Well, that’s 1.5 photo albums scanned!

Then there’s 30 years of my father’s slides to go…!

Found some good piccies from the past though! They may yet appear here in an ‘identify this aeroplane / car / flower’ stylee…

Go and look at the Vallis Vale Unconformity if you are interested in geology? Nice walking around there anyway.

Ford Edsel

6/6 Have to

omit
the Mauri one was a guess between NZ & India

?

admit

No-one’s mentioned the caving possibilities. Used to be a member of the BEC but they were too much into smashing their own hut up and being wild for my liking. The Wessex seemed more civilised.

St Cuthbert’s Swallet is the best cave I have been into on Mendip (but it’s not a beginner’s trip) and GB has the largest void under Mendip in it as well as some good decorations, but there’s Swildon’s Hole and the stuff in Burrington Coombe for beginners.

Can’t stand the Hunters or Roger Dawes but the New Inn in Priddy was nice and did good food a few years ago.

Always enjoyed the Miners in Shipham, but that was mostly because we’d just got out of Singing River Mine, which was great fun!

The Feathers at Rickford Rising used to be nice too…

Going to be a lot harder to get hold of caving kit on Mendip now that Bat Products has closed though (and what a nice guy Tony Jarrett was).

I was annoyed that I didn’t get ‘Nomocracy’ as I have often seen ‘Nomos Chania’ or ‘Nomos …’ in Greece and knew that they refer to administrative areas!

Last one stumped me though.

And ‘pikau’ was a quess – just sounded a bit New Zealand-esque.

Yeah, they were! Really really hope they survived the move. Had to do it. We checked out with Hampshire Wildlife Trust about moving them and they said it was OK…

Glad they’re out and about: we look forward to seeing ours!

Nice one – always great to see. Had to move ours on in case the neighbours thought ‘oooh, snake’ and killed them (long story). Hope they survived the move (there were babies and adults: just babies here)…

Good news for the Ghurkhas and bad news for Gordon Brown! Result (hopefully). It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out…

@redthunder: thanks for your comments!

Main camera is an Olympus E500 and backup for riding is the Sony Ericsson K550i phone: no changes there…

Nice ones yourself!

Finally got to a bluebell wood with my camera today:

Also found these guys:

and

Where have the img and url etc buttons gone?

Don’t pay for anything up front. We’ve been caught out and may have problems looming (to the cost of a grand…)

Oh yes! I think she / they are fantastic.

Must Google to see if there is any chance of a tour!

Not sure why, except perhaps that the original was very good, although now sadly dated.

I must admit that my heart sank when I heard about it, but with Martin Clunes and Fay Ripley it stands a good chance of being watchable, I think.

Maybe it is partly playing on our nostalgia, too: ‘cor, I used to watch that when I was a kid / teenager / whatever’.

I’ll either be watching or downloading later.

My bowler hat and furled umbrella, please: yes, those in the corner, thanks.

Wassup?

@ml – that site seems to give a fair amount of info.

Only skim-read it, but not sure whether it points this out: if you divide the smaller number into the larger number, you can use the result as a kind of ‘brightness index’ (the higher the better).

Thus MrsJA’s 10x42s have a ‘brightness index’ of 4.2 but my 10x50s have a ‘brightness index’ of five, therefore the image that I see should be around 20% brighter.

Having said which, MrsJA’s binos are excellent and do offer a slight weight saving – you pays your money and you takes your choice. We paid around £100 each for ours, but we’re fairly serious about our birdwatching and like a reasonable image (and NEED to go and buy a telescope!).

Good luck – you’ll just have to make the trade-off between image brightness, image quality, weight, magnification and price!

Mmmm, Saracen’s Head. Good food, good beer, good pub!

Sounds like a plan…

WWI, WWII, Minoan stuff, Mycenae, Delphi, John Pendlebury, Dudley Churchill Perkins, anything Greek, The Villa Ariadne and any of Dilys Powell’s Greek books, Peter Hopkirk (Foreign Devils On The Silk Road anyone?), Francis Younghusband, Sven Hedin, The Great Game, anything by George MacDonald Fraser, Patrick Leigh Fermor, William Dalrymple, Tim Mackintosh Smith, SOE, WWII resistance, industrial archaeology, archaeology, Ur, C Leonard Woolley, Pausanias: the list goes on and on and keeps getting longer the more I read!

If I live long enough I might get to read all the books I have and want to have!

Neville Shute – On The Beach (all his books are excellent)

MrsJulianA’s 10×42 Bushnell Powerviews are pretty good and fairly small.

Assume you know what the numbers all are and how also how they affect the light-gathering capabilities?

@alpin – the guy doing our tour was actually one of the people we were staying with in Welden, not a professional guide, bu that hardly makes a difference to your point.

Yes, everything did look ‘old’: hadn’t occurred to me that it had been rebuilt – which was stupid of me as I have been to Ypres loads of times and know full well that it has been rebuilt!

It sounds as though you have been in a position to hear some interesting stuff and live in an interesting part of the world.

Interesting how this thread has progressed: for such an emotive subject there have been some good posts! (And obviously the only-to-be-expected jokey ones…)

alpin – Member

i’m in frigging germany for christ sake! in the very town where the nazis first gained power and is the birthplace/hometown of Prince Albert, victoria’s husband.

it’s a real difficult subject to breach here.

