Volume 34
24 Oct 2001
23 Oct 2001
22 Oct 2001
Been struggling to get things working so have a little backlog of links - They Rule and they surely do, Coke Machine Accidents which sound scary, and a useful FAQ about the food airdrops in Afghanistan (Thanks kd!) - I still think the contents are weird.
I'm trying the opera browser beta on the iBook - damn, it's fast. And it also doesn't have the norrible MDI interface that it does everywhere else. Why do we have to have it on Linux tif you don't have to have it on a Mac?
And via Sharpeworld, we have the John Lennon AI project - a rather poor Eliza clone, or so it seems from talking it. It never claimed to be bigger than Jesus once!
I am sure there is a lower circle of hell reserved for designers of wall fixings where the electric screwdrivers are always flat and the walls are made of either chalk or diamond, or both.
19 Oct 2001
Villa Rotunda - a great building. I am playing with the model viewing tools they want you to use at this page. Why didn't they just use VRML?
I haven't pinched anything from gmtPlus9 for a while, so here's one: Memoirs from Hijiyama.
WRT to my comment yesterday about the Doors and So What, it turns out that Ray Manzerak is a great Miles Davis fan.
18 Oct 2001
I wondered about places in the USA called Kabul - well there is one, but it isn't exactly on the mainland :-) (Thanks John) I kenw there had to be an interactive US gazeteer somewhere!
Chirality in Liquid Crystals - I really have no clue what this is about at all. My brain started to feeel mushy when I started reading it.
Hmm, the net is slow today. Can't get to Amazon at all. (I take that back, I can get to Amazon Germany, but not Amazon UK. *sigh*)
I'm reading a book 
about the recording of Miles Davis' Kind of Blue (an album with its own website), so I was listening to the record. I had not noticed before how some of the piano bits of the Doors' Riders on the Storm are very like bits of Bill Evans' playing on So What. (Phew - a lot of links in there. There needs to be a much clearer way of differentiating links. Colour doesn't work when there are lots of them close together)
17 Oct 2001
Very odd photo of Bill Gates on the Japan Today website. Doesn't look like him at all - he seems much fatter than he used to be.
16 Oct 2001
Can someone explain to me why the food that they have been dropping on Afghanistan (along with the bombs) is a) labelled in English and b) contains things like strawberry jam and peanut butter? Who do they think they are feeding? This is not a food drop on Peoria! Or maybe they think that Kabul is just down the road from Peoria? (Is there a Kabul in the USA? I haven't found one so far, but it seems very likely that there is somewhere.)
15 Oct 2001
Some people really shouldn't be allowed to make webpages, or else the people who design the "tools" they use should be re-educated.
Images from the Colon & Ileum - You know Colon & Ileum - it's that little Greek place on the corner...
I finally got round to reading a Guardian article on slower paced living that they published last year and found this link to New Earth Time. Just as bogus as Swatch Internet Time
I was catching up on my 2001 Dilbert calendar and noticed that the September 11 item features a plane crash that everyone thinks has killed the pointy-haired boss who turns up three days later. I haven't seen this "prediction" reported anywhere else.
12 Oct 2001
gmtPlus9 has a link to a video of how to put on a condom, here's a picture of another way to do it.
A page of Steve Bell political cartoons - SB is fantastic, never wishy washy in that horrid Gary Trudeau way.
The network is slooooooow today, but on the other hand I got a parking space this morning so that probably counterbalances the problem.
11 Oct 2001
I have been starting a lot of books and then abandoning them recently. Lots of nearly interesting stuff but just not grabbing me.
I've been reading too many books about user interface design recently and am being bugged by all kinds of things. I mean, Microsoft have owned Powerpoint for a long time now, so why doesn't it have the same interface as Word for manipulating type settings? The Mac Office 2001 version of Word has a really quite usable (for MS) interface to this but Powerpoint in the same package has the horrible old clunky one. Why are there even two versions? Have these people never heard of code reuse or library sharing? I don't necessarily agree with the view that all interfaces should be consistent and monotonous (no, not in that sense) but this kind of disparity is just stupid.
In the last week I have recevied three textbooks from publishers each of which is 1500 pages long. What is this all about? What happened, short, cheap, succinct texts? I can barely lift these books and two of them are simply hymns to Microsoft. Ugh.
This morning on the way to work I saw a man walking along holding a polystyrene cup at arms length over his head.
10 Oct 2001
This is good news about MySql - a great program but it needs some of the features mentioned here.
