Craig Sawyers

Oh wow. One of my heroes, set on a cinder track at Iffley near Oxford, with pacemakers who were legendary runners themselves - Chris Chattaway and Chris Brasher. Brasher was the guy who founded the London Marathon, and after track running turned himself into a fell runner, both competitively and as a pacemaker. Bannister outlived both - Chattaway died in 2014 and Brasher in 2003. The Iffley Road track is still there, about 11 miles from here. It is now a composition track of course - the last cinder track that I ran on was 25 years ago, and that made me understand what a feat a sub 4m mile was on that surface. RIP Roger Bannister

Thanks all! Since we did not make it to the Peak District walking as a result of the Arctic invasion of our weather, Carole took me to the Hand and Flowers, a 2 Michelin star restaurant. It is so unpretentious - Tom Kerridge, the founder and head chef wanted essentially a pub atmosphere that sold superb food. First one is Lovage soup, croutons and smoked eel, second is celeriac soup. Then the Hand and Flowers signature - fish and chips (triple cooked chips/fries, pea puree and tartare sauce), and finally the thing that looks like Saturn is white chocolate shells filled with rhubarb, candied ginger and raspberry sorbet. I think there was some pieces of chocolate cake in there too. We had a good day!

In the (not so distant) future someone's offspring will say "My poor old 137 year old dad still has absolutely no idea how to connect the socket on his skull to access enhanced reality" Seriously, both mine are no longer here - but I absolutely guarantee that dad (gone 25 years) would have been absolutely clueless with computers and the internet - even though he was an engineer. And my mum, who passed 10 years ago, never ever worked out how to drive the video player we bought her (pre-DVD, clearly). But we'll all be clueless old farts in time

Happy birthday!

"Climate change - fake news, bad"

This is insane. Not only is it -10C and snowing, there is a storm coming in out of the Atlantic which, when the moist air hits the icy blast from Siberia will first give blizzard conditions, then at is warms, freezing rain - so a mini ice storm. Splendid. March 1st - what on earth is going on?

Great guy. Saw Swarb at the Nettlebed Folk Club http://www.nettlebedfolkclub.co.uk/index.html with Martin Carthy. Tiny place, and plenty opportunity to meet them in the bar for a chat. When you consider that the two of them were part of highly successful bands that filled major halls in the 70's - Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span - it was a real treat to see them (and others) in such a tiny place.

That's warm by comparison to a visit I made there in January in the late 80's. I'd spent a week on business in Israel, where it was really nice, 20C, shirt sleeve weather. I then flew to Helsinki, changing planes in Frankfurt where it was snowing. At Helsinki I knew I was in trouble when locals were going to lockers and pulling out all sorts of thermal protection gear - fur boots and hat, leggings, and thermal gauntlets. Stepped outside into -40C (the same number in F - ie -40F). Even the Fins were in shock at that temperature - far lower than it normally is. My nose hairs froze, and my feet did not feel cold - the soles just started to hurt. The taxi has 6mm of ice on the *inside* of the windows. Totally surreal. Our local marketer then took me to a sauna. So in a single day I went from +20C to -40C to +100C. A very strange day.

Tomorrow's weather where I live. That is temperature in celcius - but the kicker is 44mph winds. Yes we have a screwy units system. We measure distance in metric unless it is road signs in miles and wind speed which in miles per hour. We buy shots and wine in metric, but beer in pints. And we buy petrol/gas in liters but the cars read consumption in miles per gallon. Go figure. Anyway, it is set to be bloody cold tomorrow given windchill.

It's almost like Dave Swarbrick ("Swarb") who was one of the founders of Fairport Convention, and a folk fiddler who's style has been copied ever since. We saw him shortly before he died for the second time in 2016. He basically had smoked so much that he contracted emphysema, and ended up performing with an oxygen cylinder next to him and a mask from which he'd take relief from time to time. Anyway, in 1999 he was admitted to hospital in pretty poor shape, and The Daily Telegraph published his obituary. He subsequently recovered, and used to read out the obituary at concerts! The folk community then held benefit concerts called "Swarb-aid" and "Swarb-aid 2" to raise money for a double lung transplant, which went ahead in 2004. That bought him 12 more years, and continuing wall to wall concerts. So yes - Swarb died twice, and is one of the few people to have had two obituaries separated by 17 years.

What will ultimately screw us in our little island is failure of the North Atlantic saline heat pump. It is responsible for driving the gulf stream, which warms the waters around the UK. Now over "recent" geologic history it has failed in the past and triggered ice ages. The problem is that melting of the arctic ice is diluting the local saline concentration, with the risk that the pump fails. If it does (and measurements suggests it is only a matter of time) we will go down to the Winter temperature of areas on the same latitude - Moscow, Milwaukee and Sioux Falls.

