so lets do something about it’ phase at the moment. So trying to think up way to make/save money. I no longer get a cup of coffee from the vending machine on the way into work each day anymore. That saves me 20p a day. Well it’s a start. On the making money front I’ve added a link to YouGov in my list of links on the right of this page. They were recommended to me by a Geocahcing friend. Basically you sign up. They send you surveys which take a few mins to complete about once a week or so. With the majority of surveys paying 50p for each completed one. Once you get to £50 you’ll get a cheque in the post. OK at 50p a time it does take quite a few years to get to £50, but for a few mins a week I think it will be worth it. You can boost your earnings by recruiting friends, hence me putting the link on my blog.

Band practice last night. Good fun. I feel that I’m getting better but realize that there is so much I’ve still got to learn and a huge amount of practice I need to get things sounding good. Also there is the need to sit down and totally learn the songs. Yes I know the songs, but I’m talking down to a level where I know each beat of each bar. This will help with fills and knowing when I should be changing the pattern that I’m playing.

Having a bit of a sort out of stuff at home. Got boxes in loft, cupboard and under work surfaces that haven’t been touched for ages. Wanting to go through them all and sort out what we can sell, what we want to keep etc Sorting out our books and videos as well. Listed some of the books on the excellent readitswapit web site. Where you can swap books that you’ve already read, for books that you haven’t. Sue typed out a list of videos we don’t want and I’ll put it on our Intranet at work and try and sell them. Anyone want all three Robocop films???

Football, Popham and next years trip

2007-09-17T07:58:00.000Z

Well another weekend gone and a busy one it was. Saturday was off to football. One all draw, though the ref denied us a definite penalty. Worrying though is that two of our players had to be stretchered* off.

Home in the evening watching TV. Nice

Sunday was another Popham. This time the Solent Aviation Society Fly-in. One or two nice aircraft. Sales were good, glad that we sold quite a few book, thus making our boxes lighter. Saw Eric and Lynne from Aeroprints Tours. They are the company that I do my plane spotting trips with. Now I had booked up to go to Shawbury with them later this month, but due to a course I’m having to go on for work I can’t make it. I initially told them to put the money from that tour towards a trip to Ireland that they are doing in August next year. However seeing his new brochure (or book of dreams as Sue calls it) I noticed that the trip to Austria next September is only £100 more and you get twice as long. Also I’ve done Ireland before, where as I’ve never been to Austria. One of the few Western European countries I haven’t been too. Plus the trip also includes a visit to the World Hot Air Balloon Championships, which should be good. On the down side is that I’ll be away for over a week, the longest Sue and I would have been away since started going out with each other. Also it won’t be the same to go to a balloon festival without her, but there is no way that she’ll stand all the coach travel etc.

*Typing this blog in word on the train heading for work. It says that I’ve miss-spelt stretchered, but won’t give me the proper spelling. Now surely stretchered is just stretcher (which is spelt correctly) with an ed at the end. Isn’t it???

Time Management

2007-09-12T13:09:00.001Z

Well the roofers and scaffolding has gone, but the Council bod has said that there might be a problem. Read all about it on Sue’s blog.

Another Popham Fly-in last Sunday. Didn’t sell that much on the stall but there was some nice aircraft there.

Did a time management course yesterday. They had someone else booked on it but for some reason unknown to me they could attend. So to avoid paying a cancellation fee they asked around for anyone wanting to go on it. I said that I was willing, but on finding out that it was in Creekmoor, I said that I couldn’t go due to lack of car. Next-to-top manager agreed to pay for my train ticket from Bournemouth to Poole and then taxi’s to/from the venue. Which I’m sure will come to more that the cancellation fee but there you go. On arrival at the venue I noticed that there was a bus stop right out side the place, So I decided to save the council some money and catch the bus back to Poole. Wasn’t that good of me!

The course started off OK. The morning session was good, learning about Alan Leikens 6 point road to time management happiness. The 80/20 rule etc. Then in the afternoon we seem to drift off topic a lot and started talking about delegation etc (Stuff I’ve done on my first line management course) So the afternoon was a bit of a waste of time.

Rushing around this morning as per usual, getting ready to leave and try to get to the station in time for my train. Sue was still in bed and commented that my time management first thing in the morning hasn’t improved. I advised her that I had done a ‘to do list’ yet. She jumped at the chance to help me with that.. Thanks for the offer but NO!!!!

Geocaching and rehab

2007-09-06T08:44:00.000Z

Last Saturday went to football for my first home game of the season. Got a new system there for us Matchday Draw Ticket sellers (and the programme sellers too). Basically we are not on commission anymore, but a flat rate no matter how many tickets/programmes we sell. Whilst we all do try our best, I don’t think any of us will bend over backwards to try and increase sales like we used to.

Went to check on my Ziegler Passage geocache recently. I made the cache a virtual one about 3 years ago after checking on it and finding that the original box was missing. Anyway after someone reported finding the box a few weeks and we thought we’d go and check. Sure enough there it was. We even remember some of the items we’d put in it. I guess it would be nice to make it a proper cache again.

On the walk down to the cache spotted a bird neither Sue and I had seen before. Made a mental note of it and looked it up when we got home. Turned out to be a Wheater. That’s a new one on my life list.

Football again on Tuesday and we finally scored a goal at home this season. If fact we scored two and had our first home victory of the season.

