For thems that don’t know, Hago is a classical guitar orchestra based in, well Hampshire surprisingly. The Orchestra was formed by Derek Hasted in 1999 and will be celebrating its 100^th concert in June of this year. The Orchestra has raised a shedload of cash for both local and national charities and fully intend to continue in that vein.

Hago has performed in venues all over the South of England and play music which is as varied as the sizes of instruments they use; from Baroque to Spanish, The Beatles to Dvorak on four different sizes of guitar. There’s the tiny Alto, the baby of the family (but the most tricky to play!) the Prime (the ‘ordinary’ one we all know well) the Bass (bigger than the Prime and lower in pitch) and finally the Contra (which the Hago Director states is a little like a wardrobe in its size!) this has the lowest pitch of all the four.

So yes, all very interesting you say but so what? Well here’s where you come in. Hago are playing a once-only concert on 26^th May 2012 at All Saints Church, Milford-on-Sea. It’s on behalf of Naomi House and Jack’s Place and tickets are £8 in advance or £10 on the door. These can be purchased by calling 01962 672457 or email Nicole.denison@naomihouse.org.uk  Or send an SAE & cheques payable to The Wessex Children’s Hospice Trust to Nicole Denison, Naomi House fundraising office, Unit 3, Sun Valley Business Park, Winnall Close, Winchester, SO23 OLB.

If you haven’t heard about them, Naomi House and Jack’s Place are two children’s hospices based at Sutton Scotney in Hampshire. They provide support to children and young people with life-limiting conditions from all over the South of England. The two units mean that the hospices can provide care structured to the needs of both younger and older children as well as now also helping young adults (over 18’s) at the recently opened Jack’s Place.

The hospices provide a range of service from end of life care to respite care, bereavement services and family support. They also provide a hospice at home service. It costs £5 million to keep the hospices running each year; only 10% of these costs are paid using money given by the department of health which means a staggering £4.5million must be found through charitable work and donations.

So there you have it, a worthy cause and a good time. Unbeatable. If you need further convincing some of the music being played is as follows;

Plink Plank Plunk

Bransle de la Torche  (See Below)

Penny Lane

Elizabethan Serenade

Danza Cubana

plus more which you’ll only find out about if you go!

One lives in hope. If my tv had its own voice it would probably have said ‘I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that’. Funny how one always expects electronic goods of any sort to start channeling HAL when things go wrong. Blue or Yellow made no odds. Change channel, turn off, turn back on, message in black box. So I thought maybe it’s imminent and therefore necessary that I do something right now. So I Googled when the digital switchover was due putting in my postcode and noticed that my house name or number was also requested. A little strange, so I made use of the ‘Why do you need this?’ link only to be told that the results would be a lot more accurate if I input this detail.

Now I’m no expert on public transmitters, digital or otherwise, but I have the sneaking suspicion that, unless you live on a road the length of the M3 the number of your house isn’t going to make that much difference to which transmitter you are getting your signal from. This suspicion was born out when the results came back saying ‘The Rowridge transmitter in the Meridian TV region is your most likely transmitter.’ So much for accuracy.

Expecting the changeover date to be that night because of the insistence of my tv, I was a little surprised to see that it was in March 2012. A horrible thought then dawned on me, what if this was going to happen every time I changed channel or switched on until Spring next year? Fortunately it seemed that there was to be no repeat the following day, or the day after. One cannot help but have the sneaking suspicion that the black box may be appearing again before we are launched into the digital wonderland next March. One last little point to give us all the feeling this will all go fine and dandy is a note on the Digital UK website which says “You won’t see these messages if you already watching digital TV (e.g Sky TV, Freview or another) or if your aerial is pointing at another transmitter that will switch at a different time.” That worked then and nice to know they can spell ‘Freeview’. Details such as they are below.

It was announced earlier today that The Torch would travel to within ten miles of 90% of the population during its roughly 8000 mile journey. You have to wonder how they do it, I suspect dark arts, or at least Google Maps. Actually at times they seem to be the same thing. Wonder if Google will sponsor it. They could put a camera in The Torch and update a whole bunch of their spy camera Street View images at the same time. I’ve been expecting a knock on the door any time with them offering untold amounts of dosh for my insightful marketing ideas for a while now. Strange it hasn’t happened yet though…

Anyways, for more information than you probably care for on the subject, the Blessed Beeb have the dope on it at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15572381

But if you’re looking for info on whether it’s going to come down your road, don’t hold your breath. At least not unless you can hold it until ‘later in 2012′ which is when the detailed map comes out.

Please note-

Since we are due quite a lot of rain here on Saturday, it has been moved to Sunday at the Pennington Recreation Ground, Lodge Road, Pennington.

