barclaycon

Interesting to see the 'iconic' ORANGE amps in this thread. Always used to make me laugh when I used to see guitarists tweaking the DFA control, expecting some sort of difference in tone. Great programme on BBC 4 about Marshall amps recently. I always assumed that they were mainly distortion, but was suprised to find that when you put music through them they actually sound really nice and clean. It's only when you crank them right up that you get the distortion. Amps are as much important to the tone as the guitar is, and it's important to get the right combination. They mentioned Jimmy P

I live in a suburban area in probably the most polluted city in England and yet people still insist on burning rubbish and garden waste. Despite the fact that we have blue bins and green bins that are collected every week. It seems that our Romanian and Polish friends have a culture of burning rubbish in their back gardens. I've complained several times to neighbours that we don't burn rubbish as a general rule and that the smoke they are generating is getting in peoples' washing on the line and into peoples' houses. The number of times I've opened my window or patio door to be greeted by

Vodafone. I may have mentioned this before.... You cannot trust these people with your personal details !

Unfortunately nobody is immune from nuisance calls. The unscrupulous bastards can even just go through telephone numbers numerically. It doesn't matter if they are active or not. They use machines which can make thousands of calls at the same time. They'll phone anyone, they don't care. What really annoys me is when the police and local government pass your number onto survey companies. Because they're so desperate to get figures to show your satisfaction with their service, they'll pass your home number onto these scumbags who will then call you to phone to ask if you were happy with the

There are a lot of companies that hold stocks of old transistors - particularly in the far East and some companies have even gone to the trouble of re-manufacturing because of demand. In the case of Quad, they used to use RCA transistors which ceased manufacture a long time ago, but they held quite hefty stocks. All gone now, unfortunately. Last time I fixed a 303 they offered an equivalent which worked but didn't look as hefty. Military still have demand for older components. I read an article some years ago that they had developed a 'Fetron' - an FET solid-state equivalent of a valve whi

Yes, he was into Big Bands (Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey etc.) but would buy things like the Beatles and Billy J.Kramer for us to listen to. He relented after the Rolling Stones (19th. Nervous Breakdown if I remember rightly) and insisted that we had to buy our own records from then on, and didn't want us using the 'big' Hi-Fi. Sadly, he eventually had to sell all of his stuff - including record collection because deafness took away the pleasure of listening. Quad is a great company. Even now you can ring them up and get spares for a lot of their stuff, though things like transistors are no l

My dad was a Hi-Fi buff and he got a great system together in the early 60's It was a Rogers amplifier and tuner together with a Goldring deck. He had a nice walnut cabinet made to house it in, which matched the Rogers speakers and looked like a classy piece of furniture. The sound was superb. Even as a young kid I marvelled at how good it sounded. He used to buy Hi-Fi magazines and liked to invest in the new stuff that they would recommend, but I don't think anything bettered his original system. I'm sure that people would go crazy for that kind of thing now. I'm told that in Japan they

Yes ! Talk Talk hacked. Aviva last week wasn't it ? Your data is NOT safe.

Photoshop is a wonderful programme and well worth getting to know. I too have been using it for yonks. If you do a lot of scanning - it's also a good idea to use Photoshop to get everything trimmed up, saved correctly, and in the format of your choice. (e.g. a lot of web stuff likes to GIF format). Just to let you know, since Adobe made the crazy decision to put everything in the cloud (!) and then charge people rental for using their latest software, they've made version CS2 available for free. That's the version I use and, along with a few plugins I've collected over the years, it does e

The thing about Hi-Fi and all the attendant gubbins was that the equipment was more than just for playing records, the stuff was 'Objet d'art'. It looked great as well as sounding great. I notice that someone had a Michel Transcriptor deck in an earlier picture. What a fantastic bit of kit. And Bang and Olufsen - expensive but superb. On the TV someone just found a pair of speakers in a loft and didn't know what they were - but raved about their styling. I knew instantly what they were - Quad Electrostatics. A better sounding set of speakers you are unlikely to ever find. I bemoan the fa

That's how 'rapid transit' should be. Not some hare-brained scheme to earn millions of pounds, but a means of transporting people into the city for a reasonable price. Brussels has a similar system in that the trams go underground and become part of the underground network - a well-thought 'integrated' transport scheme. In Amsterdam you are only 2 minutes from the station platform in the airport to connect with a train every 15 minutes to get you into the city for about 5 Euros. All fantastic systems that have one thing in common. They are reasonably priced, and they all seem to work effic

Leaves detaching themselves from trees, and rain falling onto the tracks. It seems their every move is hampered by freak conditions !

