Craig Sawyers

Grenadilla is just an alternative name for Blackwood - Dalbergia melanoxylon. Other names for the same wood are Mozamique Ebony (though it is not an ebony, which are Diospyros species), Mpingo and Pau Preto. And yes - for some bizarre reason they dye the black wood black. I play the clarinet, by the way, so I know from first hand experience the sort of black muck that comes off a brand new Selmer clarinet until you get it well played in.

The drawer pulls on the oak drawers I made are from brown mallee burr. I love the stuff so much I have a huge chunk set aside for future projects.

I've already offered to get a chunk for Kevin from the same wood supplier that I got the LV from. Just need to find some time to go visit them.

I'll stick to the UK thanks. We only have three rare snakes, only one of which is very mildly poisonous (the adder). We have no poisonous spiders, two stinging insects (the bee and the wasp), and no dangerous wild animals. Well, not quite on that count - wild boar have been re-introduced in some remote areas. But you'd have to be determined to find them, and provoke one enough to have a go at you.

That was excellent Reks! Our Polish population is going down rapidly. They all came across to England when the pay was so much better. But now the Polish economy is pretty good, they are all going back to their families (or clearly to the US...). So now what are we going to do for dentists, doctors, hotel cleaners and flamenco guitarists?

= brinjal in indian cookery. In the UK, indian food is the national dish.

Yeah - with Alan Davies. He's been in a number of things - his current series is called Whites, in which he plays a chef. But if you watch him on QI (the celebrity quiz show with Steven Fry as cerebral quiz master) you will see that Alan Davies only plays one character - Alan Davies. Made a lot of money that way though. Driving toward my village yesterday, saw a very nice Rolls Royce in a traffic queue in the opposite direction. Wonder who is at the wheel? - James May. As Bill Bryson's book "Notes from a Small Island" indicates - we are truly titchy, and spotting celebs is fairly frequent in cars, restaurants etc. The next X-Men movie is shooting at the moment in Oxford, for example.

Oxford Audio Consultants . Made the salesman's day - I walked in, payed him a lot of money and walked out. Five minute deal. The price in the UK is

Running new Winged C EL34's at the moment. Showing up the limitation of the CD player (Tube Technology CD64) at the moment, so will correct that first, and then try out the NOS Mullards. I'm going to have to tear myself away from listening to the BH + O2's and get the T2 up and running now that I have repair parts. I bought 20 K216's on the basis that these seem to be the thing that goes phut in quantity if anything else goes wrong in the T2.

Pocket now duly evacuated on a pair of O2's. OMG - can't write - have to go listen more.

You prof needs a good kicking - he/she is clearly a bio-luddite. The bio-sciences have a strong statisitical element, so stochastic modelling is entirely a valid approach to data and meta-data analysis.

I know that feeling Started running again after four months being plagued with an achilles problem. Poured some money into my sports physio, who put me through physical hell, and I seem to be over it. Reduced from marathon and beyond distances to 2 miles with aching quads. Hey ho.

I've got the advantage here. Worn specs since I was four - so half a century on now. Always wear until falling asleep - onto the nightstand. Wake up, put on face. Repeat. When I take them off to run, I have to remember where I put them - cause as sure as hell I can't see them.

One of the guys on the space instrument project I'm managing went back to Italy to visit his mother for a few days. Felt a bit unwell and went to the doctor. Bam - cancer. He's 26. Not sure what sort, or what the outcome is, but when it happens to someone who is the same age as my son.... I'm still reeling a bit.

Because the UK is truly tiny, everyone is pretty close. Clarkson lives around 30 miles away, Richard Branson less than 20, and at Henley-on-Thames 25 miles away it is a veritable who's who. George Harrison used to live there (before he smoked himself to death), and the Leander Rowing Club is the source of the clutch of UK Olympics gold medals over recent decades.

Ah - the Bigg Market. Never, ever under any circumstances go down the Bigg Market at night at the weekend. You'd be asking for a "Byker kiss" - being nutted in the face. Byker is a rough area of Newcastle (there are others).

Cheers! I'll take some pics soon and post them somewhere. I managed to scare up enough 2SA1968's, but I wonder whether a T2 style anode current source could be substituted; but is that what is already in the BH-2? Yeah - the next pocket evacuating exercise will definitely be O2's.

Well, it'll come as no surprise that I understood every word of that. It wasn't particulary heavy dialect either. True Geordie phrases include the memorable "Divvent cowp yer creels bonny lad" and "you lookin' for a cleb roond the lugs?"

The accent you are recalling (my accent) is called Geordie. It is actually a bastardised ancient Norwegian/Swedish from the dark ages Viking invaders. There are whole chunks of Geordie that bear a strong link to modern Scandinavian languages. Remarkably persistent dialect that has its roots back over a thousand years. It is no wonder you have trouble with it

An excellent semi-fact-based series. The Yorkshire Ripper was a real guy Peter Sutcliffe, who went on a serial killing spree of prosititues and other women from 1975 to 1980. Serving life in Broadmoor. The corrupt developer played by Bean was also a familiar thing in the North of England (where I come from) at around that time. The most famous pair were T. Dan Smith (Head of Newcastle city Council) and John Poulson (the developer/architect). Vast bribes (we're talking many hundreds of thousands - worth perhaps ten million today) passed to ensure a contract for building a vast mall in the city centre of Newcastle (Eldon Square). T Dan Smith was the invited speaker at one of my school's academic achievement prize events - I remember him calling making Newcastle the "Brasilia of the North" - he was arrested less than a year later. T Dan Smith was also a central character in another excellent series called "Our Friends in the North" made in 1996. If you enjoyed Red Riding, it is worth looking this one out. Just as dark.

Well, OK - I've now got the BH sorted, and truly awesome it is too. Takes a long time to warm up and get on-song - but what a song! Clear that the limitation is the source (TT CD64) and phones (lamdas). Now on to repair and get the T2 working...

Blimey - the Pikes Peak! For those not in the know, this is like no other marathon on earth. Well over 6000 vertical feet (actually over 7700 feet of ascent), with 2000 feet in the last three miles, involving rock scrambling. Best time for the full marthon (ie up the Peak and back down) is around 3h30m. Which is about my best marathon time **on the flat**. Most times are way, way longer than that. But the real ball breaker is that it starts at well over 6000 feet - so the Peak itself is at 14,000 feet - and oxygen starvation becomes a major issue. One of the planet's ultimate challenges. So hats off Tyrion!

Got my Blue Hawaii up and running. Awesome.

I think that is probably the problem with sensing the inside of the block. LV is one of the half dozen wood species with a density greater than water - LV is around 1.3. It is also full of a type of gum which both smells like strong perfume when you work it, and makes it self lubricating (it was used for propellor bearings in steam ships for that reason). So it is very homogeneous, which makes it difficult to sense internal structure.

There is no spoon