Big J

There is a fairly new local Brewery in Livingston that I'm presently enjoying - they do a Cockleroy Black IPA and it's excellent. Drinking it at the moment

I must admit to liking Champion too, but was too ashamed to admit it! Almost any ale from the Borders Brewery is excellent too. They farm all their own ingredients. Wee Beastie is probably my favourite, which is odd as it's the lightest and weakest. Lovely!

Arbtalk should organise a public service announcement to warn Joe Blogs of the total rubbish on eBay. I suppose it's a danger in any field that you aren't an professional in, but it pains me to see folk paying over the odds by so much.

52cc 20" bar two stroke petrol chainsaw NEW next working day delivery | eBay A throw away saw for the price of a 550xp. What's especially depressing is the amount he's sold. The public need educating!

Ooh, lots of favourite ales! Here are some: * Samuel Smiths Oatmeal stout - probably my favourite. Lovely rich, sweet stout. So thick you need a knife and fork. * Samuel Smiths Taddy Porter - similar vein without the sweetness. * Orkney Brewery Dragonhead - crisp and deeply smokey porter. Punches well above it's 4% weight. * Midnight Sun - Williams Brothers. Spiced porter. * Just about any Imperial Stout. I generally just drink stouts, porters and strong ales from a bottle but am much more forgiving of IPAs and lighter ales on draught. Jonathan

I'm 28, but always liked classical. My grandmother taught piano and it's always been present. Really like punk (not 77 punk, but the stuff that followed. Much of it was written for the right reasons, and it's a great form of musical expression). I'd say you can bop away to classical - try this (Chopin's 'Butterfly' study): [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKeley78hM4]Chopin Etude Op 25 No.9 HQ - YouTube[/ame] Loved Offspring when I first got into punk, and then moved more into the UK scene but I'm years out of it now. Cracking song: [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oh2vO_FTEJc]Offspring smash - YouTube[/ame] Thing I really liked about Offspring is that they really just wrote music for the love it. They put their entire discography online for free, and gave a million dollars away by a lucky ticket in one of their albums. Top chaps.

I do respect singer/songerwriters in that regard, but if you are going to go to the effort of writing your own music, why not write something good? It's depressing that there isn't really much that is popular these days that has any music merit. Not to say that wonderful music isn't being written, only that Joe Blogs chooses to listen to Radio 1 and the same 3 chords/notes/oh baby baby's being repeated ad infinitum!

No! Just no! Like almost all popular music, ABBA are an acoustic abomination and written with infantile simplicity and obvious hooks. All the sophistication of Coronation Street! Chopin for the win!

It's traditionally 1/3 cost of land, 1/3 cost of construction and 1/3 profit for developers. This would mean around £850k, which I'm not saying is fair, but they would probably pay it. Land is too expensive in this country.

She already has two cats. The difficulty is that she was in hospital quite a lot with cancer 3 years ago when the cats were young, so they weren't well socialised. Consequently, they are rather independent and aloof. They seem to be in reasonable health. My aunt's dementia is early stage. Medium and long term memory is OK, but short term is poor. She tends to remember what she wants to remember. My mum is essentially her next of kin and does all the care work the carers won't (despite the fact that she is my mum's ex sister in law - parent's divorced, my dad and my aunt don't get on) and it's just more work for her (and she has a lot given my sister has serious mental health problems). I've found in increasingly of late with a variety of people - there are just some people that you cannot rationalise with. My aunt is regrettably one of them. I figure that she is going to be angry with my regardless - I might as well tell the truth. I would love to get her to the point where she was happy for the lovely life her dog was having. I'd even bring her down for visits, but I think that might be a struggle. I saw Ellie the retriever today at our friends and she is looking superb. Perfect weight, goes like the proverbial doo da off a shovel and spends half her life ourdoors playing in the snow, trying to dig our rabbits or lying in front of the fire. She lives in the house on the far bank:

It's my aunt to whom the dog belongs, but a fair point. My mother, whilst not a dog person, agrees with me!

Isle of Mull?

You'd not catch me paying myself £8 an hour for extraction! Not worth getting out of bed for!

Looks a touch shy of 6ft in diameter (say 5.5 at mid point). Hoppus measurement of 187 cubic foot, which would equate to a touch shy of 7 tonnes. Send it to Helmdon. It's 87 miles from Guildford. Hire a HIAB truck and operator for a day (£52.50 an hour plus VAT in these parts for an 8 wheeler that would lift that. They could take it up, wait a few hours for Steve to mill it (you'd need to book ahead to check he could do it at short notice) and bring the boards back. He's about £1.50 a cubic foot including VAT for milling, so you'd only be £800 out of pocket for nearly 200 cubic foot of very nice oak. Jonathan

At about £4 a cubic foot, £110 a stem roadside. I'm not a huge fan of dead elm, but if you catch it early enough it can be fine.

Good lord! What species are they?

