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Mark now uses:- Letterpress, Thermography, Full Colour Digital, Metallic Foil, Single colour Screen Printing, Signs, Vehicles and Posters. Folding, Creasing, Cutting, Perforating, Laminating, Perfect Binding, Stapling & Stitching. Printing on many materials; paper and card, glass, wood, metal, plastic, TyvekTM wristbands, and much more. Graham makes little wedding favour boxes.

Readers are not allowed to contact me to tell me abovt typos or spelling errors or, especially, incorrect dates. The post goes out daily at 4:30pm. Please don't ring between 3:30 and 4:30pm, as we are busy at that time 3rd February 2012 I had a photocopied letter today perporting to be from somebody to do with pensions to say that the Government have delayed my age of retiremnt to 66yrs. I know I am not the only one and I sincerely hope that nobody else got as near to dying of apoplexic anger as I did. My blood pressure soared so much that I was incapable of keeping my hands from shaking and I felt sick to my stomach. How dare they? I have paid for it, I am contracted to it and just because they say so, I am unlikely to live a year longer to justify it as I am fat, I smoke and cannot stop and I am diabetic. My life-span is limited. I consider it to be a breach of trust above all, theft, breach of contract and shear blinking thoughtless, unkind, mean and tawdry! I doubt it is many of those things in actuality or in law, but it surely feels that way to me. I know we are struggling to support the profligate life-style that is being foisted on us. Whilst I would not mind too much if they reduced my pension, to forceably remove the funds, the choice and the staus for a year, altogether, has driven me to dispair. Sad as it may be that it has taken me this long, I finally cannot see any way to trust my Government (any denomination) to run my life or my country. I have nothing more to say for now! 13th January 2012 Mark & I went to the council offices today. It seems that they would not give us consent to rebuild our little bungalow to 200 square meters (that's 20m x 10m) because it will only last 50-100 years, when coastal erosion is likely to destroy it. The other reason they gave is that they don't think straw build will be acceptable this close to the sea as it may be affected by wind and rain etc. Never mind! They are not desiress or able to stop us from extending 4m to the back and 4m to the side, which only makes a difference of 16 square meters, under Permissable Developement. Guess what we are most likely to do? I may need a shed as well mind, there is plent of room in the garden for that. We are not successful gardeners, anyway. We shall start by reparing the building we have and insulating it with straw. That will be OK with them. They won't even need us to apply building control for that. Fine! Then, as we want to extend, we will do so, with only building control to deal with. At the moment we are not inclined to do too much to improve the appearance, as we are quite comfortable with it as it is. Sorry neighbours, if we cannot have a decent house on the inside, the outside will have to wait till it needs doing to keep the inside dry. We'll deal with keeping ourselves warm first. We will also be changing it from three bedrooms to one. That will give us more space in the area we do have. It may not be such a good thing in terms of housing the rest of the world when we pop our cloggs, but that's the way the cookie crumbles. When we are gone, the garden shed (of straw) can be taken down and turned back into garden without a moment's trouble and our bedroom can be split into 2 and our study can become a bedroom again. 6th January 2012 Readers will remember that some time ago Mark made us our Bun-o-matic heat control unit for hot foiling. This evening he is making a 555 timer circuit to time the motor which pulls the foil through. In doing so he is saving us the other half of the £5000 it would cost to convert a Heidelberg Platen for foiling. In the mean time he has been pulling the foil through by hand as I am running the machine. As mentioned in and earlier post, we have just bought another platen, which Mark & Steve fetched from Wales last week. It arrived in 3 bits and was coated in a thick layer of ink. Mark & Steve have been cleaning it up ready to re-assemble and the idea was that we would use it mainly for printing, whilst the three Thompson automatic platens could stay on cutting and creasing. However, we have just taken on a little foiling job to which we will dedicate this new platen. It's odd how life bowls the odd strange co-incidence ball now and again! Meanwhile, orders for favour boxes and muffin boxes have recovered from the December slump and are back to normal. Woopie! 