Edinburgh

After a relatively leisurely start and amble over to Edinburgh, we arrived around 11am and found a 4-hour on-street car park in the Grassmarket with its clock set an hour forward, giving us an extra free hour's parking. Bonus!

The first thing to greet us was a complete refurbishment of the street masonry in the area, which proved to be just the first of many construction projects ongoing in the city. Everywhere we looked there were cranes, skips, diggers and workmen busily rebuilding every inch of the place, which made "tourist photography" a bit of a tricky endeavour. Even the Scott Monument (whose 287 steps I had climbed as a boy) was not exempt, its digger apparently in the process of reconstructing the nearby gardens.

We hopped on another city tour bus - fast becoming a feature of this holiday - and enjoyed an hour in the company of a very knowledgeable old gentleman who shared his history of the city with us, and oversaw the transformation of the day from crisp blue skies to cold grey ones. Even so the promised downpour never materialised. Once again we'd lucked out with the weather.

After completing the tour we left the bus at the castle stop. As you might have predicted it's approaching "30 years" since I was last here, and I recognised pretty much none of the Royal Mile, the interior of the castle or its layout. In my defence I plead that my parents took me round so many castles in my childhood and teenage years - often as many as six in a single week - that they've all blended together in my memory.

Conscious of the parking meter, and the need to shop for woollens, we left the castle around 3pm and wound our way back to Grassmarket via the various outlets lining that part of the Royal Mile. The early evening rush hour was only just beginning as we headed out to Peebles where we were to spend the night.

Peebles is a pretty little town. It claims to be Scotland's second favourite tourist town and although I found that hard to believe it certainly has a lot going for it. Especially the excellent haggis on offer in most of the local pubs. I like haggis, but even I don't eat it for dessert as well as main course. Enough said. Another early night - we were all pretty whacked after all the walking around - so I'll leave you with a panorama of the view from Edinburgh castle...

Tynemouth, Alnwick, Lindisfarne

For our second major (3-day) trip of Paul's visit, we'd planned to spend some time in Edinburgh, travelling up via Alnwick Castle, as I wanted to reacquaint myself with it, having not been there since my age was counted in single figures. The Harry Potter references, though not lost on me, were entirely secondary to the reasons for visiting, especially since everyone knows the majority of Hogwarts is achieved through the miracle of CGI.

So Alnwick was the plan, but we'd decided on a scenic route up the coast starting at Tynemouth, and once you get into the habit of stopping journey plans do seem to go quickly awry. What was intended to be a short stop, by the time you've found somewhere to park, walked about a bit, had a swift half in a local pub with a stunning coastal view, chewed the fat over said half, queued for a pee, etc, you've lost an hour or so. And then there's the Sunday driver factor (which believe me had a *significant* impact on the journey time today), all of which added up to us not getting to Alnwick until around 2.30pm.

To make matters worse the Castle, still operating its out-of-season hours, was due to close at 4pm, so we didn't feel like forking out eight quid a piece to canter round the place in 90 minutes. We had to content ourselves with what we could see from the path (and the small glimpse of the first courtyard which the gatekeeper graciously allowed us), so my 40-year quest for better photos than I could achieve with my old box Brownie still remains unfulfilled.

Casting around for an alternative to Alnwick, it being far too early to head to our designated berth for the evening, we decided on a small detour to Lindisfarne. I have no memory of having visited the Holy Island before, but this time round I have a feeling it will stay with me for a long time. Having consulted the tide tables and proved we'd be safe to cross for at least another four hours, we drove over the causeway and parked up for a wander around the village.

As before the weather was being uncommonly kind to us, but our timing was still slightly out, as we just missed the last bus out to the castle. Once again we had to content ourselves with gazing at the edifice from afar, and checking out at closer quarters the ruins of Lindisfarne Priory.

Feeling slightly frustrated at not being able to see either of our chosen destinations "properly," we decided the whole area was easily worth a visit in its own right, but meanwhile we'd check in at our B&B in Crookham and then walk a little way along the road to dine at the local hostelry.

We received an unexpectedly curt greeting from the barman, especially when food was mentioned, but we forgave him a short while later when we learned the cook had literally walked out 5 minutes before, leaving him totally in the lurch for evening meals. Fortunately, the pub manager had completed a catering course several years previously and stepped into the breach in fine style. His venison steaks with home-made chunky chips were mouthwatering and the desserts were heavenly perfections too. The guy then proceeded to engage us in splendidly entertaining conversation for much of the rest of the evening, totally dispelling the rather frosty reception of a few hours before.