That sounds like a bloody close call! Glad to hear that you came out unscathed. In the event of me slipping, the chain brake goes on reasonably instinctively. However for normal operation it does slow you down clicking it on and off constantly. It you're carrying the saw by the front handle, it's not possible to engage the throttle anyway. Jonathan

Haha! If only it were that simple - my father and his sister don't really get on. I'm in Edinburgh, my aunt in the midlands and my father in France! It's just compounding my feelings that most people that have dogs probably shouldn't. Even when she was well they were overfed, underwalked and subjected to cigarette smoke. She hasn't done anything malicious, but the dogs always had a crap life. To illustrate, I car walk our dog Katie quite a bit going to and from site and around the estate on the way home from work. She does a steady 20-30mph. Ellie could only do 7mph when she came to us - she was doing 15mph by Christmas and is fitter now. She went from walking 5 minutes and lying down to walking the Eildon Hills with us (around 4-500m ascent and a 2 hour walk). It just pains me to think of her going back to that smoke filled box.

Impossible to rationalise with her unfortunately. As well as the dementia, there is an element of mental health problems too. She just doesn't understand how poor a life her dogs have had. The local field where they have occasionally been walked is a dog dirt, litter strewn quagmire, and there is nothing else. Even if she gets a dog walker, which she says she will do but invariably won't, Ellie is still cooped up in the house for 23.5 hours a day, passively smoking (the previous dog died of lung cancer aged 10) and being fed constantly with toast, chocolate and anything else she can find. Apologies for the accidental swearing in the original post - complete oversight! Because the family that have her are retired, there is someone with her all the time. She's walked 2 hours a day, around an upland reservoir on which their house sits. She's never fed rubbish and is in cracking shape. Faking the dogs death it is then!

Posting to ask a bit of advice regarding a golden retriever. My aunt has always had GRs and has always done a fairly poor job of looking after them. The previous two were always very overweight and died young. My aunts health has been failing in the last few years, and she was very unwell by October last year, so we offered to look after her present retriever (a 7 year old called Ellie). When she came to us (my father brought her up from Derby to Edinburgh), she was vastly overweight, very very unfit (unable to walk more than 5 minutes without lying down) and not really trained. We put a lot of effort in, stripped 10kg off her (she started at 42kg) and she is now very fit but for a slightly weak hip. At Christmas, my aunt was really very unwell indeed, and we didn't expect her to last very long. My wife and I had just been through the trauma of losing our baby and we just needed to make life a bit easier, so we rehomed he with some good friends who lived completely rurally. They are both retired, but have a teenage son, and they are a mile down a farm track at the foot of the Pentland Hills. She has a better life there than she ever had in Derby (she was practically unwalked). Now the problem is that my aunt is little better and wants her back, but I can't bear to take what is a fit, healthy, happy dog away from the perfect home to put her back with my aunt, who just destroys the health of dogs she has. We left Ellie with her for 6 days over Christmas and she gained 2kg. I have also never seen her look so depressed. My aunt is unable to look after herself (4 carer calls a day, can't really walk, has early dementia and many many other health problems, as well as a heavy smoker) and has never been able to look after dogs, even when she was well. What do I do? I'm just stalling with my aunt in coming back to England, and I don't want to ask to take her back from a family that love her. I honestly didn't expect my aunt to still be alive now, and at the very least I would have hoped that she would be able to see that in her state, a large dog is unwise. Speaking to other people, the only thing that seems to be suggested is that I tell her the dog has died, but it would be an awful thing to do. If I return her to my aunt, I'm condemning the dog to an early death and a **** life, not to mention that my aunt had quite a bad fall as a result of having the dog back at Christmas. Help!

That is superb, thanks. Slightly higher standing price than I expected, but also high price at roadside. Jonathan

Hehe! Perhaps a little too small, but certainly under budget!

info at rstw.co.uk - thanks for that! Good thing is we've been doing hardwood thinning on the neighbouring estate for years now, so a 10 minute car journey away are 10s of hectares of woodlands we've thinned that I can show them. Call me an idiot, but even on tonnage rate I still cut scrub and prune where needed. I can't stand slash and bash cutters who just go in for the tonnage. I reckon you get more work being conscientious anyway. Jonathan

I'm in the process of trying to persuade one of the local estates to start managing their younger hardwood stands. They see them as a financial drain, and I know that they could make money from them. It's mostly 30-50 year old ash, sycamore, beech, oak and the like. Potentially a few beam grade logs from the oak, but very few. What would you be offering on the tonne, standing? I think that I can make a reasonable amount up to about £8-10 a tonne, beyond that the economics go out the window somewhat. Additionally, securing a stand of these thinnings means we can get a hardwood thinning workshop off the ground too

I only think that the Alstor is too expensive for what it is. I think £40k for a forwarder is not excessive given the potential income. I am pretty sure that the chap with the Alstor here gets paid around £9 a tonne. He pulls 40 odd tonne out a day on average, so doing the sums, it's not going to take too long to pay the machine back. I think £40k would be a good goal. Match the price, but improve the quality, capacity and versatility. The Alstor struggles with some of the larger logs we cut, and looking at what it leaves behind, you're left thinking that it could do with being just a touch beefier. I think that the main constraint with regards to size is that it fits on a 16ft tiltbed (or similar) trailer and can be towed behind a Landrover (or similar). Once it gets any bigger than that, the economy and appeal of it goes out the window. I won't pretend to have enough time to be able to operate a forwarder full time, but I am really rather interested in doing a couple of days a week and subcontracting out the other days. There is almost no one up here doing this kind of work. Jonathan