1st January 2012 Happy New Year Only one more day of interminable boredom to get through till the world begins to grind back to a semblance of reality! Wooppie! Not that Mark & I have been doing nothing all the holidays. Just that custom has been very quiet, so we have had to seek out our own entertainment. We have added a more recent Heidelberg 10 x 15 Platen to our collection. The steam engine turmed out to be a model really, allbeit a big one. So I am returning it with a polite note to say no thank you. The sort of problem was fine threads where they should have been course etc. As a model it is gorgeous. It just will not do any actual work, without blowing it's top. As it is, one of the cylinders nearly came away in transit because the bolts were too small and of too fine a thread. Not exactly victorian in design! Never mind Thanks to Steve for helping Mark collect the Heidelberg from Wales. Thanks to John for lending us his trailer to carry it on. 28th December 2011 Not only is Christmas a bore, but it's darned costly on the income. We have had 11 little packets going out today (one of which was replacing a packet lost in the post) worth about £3 each since close of play on the 24th December. It's a darned good thing we are not dependant on income from work. We self-deployed don't get holiday pay, but we are forced into submission by folk not buying when they are away from their employers PCs and not being paid to shop on-line whilst at work. Sad isn't it? I have had the unemployed on my mind for a week or several. Since The Government made changes to rent allowances, virtually forcing low-paid and unemployed, single people to live in shared accommodation. I would rather live on the streets! I have spent the odd night or 2 in such houses over my life and can tell my readers now that they'd have to watch out for me squatting in their hedgerows. I cannot think of anything less acceptable than sharing a home with virtual strangers! I have also noticed that as a proportion of the population, the unemployed have not much changed in my lifetime. A little up and a little down; nothing much! Why make a fuss about it as long as it's not changing much? If we are to have stable labour pices (and, by connection, stable commodity prices), then we must have some unemployment. 24th December 2011 The days have been getting longer by a couple of minutes a day since the 22nd. Brilliant eh? Egg production may increase, if all things were equal. 21st December 2011 Today is the 6th aniversary of our Civil Partnership. Happy aniversary to us both! As an aniversary prezzy we acquired ourselves a little steam engine. I also bought a quantity of tube with which to begin construction of a monotube boiler with which to steam the engine. No it's not very green (well, that depends on what we use in the way of fuel and what we drive with it - we have not decided either of the questions yet), but it's fun! The engine is a 2 cylinder double acting simple, made in much the same style as I used to use when I was in the business of building engines. The boiler is going to be completely different to those I used to construct twenty odd years ago. I used to employ the Yarrow design, which entailed the use of a steam drum at the top and two mud drums below, connected by two nests of 4 rows of steel boiler tube. I found that 48ft2 of heated area was about right for 2HP. This will be of roughly the same area, but be a pure monotube flash boiler. That way I can automate function with much greater ease and reduce risk to the extent that the law does not require annual inspections and insurance. I think that is a fair indication. In the case of steam powed kit I can well appreciate the need for inspection and insurance, but you all know me well enough to know that if I can, perfectly legally, avoid state interferance in my doings, I will. With this kind of steam generator, there is no risk to anybody except those in the immediate vicinity. since only Mark & I live here, it is hardly a public matter. such risk as there is is only around burning of the fingers on hot metal and such like. A goodly amount of insulation will deal with that. Politics so, them polititians really do feel quite strongly about the need to control planing, do they not? I wonder if they might be so uptight if they were living in poor conditions and wanted to build themselves a decent home to live in peaceably at a cost they could afford, in a timely fashion and at their own risk? Having said that, the term "sustainable" does seem to open us up to endless arguments between those legal parasites, at our expense. It will certainly be better to clarify that sort of thing to the extent of being clear. 10th December 2011 Last time I went to spain I was just beginning a 5 year apprentiship as a printer. I saw little boys treadling platens hand feeding from 6ft high stacks of paper and card, like little dervishes. They were much younger than I was at the time. The building in which they worked seemed to be of daub and wattle, painted white on the outsdie and soil coloured inside. The floor too was of uneven earth. The windows were tiny and high. I could see no sign of water or loos. How they worked in those conditions eluded me then, as it does now. Here in England I ws working automtic platenssin well lit, clean conditions and over 16 years old. I only worked a 10 hour day and had breaks and tea available to me as and when it was necessary. I saw the difference, at the time as being the difference between civilised society and uncivilised exploitation of low-cost child labour. I wonder how things are in spain now? England joined The Common Market around that time and standards were introduced over the next few decades, with a view to creating a free trade area, in which a level playing field was supposed to be created. Decent working conditions, to the same standards for all, and free movement of goods and services. The UK has found it very expensive to match the prices of