Craig Sawyers

I once carried out a citizen's arrest in Cambridge. My (then) young son had just had his tonsils out, and I had taken my lunch break to look for a cuddly toy for him. Guy sprints out of a jewellers just in front of me followed by two guys in suits - they guy had just grabbed a bunch of expensive stuff and run out. So I chased him at a safe distance - for me just a trot. I reckoned that if he stopped, I'd stop. If he pulled a knife I knew I could run away faster than he could chase. Eventually ran him to a standstill in one of the colleges, and the police took him away with "We've been trying to nail this SOB for months!". Got a modest reward from both the police and the jewellers, which was nice, and a slot in the Cambridge newspapers. You can get away with this sort of stunt in the UK because opportunist thiefs don't have guns. In fact no-one is allowed handguns in law here, so shooting crime is vanishingly small. Knife crime is more common, because any knife will do.

Bizzarely there is apparently no difference to the incidence of sports injuries by warming up or cooling down before a session (as compared with just getting straight down to it) of whatever your personal endorphin fix comes from. That, along with all sorts of other myth busting stuff comes from the book "Born to Run".

The most common way of saying it is "Do you fancy going out for a curry?", or "Do you fancy an Indian take-away". Most restaurants in the UK are either Pakistani or Bangladeshi - so Northern India. They have adapted true cuisine for Western taste, and invented a few new ones, but that is fine. We were on holiday earlier this year for two weeks in India, and true Indian food is different and equally delicious. Of course most Indians are vegetarians - mainly because they are Hindu, and because meat is rare and risky (food poinsoning). There are specialist vegetarian restaurants in places with really big Indian populations like Birmingham, and they are worth seeking out.

Pretty much. You are never more than a short walk or 5 minute drive from an indian restaurant. There are 1000 of them in London alone, and 8000 in the UK . That equates to one indian restaurant for every 7000 of the UK population - which is exceptionally high. The corresponding number of indian restaurants for for the US would 37,000. It is 7 times the number of McDonalds in the UK. We certainly eat indian food once a week or so, although we usually either cook it ourself or have one delivered - there are five restaurants in Abingdon (population 25,000) that deliver to your door. At the weekend you often have to book in order to get a table. I buy my ingredients from the Eastern and Continental store in Cowley, which is where the restaurants buy their stuff Shopping on Oxford's Cowley Road

The other main applications were in golf, where a "wood" used to have an LV head, and ship's propellor bearings. Because of its self-lubricating properties and complete imperviousness to continual immersion in salt water it was used extensively in the days of steam. Better wear properties than brass bearings. It was also use in woodwork for mallet heads because of its density. Of course, that meant that the relatively small global stock of this very slow growing wood is nearly depleted, meaning it is not easy to get hold of in decent sizes.

Looks like you've found a local supply at reasonable prices. You'll know if you've got the real mckoy with LV from the perfume. Ones that you have absolutely got to have in your basket are: Burmese Paudauk Cocobolo Macassar Ebony Honduran Rosewood Kingwood Olive Purpleheart Zebrawood Ziricote I keep a small stock of turnery blanks (which is what this supplier provides) for small parts - contrasting through wedged tenons, knobs, decorative inserts, bow tie inserts etc. The thing to absolutely watch about these things is that most are not as stable as LV - many are prone to splitting if you take them straight into a dry heated or air conditioned house. You have to slowly acclimatise them to the humidity in which they will finally be used - reckon on a year or more per inch of thickness.

Dunno. I've had my Selmer Prologue for around 20 years now. Cost

Ah - didn't look far enough back in the thread. Reeds at dawn....

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.