Sorry Barrie, crass of me to go off topic, fingers crossed it is a mild dose.

TV last night showed "A fistful of dollars" and the rest of the spaghetti western trilogy coming on next two Fridays. Bliss! Please please let "Once upon a time in the West" come on as well. Can anything match the calibre of those actors and sound score? Gimmicky 007s are pale by comparison and don't get me started on comic book trash but I suppose they were the last gasp of westerns, for some reason no-one does them any more.

Well it beats racing up the M6 on a dark wet Christmas morning only to return next day sans champagne, cake and game pie like the last few years. I am looking forward to lockdown Christmas!

The Bete Noirs of my English A level were Henry James and T S Eliot; every now and then I have a go at T.S.E.’s poems but after a lifetime I still don’t get what the hell he is on about half the time - probably because he was a right show-off who kept lapsing into Greek! My tastes now are more lowbrow with Ian Rankin being favourite closely followed by C J Sansom and several others, I love getting lost in historical thrillers. Time to sow a few hints with Christmas coming!

David, they mostly had servants to do the menial chores we occupy our time with like cooking and cleaning, they didn’t have television to waste away hours in front of, and everything moved at a much more leisurely pace. Ergo these writings were time fillers from a time when people had much longer attention spans than today. Look at how much faster film and tv dramas are cut now, how unfeasibly fast American tv people talk, our quick grab of news in sound bites on our phones and snippets garnered on YouTube videos. We are so inured to this that works from earlier times seem slow and tedious.

It is a geodesic dome, or several domes linked together, the engineering for which was developed by the American Richard Buckminster Fuller whose mission was to create lightweight structures initially for the US navy but with the concept of creating climate controlled colonies and space applications. I was lucky enough as a student to attend a 2 hour lecture by him and it was riveting. link

One anecdote sticks in my mind when he took his students up to a mountain ridge before dawn. Watching the sun appear he told them to remember the sun is stationary and we are on a massive spaceship rotating in space, and to feel themselves literally moving towards the sun.

To my eternal shame I find Dickens impossible to read whereas I have consumed volumes of his contemporary Trollope. I have tried, I really have, but it is like hacking your way through forest undergrowth with so many asides and diversions the thread you are trying to follow keeps vanishing. I find myself inwardly shouting "for goodness sake get to the point!" Every year the family watches one of the several Christmas Carol videos and I have the book somewhere, so I will try and see if I can get past the first couple of pages.

Wiltshireborn, I think the lesson isn't about the strap but the wisdom of putting your camera in the footwell! Camera straps can get in the way sometimes and perhaps don't look cool, but I have found changing lenses much easier with one round my neck when not using a tripod.

He seems open to comments, if you suggest corrections I expect they will be appreciated.

I know there's a few out there and if you haven't yet discovered this YouTube channel it is worth a look: link
There is a lot of information about Pentax lenses including this video about Pentax primes: link.

Enjoy.