pgkevet

Most businesses would kill to be in a position of unlimited customers :-) I'm not going to retread old ground on this thread but it really does sound like a need to analyse the business model thoroughly.

In my profession there was/is a bad approach to selling. American driven theory that 80% of your sales comes from top 10/15% customers so target them. Personally my view is that I'd like to cultivate another 10% of new customers like those:001_smile: - instead of soaking the regulars and risking offending them. For a smaller business model like delivered logs I'd suggest whenever you do a delivery you drop home made fliers in the closest 10 houses..odds are that in a similar road you have similar customers - and you can offer a discount for group deliveries~: same profit/less aggro. That flier lists the new goodies too. Pics of the Swedish candles burning should sell them to the right right households... pick the posher roads for those to save colour inks. Other lateral thinking suggests safety gear, smoke alarms or even selling customer addresses to chimney sweeps to target or do a swap for passing their cards to your customers if they pass your cards to theirs.. Do I get a percentage?

Yes you can allow for those things .. every vehicle has an average running cost and that includes MOT's and MOT failure rates. But you're quite right..if you can buy in without any processing costs of your own and do a simple retail then do it - buy the bags and pay someone to take orders and deliver and do the whole thing via skype from the Caribbean:001_smile:

If you were a wholesale business with volume then you'd be content with 15%+ over your costs. If you're an average retailer then your generally happy with 50% profitability excluding premises costs. If you're a fashion retailer then you look at 100%-200% with high overheads of premises and time/sale. Don't forget to add your VAT to any retail. You should then look at it as how much you want to earn. Self employed one-man band with capital investments should be looking £50K plus to have a worthy lifestyle and a reserve. For low skill hired labour you're going to be looking to pay £20K fulltime? Again don't forget the NI and holiday pay, paternity leave and 'sick days' etc Your figures suggest £50/cube costs including overheads but no labour costs and 1.5hrs work? 50K income = near enough £25/hour with holiday pay etc= £87.50/cube+tax if I've read it right. Not so bad assuming you can shift the volume. Anyone you employ and pay less than £25 per hour is added profit for you and less competition AND is roughly in line with that 50% markup over costs. Tell me off for interfering as an outsider but I had to run a business too and getting it right saves sleepless nights:001_smile: The best way of adding profitability is add a consultancy... paid for your time without any buying-in of goods. The other way of adding profitability is to sell related small volume/high profit fashion items - fire irons/baskets/kettles/tripods etc and any extras will be extra cherries on the topping such as the guys here selling their swedish logs and firelighters... There may be other ways to look at any business.. find a part-timer - some old reliable retired bloke - to run the deliveries for you for cash-in-hand beer money (but watch the way you record that) to allow you to do the producing..

It's not a matter of being fair:001_smile: Any business really ought to work out its costings properly. What that business does with the results is another matter but you can work it out whether you have one employee or hundreds, whether you do one type of job or multitask within your profession. Even if you think it's a waste of time its a good exercise because it should show you where to tidy up your act. This isn't something you do for the taxman its something you do for yourself. If all you want to do is run around the woods chopping stuff and have enough money in the bank to eat then your business isn't a business its a hobby:001_smile: I used to do this breakdown exercise every year or two (should have done it more often) and I used to keep a track of individual employee gross AND net since some were capable of work that others couldn't do. If you keep proper accounts then charting it from year to year will quickly tell you where progressive waste is happening - simple example: phone call costs disproportionate to client numbers coming through the door and you know staff are nattering on the phone and losing business through clogged lines or missed calls instead of efficiently dealing with enquiries. If you're spending too long on the phone and not enough time producing then you need a better phone system or a secretary or educate your clients to order by email or answering machine. If your hourly earnings are worse than a hod-carrier then go get a job as a hod-carrier and chop wood in your spare time or rent your woods out for paint-balling:001_smile:

A small addition to TK's story that I've just remembered. During College final exams I was called in to be interrogated by Prof F for my equine oral section. As I strolled into the room I could see out of the window towards the Horse loose boxes and saw TK walking that way with his examiner. I grinned. Prof F asked me why I was smirking and I told him that it was always funny to watch TK come to grief. "What do you mean" Asked Prof F "Well TK is about to examine that horse and I've just spotted the dung heap over there" I replied. "I'll take a bet he ends up in it." "Why? What do you mean? What is he doing wrong?" Barked the Prof. "Nothing" I answered "He's approaching the horse properly, he's standing correctly to pick up that foot..." And right on cue out sailed TK head first into the dung heap. No-one could have known that horse had just learned to cow-kick that efficiently. Fate