Apart from that nothing much to report. Still got a bad cough, which only seems to effect me at night… (sorry Sue for keeping you awake). I’ll spare you the gory details of my infected finger, just to say its on the mend. Its amazing that it is not until you have a middle finger that is painful to touch, that you realise how often you use it.

Oh have donw more work on the family tree. Found details of great great grandpents on my mum’s mum side. Also found another two people who are possible living relatives.

Final note is to pass on my very best wishes to my mate Henry The Thirst… Let’s hope you can go back to being Hentry Not The Thirst after you come out of rehab.

Forward Roll

2007-08-31T07:34:00.001Z

Another catch up blog. Quiet bank holiday weekend, Unfortunately my announcement on me getting better was a little premature. My stomach is still not right. OK It’s never been 100% perfect. I noticed that Sue has got some air freshener for the bathroom, Obviously its getting to her as well.

Quiet Bank Holiday Weekend… Did a lot of work on a new aircraft research project I’m doing. On the Monday we went off to Sue’s parents. Sue’s blog contains all I can really say on that, so there’s no need for me to duplicate it.

Took yesterday off as we had the scaffolders, putting up the scaffolding ready for the roof people to start work next week. Couple of young lads, who didn’t talk to me or to each other for that matter, that much, So I left them to it. Annoyed that they didn’t have the courtesy to walk around my veg plot, so a few of my leeks have gone for a burton.

Last night, Sue and I went to see The Grand Cirque, the BIC. Brilliant show. Amazing the strength and subtlety of the performers, I remember at Junior school having to do gymnastics. We started off on the forward roll. Something I never could do, I’d always end up on my side. The teacher tried to help me once but pushing me round the roll. I just span out of control and ended up as a big heap on the ground, feeling rather dizzy. Other kids had some real talent, and went on to master some complex moves, Particularly on the vault. Ever since then I’ve always admired people who such talents and will always watch gymnastics, if its ever on TV and I’m in the room at the time. So for me the show was jaw-dropingly good, Seeing such feats of strength, flexibility, balance and sheer nerve of the artists.

Feeling better and Charlie's 30th

2007-08-23T08:09:00.000Z

Thursday morning and again on the train to work. Another chance to write a blog. Well I’m feeling a lot better now folks. Still a bit tired and I’m not eating as much as I was before I became ill, but then again that isn’t a bad thing. Band practice last night which was fun. Dave made me a CD with MP3 versions of the bands songs. This together with the MP3 player than Lisa gave me, means I can listen to the bands songs on the train and work out stuff, like different rythums and fills etc.

My mate Charlie’s birthday tomorrow but as he’s off we’re decorating his desk today. We don’t normally do this but as this is his 30th birthday we thought we’d make the effort. I’ve been contacting his family and old school friends via facebook to get some photos of him. Got a couple which I’ll display on the door to the office in a vary humerious way. Lisa’s doing the balloons, banners etc.

Looking forward to the bank holiday weekend. Hopefully catch up on jobs around the house and sort out stuff on the PC as well.

Weekend of illness and cheque

2007-08-20T08:29:00.000Z

Monday morning and I’m on the train going to work, so a chance for a quick blog.

You may have read on Sue’s blog that I’ve not been well of late. Since middle of last week I’ve felt really tired. I know I had one very late night last week but it must be more to it that that. I’ve been off my food as well. Thursday and Friday I did go to work as there was a major project that I really had to finish. OK I didn’t actually finish it but I can do that this morning. Thursday evening I was so tired, I had tea and went to bed, Friday evening was better but still went to bed early. Plodded around on Saturday. Was supposed to go to the football and sell my tickets. But decided against it. I really should have gone as I didn’t do any of the pre-season friendlies. Oh well. I thought I’d try and save my energy for Sunday, when Sue and I were due to go to the Tate Modern, something I know that sue has been really looking forward to. Unfortunately Saturday night the stomach bug side of my illness hit me hard and we decided that I couldn’t do a trip to London. I’m really disappointed that Sue and I didn’t go to Tate Modern, I knew how much she was looking forward to it. I’ll try and take her there next weekend.

So that’s about it folks. Whilst I’m still not eating properly and still feeling tired I am on the mend.

Good news is that I finally got the cheque for having a picture published in Buses Maagzine. Whilst it wasn’t much, it’s better than nothing,

Cating up with stuff

2007-08-15T14:57:00.000Z

Been trying this up as and when I can and its still not finished, but as I'm falling behind Sue's blog then this is really old news. But here it is anyway...

Sue and I are back from our holiday and what a fabbo time we had. Here’s a run down on all the exciting things we done.

Saturday

Left home and drove up to out cottage in Herefordshire. Stopped off at the Little Chef in Cirecester. It seems that they increased their prices since we last went into a Little Chef, which I must admit was quite a while ago. Kept seeing signs to churches, so thought there ust be some good ones around. Saw one close to the main road and stopped. Met one of the church ‘staff’ in the church. She told us about how she got into making the marmalade to sell in the church. We did buy a pot and absolutely wonderful marmalade it turned out to be.

Stopped off at Leominster Train station to have a look around. Saw one train come through. Nice station, but only 1 train an hour in each direction.

