Paul

I don't often disagree with you JM, but I don't think that argument is particularly watertight (a bit like SOB some might say). I think the authority would have "invested" in SOB if they only had a flock of over wintering geese to keep an eye on.

perhaps a few more details might help, any pre-allocated weeks, allocation process, annual maintenance fee etc might help spark peoples interest.

an excellent suggestion PW, but as this toll money is paid over to the Authority it would be for them to do such channeling rather than the boatyards who already provide waste facilities for their own and visiting hire boats and incur the heavy cost of disposal of such.

bless you Peter, never give up trying. I wouldn't necessarily disagree with changing the bylaw to allow electric trolling motors to be used at low speed, maybe that could be your next campaign.

As long as the bylaw remains, it should be policed. It is not the job of the ranger, or indeed the collected brains of Thorpe House to determine which bylaws should be enforced and which should be ignored. Once you start ignoring one bylaw and others see that it is being disregarded then the rule of law is diminished. Why should we then criticise someone for boating after sunset, after all, it is still light enough to see so what harm is being done? Why shouldn't I leave my twelve year old son at the helm, after all, he's been driving boats since he was four and is far more competent than many?

I'm not sure you should aim this one solely at hirers or hireboat yards. I lost count of the number of anglers I saw trolling from boats using electric motors during this last week. These are not occasional visitors, nor "once a year" anglers. These were serious fishermen with serious gear including the boats who should know the local bylaws but choose to ignore them. I spoke to one of the rangers who acknowledged the problem but it is something which generally happens when these people know the rangers are not on duty and even if caught they are only "spoken to".

Congratulations on your appointment to your new post, the top post at Thorpe House. As you sink into your sumptuous executive leather chair and drain the last of your double shot skinny choco mocha latte with hazelnut syrup and sprinkles collected from one of Norwich's swanky coffee houses on your way to the office you open your very first email. It comes from the representative of a deceased oligarch, a deceased wealthy oligarch who has left his entire fortune for the "protection and furtherment of The Norfolk and Suffolk Broads". You predecessor created an environment where the Chief Executive's word is law, a democracy of one. So what are you going to do with your limitless budget. What would be your first order of the day?

My pet hate is "my bad". You mean it's your FAULT. Bad is the description of your upbringing and education.

Griff will do it backwards!

Fear not. I'm not about to offer comment, informed or otherwise regarding the RPI, the CPI or any other set of figures that skillful government advisers manipulate to suggest that the incumbent troupe of cercopithecidae are doing better than our own common sense might otherwise suggest. Rather I'm thinking about packing for our broads excursions. Back in the day, when Noah was still wondering what to do with his great pile of wood, packing meant one bag. It would contain the following: A change of clothes, obviously. A folding raincoat and a pullover, for the bad weather A pair of shorts and sunglasses, for the good weather A smart shirt, for nights in the pub. We used to smarten up in those days. A wash bag and towel Camera, binoculars and a good book A spare roll of film (anyone under 30 may need to google "35mm") A small transistor radio, for the Radio One roadshow in the morning and the test match in the afternoon. A bar of chocolate, usually Terry's plain but Bournville if I couldn't find it. And of course your wallet with a few quid and a credit card for emergencies. All very carefully fitted into one holdall. Everything we needed for a week. So when, may I ask did things begin to change to the state we find ourselves in today. A 4x4 filled to the gunnels with bags full of this, bags full of that and bags full of just about everything in between plus a trip to the cash machine wondering if the daily limit of the debit card is great enough to withdraw sufficient cash to last a week? Is this due to a change in thinking or is it just about getting older? I'll swear I noticed Elaine eyeing up the dishwasher this morning wondering if it too would fit in the boot of the truck.

I think I'd rather go brand new for the extra £100. No issue with warranty etc.

No, but I do think it should be moved to the middle of the summer when the shops are not so busy.

I only asked about sterilising as pitching the yeast to soon after adding the Sodium Meta (or whatever sterilising agent you use) can inhibit the yeast. That's obviously not an issue here. It's not essential to sterilise apple juice for cider, I wouldn't do it. If you are heading to Wilko's get a hydrometer as well, they are not expensive but will allow you to see how much unfermented sugar is in your wort. You'll know then if fermentation is complete or if the yeast has stopped prematurely.

it was on Radio 4 last week that there has been a bumper crop of apples this year due to the weather, but that the sugar levels are low. Did you measure the gravity when you started fermentation? can you measure a sample now? It may be that the yeast has used all of the available sugars. There could be other reasons. Did you sterilise the juice? if so you must leave at least 24 hours before adding the yeast. Did you whisk the juice to get plenty of oxygen into it. If not then the yeast may have used all of the available oxygen up.