Characters There were sixty-five students in my year at Vet School. One of our number was TK. He was one of the nicest, politest chaps you could wish to meet. He was short and slim and shy-looking but that façade hid a bright fellow, albeit one with an even odder association with Lady Luck than I have. Because we both had the same surname initial we ended up partnered together whenever we worked in pairs and my short tale of a pathology practical sums up “The Luck of TK” We were expected to wear clean white lab coats and canny student’s had an arrangement with the cleaners to do a cheap laundry and starch job for us for cash in hand That day’s exercise was some bacteriology which involved gram staining; simply staining a slide with Crystal or Gentian Violet, rinsing out any that doesn’t dye and counter staining with bright red Carbol Fuchsin. The first part was fine but when it came to the Carbol Fuchsin the stopper was jammed in the bottle and I couldn’t shift it. “I know a trick for that,” said T “It’s all in the way you tap the neck of the bottle on the bench.” And before I could argue he gave the bottle neck a gentle tap. Now, to be fair, it was a gentle tap. T was being careful. T was always careful. His run-ins with Lady Luck had taught him that.. The bottle exploded. It exploded hugely and the contents spumed skywards to the lab ceiling as one ball of bright red permanent stain. Just short of the ceiling the liquid fanned out a little into a classic mushroom cloud and then gravity took over. We stared up in horror. Time stood still for us, each with a leg forwards trying to run. The cloud gathered speed and stayed in its thick column of carmine terror as it slumped down to deluge us both. My lab coat was covered in the bright red dye but somehow it had managed to miss the rest of me. I looked across to tell T off. There he stood without a single mark on his lab coat. It was still starched and pure white but his face, hands, feet and hair were now stained the brightest crimson and would be for 2 weeks. TK was one of those guys whose metabolism couldn’t hold a drink. We found this out early in our college years when we took T out for a beer and the one pint was enough to have him staggering and throwing up and the next morning he still had a terrible hangover. For the college BBQ night he had taken control of serving the spit-roast hog. I never found out who was to blame but someone had spiked his half of shandy by only putting a quarter of lemonade in the glass. T was tipsy. T was asserting himself. Instead of being the mild mannered bespectacled Cark T he was now Super T , no spectacles and giving everyone strict orders about queuing for his servings. He was heard haranguing someone “Good God , Man, don’t you have any manners. You’re supposed to be British and form an orderly queue; not behave like some rude scum from uncivilised parts. Go to the back of the queue and learn to behave properly” Which isn’t the most diplomatic way of speaking to the Dean of the College; whether or not you have your spectacles. The Common Room in the Hall of Residence was at one end of a long corridor of student rooms. It was always a dangerous and exciting place because you never knew when someone was going to pull a prank. That might be a group carrying KM’s fiat 500 up the stairs or someone picking a lock to shove a goat in someone’s bedroom. That was only done once because we found goats eat everything from bedding to text books and it gets expensive. I was sitting there reading the paper the morning after the BBQ and every hour on the hour TK would open his door, groaning and stagger to the ablutions to throw up again. He had had a second half of strong shandy after his faux pas. His appearances slowed down after lunchtime and our attention was diverted by screams from LS’s room where the cleaning lady was swearing about his snakes having got loose again. They had a tendency to seek the warmth of his pillow case and she wasn’t too happy to have shaken them out. Well not all of them. The big Boa was spiraling up my leg at the time. But he was cute. So we really didn’t notice that TK had stopped making his toilet trips. In fact it was a couple of days before we wondered where he was and then any attempt to knock on his door was greeted with a “Go away”. It turned out he was sulking over the BBQ affair and had decided to learn Swahili and emigrate. We talked him out of emigrating but his Swahili was pretty good.

Can I ask if any of you guys really sit down to do a proper costing? buy-in price or tons/hectare over capital cost land/management/interest of loan Transport costs in/time/fuel/depreciation of vehicles Rental value of storage/work space Packaging costs/advertising/phones/time Delivery costs incl deprecations and fuels Banking costs/bad debts etc Total time:profit ex vat ..to work out what you really earn per hour?

