dme bemoaned the lack of updates on here yesterday, but there has been a good reason. In amongst all this DIY telecoms I’ve been doing I’ve also been working hard rearranging furniture and junk to make room for our new baby.

However, there are a couple of things to mention. First off, last Friday I had a new hood fitted to my Escort. The job was done by Soft Tops based in Croydon. Sadly the weather let us down badly but the fitter was quite “happy” to do the job in the covered section of Asda’s car park! And what an excellent job he’s done too, no leaks and it looks excellent.

On Sunday we all went to a couple of parties celebrating a friend’s 40th and then a wedding reception. The wedding reception was particularly interesting for me as the chap who got married, Jem Davis, is an ex-keyboard player of the group UFO and I know he knows the chaps from Iron Maiden of whom I’m a fan. Well to cut a long story short, Janick Gers of Iron Maiden was there! I’d have loved to have had a chat with him but a) I’m never sure when it comes to recognising “celebs”, and b) he’s just a regular guy, a dad in fact, just out with his family seeing friends, so why should I go and bother him?

On the Monday the band were supposed to be playing at Lemsford Fete but the fete was called off on police advice after torrential rain (the car park was in a field), but after speaking with the organisers we put on a free concert in the village church for an hour to the obvious delight of the villagers and organisers. So much so that they’ve booked us for next year! The concert went really well considering it was an improvised programme, all the soloists played really well and went down well and we nailed pieces that hadn’t had a massive amount of rehearsal, so all in all an excellent afternoon for the band.

Finally, some toys have started to arrive; namely, an Epson Stylus Photo R300 Inkjet Printer and an Alpine CDA-9812RR head-unit for the car. The printer is excellent, it came with some sample photograph paper so I printed out a photo from Euan’s birthday and left it out for Louise. When she saw it she thought it was a photo as you would get back from a lab. Not had chance to play with the Alpine yet as it needs to be installed and I’m not confident about doing it myself.