What no-one could explain though, was why Lindisfarne Priory has a statue of Max Branning in its grounds.

The manager's banter was helped by the rather unique names of the beers he was selling, apparently a well-known feature of Northumberland Brewery. Most of us stuck to the Easter Bunny Ale all evening, but Paul was eventually tempted by a pint of Seaman Staines. Something I'm sure he'll not live down for quite a while. If I have anything to do with it.

Hawkwind: Manchester Academy

The mid-point of Paul's trip and the traditional gig. Last year: Pink Fraud. This year: no fraud at all. The real deal. Hawkwind - on their "Christmas Show" which had been postponed from last year for some reason we didn't bother worrying about, but which gave us a chance to see another set of rock legends in the flesh.

Unfortunately the venue - Manchester Academy 2 - is standing only, which for us geriatrics is a challenge given the doors open at 7.30 and the gig wasn't likely to finish until 11pm, but hey. We were up for it.

What we weren't up for was the slightly less than impressive support act: Tribe of Cro. As soon as these guys took the stage you got the distinct impression you were in for something mediocre. What you didn't know was just how mediocre it was going to be. In fact, mediocre is glittering praise for a band who spent most of their set fiddling with their kit as if they had no idea how to work it properly. As one very tall member of the audience was heard to shout at the end of their interminably long and boring second number: "was that your sound check or what? You're fucking crap."

Nikki suggested a better name for them would have been "Pile of Cro" which is quite apposite, given that "crow" is Nottingham slang for bogeys, or lumps of snot.

The drummer and the bassist could have been playing for any band you have ever seen in your life; the former laying down a series of basic beats (the bass part of which ripped out my spine with each single beat) and the latter repeating the same simple riff over and over and over again. So basically we were left with the other two guitarists to create the heart and soul of the music. Dear God. What I will grudgingly call the lead guitarist looked as though he might have been halfway competent except for the fact that we couldn't hear him during the first number, and he spent most of the second number on the floor poking around with his effects buttons. I remember a short interval during the second number when his guitar burst into life. It sounded pretty good, but somehow strangely divorced from anything the other three were doing.

And then there was the other guitarist. The guy who clearly thought he was in charge, and did all the talking. His guitar prowess apparently consisted of a series of attempts to get the instrument to make as many strange noises as he could in as short a time as physically possible. Interspersed with his "lyrics." After the first "number" had mercifully reached its conclusion, he commented that he doesn't usually sing, but had decided tonight he wanted to. Thanks a million. "I have no life, I have no life," he repeated as his first lyric. I won't make the obvious comment. He followed this gem up with "make me a winner; make me a sinner." Well you already scored very highly on that latter item buddy. For sins against music, score a full 100%. As for making you a winner, I fear that is beyond anyone on the planet.

I said the first guitarist sounded like he was playing something else, but in reality pretty much all of them might as well have been on their own for all the coherence they exhibited. Four individual musicians on stage, all playing something totally different, resulting in a cacophonous melee which lasted for their entire, painful, 45-minute set.

Tribe of Cro helpfully preceded their set with news that they've decided to make their latest album available for free download from their website (yes, you guessed it: the album is worth every penny of its download price) and handed out leaflets with their email and web addresses for their many fans. A bunch of them (the leaflets, not the fans. There weren't enough of them present to be referred to as 'a bunch') were screwed up and thrown back onto the stage at the end of their third number. A fitting tribute, I thought.

And so to the main event: Hawkwind. Prior to tonight my sole exposure to this band has been their seminal hit Silver Machine, which I played regularly when I DJ'ed (occasionally) at the UMIST Heavy Disco on Thursday nights during 1976 and 77, and which has formed part of the backdrop of my life pretty much since its release in 1972. Oh yes, and a review of their tour in the local rag that dropped through our door half an hour before we were due to leave for the gig. Whoever wrote it didn't like them much, but I kept an open mind.