Has the station at Wayford Bridge closed?

I have mine set to download updates but ask me before installing them. I got the message "New updates are ready to install", all in all it took less than 15 minutes on my i5 with SSD, including the reboot.

Scooters, don't get me started. What? Ah yes, you already did. Jamie attends the village infant school, which is reached from our house via a footpath, or as we call it, a "jitty". Long, straight, narrow and markedly uphill from us to the school. That means walking home it is downhill, a racetrack for children from the school, or younger siblings (sub 4 years old) on these micro scooters or pedal-less and brake-less bikes. They are a menace. I have lost count how many times Jamie or I have been run into by children on these things. On one occasion last term Jamie had his trousers torn and leg cut by one such incident which I duly reported to the school. Whilst expressing concern they also admitted that they were not keen to discourage children riding to school as it offered a healthy alternative to travelling by car. The fact remains that the footpath is, as it's name suggests for travelling along on foot. It is not a cycle path or bridleway, it is too narrow. I have stressed that if there is a recurrence I will involve the police, though every time I collect Jamie from school I witness one or more near misses. What really annoys me is the attitude of the parents. "Oh, they are only children". We were only kids once. I had a scooter. It was green, though that was probably not it's original colour. It was very much third hand and had been repainted above once. It was made from tubular steel and should have had a wooden tread board on which to stand, though that had long since rotted away and so you stood on the steel tube which was polished shiny by the use of many pairs of feet. I went miles on it, but I knew two things. I stayed off the road and kept clear of other people. If not I got a clip around the ear. Sadly these days most children are not taught respect at this young age, and what Timbo witnessed is the result. The children need educating, and the parents a good boot up the arrrrrr - sorry mustn't swear!

Kent is one of the worst routes we get assigned. Even on a "normal" day it's rare to get through the tunnels in less than an hour from the A2, a little better, but not much from the M25. Any planner who schedules us back that way gets a real mouthful. We would normally try and ensure we finish our day as far west as possible and head clockwise, even if it's further. The proposed third crossing near Gravesend is an error IMO. What is needed is a second bridge for northbound traffic on the 282 allowing the tunnel bores to be opened to relieve congestion as and when needed, or even to take traffic from the A225 and A206, which causes mayhem - especially at rush hour as it attempts to join the A282 between the A2 junction and the tunnels.

That's some achievement. I always said the biggest t*55ers came from Yorkshire. OK, I'm behind the sofa!

Enjoy Griff. I saw ELO part 2, the Jeff Lynne-less incarnation back in the early nineties and have to say I was a little disappointed. I had seen Lynne in concert a little while earlier with Tom Petty and George Harrison and that was incredible. It was always on my bucket list to see the Travelling Wilbury's, I was a huge fan but they didn't "tour" as such so it was always unlikely and Orbison's premature death ended that dream. Still, I did get to fly on Concorde, saw Montserrat Caballe in concert and attened the opera at Verona. I've seen the northern lights and climbed Kilimanjaro. I've driven an F1 car and watched Queen at Wembley, and more than all of those witness the birth of my son, so all in all not too bad. One or two things left but I doubt that ABBA will ever reform and I no longer have any inclination for overseas travel so I guess Machu Pichu and the Pyramids of Giza will slip me by.

Blimey, engine out, repainted, cutlass bearing fixed, bilges cleaned, new rudder, new planks, rub down, new varnish. I'm glad it's just a "bit of tlc"! I shuoud hate to think what is involved in serious renovation. Lovely job you are making of it, btw.

Sorry to drag this thread back from the annals (or should that be anals) of forum history but hopefully I might have solved my immediate predicament with the purchase of a spares / repair machine from the good old US of A. A good job I ordered it before we Brexit tomorrow, as that dear old Mr Cameron says we will not be able to trade overseas afterward. I'm not sure what of the internals work, it's coming as is the norm nowadays without HDD or power cord, which would be useless to me anyway, but does have the processor (an upgrade to my current 2.5ghz i5) and mobo, power board, USB board, speakers, Optical drive, screen, battery of unknown viability, keyboard and most importantly all of the case, in tact and virtually unmarked. I'm quite pleased with the find. V3-771's are quite rare and as such even used parts go for big money. To get a whole machine of bit's (just the plastics) for just under £100 including international postage, import duty etc is a steal. Ideally I shall be able to drop my HDD into it, fire it up and away we go though that maybe wishful thinking. More likely I will have to transpose my innards into it's case but that's not rocket science. I may then treat it to an SSD for the operating system and use the current HDD for media storage. One big plus of the V3-771 is two HDD ports. So a couple more questions. If I do indeed need to swap over the internals is it worth changing the processor? I have an i5 3210 at 2.5g and the spares machine has the i5 3230 at 2.6g. Benchmark websites suggest quite a jump in performance, is that realistic? Secondly, if I do a clean install of Windows 8.1 from my media can I get back to Windows 10? I appreciate the W10 free window is coming to a close, but I should have time. Will they stop me downloading it for a second time? As always thanks for your assistance. Be warned, more silly tech type questions on the way.