Greeted at the cottage by its owner who lives next door and a lovely little place it turn out to be. Loads of birds flying around, mostly swallows, house martins, blue and great tits and about a million sparrows. Sat in the garden and had tea. Lovely

Sunday

Off to Wales to the Gilfach Nature Reserve, as seen on Chris Packham’s Nature Calendar TV programme. Had a lovely walk around. Birding highlight was seeing 3 Red Kites circling together overhead. Did see to others separately, as well as a Buzzard. Sat and had a picnic on the site of the old railway line. Must have been quite a wonderful train journey through this lovely area. Went back to the cottage and sat and had tea in the garden. Lovely.

Monday

Hay-on-Wye. Second-hand book capital of the world. Was hoping to come back with lots of second-hand books but they were either too expensive or not want I wanted. Did buy a lovely book on the Lockheed Hercules Aircraft. Sat and had a picnic next to the River Wye and watched some Geese on the other bank. Looked at more bookshops before retuning to the cottage. Sat in the garden I felt a bit bored, so went for a walk. I saw on the map that there was a trigpoint on top of one of the hills nearby. I planned what looked like a nice circular walk to take in the trigpoint. Off down the road. Found the footpath sign into the fields and then off up the hill to the woods at the top. There should be a footpath through the woods that woud take me along the ridge of the hill. But finding the footpath into the woods, to connect with it was a problem. So I just went through the woods hoping to find the path. Eventually I came to what looked like the path. Bit overgrown with brambles and lots of other prickly things. But a footpath I looked like. Off I went hacking my way through. However the path got boggier and boggier and the brambles thicker and thicker. I was using my bag to hack my way through the jungle. It was slow, painful and hot work trying to hack my way along the path. Eventually I got to a point where I couldn’t go on. The brambles were just too thick. No way down and I didn’t want to go back after spending best part of an hour to get here. There was only one thing for it. Upwards up a very steep slope. Crawling up on all fours, I just hoped that they was some sort of path or something to help me. Eventually found a track, which led upwards into a compound, but more importantly, downwards to safety and home. As I walked down I managed to scramble over the fence to see the trigpoint in the next field. But barbed wire between me and it meant I didn’t get that close to it. But at least I saw it. The last part of the walk was bliss. Swallows all around me swooping low to snatch seeds drifting off the plants. There was about 20-30 of them and seeing so many, so close was great. Really made up for the earlier part of the walk. Got back to the cottage and flopped. Had tea in the garden and watched the birds. Lovely.

Tuesday

Simmons Yat & Sculpture trail

Following a recommendation we headed down to Symmond Yat this morning. Hoping to get by the river but ended up at Symmonds Yat Rock. Nice view across the valley from here. There were some RSPB people here with their telescopes watching a Peregrine Falcon nest site. They informed us that the birds hadn’t been seen that day. I stood around watching the Buzzards flying overhead and seeing the deer in the nearby field. Sue sat and read her book. I did buy her a ladybird badge and myself a falcon badge to put on my camera bag, even though I hadn’t seen one yet. Walked over to another viewpoint, just got there when we heard a strange noise. Rushed back and all the RSPB people we getting excited. The male Falcon had left the nest. Got a quick view of him. Really glad about that, another one to add to my life list of birds seen.

Went back to the reception hut to have a cup of tea but were driven mad by a screaming kid in a push chair (yes he was screaming) and groups of loud teenagers. Once decided to walk through the forest singing away as loud as he can. Oh well so much for a quiet day in the county.

Sue wanted to see a sculpture trail nearby and so off we set. Nice walk around the trail. Now my hour a day walking I do to/from work really helped, but I think sue struggled a bit with the 4.5 mile walk. OK she struggled a lot… Best sculptures were the cathedral and the cube. Back home to have tea in the garden and watch the birds, lovely.

Wednesday

Decide that today we’d do a visit to the town that was closest to the cottage. Leominster (pronounced Lem-ster if you didn’t know). Nice town, with a nice church. Headed off to a local Nature Reserve. But despite being on the Ordnance Survey Maps and signs around the place etc, wasn’t open and the guy didn’t know when it would ever open. Oh well. Checked the map and we went off to a nature reserve further away. Turned about to be a forestry commission place. Sue was too pooped to do any walking, So I did the 3.5 mile trail on my own. And a jolly good walk it was too. Went back to the cottage to have tea in the garden and watch the birds. Lovely.

Thursday

Shobdon airfield and National Trust Places

Wasn’t until I say it listed in the ‘nearby items of interest’ section of the cottage information, that I realised that there was an airfield nearby. Shobdon. Popped in this morning and had a cup of hot choclate and sat in their club house area. Did ask if it was possible to have a look around and was refused permission. Oh well, got what I could and had to leave it at that.

The off to two National Trust Places. A Castle who’s name escapes me and The Weir. Arrived a bit early at the Castle which didn’t open till 1pm. But there was a nice church in the grounds, which was been decorated inside with flowers for a flower festival. The castle was good and didn’t take us long to look round. We appreciated this as sometimes seeing room after room does get a bit boring. The Wier was very good. It’s a formal garden (which has gone a bit wild) along a quite fast flowing river. Lovely plants. Saw about 6 long-tailed tits fliting around a bush and later on a Kingfisher. My first Kingfisher this year. Went back to the cottage and sat in the garden watching the birds. Lovely,

Friday

Did some caching today. Went to the Secret Hills Discovery Centre in Shropshire, from where we did 5 caches.

