pogofish

I have one of those & I dont think they are much dearer than other makes now. Never felt the need to buy a top-up card yet.

A truly excellent camera, great image quality, excellent lens/zoom range & the low light/stabiliser & macro are splendid - I had a look at the version with the proper manual focus ring before I got the Fuji. At that time it was just outside my price range. Just to be awkward tho, I thought it might be a bit fragile but then I do have a bit of history with Panasonic. When I worked for a video production company a while back, we had lots of Panasonic kit & such was the rate at which bits broke, I was soon on first name terms with most of Panasonic's UK warehouse staff in my continual quest for near unobtainable spare parts! A quick google turns-up one place selling them at £189, again, at that price, an absolute bargan!

There is also a pedestrian tunnel across the Dee to Torry from North Esplanade East - You can still see the stair houses on each side, little domed granite structures by the dock on the City side & in the oil yard on Sinclair Road. It is in good condition & still open occasionally on Doors Days etc. Worth a look.

I don't know about hidden streets there because the medieval street plan is still pretty intact - take the lane from the Adelphi, round past the cinema to see some of it & I lived in a flat in that area for a while once (the source of a few more bonkers stories in itself! ) & didn't turn-up anything. I do remember the basements in Marischal St tho. When Telemech had its shop there, the record dept (yup it had a good one once!) was down in two of them - I bought my first Stranglers album there & there was a near legendary incident in another building where a group of workmen decided to deal with a strange obstruction that reduced the ceiling height in one cellar & were a tad surprised to discover where part of the Castlegate Sewers went! The Vent at Holburn Junction was for the original electricity cable tunnels, that ran from the old city power station at the foot of Crown St - which is being rebuilt into flats just now & a few months back, the old generator hall was visible again. I'd have to look the details-up but IIRC there is indeed a fairly extensive tunnel system to the main distribution points for the old tram network (so it could quite feasably go to or near the beach where some of the main tram-sheds were) & there are/were at least three other such vents serving other high voltage tunnels around the city centre - The system ran to several miles all-in & most of it is apparently still there. There is also a cracking sewer sump @40 feet under the Bedford Road St Machar Drive roundabut BTW.

Strictly no, none at all. The entire Dee & Don river systems are under a "protection order" that severely restricts fishing on them & any water that feeds into them so nearly all the old millponds & feeder streams that used to be free or free with permission are either closed to fishing or restricted access under the order. However, different riparian owners take differing approaches to operating the order so maybe if you ask about, you might be rewarded. The harbour has its own byelaw banning fishing in any part of it which is a pity as the old South Breakwater (that stump under the Torry Battery) used to be a cracking place to fish. The rest of it only seemed to produce shitey Sadies IME. For the Donmouth, it is more a case of them tolerating a few folk fishing for flatties rather than free for all. The foreshore rights are extensive & owned elsewhere too so unless you are fishing with a beachcaster & not using any tackle associated with game fishing, you are probably OK there. Otherwise, you can expect an unpleasant encounter with the police/water ballifs almost anywhere. The protection order legislation gives them considerably more power to stop, search, detain & confiscate tackle/vehicles/equipment etc than under almost any other circumstances & if they think you might be after salmon, they will use it. I share the same name & live just down the road from a former local ballif & untill he retired a while back, the number of times the police got it wrong & dragged some poor sod up to my door for identification was incredible! I should say now that the protection order legislation had sod-all to do with protection. Instead, it was more of a sop to riparian owners (usually big landowners/gentry types till recently) as compensation for the abolition of feu duties. Applied with care & responsability, it can be used for protection/conservation but in most cases, it only served to restrict access to waters & push permit prices up to stupid levels. I'd cite the difference in application between the Dee & Don orders as a prime example of this. Us mortals have more chance of getting to fish the don & catch a fish there, whilst the Dee remains the preserve of the fortunate but with serious ongoing problems about fish stocks. You can still fish for coarse fish (eg pike, grayling bream (?) & a few other species) under the order but most riparian owners deny they are there & electro-fish them out mercilessly if they find an active swim. So much for "protection" if it isn't a game species. Anyway, enough of the politics! There may still be a stretch of Feeder burn up from the Rob Roy Statue at Culter that is still free but the position is unclear, its last owners permitted locals to fish there for free & its current owner agreed to carry-on the tradition but freely admitted they didn't know the locals well enough to tell the difference. Loch of Skene is still accessable & reasonably cheap (Cowdray Estate office for permits) for a season ticket but toxic algae in the summer has been a problem for the last few years. Similarly, Aboyne Loch is an inexpensive coarse water (permits from camp site) Also folk using the estate campsite at Glentanar got to fish the stretch of the Tanar alongside the site for free when I was last up there. All you needed to do was ask the warden. Loch Kinnord is unclear - the estate seems to have stopped maintaining the fishing there but a permit can still be got from the PO & hotel at Dinnet but many just go ahead & fish without one. The dedicated small group of anglers who are trying to keep it an accessable water would rather you helped-out tho & are heartilly sick of the booze & bonfire variety of anglers who seem intent on ruining it for everyone else - Excellent perch & pike there, & no small amount of trout too! Other than that, its the dreaded fisheries for those who pay (often dearly) by the day. Some are quite good tho & you are almost garunteed a fish or two. Hill lochs are traditionally free but the more accessable are now on cheap permits & all are a fair walk/climb/cycle to get there & the fish are almost always small & hard to catch with very short periods where they fish well as the water temp remains low till well into the season. The "Fishing the fly" & "Wild Fishing Scotland" boards are full of helpful & experienced fishers who may be able to be more specific if you ask.

