I listened to a really good dramatisation of this on the radio a while ago (probably BBC I think) - it worked very well in that form.

He was a stone mason so I am assuming he worked on the boring stone parts and not on the more dramatic sections everybody knows!

Special to me because my great-grandfather helped to build it.

We are in a 'firework control zone' here from today until 9th November, partly because we live near the Zoo and they have been concerned about some of their animals and have put pressure on the city council. Our cats never seem very bothered by fireworks but we once had a dog who got very scared.

I used to use a really simple recipe with cottage cheese instead of cheese sauce. I think the noodles were the kind you didn't have to pre-cook. (I do even less actual cooking now!)

I can never resist these, no matter how preposterous they are.

We get a lot of our electricty from wind turbines now and I believe there might even be a surplus sometimes.

The frogs are particularly good!

The crunch comes when you have to do it as a matter of survival.

He must have put a huge amount of pressure on them to get this far, and unfortunately he seems to be the only one in that position just now - with luck there will be some better qualified people around to take it from here.

Must read some more of those!

Some great posts on Threads about Portland.

I think I prefer the word 'garden' in a title rather than the name of an individual flower - it seems to give more scope somehow.

A belated thought - our IT dept at work liked Acers (and I tbink I've had one for home too) but maybe that's also not a brand you can get hold of.

The Salisbury poisonings should have been a wake-up call.