Happy birthday!

We cancelled. It was just going to be too extreme to enjoy, and the 150 mile journey would have been a nightmare in the snow. We've re-booked for May, by which time all this Siberian nonsense should be long-gone.

So very Australian

Yes - it has gone from seas of mud to seas of frozen mud. It is hovering around freezing just now, but for the next couple of days looks like sub-zero, snow and a high wind - with windchill -20C, which is getting dangerous. Coming in from Siberia, allegedly. We're going to the Peak District on a long weekend walking on Friday, and hopefully by then it might have warmed up a bit. Or not. http://www.mwis.org.uk/english-welsh-forecast.asp?fa=PD&d=2018-02-28 Paricularly: "Frequent snow; risk lightning. Whiteout." and "-7C: exceptionally cold. Will feel as cold as minus 22C directly in the wind" and "Unusually low mountain temperatures, and increasingly upland easterly gales Wednesday to Friday, will result in severe, perhaps extreme wind chill."

This has been a very full few days, to put it mildly! Looking forward to a rest, frankly Today to see Julius Caesar at a new Theatre not far from Tower Bridge in London https://bridgetheatre.co.uk/whats-on/julius-caesar/ With a great cast including Ben Wishaw (Q in the latest Bond movies) as Brutus and David Morrissey as Mark Anthony. Absolutely stunning day out with first rate actors.

That is so freaky listening to Alec Guinness describing his sixth sense about Dean's demise. That must have been the original 911, where the front wheels left the ground at around 120mph. It was known as the widowmaker. Took several generations of 911 designs to tame the darned thing so it was no longer lethal.

Opera up Close production of The Magic Flute http://www.operaupclose.com/calendar . Massively superb and hilarious update of the Mozart classic.

Have a great day Dan!

Well, that was fascinating. There were people there who had indeterminate but massive wealth. Founders of hedge funds, international road and infrastructure construction, bankers and so forth. The Countess Wessex was both charming (she was in PR before she married Edward) and disarming. I had the whole "Your Royal Highness" thing worked out in my head, but she totally threw me by coming into an entrance behind me, and I was the first person she saw in a full room - put her hand out for a handshake and said "Hello - delighted you could come". You could almost hear me brain rattling around wondering what had just happened; I think I babbled something. Carole said "Yes - that is absolutely typical of her. She is completely not up herself, unlike Prince Charles who gets really upset if you don't follow protocol" The house was built in the 1880's for Queen Victoria's youngest son, who died in the 1940's, after which the house spend long periods unoccupied, and of course progressively degraded. Took several million to restore. We had dinner in The India Room, which is lined with carved paneling in the Indian style. Actually everyone was really good company. Had a chat with Susan Hampshire, who has aged really well (no facial work), and still has the glorious honey-like voice from TV and film. Impossible to think she's now 80. It was only afterwards that it was found that five of the ultra-wealthy had chipped in £25k each, and two substantially more. Sort of as loose change. One guy, a self made man from Mauritius, has pledged to become a philanthropic fund raiser for Brendoncare. Quite an evening!

Looking at the guest list, the only one I recognise is Susan Hampshire, the three time Emmy award winning actor. Her husband has dementia, hence her interest in Brendoncare.

This is actually for tomorrow. My wife runs https://www.brendoncare.org.uk/ as CEO. Their patron is HRH The Countess Wessex, wife of Prince Edward, youngest son of the Queen. So tomorrow we're off to Bagshot Park (their home) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagshot_Park as a fundraiser for my better half's latest project https://www.brendoncare.org.uk/care/our-care-homes/otterbourne-hill . Dinner for 42, with five great and good expected to fork out UKP150k. The ones that could not make it, chipped in UKP10k. Should be interesting! I'll let y'all know what it is like.

Although it is a massive pain in the ass, particularly with large boards, I stuff one part at a time. And then use a highlighter to cross it off on the BOM and component layout. It just saves so much grief trying to find the stuffing error, or lead you've not soldered. Even so I've stuffed PNP's instead of NPN's recently (pulled them out the wrong tube). Took an embarrassing length of time to find that error. Fortunately low power, so nothing fried - it just failed totally to work.

Happy birthday - and get well soon!

Currently 10% of global power generation is consumed by server farms, cloud computing, crypto-currency, data centres and so forth. Google and Amazon alone count for a good chunk of that. To control that nonsense new installations are located either in cool climates (Like Iceland!), near the sea (to limit air conditioned cooling), and current plans are to site under the sea (security and having lots of cooling *right there*).