69. The promised vid!


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73. Stuck for something to read?

Try a William Boyd novel. They hook you from the start, have interesting and original plots and are not overly long. What's more there are lots of them, and relatively easy to find in second-hand bookshops. Perfect for a holiday read, if you are stuck on a difficult novel or just want something a bit different. His books sometimes feel like he has written them with the aid of a special book-kaleidoscope: twist it again, 10 bizarre plot-lines fall out and Boyd glues them together in 300 pages. Try one!
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79. Nepal - trekking...

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Just back from Nepal... Our Annapurna Base Camp trek was a good one - 10 days of almost perfect weather, no rain. Great views, smiling faces everywhere and pizza and apple pie every night if you wanted it. And we did! I did this trek 20 years ago. Some things have not changed at all; the subsistence agriculture is still very evident and makes a very interesting if humiliating (the size of their cabbages!) trekking panorama. Nepali livestock are trained to be precise... But, a lot has changed. Mobile phones are ubiquitous - including ABC itself. Even the odd laptop. Like many developing countries, they have bypassed landlines. And electricity is almost everywhere; with all its associated hoorays (lights, microwaves, even a hoover in one lodge) and boos (TVs). A man with a hoover...
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186. Nuts . . .

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It is still very early days for our orchard - this year our harvest will consist of 3 pears and a handful of hazelnuts. But the hazelnuts are good ones - cobs and filberts, from a Webb's Prize Cob and a White Filbert respectively. And, what's more, we have beaten the squirrels to them. The squirrels seem to have concentrated on the plum tree (original, not in our new orchard) and many of the surrounding sycamores have bits of plum sitting on their more horizontal branches.  Of course, as John Seymour memorably wrote, it is OK to lose crops to marauders such as squirrels and pheasants . . . as long as you eat them . The freezer now has a fair bit of (plum-fattened) squirrel-meat in it. 
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