Brac's big moment...but don't blink!

This is a frame from the Morrison's ad that Brac is in. You will have to be quick to notice him when it's on as he's only visible for about a second and hidden behind the other collie. Sorry about the quality of this image but it is a photograph of my TV screen.

Taking to the Air

Now we have the aircraft back Paul is desperate to get up-to-speed again with flying it before we go on holiday in it at the end of the month. For this reason we spent the weekend going places in it. On Saturday we flew to Shoreham airport which is near to Brighton on the south coast. This is a charming airfield as the terminal building was an original 1920 Art Deco building with all it's original features. The airfield is also located so close to the town you can walk there and get straight down onto the beach.
Yesterday we flew to Old Sarum airfield which is next to Salisbury in wiltshire. We me his parents, sister, and niece Bethany there for lunch. Paul gave Bethany and his dad a joy flight while we were there. There is a large Iron Age hill fort next to the airfield that you fly right over on the approach. This was later turned into a Norman bailey and mote castle and when that fell into disuse the stone was taken to build a cathedral. You can see the ruins of both in this image. Apparently when this cathedral was built it was so exposed and cold that no one wanted to worship there. A decision was made to relocate the cathedral and so history books record that an archer fired an arrow from the mound and where it fell was where they erected the current cathedral. However, it seems extremely unlikely that any arrow could have ever made it that far. You can just about make out the spire of the current Salisbury cathedral in this photo and it's a very long way.

Major Headache

Now here is an even bigger reason for my tardyness in blogging. My PC is getting old and arthritic. OK so it's only 4 years old but in technology terms that's ancient especially when I need to run hungry software like Photoshop. Paul tried increasing the ram for me but it's already on maximum at 1GB. One thing that did seem to be slowing everything down is spurious software that seemed to be running for no reason. Then Abode bridge, a pert of Photoshop that manages files, failed. On contacting the support desk I was told it was basically my operating system that was in error and not their software. They provided me a fix that sure enough fixed Adobe bridge but messed up the rest of my operating system! Thanks guys. I finally came to the conclusion that the only way to go was to start from scratch. I didn't want to replace my PC just yet as after the aeroplane refit we are a little tight on available funds and when I do replace this PC I want to make sure it has enough spec to last me a little longer than 4 years. The only other solution was to reformat the hard drive or simple replace it with a new one as they are pretty cheap these days. That was done last Saturday and I am still trying to re-install all my software and configure my system. It took me 24 hours to get all the windows updates installed! I'm nearly finished now and hope to have it all done by tonight but I'm sure there will be things I go to use in a few weeks time that I've forgotten to re-install. One thing I have noticed though, far less space is being used up by all my system and program files than was before. Lets just hope it runs more efficiently now. :-)

Long weekend in Berlin

The weekend before last we had a trip to Berlin. It was a flying trip organised by a group called the Socata TB Users Group which is an internet based support group for owners of Socata TB aircraft. It had been planned a long time and we were all paid up for it but for one problem. Our aircraft had been booked in over the winter for a respray and refit and the work was taking longer than expected to get done. We should have had it back at least a month before this trip but as it ended up we didn't get it back until about 30 minutes before we were due to take-off as there were still last minute problems that needed fixing. It does, however, look beautiful and the flight to Berlin went like a dream. See below



There were 31 other aircraft on the trip and we all flew into Templehof airport which is right on the edge of the city and the location for the Berlin Airlift just after the war.
Berlin is a real phoenix of a place. Flattened mainly by the Brits during the war there are few original buildings standing but what they have they have restored beautifully along side the ultra modern buildings of the Chancellery and the Paul-Löbe-Haus.
We arrived on Saturday afternoon and left after lunch on Monday. We had a city tour on foot and another by boat. A group meal was arranged for us at the top of the Reichstag on the Sunday evening and walked back through the Brandenburg Gate to our hotel. Although we saw quite a bit there is plenty we didn't get to see and I would thoroughly recommend it for a city break.

Brac moves into video

One thing I forgot to tell you guys that I know you'll be interested in, Brac did another ad last Saturday. This time for Morrisons supermarket. It's a TV advert rather than a still one and if used will be shown on ITV in the next few weeks. I took this on my mobile as they were setting up. Brac's not in this shot as he is with me. The advert had a housewife pushing a shopping trolley through a farmers gate on her way to get some spring lamb. The farmer is leaning on the gate and Brac is sitting next to him pretending to be a sheep dog. For some of the shooting he has a girlfriend, a beautiful tri-colour border collie bitch but she got worried by the shooting and after a few takes wouldn't settle any more so they continued without her. If she is in the final ad will depend on which take they use. You can just see her in the centre of this image being held my Brac's agent Viv. If you look closely you can also see the guy playing the farmer holding the gate open for a woman pushing a shopping trolley. They wanted to see if the set worked before bringing the dogs in. I think you can see the image larger if you click on it.

Bloggers Catch 22

The big trouble with blogging is that when ever I have time to blog I never have anything much of interest to say. When ever I have plenty to tell you, I don't have the time to blog! It's the Bloggers catch 22. I've not been blogging lately because I've been so busy but now it's all old news. I'll tell you some snippets but I'll break them up into separate blogs because long blogs can be a strain to read. :-)I'll also space them out a bit so they won't appear all at once.