Steve: Takk is going well - Paul has it on at the moment. Possibly a bit too accessible for you Tim :) Actually it reminds me in places of Cocteau Twins with female incomprehensible singing.

Played Blast by Centrozoon last night - excellent. Trying UNN today in the walkman, pretty impressive so far.

Found a Conrad Schnitzler on eBay which I'm watching closely.
 

 nick: oohh, accessible..sounds like I might like it then.

Steve I meant to say that I have been thinking about the carbon-neutralness of fires since you were here, and so have been making a conscious effort to burn a rubbish rather than chuck it or drive it to the recycling. There's a lot of cardboard and so on that can be put in the fire, not to mention financial papers etc.. Did you look into having a fire at all?

I've not been out cycling for a while but will have to do so before the Luton weekend otherwise I'm going to be in big trouble. I had an eye test the other day and apart from needing new (varifocal) glasses, he said I needed to get my cholesterol checked, so increasing fitness level is on the agenda.

Incidentally Tim, how come specsavers are so cheap? Lens prices there were about £60, but all other shops were about £150. And I can't buy from Specsavers because they still do french connection stuff. When we asked in another optician, they said specsavers were cheap because they used low quality lenses. But it seems a popular strategy: specsavers were full of people and the other shops were almost empty.
 

 Steve: Yes well the Luton weekend is starting to look a bit dodgy as we have a major release due for the Monday after. Will let you know as soon as I do. I may have to work this weekend at least.

On the cholestrol front I would've thought that you had a pretty fat-free diet but then there's hereditary considerations I suppose.

I'm still very keen to get a fire but it's had to be put down the priority list as we've booked in for the drive to be done. Paul is saying that it's bad for the environment and we should leave it as is. He's probably right with all of that asphalt and then there's the water run-off into the drains...

I thought I heard that FC were going to stop or at least reduce the use of that offensive abbreviation. Yes, from a BBC news article last December:

"But after a slump in sales this year, French Connection scaled back the use of FCUK, while fashion industry analysts claimed the joke was past its sell-by date."
 

 Tim: Sterling effort on the DiN front Steve, cheers.

Takk, yes, not quite what I expected, but still not bad. Nick, as it happens I spotted a cheap copy, I'll bung it in the post. No, it's not my one that I'm ditching :-)

Opticians, I don't know why the others are more expensive (and I didn't know they still were). Maybe it's just a market niche thing, perhaps the others are just not really aiming to compete on price. When Speccys started up they were competing against little opticians who'd have a load of staff and 5 customers a day, easy to undercut if you can get a shedload of customers in.

Finally, is it time to start pencilling in a different weekend date, just in case?
 

 nick: more on environment-friendliness in today's guardian. Perhaps you could install one of these before putting your drive in Steve
 

 Tim: Nearly had me, but I soon realised it's a spoof ;-)