The Prisoner was fantastic when it first started. The storyline and style were excellent. But after an initial burst of popularity it tailed off because the writing wasn't good enough. There should have been more collaboration on it AND they should have had the thing that causes most series to fail - a well thought out ending. More and more ridiculous plot lines and implausable situations to try and create intrigue ultimately fail if they are not heading towards something. People just got fed up, the audience figures tailed off and they were forced to end the series early. We've talked ab

I didn't come to Nottingham until late 67, but even then it seemed like there was a lot of activity and manufacturing in Beeston. Amazing at how it has all drifted away.

Beeston railway station on the Midland line looks very much as though it had a level crossing, but now has a bridge over the line. At one time there was also a freight terminal there (Freightliner ?), but now it's just an empty patch of ground.

I can't remember any programme doing a really thorough investigation into the various caves and tunnels around Nottingham. It would make fantastic viewing. Especially with all the new technology available now to show the intracacy and ingenuity of how they managed to build these things. It's also valuable from the point of view of cataloguing who built these things and why. On that Channel 5 programme one guy made a very important point about when things are covered up and forgotten. Within a generation nobody knows anything about them if they haven't been recorded for posterity. There's

Interesting programme about subterranean Britain on Channel 5 yesterday. They did a segment on 'Mortimer's Hole' - a passage carved out of the sandstone that goes quite a long way from below, right into the heart of Nottingham Castle. Recently they have found another tunnel that went from The Park into the Castle which they now think was probably not known about by the inhabitants at the time and so was probably the one they used to get in and kidnap Roger de Mortimer. I wish they'd made more of the story and that they used more of the imaging techniques to show the layout. There's a great

Blatter is like the Robert Mugabe of football. He just won't go. They'll have to drag him kicking and screaming from his shiny offices in Geneva. Unfortunately we will be left with the lagacy of the bought-and-paid-for World Cups in Russia and Qatar. How he thought he was ever going to get away with Qatar thing, I don't know. Just shows the arrogance of the man. And like VW and all the other organisations where executives can control large amounts of money, it's impossible that he didn't know anything about the corrupt goings-on.

That's good to hear that a 'celebrity-endorsed' restaurant can be both good quality and reasonably priced. There's quite a few stories about TV chef establishments being both expensive and not particularly good. I'm thinking of John Torode, Marco Pierre White and even Gordon Ramsay. I shied away from going to a place like '15' because it was basically just for trainees and I didn't fancy spending my harded-earned on something that might or might not be good.

He is an irritating pratt, but interesting to hear that the restaurant was good. Was it expensive ? I can't stand the bloke. He such a self-publicist. He was in 'Linda Barker' mode a few years ago when he endorsed almost every product ever made. I noticed at the time that there was even 'Jamie Oliver Compost' (!)

It's one of those urban myths that Roger Moore had a house on Cow Lane. As far as I know there was a guy called Roger Moore who live there, but not the master of eyebrow acting ! Does anyone remember a Spitting Image sketch about when Timothy Dalton took over the 007 role? They said that he'd been struck down with a stiffness and couldn't move - except for his eyebrow. He'd got RogerMortis. I used to see Joe Baker all the time when walking down Bramcote Lane to the shops (around '68).

I'm sorry to say that I didn't like Denis Healey. I thought he was arrogant and out-of-touch throughout most of his life. A lot of the decisions he made as chancellor were just plain wrong. And yes, he was a major player in the Bildeburg group - probably even one of its architects and you can't get more elitist than that organisation. It being the absolute epitome of 'politics is too important for democracy to get in the way'. Still, 98 was a good innings. R.I.P.

Great work on those aerial photographs Cliff ! Enjoyed those a lot. As a matter of interest, have you ever seen an aerial shot of Trent station ? I've been trying to find one for years to show the complicated track layout. The nearest I've come is in Geoffrey Kingscott's book. But 'Britain From Above' must have one - surely ?

Yep. Everything that is an earner. They'll then make a programme about it for Pick TV.

I've never smoked either, but I never preach to other people about what they should do. Not that I don't dislike it - and I entirely understand how damaging it is, but blanket bans tend to have unintended consequences. Most people know it's a bad habit and if they indulge then they should be considerate about how it affects others. Whilst I am delighted that smoking is banned in public places etc. I'm increasingly finding myself a passive smoker because of groups of people standing outside their place of work. The so-called 'Snout-casts'. My next-door neighbours smoke like chimneys and the