And actually, in the end, I enjoyed it. At least the first hour, after which my feet gave out at about the same time as Nikki's and we beat a retreat for the bar through about 1,000 milling, dancing, beer-spilling Hawkwind fans, leaving Paul at the front with his camera and his friend the obnoxious drunken, balding fan who kept yelling for Spirit of the Age ("play Sp'ri Aids") and who lit a cigarette during the concert and proceeded to smoke the entire thing right next to me without anyone (yes, alright, me included) challenging him. Wanker.

So even though I was unfamiliar with all the music, at least it WAS musical - especially when compared to the previous car crash. Clearly, after 35 years, the band know their instruments. Just as clearly, some of them are completely mad. Like the guy (sorry, not being any kind of Hawkwind fan I can't tell you his name) who started each number by waving his hands expertly around his theremin with a wild-eyed squint. And of course, the music is often accompanied by a load of pretentious, pompous claptrap wrapped up as "narrative" to the story the music is telling. If you can cut through that and enjoy the rocky parts of the music for what it is, it's quite entertaining. I wouldn't buy it, but it was worth listening to for an hour, and I appreciate there were a lot of people there tonight who are every bit as ardent Hawkwind fans as I am a Genesis fan. Takes all sorts.

I was glad to get home though. And I don't think I will *ever* get used to watching live performances from rock legends and seeing how damned wrinkly they all are.

London

When Nikki said she'd found a train ticket deal for a day trip to London, I wasn't sure how I felt about it. There was no doubt it was an excellent deal - £16 return for the day compared to the £236 I usually pay to travel down on business - but those last few words held the key to my dilemma. I go down there so often with work (and hate it every time) - how would I feel as a day tripper? Wasn't it going to be a bit of a busman's holiday, even though we were going by train?

I needn't have worried. I didn't have to rush, or leave early, or battle the rush-hour tube, or carry a laptop bag everywhere with me, so the entire trip was much more relaxed and didn't have the slightest resemblance to a work day.

We left Piccadilly on the 9.15 and arrived just before 11.30. Not really having any firm plans for the day (a mistake, as it later turned out) we set off to spend a couple of hours in the Science Museum. This proved a bit disappointing. Parts of it were being refurbished and the rest had been thrown out of kilter by having some exhibits housed in alternative positions. I also found many of the displays - designed for today's youth with their microsecond attention spans - quite unsatisfying to browse, although there were some neat items like the first Cray supercomputer and the original DNA model that Watson and Crick put together.

Emerging from the museum around 1pm and unsure where to head next, we walked around the block through a short shower of rain - the only rain we suffered during the whole day - passing the Albert Hall and then setting off for Kensington to find a place to lunch. Walking down Kensington High Street, we passed Paul Weller - our only celebrity encounter of the day.

Eventually we recognised a few landmarks and ended up at the Lord Moon of the Mall - the Wetherspoons pub at which we had intended to meet up with a bunch of friends several years before but which had been closed back then owing to a bomb scare in Whitehall.

A couple of pints and a sandwich later, we were suitably refreshed and set off again in the general direction of Westminster. When I first visited London - a 17th birthday present from my parents - we had ticked off all the major tourist destinations. Back then this included Downing Street, and we were able to walk right up to the front door of No. 10 and stare into the whites of the eyes of the single London bobby who stood on duty protecting the head of Government.

Clearly the head of Government requires a deal more protection these days. Not only is it impossible to get within 50 feet of No. 10 owing to the road being closed off with several tons of ironwork and automatic barriers that rise silently from the road, but the single bobby has been replaced with an entire squad of armed police in Kevlar vests, sporting automatic rifles.

They smile at the passing tourists, but the smile doesn't quite reach their eyes. I walk past similar barriers, even sturdier and with an even larger police presence, every time I visit Westminster. It's a blight on the London landscape. Do other countries feel the need to protect their PM this way, or is it just rampant paranoia? I don't know, but I can't help feeling that it may all look very impressive, but none of it would stop a determined terrorist with an ounce of sense.

We walked over Westminster Bridge, snapping away at the Eye and the bizarre artwork outside the Dali exhibition, and along the other side of the river (Jubilee Walk is it? Or something) where four strange figures dressed all in silver were standing or sitting motionless except for the breeze-induced flutterings of their monochrome costumes. Every now and then one of them might lean forward unexpectedly to bop anyone who threw change into his pot lightly on the head with a long silver staff. This lady merely sat with her demur smile fixed prettily on her face, holding her hat on against the wind. London in all its mad eccentricity. Top stuff.