A lancashire hotpot is a meat dish covered in potato slices and baked.. not going to be easy to do on a hotplate unless you make some sort of oven to sit on top first. That'd have to be a metal box with a shelf so the hot air circulates all around instead of direct bottom heat otherwise you're not going to get that nice potato crust on the top of the spud slices.. A good stew is under rated, though. Any stew or casserole is always best slow cooked. That might mean putting a stand-off under the pot to get the temp down if the plate is really hot OR another old fashioned trick is to get things thoroughly cooking and then put the pot in an insulated box (a simple cardboard box with loose balls of newspaper all around and over the pot lid) and leave it to do it's magic. There's a million and one recipes for stews - depends what you like. Personal favourite is good old beef based.. you know the score.. slice and pink up the onions in oil, toss the meat chunks in a bag of flour, seal them on the onion/oil then chuck in everything else, add some stock and water and seasoning and wait. Campbells game soup is a tasty stock. If you want to be creative for a dinner party then you can do fancy things like cut some radish into water lily shapes (they stay firm in a stew) and make up frankfurter squid (half a frank then cut down longways 3/4 times not quite to the round end).. they splay out and look wriggly.. and shove a slug of booze in towards the end...chunks of crusty bread to mop in it too... As students we could keep a stewpot going all term.. curry it the last fortnight then throw the pot away..impossible to clean by then :-) Whoever was home first used to switch on the gas, add new stuff and start it simmering. If it got too thin we chucked in some stock or rice or cornflour. If we saw a butchers shop closing we popped in for the cheap leftovers.. and we lurked around the markets for the bruised veggies going free..just cut the bruised bits off - in went the rest plus chickens from the college farm and rabbits and duck from the physiology labs....

This may be a crazy suggestion: How about a seesaw platform with a chute that goes to a frame opening. Attach bag to the frame, fill chute, tip seesaw, fills bag, detach bag, tip seesaw to start over?

Most rotties are sweet deep down...a shot of dexdomitor/torb and it'll roll right over but getting the tooth out might need an alveolar resection. In tree terms that'd be wrap it in canvas, dig round and cut roots on one side and drag the sucker out of the ground with a tractor:biggrin:

One of my favourite trees. I bought my folks one in 1970 and it's the only one I know that size that still has branches all the way down to the ground

lovely. superbly adapted creatures

Can I ask if there is there any fire retardant used on wooden candle holders?

Toby 1972 - 1984 Toby was the first dog that was truly my own. I had only been qualified a few months and had just started working in a new Practice running the branch surgery as a solo vet when Toby was brought in as a Road Accident stray. The Practice was very basic and almost no equipment. Indeed, back then, it was just a waiting room, consulting room that got used as the operating area and a small side room which became either an x-ray room, dark room, pharmacy, general store or anything else when needed. Harry Potter stole my idea for his Room of Requirements. Toby came in as a bit of a spare parts kit and under the tar, blood, mud and grit it was an exercise in guesswork what breed he might be. I patched him up and made myself a Pointer Cross. His left fore shoulder had simply been dislocated but the lower leg was fractured through the radius and ulna and he had a damaged rear leg too. We had a plumber in that day fitting a new sink and he didn’t mind me emptying his bag of tools and boiling up a load of them on the gas ring. They made good enough orthopaedic stuff as a one-off but were already going rusty when I handed them back. Toby was splinted with conduit tubing. He stayed as a patient for several weeks but no-one came forward to claim him. By then we had got attached to each other so I kept him. That dog caused me so much trouble. The first day I finally let him off a lead in the park he was sniffing and running around and then panicked that he had lost me. I was right behind him and he was too daft to look round. He ran all the way back to the clinic with me running after him shouting his name uselessly. Then he dashed over the road and got hit again. This time the damage was mostly just bruising but he lost one ear. A kind passer-by came in with it. She had found it further down the road and seemed disappointed when I explained that it was now the size of a dinner plate and had been squashed out and mashed by several car tyres. Toby liked my car. He always sat bolt upright on the passenger seat and watched through the front. If I put the indicators on then he leaned ready for the bend and if the lights turned red he braced himself for the brakes. If I pulled in for petrol he would sit staring forwards, ignoring the menials, like any well-chauffeured city nob. Folk he had been introduced to were allowed in the car but my Boss made the mistake of trying to borrow something from it and just stayed lucky by reflexes. If I left Toby in my flat then he would bark all day so he came to work and happily sat in the car. I had a nice string of clients he was used to that would take him out into the park with their dogs and then pop him back in my car afterwards. That dog had at least ten walks a day and if I had been called to a house visit then it was a matter of ringing around to find where Toby was having tea.. Toby and I developed a party piece. I’d hold a crisp between my teeth and he’d take a standing jump and neatly bite it off. We won many a pint in the pub like that and I’m glad he never missed. Fifty pounds of Pointer Cross leaping at your face and snapping his teeth could be ugly. I got the beer and Toby did the round of the tables begging his rewards – a good double act. I recall taking a lady friend to a riverside pub on a hot summer. We were in the pub gardens with dozens of other people. It was so crowded that most folk were sat on the grass or lying down sunning themselves. I offered M another round and she slipped Toby’s lead loop over an ankle while I battled to the bar. By the time I got the drinks M was laying down, eyes closed and half asleep. Toby was watching out for me and I couldn’t resist. I gave him a soft whistle and Toby, ankle, M, her exposed underwear and then her skirt covered head bounced across that pub garden at full enthusiastic dog speed. M didn’t see the funny side of that. Odd, really, because everyone else did.

