Fish and chips!

About 18 months ago our regular fish and chip shop exchanged hands when the owner (George) sold it in order to relocate to Scarborough and go back into the world of IT. A great shame as he was a nice guy. We gave the new owners at try (once), but they were literally a walking disaster and the shop closed down before Christmas last year.

Fortunately we found another great F & C takeaway, but today we were shocked to see that that too had been sold and was under new (Asian) management. Last week the old, this week the new.

To make matters worse, we had to wait approximately 35 minutes as the idiot frying the fish fried them 4 or 5 at a time, despite having 8 or 9 people waiting (one potential customer even got bored and walked out). The end result was equally disappointing with soggy batter and a plate full of disappointment. It looks like we are back to square one again.

We went to a wedding reception on Saturday afternoon. The groom was a former boss of my wife and he and his “new” wife own an historic and very interesting house (a former inn) in Knaresborough. I am never a fan of “people gathering” situations, however this one was full of nice polite people, extremely well behaved children and a high degree of informality (other than the dress code). Behind the house (called the Royal Oak), and in a small courtyard, they have spent a considerable sum of money converting an old barn into two luxury holiday cottages. In this case “luxury” is more than apt and after a quick look around one of them I would probably be happy to live there permanently. Features include a Jacuzzi. For anyone interested I have found this page http://www.exploreknaresborough.co.uk/accommodation-in-knaresborough/the-stable-holiday-cottages/ about both the holiday cottages.

On a very different note, in my last post I showed a couple of photos that were not in fact photos at all, but rather screen-prints taken from the Google Earth.

For those who do not use Google-Earth, it is a free programme that allows you to select any location (using a search facility) and zoom down onto it using Google’s own satellite imagery (i.e. photos and not a pictorial map). It is all very impressive and it means that you can hone-in on just about anything anywhere.

A relatively recent addition to this program is the inclusion of lots of little camera icons on the roads and, if you click on one, you can have a 360 degree view of the area surrounding that camera position. All of this is done by having a Google camera car drive down just about every road that there is making continuous 360 degree photo records of everything in its path. This proves interesting and entertaining and you can take a look at a friend’s house (or your own), or check out directions, street scenes and the like. It does however open up a lot of concerns about security. Naturally google fade out features like car number plates and peoples faces, however, if you are a car thief it must be a very good way of quickly ascertaining who has the BMW’s and Merc’s in any particular area.