Walking back over Jubilee Bridge we stopped for a pint in the Sherlock Holmes before wending our way slowly back to Euston. Here's where our lack of planning really bit home. We arrived at Euston three hours before our scheduled departure time. Not really enough time to pack in any other sightseeing and still feel comfortable about making the train (the dealtime tickets were only valid for the 9.05pm departure), or eat in a fancy restaurant where we couldn't guarantee the speed of service. So we holed up in a bar just around the corner from Euston and then, still with a couple of hours to kill, sat down to a plate of Harry Ramsden's fish, chips and mushy peas in the station caff.

The pre-Summer Time light was fading fast as we walked to the main station entrance on the way to that fine repast. Countless times I've passed through Euston and this was my first chance to take photos. Maybe I should invest in a pocket digital of the kind Nikki uses, and carry it everywhere. Maybe I should turn into a photoblogger. Maybe I should stop stressing about this stuff. Anyway, here's Euston. And there we go - back to Manchester, arriving at 11.29 pm. Footsore and sleepy, but having had a strangely fulfilling experience.

The Gunt

Reviewing our photos from our recent 3-day trip I came across this gem. The sight of this sad old cinema as we walked along the sea front at Weston- super- Mare gave us all a fit of the giggles. I thought at first it had started life as The Gaumont and the G had slipped, but a closer examination reveals the original name to have been The Regent. Nowadays however, with an R and two Es missing, it revels in the surreal title The G'nt (which of course simply begs to be pronounced "Gunt").

We spent a breathless few minutes discussing how locals would say "been to the Gunt lately?" or "Coming down the Gunt tonight?" or "what's on at the Gunt this week" etc etc.

Glastonbury

Paul arrived for a visit last Thursday and since he touched down, apart from a few meals out, we've been basically chillin'. For our first "real" holiday event of his trip, we'd booked a couple of nights in Glastonbury, leaving Manchester on Easter Sunday and returning home tonight.

Our journey down was extremely leisurely and took in Weston-super-Mare. As a result, we didn't arrive at our usual accommodation - the Who'd A Thought It inn - until mid-afternoon. This left us just enough time for a brief perambulation up and down the high street before beginning the important business of sinking some holiday ales, starting at that most impressive 15th century coaching inn, the George & Pilgrims, where they had a welcoming fire in the grate and a few pints of Butcombe Bitter to warm us up even further.

We dined the first evening in the Who'd. The food there is always top notch and the company is usually quite amusing too. Easter Sunday was no exception as the bar was occupied by a local wag who proceeded to regale anyone who would listen with countless stories, pausing every now and then to laugh uproariously at his own jokes.

The following day we set off for the Tor (with a small initial detour to a local coffee shop to while away half an hour having just missed the Tor bus) hoping the weather would hold. It did, and the views were magnificent, aided if anything by the wonderful cloud formations we were treated too. Our enjoyment was marred slightly by the grass protection measures the council had put in place. Apparently they removed the concrete slab at the top of the Tor a while back and have been trying to grow grass in its place with little success. Believing this to be due at least in part to the heavy foot traffic, they've erected a utilitarian wooden fence around 50% of the grass, leaving a narrow path around the top between the Tor and the brass directional plaque. This combined with the bitterly cold and blustery winds conspired to curtail our visit to what has in the past, for me, been a deeply spiritual place. On this visit, it seemed devoid of any special feeling. It was just cold and unwelcoming.

We caught the bus back down and around again to Chalice Well and once again, despite (or perhaps because of) this being off-season, this calm quiet place felt strangely bereft of magic. Two of the most powerful sites in what has in the past for me been a compelling and rejuvenating place to visit seemed to be utterly asleep and without energy, but it wasn't only them. The entire town had an aspect of being suspended awaiting the new season. Although many of the familiar crystal and incense shops were still open for business, many others along with cafes and restaurants had not survived the winter doldrums and displayed empty windows to the world, often with bailiffs' notices posted on their doors.

Overall Glastonbury had a sad, depressing feel to it on this visit, totally at odds with the vibrant and energised experience we've enjoyed on all our previous trips. In an effort to inject some buzz into the day, we headed off to Street for some retail therapy at the outlet mall, and a beer or two in the Bear. Many of the high season food choices being denied us (even if only by the unappealingly long walk to the other end of the High Street in the increasingly cold wind) we opted for the George & Pilgrims in which to dine on our last night, and were amazed to find our local colourful character from the previous night had made the same decision.

