Possibly the last of my “New Year” posts. We’re a long way from our telephone exchange and have been suffering from a paltry 1.3Mb broadband speed for some time. Whilst investigating the supposed availability of fibre optic broadband services in…
Author: John Curd
New Year, New Camera
Yet another in the recent New Year series: a camera this time – for Carol. Her eyes were swayed by a relative giveaway price for a Canon EOS 550D on good ol’ Amazon. Her old 400D has stood her in good…
New Year, New Computer
My trusty old Sony Vaio desktop has been getting increasingly snowed under with the weight of modern versions of software and its workload. It’s all of eight years old, poor thing, but it has been faultlessly reliable and it struggles…
New Year, New Hard Disk
Exactly 50 weeks ago [and, yes, I am counting] from Tesco Direct we bought me a Dell Inspiron 1545 laptop: 4Gb RAM, 500GB hard drive. In terms of power and storage, my new Windows 7 machine dwarfed my very elderly…
Winter Visitors Return
There aren’t many advantages to winter in my book. One, though, is the chance to see a slightly different mix of birdlife in the garden. Only when the colder weather hits do we see Goldfinches dropping in to take their…
Nouvelle Année, Nouveau Guide des Papillons
Aeons ago, at about the time that the eminent Charles Darwin was thinking that a trip around the world studying wildlife might be a jolly neat idea, I bought a copy of A Field Guide to the Butterflies of Britain…
New Year, New Look, New Site, New Title
For much of the current winter, I’ve been beavering away giving our website a bit of a facelift. [Ed: Now that was interesting, spellchecker doesn’t understand beavering and neither, to my surprise, does Chamber’s 20th century dictionary. Hmm.] Although it…
Anniversary Present
Today I had another chance to enjoy a trip to Stoke Mandeville hospital for my third PSA-level check since my radical prostatectomy. Coincidentally, it is one year to the day since I dressed (briefly) in a theatre gown and was…
France 2011, Autumn – Picturesque Pyrenees
Normally when we get to our blissful dairy sheep farm at Fanjeaux, we have trouble dragging ourselves away. Our normal pattern is to go through the motions of a debate between ourselves, whereupon we always decide to stay as long…
France 2011, Autumn – La Rigole to the Rescue
The beginnings of misgivings began in my mind when we visited Fanjeaux, comme d’habitude, during our spring trip. Farmer Luc had let a fish farmer in to breed inconceivably large numbers of inconceivably small fish in his lake. The inconceivably…
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