European imports with our own goods, largely because every EU law passed on working standards and conditions seems to be gold plated here and completely ignored in much of the rest of Europe. There is clearly no suggestion of a level playing field and no chance of free trade because of it. Even in planning law, I know from fairly recent experience of my in-laws, who live in spain, that it's more a matter of how much to bribe the autorities to ignore standards and regulations, than it is of complying with those regulations. That's by no means the way of it here. We are almost compelled to pay so-called professionals to do things we really don't want done and to record what they have done for submission to the authorities. At least in our country the people we are having to pay, have to work for their money, not just keep quiet and sign the job off! What am I saying? Well! I think there are situations in which we are rather better off outside the EU but with so-called freedoms to trade. However, I am also sure that we will be expected to comply with thousands upon thousands of regulations, of which many full-member countries wouldn't dream of taking a blind bit of notice. I really don't call that a level playing field. However, I can see that the EU is never going to accept us saying no to paying their fees for membership fees and financial penalties. Why we don't just close The Chunnel and let them get on with it on their own, out there on the island of Europe, I really don't understand. If they don't want our goods and services and prefer to tax them on import or take a flat "membership" (bribe) fee, they can just do without them asfar as I am concerned. I sure as heck don't need to sell to Europe. Indeed, over the past year I have lost such a high proportion of goods, which I have exported there that I will not do so now. What they do with the goods I have sent them I have no idea. All I do know is that most of the orders we have sent to Ireland, spain, France etc. have ended up either replaced (under laws which hold me responsible for getting the flaming goods all the way to their door, when it is they who have chosen to buy from abroad with the attendant risks of long and unattended oversees journeys), at our expense, or unpaid for. Non! so long Europe! Have fun without us! Look! We only need foriegn currency if we don't do things for ourselves. If we make our own goods or supply our own services, we don't need their stuff. If we thnk we want their raw materials for our manufactuing industry we could always do without foreign raw materials and make our stuff out of something we do have. Let the nations with iron make iron things and the nations with copper or diamonds make things of copper or diamonds, as it were. Frankly, if we cannot feed everybody from our own farms, then perhaps we could try selling some of our surplace stuff and use the funds to buy food? If we have that many people here that we cannot feed them, then we have enough people to make more stuff than we need. We have, after all, been doing just that on mainland Britian, for centurues before the EU was even a twinkle in the eye of any meglamaiac based on the island of Europe. Let's face it, in the olden days, them Europeans from Rome thought we had so much naural rescourse here that they thought we should work for them. In the end, they came a cropper too! Why is it that Europeans are so dead fixed on creating Empires. We even tried the idea and stopped because it was so obviously wrong. Why doesn't Europe follow our lead? 9th December 2011 Foilink magazine is now printed and posted. Members of both Foilink and The Association of Hot Foil Printers should recieve their mag over the next few days. I am interested to see what feedback we gat as we have changed the format fairly dramatically. Our PM seems to have stood firm. I don't quite understand about this veto thing. I thought if one party use the veto, then all the others had to NOT do whatever it was that was suggested. In this case, our ot seems to have veto'd the project and the rest have simply announced that they are goign to do it anyway, without our lot. I really did not think that was how it was supposed to work. I wonder what will happen now? Fascinating! 1st December 2011 Pinch and a punch etc! We are busy with several little jobs aside from wedding favour boxes. We only have 13 sets of cracker snaps, hats and party poppers left out of 100. That's a surprise to me, with nearly 3 weeks to go to Christmas. We have had a TV licence and a TV for a few weeks now. It's OK thanks to 1 of the channels on Freeview. Most of the others are not up my street. They are mainly nonesense as far as I am conserned. Even the BBC seems to be aimed at people other than the like of me. I was a bit shocked to hear that, even China, is feeling the pinch today. It's obvious in hindesight, but I had not seen that coming. It's a matter of timng, you see. I had expected this financial disaster to come after the developing nations had developed to the stage that they would have had their own internal markets. still, with no-one to sell to... It is going to take me a while to work out what changes that makes to my predictions. I suspect some very big changes to my thinking. Are they all still living in the dark ages? If so, this is going to be interesting.

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