The museum of online museums. Some good stuff here - check out the manhole covers. (Thanks George)
ChildCare Action Project: Christian Analysis of American Culture - I find this entirely suspect. There are also really annoying and stupid popups. (Thanks Andrew)
8 Oct 2001
The team of students I took to Hursley last week won the competition!! They each got a thinkpad and the department got 1000 pounds.
3 Oct 2001
I'm off to visit IBM Hursley tomorrow and friday....
2 Oct 2001
Al-qiyamah - that means Resurrection. Lots of Koranic verses and much other stuff. Seems like an Islamic version of the rapture, but I may be doing an injustice.
Red Grammer "is an award-winning singer and songwriter with a clear golden voice and a vision. Beloved by children, parents and educators alike". Oh dear. Golden is not the word I would use if the MP3 is anything to go on.
North Carolina Blues Historical Marker Project & Blind Boy Fuller Historical Marker Project. Phew! Blind Boy Fuller was great.
Jen has some great links today. So many that I can't in all honesty steal them either. Go and look at them.
You may notice a somewhat drastic improvement in response from the log now - there is a new fast catless server underneath.....
1 Oct 2001
Hmm, I spent all day yesterday building mouldings for one of my doors and then discovered I had a measurement wrong and half of them didn't fit. *sigh*
28 Sep 2001
The Vaults of Erowid - documenting the complex realtionship between humans and psychoactives
Astonishingly detailed review of the Minolta Dimage 7 camera. Wouldn't mind having one to play with I must admit. (Actually I wouldn't having one to own, but that's entirely different)
The Book of Forbidden Knowledge (featuring exceptionally cheezy porno-movie style background music!)
27 Sep 2001
Jen has some gems this morning, go check them out, but I will steal this link as I think it is particularly frightening.
26 Sep 2001
Connected Japan which led me to a site with Hiroshige's 55 Tokaido prints (the thumnails are dreadful, but click on them and the reproduction is not bad at all)
I've been listening to the Peatbog Faeries. (Their "official" page is under construction and this one has not been updated since November 1998...) Their music is interesting but I am not overwhelmed. Some of their stuff sounds like prissy, Celtic twilight Enya-style nonsense with a taste of Mike Oldfield thrown in. And they need to ditch the rockband drummer - his beats are just diminish the whole thing. (And he is far too loud in the mix - a common problem with electric folk bands in the UK)
God Photos - this page really annoys me. First there is the "I won't listen to whatever you might say because you couldn't possibly know anything about it" text and then there are the photos! I am deeply suspicious of Sai Baba and events associated him. I mean who wants a god that doesn't write neatly and who sprinkles dust all over the place!!! I want a clean god with nice handwriting thank you.
25 Sep 2001
Just watched the LotR trailer - seems to have lots of good SFX, lots of outrageous overacting, and what have they done to the hobbits? Hobbits aren't humans!!! Sheesh.
As I am a sad old hippy I've downloaded the trailer for the Lord of the Rings. I probably wont go and see the film though. It might be a fantastic film, but it won't be like what it was like in my head when I last read the book. (Of course inside my head is not like what it was when I last read the book either...)
Hmm, I see that Deepend have gone bust - looking at their home page I wonder why they had any customers at all. Way too flashy and clever. (And incredibly annoying too)
I went to the theatre on Saturday night to see Glengarry Glen Ross and most enjoyable it was too. I'm not sure that I really understood what happened in the end, but it was well acted and fun.
The net is still snail-like today - utterly painful. How do they expect us to weblog if the network is so slow? There ought to be a law against it.
24 Sep 2001
Hmm, the net appears to be entirely impossible to use today - I assume that there is some local/national/international bottleneck. (Seems to be international in fact as I can get to UK sites, though they may be cached locally too)
There was a mention of a short film called "Stanley Kubrick goes shoppping" in the Observer yesterday. It is reputed to be on the web but so far I can't find it. Sounded entertaining. Even the Kubrick site doesn't seem to mention it. (Though it does have the Zero Gravity Toilet instructions from 2001...)
RIP Isaac Stern
21 Sep 2001
I have been poking around in old mailboxes and found a message from someone who asked me "What does WWW mean in your signature"...
I tried looking for abandoned women, but as always no luck. Story of my life really.
I'm sure that I've linked to Infiltration before, but here it is again. I like the Canada Malt plant section.
