Doodlecat.com

Just caught up with this on John Manning's Blog. John was TGO's deputy editor (Deppity Dawg) and is a fine outdoors journalist.

John is giving a talk on his epic Pacific Crest Trail walk on March 26th in Stainforth - details below. And it's in the middle of stupendous walking country, so we'll be toddling along. Hope to see you there!

I received the little piece below in an email this morning. This is for every southerner who has been lured by the delights of living in the north :-)

THE DIARY OF A LONDONER LIVING IN SCOTLAND
 
'MY FIRST WINTER '
 
DEC 20th It's starting to snow. The first of the season and the first we've seen for years. The wife and I took out our hot toddies and sat on the porch watching the fluffy soft flakes drift gently down clinging to the trees and covering the ground. It's so beautiful and peaceful.
 
DEC 24th We awoke to a lovely blanket of crystal white glistening snow covering as far as the eye could see. What a fantastic sight, every tree and bush covered with a beautiful white mantle. I shovelled snow for the first time ever and loved it. I did both our driveway and the pavement. Later that day a snowplough came along and accidentally covered up our driveway with compacted snow from the street. The driver smiled and waved. I waved back and shovelled it away again. The children next door built a snowman with coal for eyes and a carrot for a nose, and had a snowball fight, a couple just missed me and hit the car so I threw a couple back and joined in their fun.
 
DEC 26th It snowed an additional 5 inches last night and the temperature dropped to around minus 8 degrees. Several branches on our trees and bushes snapped due to the weight of the snow. I shovelled our driveway again. Shortly afterwards the snowplough came by and did his trick again. Much of the snow is now a brownish - grey.
 
 JAN 1st Warmed up enough during the day to create some slush which soon became ice when the temperature dropped again. Bought  snow tyres for both our cars £500. Fell on my arse in the driveway. £100 to a physio but nothing was broken.
 
JAN 5th Still cold. Sold the wife's car and bought her a 4x4 to get  her to work. She slid into a wall and did considerable damage to the right wing - £200. Had another 8 inches of white shite last night.  Both vehicles are covered in salt and iced up slush - that bastard  snowplough came by twice today. Where's that bloody shovel.

JAN 9th More f####g snow. Not a tree or bush on our property that  hasn't been damaged. Power was off most of the night. Tried to keep from freezing to death with candles and a paraffin heater which  tipped over and nearly torched the house. I managed to put the flames out but suffered 2nd Degree burns on my hands. Lost all my eyebrows and eyelashes. Car hit a flipping deer on the way to casualty and was written off.

JAN 13th F****g bastard white shite just keeps on coming down. Have to put on every article of clothing just to go to the post box. The  little buggers next door ambushed me with snowballs on the way back - I'll shove that carrot so far up the little @#*#ks arse it'll take good surgeon 6 hours to find it. If I ever catch the arsehole that drives the snowplough I'll chew open his chest and rip out his heart with my teeth. I think the bastard hides around the corner and waits for me to finish shovelling and then he accelerates down the street
 like Michael 'f*****g' Schumacher and buries the f*****g driveway again.
 
 JAN 17th 16 more sodding inches of f****g snow and f*****g ice and f*****g sleet and god knows what other white shite fell last night. I am in court in 3 months time for assaulting the snowplough driver with an ice - pick. Can' t move my f******g toes. Haven't seen the sun for 5 weeks. Minus 20 and more f*****g snow forecast!!!
 
 F*** THIS, I'M MOVING BACK TO LONDON !!! 
(original author unknown)

In November Gordon Brown, our esteemed leader, announced that the Government wished to make some Ordnance Survey data and some products free to the end-user.

Following this announcement, in December last year a consultation document confirmed that the 1:50,000 ‘Landranger’ and 1:25,000 ‘Explorer’ maps would be included. The proposal is for these datasets to be released with few restrictions on re-use. Maybe none at all.

Why?

Well, the real objective has nothing at all to do with us, the outdoor enthusiasts. Our benefit is a welcome side effect. It is to make the mapping freely available to organisations that might use it for mapping crime statistics, house prices, recycling targets, flooding reports or any other of a multitude of uses.

Much of the OS revenue stream will remain, and may become more expensive to compensate. The proposal is for the withdrawal of the least detailed mapping, so the sort of large scale mapping for property registration, developers, builders, surveyors etc will remain as paid-for data. However, the so-called "low resolution" data happily includes the 1:50000 and the 1:25000 scales, which is about as detailed as we're ever likely to need outside a street map.

The digital mapping publishers must be quaking in their virtual boots, and one wonders how they will justify the cost of their software without the highly lucrative sales of OS licensed product. Paper map publishers, less so maybe. A Harveys map is still the bees knees.

Obviously, to preserve the excellent paper maps and fund future mapping, the OS will require a considerable subsidy from the government (i.e the taxpayers of this fair land) to compensate for the loss of revenue. That's you and me, but, wonderfully, everyone else and every business and banker in the land as well, so only pence per head.

It's not often that I find myself the recipient of government largesse - in fact most of my business life seems to have been spent funding folly after folly by our commercially inept politicos - so in this case I'm prepared to put my capitalist principles to one side. Bring it on!

So well done to Grough Route for being at the forefront of free digital mapping. Right now it's a bargain £1.50 per month for the whole of the UK at 1:50000 AND 1:25000. If the proposals for free access to this dataset go through, then it will be free.

What now for Anquet, Memory Map, Quo etc?

Meet our two new charges. We take them out for a brisk couple of miles twice a week as part of Miss W's voluntary work for the Cinnamon Trust.

Their owner is disabled, and one of the dogs is the helping hand around the house (opening and closing doors, bringing the milk, post and papers, emptying the washing machine into a basket - that sort of thing). Come to think of it I fulfil a similar role at home.

But obviously their owner can't take them out for as much exercise as they need, and that's where the Cinnamon Trust and Miss W come in. As a local volunteer, she takes them out twice a week, and I come along too. We're getting to know the dogs and their owner quite well, which is nice, and the dogs are always delighted when they see us as they know there is a walk in prospect. There is an explosion of barking, tail wagging and bouncing up and down as soon as we arrive. The 'help dog' often grabs the other's lead and tows him to the gate, as if to say, "Hey, let's go!"

So now we can do something worthwhile with our midweek walks, and in return we have all the fun of owning a dog, and none of the responsibility - perfick!

With almost 2 weeks of a continuous freeze & with one abandoned trip to the hills already. Due to the roads being impassable around the 2 relative hills we wanted to climb on the Tyrone Donegal border, we were keen to get out.