Yup, Georgian, sorry! IIRC, the bankrupcy stemmed directly from the construction of those new streets.

Its build quality is easily the best of the small Fujis & considerably better than its predecessors (the 5500 was truly kack). I have one, I don't give cameras an easy life & it has held-up well - as good as my Nikons IMO. Indeed, for a lot of my general stuff, it does the job just as well, less intrusively & the menu-navigation is a lot better thought-out than Nikon's too. Image quality is excellent & the RAW images are actually pretty good. Unless you are going for effect, there won't be much need to do a lot of software afterwork on them. About the only minor niggles are the lack of a flash connector, manual focus is a pig & the macro mode is not very macro but its low-light performance is excellent & unless you need the interchangability or high MP-count of a modern DSLR, this camera is an absolute steal at current prices. Batteries are standard AA-size. I use Nimh rechargables & usually carry 2 spare sets, you will get decent sized XD-cards a lot cheaper online - at Amazon in particular. Plenty of my snaps taken with one here - http://www.flickr.com/photos/pogofish/ Reduced to 1024x768. Images off the camera at standard JPEG resolution are 2592x1944, RAW is 3648x2736.

Well, after going to the tunnels, I spent last night, swaithed in thermals, up the Cairn O'Mount. It was a crystal clear night. Whilst there were a fair number of spectacular meteors to be seen, the hail of them didn't happen this year. There were particularly good ones @3am & a short burst of bright, long trailed ones @5am. Smaller meteors were steady on a minute by minute basis. My photos were not up to much, however, sunrise brought a different sight. The first light dusting of snow for this winter. All-in, along with some deer & two hunting owls, a good night.

Virtually the whole city centre is built-up on arches, to take it across the Denburn Valley & lift it out of the old medieval centre-route from the Castlegate to The Green, Windmill Brae, Justice Mill Lane & eventually the Hardgate. Centered on Union St, from a bit before Crown St to nearly the Castlegate, including Bridge St & Union Terace. The Arches that make-up Carnegies Brae & the Tunnels is one, whilst a bit of another is visible by the Steps to the Green from Virgin whilst another used to be Visible around Marischal St but may now be obscured. Many have housed stores & workshops over the years & in WW2, many were appointed as air-raid shelters - I understand a couple may still remain virtually untouched from this period. There will also be plenty of subsidiary arching to merge levels between all the old streets that link to the new ones. Try Googling the "Aberdeen New Streets Act" or checking-out some of city histories. It was Millennium Dome of its day, one of the biggest construction projects in Victorian Britain & the whole project bankrupted the City for years on end. Indeed, the initial concept was traffic-only, with wide & clear classically-appointed streets & elevated promenades, allowing easy movement between the various parts of the city centre. In order to get out of the mess, the council of the day (nothing really changes, does it?), who were dominated by builders & granite merchants, sanctioned the development of property along the arches to save their arses & give us the city centre we know today. I also remember a series of medeval tunnels & underground rooms were discovered in the area occupied by the old Co-op headquarters & the church beside it. Roughly in the space today bounded by the Blue Lamp, Aberdeen College, John Lewis & the Bon Accord Centre Car park. The area under the Academy & Marischal College also has an interesting series of basements so I'd assume there are plenty more. Also a long disused Cold-War emergency control centre accessable from a building off Albyn Place. The large ROC command bunker from the same period in Northfield was demolished some years ago. Yup, you may assume that I'm a bit of a troglodite!