I've been struggling to synchronise my Handspring and I found that the problem was battery related. I presume this is a USB thing - I might just go back to serial port!
20 Sep 2001
I started back at my Tai Chi class again last night after a long time away and found that I could still get through the whole form with only the visual prompt of watching what was going on around me. It was good to get back to it.
I pinched this link to a paper cut out Taj Mahal from Jen. There is even a paper cut out of Bill Gate's house (though you have to sign up for that one - typical , eh? :-) )
/. points me towards Atollo - I hadn't seen this before. The idea seems to be good, but, there have been things like this around before and there are always disadvantages - I mean, if you look at the front page there is a link whose description suggests that the peices are hard to break apart. Lego can be bad enough, this looks tem times worse! (I also suspect that as it wears it will get less and less robust)
The present world situation has produced some very hard to parse headlines. I saw one that read "US attacks prompt EU action". A sentence with diametrically opposed readings.
19 Sep 2001
Hmm, can't get anywhere today - I don't know whether it is this new virus clogging the network or the fact the Internet Explorer is not very good! (Mind you Netscape 6 is pretty dire too)
18 Sep 2001
Tom fed "Hippie Chicks and Sippin' Whiskey" through babelfish into chinese and back again. The result is very strange, but it is proving a tad hard to organise that you can see it...
Also going missing yesterday was the album featuring Ginseng Sullivan - it wasn't on the New Grass Revival record and I couldn't find out which of my records it was on. It may be that I heard the song on the wireless or something, I suppose.
Yesterday I saw a good quote from Benjamin Franklin in the Guardian (I think) and I cannot find it again - I have reread all the articles and it just isn't there. I hate when that happens. However, as ususal the net cavalry comes galloping to the rescue : "They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty or safety". Found (amongst other places) at the QuoteGeek Benjamin Franklin page.
17 Sep 2001
Since when has "herbologist" been a word? It's"herbalist" for goodness sake! If can't get their title right would you trust their prescribing???
Ginseng Sullivan sung by steelBlue in Real Audio, and Willin' too - a band of taste and discernment clearly.
I was poking around some old mail boxes and foundsome mail about the Norman Blake song Ginseng Sullivan (Inaccurate words methinks). Now I have to go and find where I heard it 'cos I remember it as being fantastic. (I know it wasn't NB's version of it that I heard though - some searching suggests to me that I know it from the New Grass Revival's album Too Late to Turn Back Now)
14 Sep 2001
13 Sep 2001
12 Sep 2001
Good grief - they just rescued a fireman who had been on the 83rd floor.
BBC and CNN are still entirely clogged.
Very interesting how most of the UK newspapers have all chosen the same (even if cropped) image for the their front pages.
One thing that people keep saying that I really don't get is to do with how the WTC was a "symbol for the West" and other such comments. Frankly, I (and everybody I have spoken to) thought of it just as building in New York which had no other significance than that it used to be the tallest building in the world at one time. I certainly didn't associate it with being a financial centre of any kind - World Trade Center sounding like just a name of a building rather than a description of what it did. I am astounded to find that so many crucial (at least in capitalist terms) operations were located in a single, very vulnerable building - yes it is convenient for everyone to be in the same place but is it sensible. I think yesterday proved that it isn't, especially in this age of networking.
Dan is thoughtful and sensible (unlike others who are jumping to conclusions and not really thinking things through) - there is an awful lot of pointless sabre rattling going on (though not from the US administration who are being very cautious). This whole event has demonstrated rather forceful how good the "old" media are, and how "new" media just cannot keep up. It was essentially impossible to get any information off the web yesterday PM (our time), apart from the Guardian site and Ananova. Live broadcast media do it better than anything that can get bottlenecked or that has bandwidth restrictions. Sure, they kept repeating much of the same stuff over and over, but they were very quick with any fresh info, such as there was.
This list of the companies that had premises in the World Trade Centre just brings home the scale of what has been happening.
11 Sep 2001
And now the pentagon. Makes that Star Wars Missile defence seems like a really bright idea doesn't it.
I read on Slasdot that two planes have crashed into the World Trades Center and I can't get to any news sites at all. What is going on. Hmm, I got on to the Guardian site but it really doesn't tell me very much.