Holidays and Me. As we all know holidays are a relaxing, pleasurable way of removing the stresses of our everyday and humdrum jobs – except for me. The following is a typical holiday experience. I went skiing. I had been skiing a few times and had progressed to the point where I knew I could get down any slope even if that meant a long side-slip down iced rocks. I could weave my way down through moguls higher than my own two meters. In other words it might not always be pretty. It might not always be elegant. But I could manage a workmanlike passage down any ski-able mountainside. I had gone alone. V hates snow. I may tell of some of our joint skiing holidays before this one but for the moment we shall gloss over her hysterical screaming and the abuse she hurls at me for putting her and snow together. I had gone alone. The best way to meet folk and have fun is to join a ski class. Usually my first week is in a ski class and I make enough pals to ski with on the second week without classes. The most notable experience of this class was the last day when the instructor took us off piste. He knew of an interesting gully and claimed the snow conditions were ideal and rare for this run. The gully was deep and narrow. The experience of hurling oneself down the first side of this, then the feeling as the skis flexed into a full ‘U’ shape at the bottom and the run up the far face? Incredible! The amount of flex and the sheer steepness of the second face left one skiing uphill with the ski tips stuck inside one’s own nostrils. Okay, that was a slight exaggeration but it paints an image and it was exhilarating. A couple of days later I was free-skiing and my pals of the day had finished early with another engagement. I stayed on the mountain and then popped into a hut for a last gluhwein and slice of cake and then made my way down with the last run of the day. Except.. Except that as the run passed near the off-piste track I decided that gully was too inviting to miss. So, leaving the last runners on the piste I took the side track to gully, stood at the start point and looked down that deep narrow ravine with anticipation of the bottom, the flexing and sheer upwards power – and went for it. I shot down the near slope perfectly. Weight forwards, knees bent and springy and picking up speed down to the bottom for that tight flex and… Slam! Straight into the other face of the gully. A cartoonist might have drawn a man-shape in the mountainside? I don’t know. I think I must have been unconscious for a while. Some time afterwards I became aware of a ringing sensation in my head and a nasty headache and started the checklist. Apart from the headache nothing else hurt but I was completely blind and deaf. I felt my legs and arms and nothing was obviously broken. I felt for the skis and released them and promptly fell over into deep snow. Taking stock I’m now lying in a deep gully, off-piste, where no patrol goes and it has to be some time after the last run and the lifts will have closed. And I’m blind and deaf. Blind and deaf are not the best ways of walking down a mountainside in the dark when no-one else is likely to see one and come to help. That and the risk of falling right off the mountain or even walking entirely the wrong way. I figured this could be a cold, long night. Thank heavens for lightweight gortex all-in-one ski-suits. I start to get organised for the long wait. I scoop snow around me to build a small cave wall and help keep the heat in and then start to shake the spare white stuff off my gear. I take the goggles off to wipe them and, bless me, I can see! Oh yes. In my groggy state I’d never realised that the goggles had become so packed with snow as I had slammed into the gully-side that they had filled up completely. A second experiment proved that my deafness was solved by digging ice out of both ears. Result! There was even a little dim daylight left as I made my way back to the hotel. Aren’t holidays fun?

