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Todays walk in splendid conditions, the first hot weather of the year was a good stretch. Totalling about 21 miles with one pint of shandy (Queens Head, Newton) and tea and cakes at The Orchard in Grantchester. Followed by a very quick dip in the river at NRC, I did our first mash using my ultra lightweight stove and kettle both by MSR whilst having our drink I also managed to get a good picture of a female sparrowhawk
I’ve put the walk up at Wikiloc and all todays photographs are on Flickr.
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Firstly a disclaimer – Mia is my eldest sons wife so this post might be biased a little
Mia does the most amazing bookbinding ever (this is NOT bookbinding as the normal person would imagine), in fact, it is more to do with sculpture as in 3D works of art. She produces the most original books, scrolls etc imaginable. They are exactly the type of objects that will become family heirlooms, so would be ideal as wedding, baby books for the sort of people who appreciate fine art and don’t mind spending the sort of money for a truly unique item. They would make an ideal special gift for that unique person in your life.
Mia has won numerous international exhibitions and had her work displayed at The British Library, London (2005 The Designer Bookbinders annual competition, 1st prize ) plus numerous other exhibitions
To see amazing examples of her work visit her new website. Leijonstedt – commission handmade books, custom-made anniversary gifts, wedding books and collector bookbindings
This is another example, the photo doesn’t really do it justice, of my sixtieth birthday present from Mia, Nick & Isla
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Oh dear whilst trying to increase the display speed of this site by eliminating all the external RSS calls to Friend Feed and Profilactic and then running a speed test
The test came up with:-
Guess I will be heading over to Elance to get a coder to tidy it up for me for a tenner.
Never realised that Gordon Brown and his cronies at 10, Downing Street cared so much about me that they want to follow my tweets. and by implication my blog posts too..
Update:-
I’m not alone! Currently they have 208 followers and they are following 140 but with only 12 tweets so far.
Some way before they catch up with Barack who is following 18,718 and has 19,155 followers with 90 updates.
Perhaps they should do a Jason and hand out a Mac Air if they get 20,000 followers
Yesterday, after 3 years of construction, the second phase of the Grand Arcade project in Cambridge opened. The first phase, John Lewis opened in November 2007, the final phase, Cambridge’s new central library is scheduled for October this year.
Emily and I were there, taking lots of pictures especially of the Ribbon Acrobat team.
The queue for the Apple store (The fifteenth in the UK) was by far and away the largest and they gave away around 1000 T shirts in the first two hours, the T shirts were wrapped in a way that only Apple could do – very impressive packaging. I very nearly bought The Air but as a retiree I have to watch those thousand pounds disappearing 
Apple as a retailer is simply amazing, the concept of every staff member carrying what is in effect a portable till so that they truly serve you with no additional queuing (even emailing you your receipt). Compare this to IKEA and John Lewis who force you to queue, just to pay for your object of desire.
Apple also offer a personal shopper scheme – where you get the undivided attention of an assistant for 1 hour to help you make your purchase. This coupled with the training evenings at the store is pretty awesome. In fact I think I will spend my money on buying some Apple shares!
The Grand Arcade seems to be a success for my (small) pension fund at USS (from when I worked at The Cavendish). At the opening I counted 18 of the 52 outlet spaces not let (35%). However, looking at this unlet area of 2225 m² against the total of the 52 store spaces available of 15,793m² it is only 15% by area unlet this reduces to 5% if you include the monster John Lewis store of 26,013m² (Although I notice that the John Lewis store could easily be removed from the main Grand Arcade if they so desired). So pretty remarkable for such a huge development in a provincial town of 120,000 folk.
Quentin and Chris have also done opening reviews.
I am trying to think what sort of retail shop I could open in the smallest unit available at 13m² any ideas out there?
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