Last time I was travelling I inevitably ended up looking at the International Herald Tribune - there is nothing else to read on aeroplanes. Some issues had the amazingly unfunny Dave Barry (is davebarry.com really his site?)column in them, but others had an Art Buchwald column. Don't think that that but means that I thought the Buchwald column was funny - it was at least as unfunny as Dave Barry, if not unfunnier - but the photo of Art Buchwald was the same one as I remember seeing of him from about 30 years ago! Looking him up it seems he is not as old as I thought (b. 1925). The sad thing about these "humourists" is that not only are they not funny, they are not witty which seems to be a prime requirement for the job. Mind you I'd been churning it out as long as Buchwald has I suppose I might be becoming a little stale too.
10 Sep 2001
Words From Here - sadly a flash based site, but has interesting things, such as film scripts.
I'd really like to get hold of a Psion Wavefinder digital radio box, but they seem to have been discontinued (and were too expensive anyway) I wonder if there are any floating around out there in discount bins?
I picked up the most recent Banana Yoshimoto book Asleep at the weekend - I can recommend it highly. Three short stories (or "novellas" as they seem to want to call them), all with that slightly haunted feeling that she does so well.
Well I certainly didn't know what a fluffer was before I read this. (If you are easily offended don't bother finding out)
Tom also pointed me to JumpTV which is a good source of TV links. He alos sent me Wacky patent of the month - another gem.
Cool! Live Japanese TV - thanks Tom! Now I will have to work at learning the language. Tom found this at the excellent broadcast-live site.
I was doing some looking around for info on building saunas and came across the fabulous word "löyly" which is "a sauna-specific word meaning the steam rising from the hot stones, and more importantly, the feeling of the warmth". They even talk about löylymasters. Great.
I must admit to a genuine worry about the safety of ceiling fans. It's probably to do with being tall. (Thanks Damien)
7 Sep 2001
Akebono is retiring - I wish there was more Sumo on TV here, it doesn't seem to have been for ages. Why can't I have a channel where I can watch Sumo, cycling, and various forms of boarding, and *NO GAMES INVOLVING BALLS OR POWERED VEHICLES*? Is this too much to ask?
Some nice typefaces by Emigre. The way it scrolls through all the different weights and styles is interesting.
I just found someone using an HTML tag that I didn't recognise. I must be slipping.
The Librarians' Index to the Internet - another one I should have come across before but hadn't. Tut.
While searching for information on the Ondes Martenot, I found this fantastic history of electronic musical instruments. Wonderful (The quest for information in the first place was sparked by the death of one of the world's few Ondes Martenot virtuosi)
6 Sep 2001
I really want a mountain board (though would probably be too scared to use it!). This is a nicely designed site and you should check out the advert videos - especially 911 (avi, mpeg) which is excellent.
5 Sep 2001
Alistair and I flew our new Flexifoil kite at the weekend. It's only a six footer, but what a blast!! Absolutely the best kite I have ever flown. I can't wait to get some more and build a stack of them. I want to build a kite buggy too...
The Virtual Texan
Divination - a Japanese page, what I like about this is the navigation bar that reads "Up home eroticism about author". Now I can conceive of what downhome eroticism might be, but not up home!! (The eroticism link leads to all kinds of stuff in Japanese with strange flow diagrams)
I bet you have all been dying to know how to make sigla. (I don't believe that sigla is the plural of sigil)
The Occultopedia - "An Encyclopedia of the Occult, the Unexplained, Myths and more" I always wonder what "and more" means. "We have run out of words", "There is some random crap here as well", "We want to sound much more comprehensive than we actually are"
Michael Winslow - the man of a thousand sound effects. I have never heard of him of course. But that's just me. (And I listened to the clip, and I didn't think it was funny, but there again I am entirely humour impaired when it comes to prank calls: when people are just trying to do their job you really shouldn't make it harder for them.)
The Sierra Times. I particularly like the heading "An Internet Publication for real Americans" - that will be as opposed to any publications for artificial americans, or perhaps unreal americans?
I have finally got anti-aliasing to work under X and it makes a big difference.
Many thanks to all of you who told me about Madlibs - it's a variant of what we call "Consequences" (Or in my family, Guiness, as my daughter misheard the word cponsequence....). Consequences has a standard structure rather than the more free structure of Madlibs (which of course renders madlibs much more amenable to commercialisation.....)
4 Sep 2001
Another one of those things that I can't quite work out what it is. I have no idea what "the old game of madlibs" is/was!
Nicotine Water - I think they miss the point of smoking entirely here. Sure, people are adfdicted to the nicotine, but there is more to it than that.
3 Sep 2001
I found this link in a message in a mail folder which I found. I haven't a lot of clue as to what it is all about though.