A pleasure to meet you too..and always a pleasure to make a pratt of myself for charity:biggrin:

Thanks for the positives...but I did once punt a fictional book I wrote.. not a sniff. It's hard to break into that world unless you're famous first. Now i just jot the odd thing down for myself and anyone it might amuse.

You will figure out why this is called 'Hangover III - the prequel' We are going back in time again to the late 60's. It was Pat's stag party and a sophisticated affair for the era; which started with dinner at the Leander Club in Henley-on-Thames for the crew we all rowed in. I dutifully arrived in my 'student heap’, which was an Austin A30 of dubious reliability in a powder blue colour. Any student is immensely proud of their first car and I had nicknamed mine 'Nilgai' after the sacred blue cow of India. That was before anyone could take offence at such matters and was a cross between a term of endearment and the mix of prayer and cursing that accompanied starting, driving and the inevitable concerns regarding stopping at the end of any journey. But, yet again, I digress. This was winter and the Thames was running very high with lock gates open on a cold mid February night. We finished dinner with the usual banter, bad and practical jokes and settled down to the serious business of becoming totally inebriated. Such was our host's organisational abilities that we had a tin bath in the middle of the room should anyone's digestive system demand immediate purging and the drinking games commenced. These also followed sophisticated rules: FizzBuzz using prime numbers and numbers divisible by thirteen. Naturally we did not remain sober long. At some stage one participant suddenly made a bet of £20 for the first person across the river. Back then the £20 (or bluey in our slang) was almost 2 week's grant money. My rent at the time was £4.50 a week to give this perspective. It was a serious bet. M took up the challenge but on the way down to the riverside and boating raft I suddenly decided to take the challenge too. And running down the stairs stripped off to the underpants and beat M to the dive. I was a third of the way across the river when I became sober. I was halfway across the river when I realised I was going to have to swim darned hard against that current to have any chance of getting to the other side at a point I could climb out. And I was less that three-quarters across when the strength of the current ripped my remaining underwear away. I emerged naked, wet and very, very cold on the opposite embankment by the Angel hotel. It was around 2 am. Somewhat embarrassed at the thought of walking around the road bridge in nothing but skin, I saw an opportunity in a gentleman getting into his car. The fellow must have been of placid nature. He hardly blinked when I tapped him on the shoulder, said 'excuse me' and he turned around to see six feet eight inches of naked male student asking for a lift to the other side! His car was parked facing the river and perhaps he wasn’t as placid as I thought. He asked me to stay qui0te because he was doing a 'moonlight flit' from the hotel, engaged the wrong gear and drove his front wheels off the road! I was out of the car in a flash and sitting on the boot to counter-balance the teetering motor before he joined me. Remember the scene at the end of the Italian Job? We figured out how to keep the car balanced and open the boot for him to retrieve me a pair of shorts while I shouted across the river for my pals to come round and pull his car back onto the road. Somewhere in all the excitement my trousers, wallet and everything apart from a shirt had vanished - probably into the river. It was in borrowed shorts and shirt, wet hair and dripping river water from my legs that I denied all knowledge of anyone swimming the river to the enquiring policeman that someone called.. The best man had wisely brought spare trousers and my congenial colleagues had a whip round to help reimburse for the missing items, helped me hot-wire my own car and I drove back to my flat in North London. I had a reputation for never being late. The wedding reception was at 2pm in Windsor and I woke in plenty of time, bought a new car key and was getting myself ready when I remembered, with horror, that the directions to the reception had been in my wallet. This was in the days before cell phones and all the other guests would have been away from their flats and rooms by then. I had no way of contacting anyone and just had to give the reception a miss. I had ‘a liaison’ arranged for that evening with a young lady of ‘broadminded and very loose moral character’: S was a gorgeous hottie! My consolation for missing the wedding was an evening with her; a show, dinner and back to my place. Unknown to me things were happening elsewhere. Because of my reputation for never being late the rest of the party had been concerned at my ‘no show’ to the reception. They had sent two cars back down the M4 to see if I had broken down and then got themselves into a state wondering if I had become ill after my icy plunge. They rang my parents to see how I was. Naturally that panicked my folks. They were due to visit friends in Kent the next day and so they left early from Bedford. It’s now 7am on a Sunday morning and I am still fast asleep in that glow of satisfied release with arms and legs knotted around S when the doorbell rings with the dreaded sound of Parents’ voices. To make matters worse my Parents knew S’s family, did not know here divorce was imminent and certainly neither they nor her current fiancé would be too excited at the situation. Don’t scowl. This was the 60’s. I scrambled out of bed and made all the poor excuses. I was fine, the flat was a mess, I did not want to wake my flatmates, I was sorry for my brusqueness and so forth. My father left muttering about a son who lives in such a pigsty he can’t even offer his Dad a coffee. Dad’s parting words “You know, Son, I would have been a lot happier if you had been in bed with a girl.”