Today we bade goodbye to the subdued winter version of Glastonbury. I hope to be able to return at a later point in the year the next time we visit and see it thriving once again. Before we arrived this time around we had occasionally entertained the romantic notion of retiring down there amid the crystal gazers, poets and hippies. Having seen the place out of season it doesn't present such an appealing aspect and I think we all revised our opinion of it drastically.

We broke our return journey in Bath, spending an entertaining hour or so on the (open) top of a tour bus, which passed Poultney Bridge - seen here - several times during its convoluted passage around the ancient streets. Having completed the tour, we grabbed a swift pub lunch before heading northwards once again and arriving home shortly after 7pm. For this time of year, the weather had been uncommonly kind to us and we'd crammed a lot in, but we all agreed we were now ready for a couple of days "down" time.

All keyed up

Nikki found our old house keys this afternoon.

Out for a smoke in the front garden, she saw something glistening in the bushes. The full set, still on its Indian-bead-and-bell keyring. After we forked out £250 to have all the locks changed (insert wry smile and rolling of the eyes here).

No sign of the other two sets though. Which begs some questions:

1. Were they dropped as the tw@s made their getaway on Thursday morning, and have been lying there ever since?
2. If (1) is true and we'd found them earlier, would we have felt safe not changing the locks?
3. Were they discarded more recently, after said tw@s had returned to try them in the door?
4. If (3) is true, how did they know the set they threw away would have been the right set?

It's all very mysterious. Not to mention irritating. Nice to have the keyring back though. I missed its tinkly little bell. Make no mistake though...we won't be keeping any keys on a rack by the door from now on.

A burglar disturbs me

Funny, but I thought I was coping alright yesterday.

Most of the day was taken up with hanging around waiting for, or actually dealing with, people connected in one way or another with the break-in. SOCO; the locksmith (who doubled up as the boarder-upper); the window guy who is going to make and fit something a little more secure and less easy to chisel out; the police returning to take a full statement.

Nikki had stayed at home for mutual moral support, and also in case SOCO needed elimination prints, so we spent a relatively busy day coping with all that, and trying to get some work done at the same time.

As the day slowed down into evening and the evening, in turn, wore on, I became aware of a growing feeling of unease. Starting with a faint fluttering in the tum, and graduating into a tight feeling in the chest via an inability to concentrate on the TV we were watching and faint nausea. I soon realised what it was. I didn't want to go to bed. I didn't want to risk falling asleep and waking up again with someone trying to break in.

Completely irrational, of course. For a start they'll be long gone by now. Even if they intended to come back and try the keys they nicked, they'll give it a few days. Secondly with the window boarded up, any further attempts to break in will be a lot noisier. And lastly, I'd worked out a way of making it impossible to open the cloakroom door from the inside. At least, without destroying the door. So I was able to tell myself, intellectually, that we were more secure than we had been.

Didn't help though.

I disturb a burglar

Thank God for those night-time pees. On returning to bed around 3am this morning after one such visit, I heard a strange tapping sound. Now this old house has a variety of creaks, pops, murmurs and whistles that took quite a lot of getting used to when we first moved in, but this was a noise I hadn't heard before. I pricked up my ears and lay there in the dark, listening.

Tap, tap. Pause. Tap. Pause. Weird. I thought at first it was the cat flap, but it's never that loud, or that persistent. Then I wondered whether it was the high wind we'd had last night. Everything went quiet for a time, so I turned over. Tap, tap. And then another noise. Louder this time and even more unusual. No, something definitely needed investigating.

I stopped by the spare bedroom to see if I could see anything outside that could be causing the noise, but all appeared normal so I proceeded downstairs in the dark. The memory of this gives me shivers now. Not only would I not have been able to see any potential attacker very clearly, but worse, I was only wearing a pyjama top. Mind you, that would have been enough to scare them off! Anyway I peeked into the kitchen (nothing) and the lounge and dining room (nothing - although I wasn't expecting to find anything in there - if they'd tried to go in they'd have tripped the alarm). It was then I noticed the downstairs toilet door was open and there was a helluva draft coming through it. Sure enough the leaded window had been removed from the frame. The tapping I'd heard had been the chiselling away of the putty.