Yesterday

I haven’t done a proper AFC Bournemouth away match for years, Ok I’m not counting the friendly at Eastleigh last year. I work with a guy called Neal and he’s a huge West Brom fan, So when the Chrries were drawn against the Baggies in the Carling cup we knew that we had to go up. I suggested we made a day of it. He could go and see his family, who stil live in the area and I spent the morning at Birmingham Airport, Which was OK, A few nice aircraft. Then riding on trains in the afternoon. Rode on my first Virgin Train Pendolino. Which was smooth. OK ish seat but the windows are tiny. Then rode on a class 350 unit. These are exactly like the south West Trains Class 450, except painted silver and are supplied by overhead electics. The on train annoucments were even more rubbish. Kept saying that we were heading to Coventy when actually we were heading away from it. Took a few bus pictures outside Moor Street station. Before using the Birmingham metro for the first time. Nice trams, fast service. Very good.

The Hawthorns is quite a big stadium. Holds maybe 20,000 but there was only 10,000 there. Good to see some familiar faces amongst the crowd and we were in fine voice. However we didn’t attract that much, not until the last 10 mins or so and lost the match 1-0. Still, go days spotting. Good to get another football ground in the book. Just didn’t get back till 1am, so a long tiring day

Photos, Shows and criminals

2007-07-31T07:48:00.000Z

Tuesday morning and I’m on the train going to work. There is a bloke sat behind me with a huge B.O. problem. Well I hope it’s him and not me…

Just thinking about all that happened since I last blogged. I had written two part blogs since my last full effort. The first was discussing the pro’s and con’s of various photo image hosting that I had available to me and asking you dear readers your opinions. Thing is by trying it up, make me think more and more about it and I made up my own mind. I’ve decided to upgrade my fotopic account to a premium account. Which means that I can have more galleries on there and more importantly be able to sell copies of my photos. So far I’ve added some aircraft photos and I’ll copy across my church photos and eventually all my general photos. This will mean that my pbase.com account will not be renewed when its due.

I did another part blog about the weekend and going to the village show in the village where Sue was brought up. I did enjoy the show. Especially coming away with some nice books from the book stall, couple of nice plants and winning a coconut, two bottles of wine and a bottle of whisky. Didn’t enter any veg into the show. Haven’t got any at the moment available to be show, they have either been eaten or aren’t ready yet. I guess I’ll try and enter something next year, but I do have issues with the whole thing. Rules and regs on every aspect of the veg, size, colour, shape, how they are presented etc and some people take the whole thing far too seriously for their own good. Mum did really well bringing us all up and there was always food on the table. But whether our spuds had a better skin colour than anyone elses wasn’t important. The fact that they were there was important.

Talking about spuds I’ve harvested my crop of them on Sunday and I’m really pleased with them. Got a huge box full. Lovely. Should keep us going for a while and hopefully reduce the food bill.

However, biggest news is that the criminal element in our society has been trying to break into the factory behind us. Gaining entry via our and our neighbours gardens. We caught a couple trying to hack their was through our gate at the side of the house. We rushed down to chase them off, luckily they legged it before we got outside. So we’re not really sleeping well these days. Feels terrible haven been invaded and knowing they could and probably will come back. My home and home life is so important to me these days.

The great side of this is that we got chatting to out neighbours to the right, who we’d never spoken to before. They turn out to be really nice people and they woman the other side of them seems nice as well. So looks like on the whole we’ve got a really nice bunch of people all round us.

Well nearly at Bournemouth now. Luckily the block behind me got off at Brockenhurst and the smell went with him… So it’s not me stinking the place out.. well not this morning at least.

Monday blues

2007-07-23T07:52:00.000Z

Well it Monday morning again. Back to the soul destroying hell that I call work. Writing this blog on the train heading to work.

Been a good weekend though. You’ve probably already read on /Sue’s blog about the fact we didn’t go to London yesterday. We did pull up the first of he spuds and they tasted lovely. Better than you would get in a shop. You see my main aim is taste (o.k. my MAIN aim is to get the things to grow) but as each year passes I get to know, what I can grow and how to grow it. So as a gardener who going to eat his own veg. Taste is number 1 aim. Unfortunately, the supermarket has other ideas. Money is everything with them. So the product has to be cheap and have a long shelf life. Taste is not a priority for them.

Did a bit of work on my we pages on old stone churches of England yesterday. Not that I’ve looked at any different ones recently. Just catching up on the ones I look at a while back. Trouble is I’ve forgotten where a couple of them were.

Oh well, passing Hinton Admrial now. Nearly all of the usuals are either on or have left the train.. Southampton twins. Nurse Gladys, PC Plod, bog man, though I haven’t seen duchess. She must have a day off*. Yeah, making up names for my fellow passengers helps the journey go quickly. Wonder if any of them have a name for me. Mind you looking at them all in their own little world I would guess that most of them never notice their fellow passengers.