Interesting that you find that to be the case: we had a guided tour around Munich from a German guy, and he pointed out bullet holes in walls etc (around the Felherrenhalle area). Whan I said ‘I’m surprised but pleased that you talk about these things’ he said words to the effect of ‘if we don’t learn the lessons of history we’ll repeat them’! (‘We’ not meaning the Germans particularly, I didn’t think).

He is from Welden, a fairly small market town in Bavaria, and the people from Welden couldn’t have been more welcoming (the only people I was ashamed of were some ‘fellow’ Brits who didn’t want to stay with local families when invited so to do – we stayed with a family and had a great time!)

Another book I found very interesting was ‘I Flew For The Fuhrer’ by Heinz Knocke. A Luftwaffe (so professional service person) pilot who was (at one point) branded a ‘traitor’ by the Third Reich as he didn’t want to fly when coerced so to do (if I recall correctly) an ME109 with a broken main spar…

By no means all service people who served were ideologists: in fact, ideologists may have been in the minority: they were forced to be there either by conscription or by (in the case of Nazi Germany), threats to their family (which becomes apparent in the Irmgard Hunt book, and probably may others which I have yet to read: my reading list is about four feet high – and that’s just books in a pile on their backs!).

Really hope you find it interesting. We did.

If you want some more stuff, email us at vdub1992 at hotmail dot com

Handbrake +1

DVD Decrypter?

Let us know what you make of it…

Gotta be Orchis mascula, RedThunder

Mine from today:

Orchis mascula for sure

Any ideas? I’m guessing Orobanche something…

Not sure about the justification for stag hunting (any offers?) but I noticed signs saying ‘stay out of these woods as there are snares in them’, or words to that effect, just after the fox hunting ban came into effect.

I like the thought of a fox taking several days to die in a snare even less than I like the idea of it being killed by hounds, but my views on fox hunting were completely changed by a land-owning friend who said that some of the countryside is kept open for people (and I reckon that means a lot to mountainbikers, walkers and horseriders) because of hunts.

I seem to recall that the law is a bit (a lot) vague as it wasn’t very good legislation to start with (also seem to recall that the Parliamentary guillotine was used in the hunting debate: not very intelligent use of it as it was designed to be used in time of war etc (and I don’t mean the war on hunting!))

MrsJulianA and I too are very interested in the Nazi story, and we don’t considers ourselves to be Nazis.

We have been to quite a few Nazi wartime installations and WWII cemeteries both in this country and on the continent. The American cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer was horrendously crowded and had an air of glorification of the Americans (said glorification we have not found in any CWGC or German cemeteries) which we found rather disturbing. We then went to a German cemetery which was very peaceful and serene. As are the German cemetery at Maleme and the Allied cemetery at Souda Bay in western Crete.

Links?

On Hitler’s Mountain – a fascinating book about how she grew up in the shadow of Nazism and how she and her family were affected by the situation.

Defying Hitler – MrsJA recomends this one.

The German Trauma – another MrsJA recommendation on my reading list.

Google for ‘La Coupole’, ‘Eperlecques Blockhaus’, ‘v3 mimoyecques’ (been to all three and they’re fascinating), ‘project dora nordhausen’ and, of course, Auschwitz, Mauthausen and any other concentration camps you can think of, plus Fort Breendonk (Belgium’s only concentration camp – been there: stopped taking photos when we got to the torture chamber as I just couldn’t photograph it).

An absolutely (to us) fascinating subject which in no way indicates Nazi sympathies. It’s only by people being concerned about the subject that we might (and I only say might) avoid a repetition of these ghastly events.

And then there’s the Armenian genocide of 1915 perpetrated by Turkey: few people seem to know about that one, and even the Israelis have denied it, and one would have thought that they would be the first to stand up for others. They don’t, because they want to stay in with Turkey.

Those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.

Thanks RedThunder. It’s Anacamptis morio with a pigmentation problem, but I was wondering if this was unusual as we have never seen anything like it before. We also found morio var. alba, which are in our book, but I can’t find any other pictures of morio with half its markings missing!

Good pic yourself.

Seen five species of orchid so far this year and it’s only April (only two in flower thougth!)

This is the other one in flower:

Ophrys sphegodes

What’s wrong with the photos, Mr Scarlet Pimpernel?

I admit I had to turn the gamma down a bit in the second one, but it should be pretty identifiable.

Agree about plantain, though: I always have to look twice to check whether it’s a plantain or orchid leaves.

Both are orchids…

simonfbarnes – Member
who else was expecting naked people ?

Any other numpty who doesn’t know the difference between naturalists and naturists or can’t spell. Probably no-one, then.

Close but no cigar, RB! Nice try though… 2 points for inventiveness (is that a word? it is now!)

Used to have some great rides together until an accident on a really straightforward bit of track put MrsJulianA in hospital for a total of 11 days and left her with a head injury which took nearly 18 months to fix itself. (Helmet: check, shades: check). Also it understandably destroyed her biking confidence and I have no intention of pushing her to go riding again unless she wants to.

So not any more but we used to have some great days out.

MrsJA has no problem with me going riding by myself, but given that I don’t have a job I go riding in the week and we have weekends to do other stuff.

Budgie supporting Ian Gillan at the Southampton Gaumont and being even better than Ian Gillan.

I must be getting old!

The Hub in Southampton

Not your insurance policy, so where’s the problem?

(Yes, I know we all pay in the end, but get your car fixed to your satisfaction: it wasn’t your fault…)