Whoever it was, and they must have been very small and skinny to get through that window, can literally only have been in the house a few seconds. When they heard me coming downstairs I presume they dived back out of the window so I never actually had to confront them. My initial scouting having revealed no missing property, the only other thing worrying my "3am I've just woken up" head was how to secure the house and get back to bed. I rooted out and fitted two strong bolts to the inside of the loo door, fastened them, and decided to leave the rest until a more reasonable hour (i.e. after daybreak).

Who was I kidding? Nikki and I lay there for almost an hour talking about whatifs and whatdowedonows so finally around 4.30am we got up and made ourselves a pot of coffee. It wasn't until we were on our way back upstairs with our coffees that I noticed all the keys on the keyrack were missing. When Nikki checked her purse, all her cash had been taken too.

All things considered though, we were lucky. When you realise what had not been taken that probably would have been if I hadn't disturbed them. Even my car keys were still lying on the hall table undisturbed, although the police later told us that was probably because the perp was too young to drive!

Still, it's bad enough. We have to have all the locks changed and so do the owners of the other sets of keys. Plus boarding up of the window in advance of getting a more secure unit made and fitted. And of course, when you take into consideration the insurance excess, loss of NCD and increased premiums, in the end it's probably not going to be worth putting in a claim.

When the police arrived to "take down our particulars" they asked if there's any CCTV footage. The answer, sadly, is no although I've since considered fitting it. In the end though, does that send out the wrong message? With the outside of the property bristling with cameras doesn't it simply say "there's summat here worth nicking"? A colleague of mine suffered a spate of burglaries over 2-3 years and each time he increased his security measures they managed to defeat them. He ended up with a full alarm system, CCTV, bars on all the downstairs windows and reinforced doors, and they still got in. I reckon all you can do is secure the perimeter (the window they took out was the only one without a sensor) and hope it's enough discouragement.

Something the SOCO man said as he was dusting for prints (as predicted, they wore gloves), is it was probably a kid sent in by older scrotes specifically to collect keys so they can come back later and do a proper job. I think that's the scariest part of all.

Seven years on

As I mentioned last time, I finished the third draft of my novel recently. It's been a work in progress since 2001 and during that time there's been a deal of progress in the rest of the world too.

Nothing brought this home to me more than when re-editing the first chapter today. The main character connects to the Internet using a modem! LOL! Remember them? Seven short years ago, that was the way 99% of us got our online fixes and the scene in my novel was graphically descriptive of the process. Today? It reads like something out of the museum. I don't really want to set the story in the year 2000, or 2001, so that small part is desperately in need of a rewrite. Do you know anyone who still uses a modem for their net connection? Exactly.

Luckily it's just two sentences ;o)

Novel news

Take a look at the top of the page. You know, that bit where it says I'll be writing about writing. That's a big LOL isn't it? I've hardly done any of that since I started this blog. That is, either writing about writing, or simply writing.

About a week ago I revisited the folder where my novel sits and I was horrified to see I hadn't touched it since this time last year. Almost. The most recent change was 21 March 2007. OK since then we've had the computers in the dining room for three months while the study was refurbished, I've delivered a major new government computer system, we've entertained various houseguests for varying lengths of time, but yanno these are all excuses when it comes down to it.

So with newfound enthusiasm, right there and then I picked up where I'd left off: in the middle of the third draft (i.e. second re-write) at chapter 7 of 20.

And today I finished it.

Now I must admit when I started draft #3 I expected it to be the last time through, but having finished it I think there's still some polishing I can do. Maybe I should do the next one on paper rather than on the screen, but at 584 pages that's a lot of printing. No, I'll stick to screen for this one and see how I go. It's looking good though, even if I do say so myself. Especially the last half, when the action really kicks in. Believe it or not I was on the edge of my seat, and I know what happens!! That's what a year's perspective can do for you I guess (he says, looking for the silver lining ;o)).

Jodrell Bank shocker

Couldn't believe my ears this morning, driving back from taking Nikki to work. Jodrell Bank, Britain's iconic radio telescope, is under threat of closure after the Science and Technology Facilities Council cut funding for the Merlin array. Merlin, a linked network of 7 radio telescopes across the UK, has an effective aperture of 217km and a resolution slightly higher than that of the Hubble Space Telescope.