*update - she was on the train - sat behind me with her friends stripy and fizzy

Wonder how much I'll get

2007-07-21T21:33:00.000Z

Well good news is that I have once again become a published photographer. I’m not sure why I took my camera to work that day. It was a nice day weather wise. But I don’t normally take it and when I do I don’t normally take it when I go out to lunch. These days I rarely take a lunch beak unless Sue wants a DVD from the papers that you have to go to WH Smiths for. Anyway. Walking back from lunch I saw Yellow Buses new training vehicle. It a new livery. Hmm wonder if Buses magazine would be interested in that. Now I’ve been kicking my of late for a) missing out of the new Yellow Buses livery and b) missing out on the new mini-bus service around Southampton, i.e. City Clipper. But if Buses magazine was going to publish a picture of this new livery, I was going to try and make sure it was my picture. Thumbnail of the pic was sent off to the editor that afternoon and he requested the full size image that evening. I had my fingers crossed. Well today the picture came out in print and I’m chuffed to bits. I’m happy on many levels. Knowing I can take pictures that are magazine quality, knowing that I can spot a photo that an editor or a magazine would want, earning money from my hobby and I’m getting back some of the expense of my digital camera. Well at the moment I’ve no idea how much I’ll get. The last time I had a photo in Buses magazine I got £2.50 but that was back in 1983! So I’m hoping I’ll get at least a fiver….

Yeovilton

2007-07-13T12:03:00.001Z

Another long gap between blogs. I’m sorry dear readers. Been a bit busy the last week or so. Last weekend was Yeovilton Air Show and what a jolly good show it was. The Swiss version of the Red Arrows, the Patrouille Suisse, put in a brilliant display, and the mock battle they normally have at the end of the show was a better than normally effort all round. Went with my good mate Paul, Mark and young Jimmi. Took lots of pictures which I’ve een trying to sort out this week for the Air-Britain Photographic Site. Normally its just a rush as to who gets their photos uploaded first will get theirs on the site, but for the first time they have decided to give people a week to upload their pictures and the only publish the best ones of each aircraft. So that’s what I’ve been trying to do, get my pictures sorted out. However there is a problem. The have a sliding scale as to how many pictures you can have in the queue at any one time, which is based on the percentage rate of acceptance of your photos over the past thirty days. Most of the time I’m on the highest rate and can upload 50 photos at any one time. However last Friday I took the afternoon off and went out the Hurn Airport and took some shots there. Uploaded them to Air-Britain but many were rejected as there was already too many photos of that aircraft on the database already. One aircraft had 6 shots from the same photographer, so there was no room for my, rather good I think, shot of it. I’ve had a moan about one photographer having so may photos of the same aircraft. Anyway, thanks to all these rejections, I’ve moved down a band and now can only upload 40 photos. Bit annoying that. Just trying to get as many photos of mine out there, to get my name know around aviation circles.

Some of you may have seen that I’ve become active on Facebook.com. Known about that site for a while but never really got into it until now. I guess I never had many friends on there but no it seems that they’ve all joined up. Strange how many of my friends have join all at the same time from both my work and outside of work. It’s not like they all knew each other.

Still off to the Air Tattoo at Fairford on Saturday with Paul and Mark. Ready to upload load of my pictures from that on Sunday and next week.

Have a good weekend all…

Job, Family and Churches

2007-06-26T12:25:00.001Z

Oh… got some blogging to catch up on… sorry about that dear readers. As you’ve probably read on Sue’s blog, things are happening at work. We have a big review going on with everyone’s jobs. We’ve just got out points that they awarded to our jobs, and given us a chance to appeal if we think we are worth more points. Which I think I am. However, points make…… yeah cash. BUT, they haven’t decided what points make what salary. It’s all a bit crap. So as regular readers already know that I’m desperate to leave, this doesn’t help my happiness, or lack of it here.

Other things are going OK. Weather was bad over the weekend, so Sue and I watch some films. During which I managed to post some more photos onto my bus photo and train photo sites. Glad I’m catching up with that. It was good to spend some quality time with Sue.

Been doing some family tree stuff. One of my distant relations, Daisy Olding, was married to a Bertie Humby. Via genesreunited.com, I found a couple of people who are relations of Bertie. So all the people in their family tree must be relations of mine, albeit by marriage. So that’s another 3,800+ people to add to the tree (maybe)!!

Weekend before last we went to a book sale, one of the many books I bought was a book on parish churches. For years, every time I pass an old church I’d have a quick look. Well, since I bough the digital camera I’ve been thinking about getting pictures of them and that’s what I’ve been doing. Don’t worry Anne, this isn’t anything connected with religion, it’s just that they are interesting buildings. Anyway, up to now I’ve had the pictures on pbase.com, but in the process of moving them to this site. Done one page for Weyhill Church, Hmpshire. I’ll have get the other pictures on there soon.

Car Books and French Pipers

2007-06-18T09:53:00.000Z

Well the weekend is over. Saturday was off to the book sale near Andover, bought a couple of nice books. Some for myself and others to sell on. Then off to our favourite charity shop in Enham. Again bought some stuff for myself and some to sell on. Then off to Popham. Piper is an aircraft manufacturer and there is sort of a Piper Owners club, with members owning the more vantage of Pipers products. It’s a French based club, but members around Europe. Each year they hold a get together and each year its in a different country. This year its England and Popham. However, only about a dozen aircraft took the risk and hopped over the channel. Mostly French but a couple of Belgium’s as well. Lovely aircraft though. Then the hevans opened. Was going to stop at Winchester Services (Southbound) for a coffee and a snack, but there was huge jams on the M3. So down the A30. Stopped off at a garden centre, Hoping that they would have a small coffee shop, but they didn’t. Picked up a bargain bush for only £2. Hope it will fill the gab in the shrubs we have in the gardens at the moment. The off to another garden centre near where we live, and had a meal there. That’s twice in two days I’ve bought a proper meal, gosh the expense of it.

Sunday was off to the boot sale near home. Hoping there was going to be a guy there selling model aircraft again. We bought some off him last time and re-sold them all at Popham at great profit. Well not bad profit. But alas the weather must have put him ff as he wasn’t there. However did pick up some Teddy bears from a weekly collection series that was going a few years ago;. Bought them before and re-sold on eBay, again for profit, so fingers crossed on them. Spend the afternoon on the PC sorting out more of the family tree. Checking my data against Birth, Marriages and Deaths on ancestry.co.uk. Came up with some more relatives I didn’t know about. Written to a couple of people that might be relations on mine. Then I sorted out some of the last picture I took on my Holland/Belgium trip in May.

In the garden I planted out the pumpkins, and no I’ve not been inspired by the Garden Fete show on TV so I have no intention of trying to grow the biggest pumpkin in the world, That’s a competition I could do without. I’d rather have a nice one that tasted lovely. I mean some of these largest veg entries are so ridiculous and you just can’t eat them. And to me that the point of it all, good food!

Hextreme

2007-06-15T17:29:00.000Z

Well work this afternoon was fun for a change. Purely in the interests of research, we played an on-line game. A game written by my old mate SimonG. If you haven’t played his latest game Hextreme then you have really been missing out on bundles of fun. Now, I know that SimonG is normally rubbish, especially as he still refuses to add my blog to his blog ring, but this time he seems to have really excelled himself, or should that be Hexcelled. Anyway everyone at work was suitable impressed with it. Good game, well thought out, excellent programming. Well done Simon.

Popham

2007-06-11T08:38:00.000Z

Popham today for the aerobatic fly-in. Big disappointment, not many planes. Stall did OK. Managed to sell quite a few of my spare slides, which is always good as the demand for them isn’t so much these days. Sue suggested that I even sort out my remaining slides. Quite a bit of work as they are all packed away.

Spend the evening, uploading my pictures that I had taken to Popham to the Air-Britain Picture Site. That didn’t take long. Then watched a bit of TV. Oh god work tomorrow

Happy Birthday to Sue's Dad

2007-06-09T08:36:00.000Z

Sue’s Dads birthday today. So we invited Sue’s parents round for lunch and tea. Yummy food. In the afternoon we went for a walk around the Lakeside Country Park. Saw, what I think is a Whitethroat. Once confirmed that will be a new bird for me. Great stuff. Spend the evening planting the lettuces that Sue’s parents gave us into pots. We have found that putting them in pots is helping us control the slug problem. They still get to the lettuces but no so many and those that do we can pick off easier.

Quiet Zone

2007-06-08T21:07:00.000Z

Some trains these days have ‘quiet zones’, where people can sit and be free of noise from mobile phones and personal stereos. Well that the theory, what mostly happens is that people completely ignore the fact they are in the quiet zone and still chat away on the phone. Most people are OK and will talk quietly. However what make it worse is when someone is on the train that demands that no-one uses the phone. That happened tonight when there was a couple on the train who were acting a quiet zone Police. One guy got a real mouthful when he phone went off. He moved to the back of the carriage, but the quiet zone Police man kept turning round and staring at him. He did suffer for long as another persons phone went off and they turned their anger at him instead. They were creating more noise and nuisance than the people with the phones. I think I’ll avoid the quiet zone in future… too noisy in there…

Black Swan

2007-06-07T21:06:00.000Z

Passing over the River Test on the train I sometimes see birds. At low tide its gulls. At high tide its Swans. Today was high tide, so swans. Mute swans. Except one of them was a black swan. OK so I can’t count it as towards my Hampshire list, as its an escapee. I mean they have been brought into the country by man. Normally they live in Australia and New Zealand, but apparently about 10 of them have ecaped and are now living wild. So a rare bird none the less.

Bromsgrove

2007-06-06T21:04:00.000Z

Had a day out of the office today. Went to Bromsgrove to get training in InterpOSe, Yes it is spelt that way with the capital OS and its software we use with our Ordnance Survey updates. We found out today that we can use it for more than that as well. So it was good training. Driving back Neil felt tired so I took over the driving. We had a hire car. A big Volvo estate. Quite nice. Driving seat felt quite high. Brakes didn’t feel that good though and if you opened up a back window you really got a thud thud thud sound. Couldn’t really work out why. Sue was out for the evening and so I was on the computer for most of the time. Sorting out photos and adding more books to readitswapit.co.uk

Caching

2007-06-03T07:37:00.000Z

Sat and sorted out photo from my Holland/Belgium trip and upload the best ones to ABPIC. Tried something new today Rum and Coke. Quite nice. Think I will have it again in the future, once in a while.

Towards late afternoon Sue was obviously bored and I must admit, I thought a break from doing all the photos would be nice. Made a few suggestions as to what we could do and to my surprise she said that we should go and finish off the cache we started yesterday. The cache in question was Abbey Views and yes, it did contain good views of the Abbey. Just wish the footpath was better marked. One of the cows in the field had a really evil stare. Still got rid of a geocoin that we’ve had for far too long.

Happy Birthday Mum

2007-06-02T17:45:00.001Z

Well today would have been my mum’s 80th Birthday today and as I haven’t been down to her grave for ages I thought that today would be nice to go down there. Decided to do a round trip. Do a couple of caches off the M27. Check up on our Ziegler Passage cache (apparently the box is now back), Quite visit to the airport. Visit the grave. Then off to Lymington for the market and a nice drive though the forest. Filled the car up with petrol. Got onto the motorway and saw the signs saying that the M27 was closed between Junction 2 and 3. Heard on the radio that the Police had no idea when it would re-open. Had the idea to go via Romsey. Unfortunatly everyone else had the same idea. Everything was solid all around. We got to Romsey by lunchtime and decided that it wasn’t really going to be worth trying to get to Bournemouth. Sorry Mum we did try.

Paul and Tim

2007-06-01T17:41:00.000Z

Off to London again, another freeby on using one of my free tickets I get with my Rail Season Ticket. Thought I’d surprise my good mate Paul and my good mate Tim.. by waiting to see them off their train. It was great to see both of them as I hadn’t seen either of them for ages and they are both very nice people to know.

Good day was had it London. Not as good as last time though. Acton Main Line was a disappointment. Not many freight trains through. Rest of the day was good. Might do something different next time.

Ended up at London City Airport again. Good there of an evening. Nice way to finish off a busy day. Just sitting watching planes, there was also a couple of Ducks, a coot and a tern there as well.

Blogging

2007-05-31T17:40:00.000Z

Hopefully I’ve finally caught up with my blogs today. When I was away to Holland/Belgium I took lots of pictures and have been trying to sort them out. Hence me neglecting my blog for a while. But taking the work laptop home on the train has given me an opportunity to blog on th e move. Just got to upload them all tonight whilst still uploading my picture onto the Air-Britain website.

The Great Escape

2007-05-30T17:36:00.000Z

Poking around the trig pointing website this morning. It has been two years to the day since we last logged a trig point and that was only because we were in the New Forest having a picnic and just happened to find a nice picnic spot close to a trig point. We must have been living in Bournemouth at the time. This brought back memories of living on the Townsend Estate in Bournemouth, with all though horrible neighbours. No way could I ever go back to living there and so glad that thanks to Sue’s help I managed to escape.

Band practice was good tonight. I’m feeling really good about my drumming. I know I’m getting better which is something I didn’t think of when I was playing the guitar. I know I’ve got a hell of a long way to go on things but given practice I am really confident that I will become a competent drummer and e able to hold up my head in any company. Dave’s more professional attitude and me buying a metronome has really helped..

Trigs

2007-05-29T17:32:00.000Z

Sat on the train this morning. Go to Southampton, Looked across to see if I could see my mate gottle on his train and my other mate Tim also on the same train, when I noticed the woman who was sat in front of me get up and move to the doors. I recognised her as being a regular on the train but normally she gets on at Southampton rather that getting off. No sooner had she passed me then she reappeared at the other end of the carridge and sat down. Was I seeing double? Does she have a twin. Does she have a lookalike. And if so does she know that she has a lookalike? Its all too much for me first thing in the morning.

Still, as I’m sure you’ve already read on Sue’s blog we had a roofer come to give us a quote tonight and our mortgage adviser came with some forms. The latter also being a goeocacher and a trig point spotter. Strangely enough I was looking at an OS map earlier in the evening and noticed a trig point not far from where we live. After the papers were signed we chatted about trigs, looked at maps etc. I had to admit that its been a while since we logged any trigs. Generally we only log trigs that we find whilst put geocaching or just out for a walk.; So we’ve only logged 12 of them.

Brown mess in the Kitchen

2007-05-28T17:27:00.000Z

Bank holiday Monday and its raining. Woo Hoo!!! Now my internet connection is free evenings between 6pm and 2am and all day Saturday and Sunday. Which is generally the only times I’m home anyway. However it would be nice if I could use it on a Bank Holiday as well. But no. As far as the system is concerned, today is Monday, So I’d have to pay for phone call charges if I used the interner before 6pm. Wasn’t too much of a hassle as ABPIC was still down. However still got loads to sort out before they go onto ABPIC.

Went to Hobbycraft as Sue wanted some stuff there. Bought myself a ‘make you own clay teddy bear kit. Came with three colours of clay, brown, white and red. The latter two were OK but the brown clay had gone real hard. Tried to microwave it to soften it up and that worked a bit, but not much. So added some cooking oil to it and that worked, but I’ve added too much and now going to have to wait for it to dry out a bit. So at the moment I n the kitchen is a brown, wet blob that looks like a small piece of s**t. The things you have to do in the name of art.

How to Complain

2007-05-27T17:23:00.000Z

Was going to spend the weekend getting as many photos from my Holland/Belgium plane spotting trip onto ABPIC, but fat chance of that happening. They have decided that this weekend to move the site to a new server and now the upload doesn’t work.

Did a morning trip to Costa Coffee with Sue., which was nice. The over to ‘The Works to see if they had any decent books in. Bought one called ‘How to Complain’. Companies watch out.

Chilled out for the rest of the day, watched a film and relaxed.

Hedge Trimming

2007-05-26T17:19:00.000Z

Forecast was for a sunny day, so I was hoping to get in some decent plane spotting via openatc.com during the morning and evening. Fat chance, kept coming over too cloudy. Planned to trim another section of the front hedge this afternoon. No way was I going to get it all done but if I do one side today and the other some when over the rest of the weekend.. Got the trimmer out and realised that I needed another extension lead. Quick visit to Homebase and I was trimming the hedge. Well trying to the branches were quite thick and kept jamming the trimmer, which gave a really load, ear piercing sream when it does. Did one side with the trimmer and wasn’t feeling too tired so talked the other. Big mistake. The second side turned out to much worse that it looked. Produced tons and tons of clippings. So our long term compost bin (with twigs, leaves etc in it) was filled up again, plus any bag we could lay our hands on was filled. Even the big industrial bag that blew into our garden once, and we never bothered to return was filled up, and the top of the hedghe still looks bad but even I can’t reach it. Going to top off the hedge once all the current clipping have been taken away, or composted. Spend the rest of the day sorting out my photos from the Microlight trade day at Popham a few weeks ago.

Band Practice

2007-05-23T17:17:00.000Z

Dave has obviously decided that we need to act a bit more professionally at band practice and rather than standing around trying to decide which songs to practice, he’s done a list of songs, which were going to practiced in the order they were written down. Also him and simon are writing some songs and they have decided that they would use the time before I got there to work on them. Before moving to the main part of the practise. Ie once I’ve turned up. Before they would practice a couple of songs and then when I arrived, they would practice them again. Then work on their own material. We’ve decided that this isn’t the best use of the time available to us.

Time together

2007-05-17T08:33:00.000Z

Back to work. Boo Hoo. I’ve delibereaty not blogged about work for ages. You may remember that I wasn’t having a good time of it. Well something have improved other are exactly the same or worse. I’d better not say too much at the moment. Just to say that I’ll look forward to the day I finally leave this place, and the sooner that happens the better. I don’t think I’ll blog anymore about work until after I leave and then I’ll just want to forgot all about it.

Spent some real good quality time with Sue. We just sat and watched TV but it was really nice just to spent time together after a week of aircraft spotting, conference and band practice.

Day off

2007-05-16T08:31:00.000Z

I got the day off work today. To recover from my trip. Trouble is woke up too early and so don’t feel up to much. Still can crack on sorting my photos from the trip to upload onto Air-Britain Photographic Library.

Band practice in the evening. Starting to feel real good about my drumming. Ok my standard is still rubbish but I’m feeling more comfortable behind the drums

Coventry

2007-05-15T08:30:00.000Z

Had originally booked today off work, but had to go to Coventry for a conference. The company that supplies our mapping software has recently been taken over by a big American company. Who in turn was taken over by another company. So I guess this meeting was just to reassure us that everything was going to be OK in the future. Well if that was the plan it didn’t work. The big American company obviously had no idea how UK local government works. Their top bod suggested a World User Conference and asked us how many of could make the trip to Seattle. No-one raised their hand. One had to point out to him that we can’t expect the Council Tax payers to pay for such a trip. We don’t have the budget for it. A trip to Coventry is all we can afford. Although Liverpool Council people did say it would be cheaper for them to fly to Amsterdam than drive to Coventry. We left the conference early as the last bits in it were not relevant to us. I’m glad that we did leave early, Chance to have some quality time with Sue that evening.

I'm just a laughing stock

2007-05-14T08:29:00.000Z

More Belgium airfields today. The last one we visited was Wivelgium in Belgium. Strange place with so many hangers being outside the perimeter fence of the airport and so and aircraft wanting to get from hanger to runway having to taxi along a public road. Must be very strange driving along and seeing an aircraft coming the other way. One of the hangers was a maintenance place for helicopters. They thought it was high amusing seeing 50+ British plane spotter rushing around with notebooks and camera, shouting out the number and all desperate to find out the reg of the helicopter tucked away in the back of the hanger. For one guy it was too much he was laughing so much he had to go and sit down. Oh well, glad we made someone’s day.

Nice people

2007-05-13T08:28:00.000Z

Off to Belgium and more airfields. Weather isn’t helping us. Many aircraft hangers being locked up with the pilots not flying their aircraft today, so totals were not as good as they could be. Still the people at the airfields were all very helpful and tried their very best to accommodate us, when of course there is no need to help us at all. So we were all very grateful for that.

Holland

2007-05-12T08:20:00.000Z

Having left Southampton at 10 last night and travelled through the night to get to Holland I thought that I would feel as rough as hell. Normally I can’t sleep unless I’m in a bed but even though the coach was really cramped. I still managed to get a fair amount of sleep. Not my full eight hours I’m used to but a good amount and feel OK ish today. Good days spotting as well. Did feel a tinge of sadness at Teuge Airfield in Holland. I used to have a Dutch pen pal who was even madder on aircraft that I am. Teuge was his home airfield and where I first met him. Unfortunately he died a few years ago at the age on 30 from some for of diabetes related illness. He had just got his dream job as well. All very sad and this was the first time I had visited Teuge since his death. I was thinking of him as I was walking around the airfield.

Aeroprint Tours

2007-05-11T08:19:00.000Z

Took the day off work today to get ready for my trip plane spotting my way around Holland and Belgium. My good mate Eric from Aeroprint Tours is running the trip. Apart from the trip to RAF Shawbury last year I haven’t been on an Aeroprint Tour for ages. Each year I get his brochure for future trips and dream about going on one of his trips…. One day I’ll do one of his long distance trips, Japan, USA, South America, Russia oh that would be great.