I dropped in..it's not far from me and would just like to say that this outsider was welcomed, found it interesting to walk about and chat with folk..ice cream and eats and didn't come last at the ax chucking.. Most amazing to me how casually easy it is to find kit to fit me at my size. It was also an opportunity to get my wife involved in thinking about our country future - she's the townie, I'm the ex country lad and I never expected to see her pick up a chainsaw and mutter 'perhaps I'd better learn to use one too' We got home and the farm contracts dropped through the door..just still no completion date

From a non-arb lurker: If the kids are really young then you might add Ashdown Forest to your list. Not so much for the trees but it's the genuine home of Winnie-the-Pooh and Pooh-sticks bridge is still there as well as a shop claiming to be Christopher Robin's sweetshop. And a +1 for Kew and Syon Leeds Castle - The Loveliest Castle in the World, Kent, England isn't far from Tonbridge as another family day out and also National Trust | Ightham Mote

Let's call this one: The vatman cometh. When I first bought my business one of the first things I did was, I suspect like many others, to sit down and work out how much I could fiddle. In my case I looked at it as high, medium and low risk fiddles and rejected the first two rapidly. I won't pretend that inherent honesty had as much to do with it as the fact that I never fancied jail. I would say that I'm probably far more honest than most folk but somehow we all view the tax system as something to beat. But the vat-man has scary powers and a nasty attitude. When I looked at low risk fiddles I decided that the small amount of virtually untraceable fiddle wasn't worth it. So I ran my business squeaky clean. The time for another vat inspection came due. I was putting all the stuff together for that and my bad sense of humour kicked in. So about three-quarters of the way down the pile I slipped in a deliberate mistake and made a note to that effect in a sealed envelope in my desk drawer. I then completely forgot about the vat-man's visit. My office is at home but HM's inspector naturally turned up at my Practice. One of my nurses came into the operating theatre to tell me. I asked her to show the man in since I was just carrying out a simple dog castration on a large yellow labrador. I offered the man my apologies, explained I couldn't exactly stop and that I had another long-winded job to do after this one. So he was given directions to my home around the corner and my wife was rung to expect him. It so happened that my next case had cancelled and I got home earlier than expected. All my past inspections had been a single visitor who plodded through books and computer records solo but this time I had three suits in my office. Mr Big was sitting in my comfy chair with the Times crossword while his juniors did the work. At least Penguin and the Riddler had their accomplices in stripey tops. These looked young, scrubbed and wearing their Burton's best. Mr Big accepted my coffee bribe but apparently henchmen aren't allowed refreshment. I left them to it and had my coffee downstairs. In due course a henchman was sent to get me and Mr Big informed me that the inspection had found no irregularities. "What? Do you realise I put a deliberate mistake in there and your guys haven't found it! I'll be kind and tell you it's more than halfway down." Mr Big looked peeved but made them start again. I handed him my envelope and left them to it while I had lunch. I was summoned again when they had found the error. Mr Big was still looking 'a bit miffed'. I suspect he'd missed his early afternoon tee slot. "OK Mr. K, That part of the inspection has concluded. I just have to ask you about any other income you have." I don't have any other income but I just couldn't resist 'hmm-ing' and 'aa-ing' a bit. And then my bad sense of humour kicked in. It does get me in trouble. "Come on Mr K. Any other income?" "I'm sorry but I'm not allowed to talk about it. It's confidential." I replied. "I am a senior member of Customs and Excise, Mr K. You must disclose." He sent the kiddies to wait in the car and pressed me further. I was on a roll with my nonsense and insisted on knowing if he was a signatory to the Official Secrets Act. That was when I thought I might have gone too far because he dragged a card from his wallet that meant Mr Big was really MR BIG. I had no choice but to go through the verification process. 'Gulp'. "Now Mr K. Tell me all about it." "Well." I hesitated "I'm employed by your department.." "If you were employed by my department I would know." He was losing his patience. "It is a special service I carry out for your department for retiring VAT inspectors" I carried on; burying myself in the muck. "They are obviously keeping the knowledge from you." "No more hesitation Mr K. What service for retiring officers?" "Well.. You saw what I was doing to that dog this morning.." He left red-faced, got into his car and said nothing to the juniors as he drove away.