The time I saw them, that album featured heavilly in their live show.

Although being out of town & in the darkest place possible is indeed the best, you should have no problem seeing many of the larger meteor trails over streetlights. I've watched them in town for the last couple of visible years but I'm planning to get well out this year. Even down at the Beach/Broad Hill (or anywhere on the coast) is an excellent spot as the meteors appear from over the sea (@3am, they will be coming from nearly the south/south-east). A few of us watched the big shower of 2001 there & got an excellent show. Which continued to be visible over a lovely sunrise on the Peterhead road. Before realising just how cold it had got & that our boots had frozen into the sand! - Chair blanket/sleeping bag & flask/hip-flask/carry-out are near vital optional extras! It is the Northern Lights that need the absolute minimum of light pollution - I'm signed-up on Aurorwatch too. Of course, any cloud will wipe-out the whole thing for us, as it did with the Orionids a few weeks back.

Just in case it is clear on Saturday night & anyone is wandering about at the dead of night in a half compus-mentus state. It is the Leonid Meteors on Saturday night/Sunday morning. Peak time for the UK will be @04:30 but they will be visible from @midnight to dawn. The predictions for this years shower are very promising indeed & if there is going to be a chance to see a big shower anywhere, this will be it. http://www.arm.ac.uk/leonid/2006/info2006.html http://mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/blobrana/news/leonids.html

They put-in a pretty good set at Belladrum as well this year.

They have indeed. However the first 6 months or so of riding are still the time when a new rider is most likely to have an accident, so watch-out. One bit of advice to remember is simply to assume that every other vehicle on the road is driven by a blind idiot, hell-bent on doing you harm & treat them accordingly. If there are any groups still running training schemes, it would be a good idea to sign-up on one, simply for the experience/advice value. Although being in a club can still give you much of that benifit. Any idea who the Scooter club that I saw regularly down at the beach this summer were? They had a nice selection of machines. Sunday afternoons seemed the best time to see them there.

Hmm, I wonder if I should try & repeat the incident where I rode my motorbike into the middle of a Wetties TV shoot? The director was not in the least amused, although the band were!

I don't think it is a bad idea to consider the issue of war/wars & the suffering of those involved. Poppies are a different matter however & few in my family have ever worn one - Mainly because past members who fought in all the major battles of the Great War & other conflicts since & suffered greatly from physical & psycological wounds, whilst dealing with the aftermath of the lost generations of other friends family & comrades. Were utterly against anything that perpetuated the reputation of Butcher Haig & his ilk. However, this in no way affected their rememberance nor their involvement with activities to help the old comrades etc. Nor did they cast any aspersions on those who chose to wear one.

Not strictly so. If you paid by credit card & it is still valid, they will use that. However, if it is no longer valid or someone else paid (had one hell of a time when my US-citizen cousin decided to take an unplanned side-trip when she was here last year & tried to book a flight!), you may be asked for further ID. Here is the list from their website: Which of course dosen't get round the issue that none of that lot is atually legal ID in the UK anyway! It is also worth remembering that Ryanair are notorious for insisting on passports only, even where it may well be illegal to do so. Easy Jet can be awkward as well but that seems to be more dependant on the attitudes on individual desks concerned. The current climate seems to let them get away with it whatever.

Hope you got a bloody good chain & possibly ground anchor for that? Any scoot that looks that good is going to be a right thief magnet, I'm afraid.

Ahh, what is it about squaddies & pyrotechnics?

Indeed. I've skipped big plasmas costing tens of thousands that were utterly unwatchable after @2 years. The cost of replacing the matrix was invariably a bit more than getting the latest model. If you are going to build-in, look, for something with a better screen life. As for projectors, forget it. Unless you wan't to put up with all the limitations needed to get an acceptable picture from them too. Or unless you don't actually care about what you are watching.

That has crossed my mind on a number of occasions - especially the one whom when approaching a 80-odd smash could only think about the silly word that could be made out of the numberplate of the car they were about to hit! Nope, my deckchair is unfolded!

It is a truly unfunny experience to drive down a motorway at speed with someone going "Oh. Look at the happy/cute/funny/sad face on that one!" as they drive along - Which is also something I'm subject to regualrly. Some drivers should also grow-up before they turn the key.

Yup, I was not far from the fence by the cafes. Nice but I could have done with some bigger blast-waves myself.

Thanks.

Any more info on hours etc? I'm not entirely happy with one of the places 'm falling into regularly & in many ways, the Tunnels is much better sited.