I understand that a follow up to this new version of Swallows and Amazons is already being planned with the Coot Club getting a similar makeover. Mrs Barrable, it turns out is really an FBI agent, a role unlikely to be reprised by Rosemary Leech, more likely Anjelina Jolie-Pitt or Rachel Weiss. Her arch nemesis will be the seemingly innocent Constable Teddar, a North Korean Spy likely to be played by Rowan Atkinson, sent to Britain's favourite wetland to test Kim Jong-un's latest secret weapon, a bio-mechanical Depleted Uranium Enriched Stealth Attack Duck codenamed Covert Offensive Ordnance Torpedo, or COOT for short. Teddar enlists the unwitting help of local children to watch over his COOTs until they are ready for deployment when they dive below the water and as their name suggests launch themselves against the hulls of ships. In a bizarre twist the Hullabaloos are the good guys in this adaptation, a crack British Commando team from Humberside who pose as tourists enjoying a holiday afloat on a specially adapted Gin Palace fizzing with all the latest technology. However their boat starts to get a bad reputation among the locals by running it's engines at all times of night and day at moorings in order to power all of the secret surveillance and communications equipment (not to mention boil the kettle) and it is thus that it comes to the attention of local boy Tim Gudgeon, son of the village eel catcher and leader of Teddar's COOT protection society. Codenamed "Silverfish" by Teddar, Gudgeon becomes worried that the noise is likely to disturb a nearby COOT and so casts the vessel adrift but, due to the 360 degree tracking TV aerial nobody onboard notices until long after the vessel has floated downriver and out to sea, leaving a juicy thread for yet another sequel. With our Humberside Heroes neutralised by Teddar's unknowing assistant it is left to Mrs Barrable to thwart the evil plans for world domination when her dog, not this time a pug but a highly trained assualt Shih Tsu dives headlong into the river and starts destroying the evil weapons. Sadly, a local wildfowler witnesses these attacks and, believing the dog to be out of control unloads both barrels of his twelve bore in the general direction of the animal meant to deliver global salvation. Thankfully the gun wielding nature lover is both visually challenged and a crap shot, instead hitting a raft of the very water birds he had intended to protect and wiping out the last of the COOTs. Barrable confronts Teddar who attempts escape on a vintage sailing boat but is soon chased down by Barrable, wake boarding along behind a classic speedboat, towing rope in one hand and assault rifle in the other. Teddar and his vintage craft disappear amidst a hail of bullets. Meanwhile the release of all that depleted uranium into the watercourse devastates fish stocks. The film end's with Gudgeon, sat at his fathers knee in their traditional eel catchers cottage asking the old man, "father, what is Prymnesium Parva and why should we stop derdging the rivers?"

The low cost "disposable" option is a non starter for several reasons, not least the amount of video processing, audio upscaling and movie making I do, plus the little gaming I have time for which requires decent performance. Even without that I abhor the slow start up times and lag that low end systems suffer from. In a perfect world I want a 3.0 ghz octacore processor with 16gb of ram, twin 1tb SSD's, fast 4k graphics with an ultra HD 17" touch screen and 5ghz wifi. Oh yes, and I want all that for £400 of course. I do use a cpu benchmarking website to look at the relative comparison of different processors however what effect the environment in which the processor runs has on those results it's impossible to tell.

I know there are one or two computer wizards here, I'm hoping you might help me out. I need to replace my Laptop, it's literally falling to pieces. It still works OK but the case has had it (it's held together by Mecanno bolts), the hinges have snapped, the keyboard has failed etc etc etc. Trying to compare different machines is a nightmare, especially when it comes to processors. What I need to know is are the number of cores or clock speed more important. Is an core i7 Quad core at 1.6ghz likely to be better than an i5 dual core at 2.2ghz? If i have software which says it needs a 2.0ghz processor will the 1.6 quad be OK? Some sites seem to multiply clock speed by number of cores to get comparison speeds. Is this reasonable?