I'm hardly an expert on this..only done a few carvings at various times. If it involves proximity to food then generally almond or walnut oils get used..but if you have a wife like mine who chucks anything into the dishwasher and want to avoid ring marks from hot cups etc..then if it was me I'd probably go with a 2-part clear epoxy for coasters.

Call this one: Job Done. Thinking back, my old man must have been a saint. He surely had the patience of one and I must have been a horrid kid to bring up. He always let me get right in the mire before he extricated me so that I would learn the lesson properly and sometimes he must have laughing inside as he saw the progress. When I was around eleven or twelve years old we moved to the village and behind the house and it's large garden is some eighty acres of landfill gone wild. That field belonged to a family friend who had sold Dad the plot he built our house on and I had permission to mess about as much as I wanted to. Carte Blanche for a kid like me was heaven. The first summer I co-opted the other three boys in the village with my master plan. We were going to build a raft and sail down the river. The river was only three quarters of a mile away at it closest and we would build the raft in the front garden and drag it down. So we started felling trees with a hatchet. There was a large stand of tall willow with foot diameter trunks and we painstakingly chopped a load of them down, cut them into twenty foot lengths and dragged them home. They were then lashed together into an amazing raft. I'd been reading stories about Kontikki and my keen labour force and I assembled our craft with intention to sail down the river to the sea and away. That meant a substantial thing with a cabin on top. My old man must have been laughing inside. He let us get on with it as this vessel was constructed on the driveway. It kept us occupied for a few weeks of the summer holidays until we were done. It was only then that he pointed out quite how much this thing must weight and happily helped us fix a suitable tow-rope to it and demonstrated that our combined strength including his car hitched to it and it wasn't going anywhere! We couldn't even lever one end up on rollers. I was gutted. I brooded for a couple of days before coming up with Plan B. This involved the gang and myself carrying out a detailed survey before we were ready to start. Dad did let us begin work before he vetoed Plan B and to be fair he vetoed it mostly on the grounds that my proposed 'canal to the river and float the raft down' was going to cross three gardens, half a mile of farmers fields and perhaps more significantly the main village road, electrical conduits and gas main... The next summer I decided to be practical and build a canoe. Dad was all for this and even took me down to the woodyard and negotiated a price for the timber. All I had to do was earn half the money and he'd stump up the rest. I mowed lawns and did odd jobs for weeks to earn my half and Dad kept his word. My first canoe was a fourteen footer that I built in the attic. We had to get the timber up there through the window at one end because the timbers were just too long to go through the loft hatch. I worked up there for many weeks before the thing was finished and my supportive Dad was ready with his Plan B if we couldn't get it out of the hatch. It did just make it but he explained he had been game to take off some tiles if necessary and take it out through the roof. The gang and I played with canoe one for the rest of the summer but it was only a single seater. By the summer after I decided it was too small and sold it for enough to make canoe two..a much larger two-seater model. This time I built it in my bedroom, on the diagonal, and slept on the floor. Once again Dad helped where necessary but mostly let me get on with it. It was only when it was finished that this thick kid realised the door was on the other diagonal! Once again Dad to the rescue. He had worked out that angling it floor to ceiling and ripping the coving away and hanging my sister from the middle just bowed the thing enough to pull it round. Canoe two got launched. I had grandiose plans for a river camping trip. Yes, I'd been reading 'three men in a boat' that year. My best friend was keen and my old man used his influence to persuade his parents. A test day was arranged and best friend and I took canoe two to the river and set off. There was a severe gale that day and as we rounded a bend where the river ran in a deep cutting the wind caught us and we went over. We grabbed onto the boat and swam it ashore, found all our stuff and trudged back over the fields carrying the canoe home to check and mend it. My best friends parents wouldn't let him come with me after that even though my Dad did his best to argue that OK, we had turned over but we had sorted ourselves out, come to no harm apart from getting wet and we had got ourselves home. Dad was happier still to let us go but best friends parents wouldn't budge. Plan B. Dad and I had a great trip down the river.

Fair enough..my expertise is mostly to do with removing testicles:lol: