GB has retired after many years of professional service - he now spends much of his time holidaying e.g. cross country skying and the like not laying on beaches! REgards

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Me too I find it hard to believe Graham said something he should not. I wonder if HE typed the above message out of devilment? Why is there so many blank lines before the message and I thought the mods were just removing the whole thing now? But this could be just the way my mind works. Own up Graham, was it you ? If not what was it? Trust nothing anyone tells you and only 50% of what is written down.

Score It's flattering to read that I've been missed and, to misquote Oscar Wilde, I suppose it's better to be missed than not missed. Forum regulars may recall the motto "Aspiring to brevity" in some of my postings last year; Well, it could be argued that not posting anything is the purest and infinite form of brevity! As bob youel indicated earlier, I became quasi-retired last year and have become increasingly busy with various other pursuits to the detriment or benefit (take your pick!) of the forum. I'm somewhat slow at typing, especially on a laptop keyboard on a dining table. This causes more errors and thus adds time to that needed for composing and proof-reading my responses. If I quote information or references, time needs to be spent on checking them - it's a near-incurable trait stemming from years of having to observe legal and technical precision while composing numerous work-related reports, including prosecution reports during my time with HSE. Thus, I've changed from being a regular poster to an irregular one. My activities increasingly include researching some aspects of industrial archaeology such as old stone and slate quarries. I can now agree with another enthusiast who started a presentation several years ago with a warning that research can be highly addictive. It's rather like a banned class A drug/narcotic but fortunately is legal and not detrimental to health. Unearthing one piece of information often opens up new avenues for investigation. On the subject of missing forum regulars, there don't seem to have been any postings by Clairel since mid-March. Therefore, if you're reading this Clairel, I hope you're okay and that you'll be back before long with your particular brand of interesting and forthright postings. p.s. Believe it or not, I applied last Autumn to join a correspondence course in digression. However, I withdrew after being told that I would learn very little from the course and that some of my forum postings were used by the course tutors as good examples of digression! Funny old world ! :-)