So even though it was 50 years old last year, it's no slouch in the rapidly moving world of radio astronomy. Now all this is at risk because of funding problems. And how much money are we talking about? Must be significant, right? I mean if the government is trying to save money, it must be SERIOUS money. Think of all the billions they're pouring into pointless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Come on, how much money will they save by sacrificing the most well-known and instantly recognisable piece of scientific equipment in the entire country?

£2.5million.

Yep, you read that right. Two and a half million quid. There's probably as much as that rattling around in the expenses funds of our politicians, but you'll never know - they don't have to submit receipts.

What makes this even more ironic is that Jodrell Bank has just been completely refurbished, and the Merlin network itself upgraded in a project to install fibre-optic cables that has only recently finished, and would have allowed the array to process vastly more data than it could before. Closing the array down now means all that money - still PUBLIC money of course - will be wasted before any benefit has been gained.

When I worked in Kidsgrove I could look out from my desk across the fields to Jodrell Bank. When the dish of the Lovell telescope was in the right orientation it would catch the sun and gleam at me through the haze. An other-worldly reminder of the world-leading research that went on there every day. If we're to lose this awe-inspiring talisman then it's a sad day indeed, and another nail in the coffin of British science and engineering.

Such clever packaging, but...

It always amuses me how some things can be astonishingly well done and yet others just aren't *quite* right.

Take for instance packaging. Over the last few years we've done a fair amount of shopping online and the ingenuity of the packaging for books, DVDs and small items of electronic equipment has been getting better all the time.

On the other hand, recently for one reason or another I've been eating a lot of Muller Lite yoghurts, and being irked by that little trough around the base of the carton from which it is inordinately difficult to extract the last vestiges of yoghurt. This is particularly annoying when compared to the sides of the pot, which are uniformly curved and smooth, and take the edge of a spoon perfectly, leaving behind hardly a trace of yoghurt and, therefore, wasting none.

Surely, I think as I dig around in the trough for the last spoonful, it would not be *that* hard to design a pot that had a flat base on the outside, but a totally smooth bottom on the inside? Answers, as always, on a postcard.

The annual Chinese meal

Not that we only have a Chinese meal once a year, but once a year we make a kind of pilgrimage to a fabulous cozy little pub in a South Notts village about 20 minutes drive from my home town, where the landlord puts on a Chinese banquet on a Saturday night. Single sitting, one night a week, and it's so popular that he's booked up almost a year in advance.

It's been a "mates tradition" for about five years, but we haven't been able to go for a couple of years owing to the usual October date for the meeting clashing with family obligations. Last year, for various reasons, the meal didn't happen in October, which fortunately for us meant that we could attend the rescheduled event today.

Things got off to a bad start when, after half an hour of waiting at the top of the road in a sub-zero howling gale, Ian called to say he thought the bus driver had forgotten his booking. He was checking up with them, and would call me back. After some debate we decided not to bother with taxis, walked back down the road and used my car.

Arriving at the pub much later than usual, we only just about had time to buy the first round before being bundled upstairs to the dining room. This too put a dampener on things as we usually have about an hour to relax with the first drink and catch up with everyone's news. Almost before we knew where we were (and only a few minutes after the last of the party had arrived) it was straight in to dim sum.

In years gone by we've had to remember to not totally pig out on the dim sum and starter courses, because there would be an enormous supply of crispy duck and mains to follow. This year the crispy duck was replaced by a rather strange concoction in a hemispherical lettuce leaf, and the mains seemed fewer and with less variety than I remember. Not only that, but the quality greatly inferior to what it had been last time we came. All was explained when the organiser came to collect the shekels - we'd been on "the cheap" menu tonight.

As if that weren't bad enough, we were treated to the sight of one of our other table guests, who was suffering from a really bad cold-cum-chest-infection, sneezing into his hands, examining the contents, wiping his hands on the tablecloth and then proceeding to hand out coffee cups to everyone which he had picked up by sticking his fingers inside them. Ewwww.

Just goes to show that not every social occasion we attend is a rip-roaring success, and it's been a long time since an evening totally bombed, so maybe we were overdue. Still, it was nice to catch up with mates - we haven't seen them since November - so the evening wasn't a complete disaster.