I've decided to try browising using Konqueror rather than Opera as opera is really not performing up to expectations and I really, really hate the MDI interface. Really, really, really hate it. I don't know how long I'll last with it but we'll see - now that I have worked out how to remote control it, it is much more useful
Dentistry in films (found on linkfilter - hey I can steal links as well as the next person!)
I was trying to find the lyrics to the Locktender's Lament (as sung by Burl Ives) and the net has failed me - not a trace of them that I can find. How disappointing.
I saw one of the new UK number plates this morning. I am entirely puzzled as to why there has been an outcry about how confusing they are. I assume this is just tabloid noise rather than a real complaint - I mean, it;s just a sequence of letters and numbers for goodness sake! You can read about the history of UK license plates at this site. More detail on UK number plates. And here's a whole site devoted to license plate pictures
I am decidedly hacked off at the person whoever you are who is cutting and pasting text and links entirely unchanged from here into linkfilter. Fine, pinch the links, but not the text as well, OK?
Fun flash - once you are there try changing the 98 to some other numbers, there are many good movies here such as number 80.
31 Aug 2001
The Mole Antonelliana in Turin - an entirely bizarre building. (The Vitruvio site is a good resource)
Why had I not come across Tokyo Tales before? probably because I hadn't looked. Check out the Japlish page.
A petition to get Disney to release more Hyao Miyazaki films. Lots of other interesting petitions on the site.
29 Aug 2001
Last night I could feel the start of autumn in the air. I bet there is a Japanese word for this, because I suspect that it is a very Japanese feeling.
28 Aug 2001
24 Aug 2001
Updates will be sporadic next week....
"Why would [anyone] want to label themselves? I say, "Lick my decals off, baby!" I'm not interested in making any new mustard or ketchup. I make very good mustard." Van Vliet Quote of the moment at the Captain Beefheart site.
Pore benighted 'eathens (and first class fighting men) - wargaming site. I have never understood the urge to play war games.
The Karl Popper web
I was (briefly) thinking about renaming the weblog - it would be a lot easier than doing a redesign - and thought about "Naked under your clothes" or "The raft of Diogenese".
Dance Hall Reggae (.com) with a useful list of dead reggae performers. (well, I suppose they are no longer performers but you know what I mean)
I was looking for the lytrics to Willin' (one of my favourite songs) because I have never been able to work out what the line after "And I've been from Tuscon to Tucumcari". I suppose it helps if you have an intimate knowledge of obscure US place names! There are still bits of "I've been everywhere, man" that I have no clue as to what the words really are, and of course the Internet helps me again. I love the Internet.
A misheard lyrics site I hadn't seen before. It leads me to Dictionaraoke which is entirely bizarre and utterly wonderful! Why have I not heard of this before?
We went to the Hyena Comedy Cafe last night (first time this year we have managed to get out together!!)) which was a new experience for us as comedy clubs were not around when we went out a lot (i.e. no children). We laughed and enjoyed ourseleves which is all you could ask for, though the acts were not exceptional by any means.
23 Aug 2001
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Jet Set Radio page - I'd really like to have this game. There may be a window when Dreamcasts are cheap enough to be worth buying one just to play this game!
22 Aug 2001
Dirty Boogie - XXX radio. I can't get it to connect at the moment so I have no idea what the level of XXXness is at this station but it may well not be for the faint of heart.
Listening to Cuzin Al's Bluegrass show for Jul 8th on KPIG at the moment. Good stuff. (Thanks for the year old heads up on that one Randall - it takes time but I get round to them!)
The Utilitarian Theory of Punishments - amazing what kenosis can lead. Definitely a dangerous heresy even when you just look it up.
The empty god : A Biblical and Theological Answer to the False Doctrine of Kenosis (This is a wonderful example of theological ranting - it sounds like the Inquisition in full flow)
Religion online - a good resource if you want this kind of thing, and accept that "religion" is almost identical with Christianity. Perhaps we need a campaign for truth in domain naming. (But don't start in on me about catless then!!)
Concresence: The Australasian Journal of Process Thought? I don't know what this is about. There is a paper with the title "How kenotic process theology underpins humanist deep ecology" which means almost nothing to me.
Famous stuff that sucks - not that I agree with most of them. Also check out how mathematics is a pernicious cult.
20 Aug 2001
Amazing rubbish. (Via the Register) and make sure that you follow the design a logo link!! (I am having keyboard problems so I can't make the link, but it's there, at the bottom of the page)
FIRST THINGS, the Journal of Religion and Public Life. Note that by "religion" they seem to mostly mean Christianity with the odd sop to Judaism thrown in.
A look inside the wacky world of Bob Jones University. Wacky is rather milder than the words I would use.
Submarine Sailor - where submariners stay in touch. (Doesn't the fact that Tom Hanks supports there memorial appeal really change your opinion?)
I watched Charlie's Angels last night - entertaining Hokum (and some pretty dire acting), but it would have been much better if they hadn't tried to "explain" why they had to do all the stuff they did. I mean, why do you need voice recognition to find the location of a phone? Just get on with the action I say - take a leaf from Jackie Chan.
Toxic Electricity . The stray voltage stuff is weird. There is clearly something going on here, but what is it?
17 Aug 2001
Mirrors Edge - a UFO website. Probably one of the nastiest looking websites I have seen recently.
Last night we had one of those ghastly salesman in the house experiences you read about. We keep trying to find some company who can replace some windows for us but in a style that we like so a new (to us) bunch called, said they could do it and this bloke turned up. We got to the point where he had got to a price quote (after much calculator bashing - have these people never heard of computers??) and then we got to the "well we can do part of the job for this much lower price so that you can see what the work is like". This price was pretty good so we said "give us a few days to think about it". But of course this was a one off, only tonight price, so we said that we didn't do business like that and that we would consider his other quote and let him know. He then tried to convince us and we just kept saying no, and as it became clear that we were not going to do it he lost his cool entirely and started becoming ruder and ruder. He ended up threatening to bill us for his wasted time and stormed out! Pen was completely traumatised by it all - we had been entirely reasonable but stuck to our guns so could not see why he had behaved the way he had. I have dealt with pushy salespeople before but none as bad as this.
The 1952 Tennessee Walking Horse World Grand Champion. I assume that is "world champion" as in "world series"...
Thanks to who ever it was who sent me the URL for the fastest entry point to google. Excellent.
16 Aug 2001
Oops, this seems to be the correct link for the national four string banjo museum. Check out some of the gorgeous banjos.
Bibliotecha Augustana "AppleMac et Netscape his paginis optimum visum dant cave Gatem et Exploratorem!" Lots of good literary stuff here.
Talking of radios, I spent a few evenings spinning round the AM dial on my little wireless. Down in the South West you pick up more stations being nearer to the continental mass. It seems as though you can always find either, blues, jazz or salsa on AM if you look and listen hard enough. Trouble is that you hear a fantastic track and then the announcer talks a language you don't know or just seques into something else. I heard a piece that was using a sample from a Robert Johnson track and ti was great but i have no idea who it was by.
Toilet mufflers (In fact many Japanese toilets already continually play the sound of running water to drown out noises)
An exciting new concept in Christian entertainment! I assume this is a spook, but who can tell these days.
Put KDE 2.2 up this morning - it's fine, but I really wish that they would improve the installation process, it's a nightmare.
15 Aug 2001
Zoom in on the UK at Lasoo. Note that the towns it marks first - Dublin and Douglas. Bizarre.
My gas company sent me a an advert for the new Disney film this morning. Nothing to do with gas at all, though there was some attempt at spin in the accompanying letter. I really hate junk mail.
Watched Otis Lee Crenshaw on TV on Sunday. Very funny and excellent music - "We were so poor that blues singers with writers' block came to stay with us". I don't know what people that really come from Tennessee would think about him though.
14 Aug 2001
13 Aug 2001
We also went to the Eden project - it will be fantastic in 10 years time when things have had a chance to establish and get larger. At the moment there are too many people and not enough things of interest to see.
We also went to see round Pencarrow which has some amazing stuff in it - a room with 8 Joshua Reynolds paintings in it, a fantastic Henry Raeburn and more percelain than you could imagine - lots of lovely Imari. There was a piano that Arthur Sullivan had played which we got to play too. The grounds were not well looked after sadly, and the whole place raised my socialist hackles as it reeked of privilege and the owners still lived in the largest part of the house, but worth a visit if you are in the area.
We finally got to go to Trerice which is lovely, and has a great lawnmower collection on display. It's one of those houses with human scale that you feel you could live in. We bought a nice white abutilon from the shop - it'll probably die inthe Northern cold though.
Well, I'm back after two weeks of sun, sand and, sadly, no sin.