Details as follows;

Gates open 5pm Fireworks 6.30pm

Adults £4 Children (4 to 16) £2.00

Free Parking on Pennington Common

Judging the Guy 6.00pm

“Best Walking Guy” and “Best Guy in a Wheelbarrow”

Apparently they are not have a “Sweet Talking Guy” as that was a hit song from the sixties by the Chiffons. I don’t just throw these together you know. OK, I do, still you learnt some pop trivia you may not have known before.

For even more detail (of the fireworks, not the Chiffons) go to http://www.lymingtonrotary.org.uk/Fireworks.html

That’s it, nothing more to see, move along.

Fresh out of the box you are faced with a bit of a ‘so what’ moment. Unless you have somewhere to go immediately it’s not like you can give it much of a spin and standing outside turning around so you see the little car change direction pales after a while. Round about the time you start to become dizzy. Still I had some garden stuff in need of purchase so I asked the satnav to tell me how to get to the Everton Garden Centre. OK not a great test of it’s navigational skills, but we didn’t want to go any further. This was when we encountered problem number one. It loves you to put in a post code, but then it asks for a house number. Bit of a problem around these parts. Not having a house number is pretty common, and my recollection of post codes is that they can cover up to ten properties or something. Hardly a deal breaker, but something of a shortcoming to my eyes. I don’t know if we had spent more we would have got a bell or whistle which looked up house names for us, I suppose in the end it depends if the name is in its database.

Having successfully navigated the few miles to Everton and back, it got us within shouting distance, we decided on a greater challenge for the lady with no discernible accent. Incidentally is there some place in Middle England where the satnav people recruit from where the indigenous populace have no accent whatsoever? Or is there some Professor Higgins hidden away turning out electrically perfect Elizas? Anyways, we decided on a trip to the ‘local’ B&Q warehouse at Nursling to give our own Eliza a bit of a run out. As it happens it turned into a bit of a run around as we remembered in time that the New Forest Show had manifested in Brock that week and there’s one thing you shouldn’t do at that time and that is to drive along the A337 right past the show-ground. The primary reason being that you would become intimate with the back of the car in front as you (occasionally) edged closer to Lyndhurst. It gets a tad busy.

Having set the course for quickest route which would have been via the 337, we promptly turned in the completely opposite direction to head towards Beaulieu. I didn’t count the number of times Eliza said “recalculating”, but I think ‘multiple’ covers it. Strange thing is, you find yourself telling Eliza that actually you will not turn in the direction she is suggesting and what is she going to do about it. Or at least we did. Maybe that’s just us. However we had the immense benefit of not having to inform Eliza that we were a. In the UK and b. Wished our directions to be in English. We had been told by Yomping Buddy that the satnav in their (German) car had taken to believing it was in Dusseldorf and defaulted to German. As a result it had to be reset at the start of every journey. I had suggested that if it indicated she should drive across the Polish border it might be best to ignore the advice. Apparently it now behaves itself having been given a seeing to on the Great West Road recently. Just makes you think, would Columbus have ‘found’ America if he’d been using a satnav? Then again he was looking for the Far East, so maybe he was.

And so it turned out, kinda. A subtle side effect was that all the favourites that I had laboriously set up on each digital TV thingy so they all matched had been wiped so they had to be recreated from scratch. Now in the scheme of things hardly a disaster I grant you. No-one was injured, no ambulances had to be called and no animals were hurt in the process. However just as every designer thinks they have the best design, demonstrably better than anyone else, so it is that every digital TV appliance designer thinks they have the best way to organise your channels. The idea being that you can shuffle the less than useful channels to the nether regions of your list, only to be seen when you are looking for an obscure radio channel. Well my experience tells me most of them are wrong. Of course I could have paused to read the manual, but that would have sat uncomfortably with my carefully nurtured techie persona, and therefore was effectively a non-option. Still the sense of empowerment after I had got the channels in the order I wanted almost made it worth it.  At least I know how much time to set aside the next time I have to rescan.

Now if that sounds a tad jaundiced, it’s probably because it is. See all the digital channels are transmitted on an analogue channel around 33-34 I think, so when you rescan, that particular channel becomes off-limits to any other gizmo generating a modulated signal. Like a video recorder. Yes I know, but a lot of people still have video recorders because they haven’t broke yet and getting a hard disk or DVD recorder means unplumbing an awful lot of wires in my case. And teaching all other members of household how to use something somewhat different to what they are used to. It will happen, but best left until disaster strikes. Not to say a certain amount of market research hasn’t been done of course, you have to be prepared. So anyway all it looked good on main telly, digital signal looks OK, no significant losses of channels, so I turn the video on to set up a recording and the picture on the TV breaks up.

Now you may recall that when Five was first launched, everyone had to have their videos retuned so they could get the signal. Ours was. Don’t know if it was on a different channel in London to down here ‘cos we were living in London at the time, but it turns out it was placed smack dab in the middle of what is now the new digital channel. Once I had realised that it was a simple case of retuning the output of the video so the picture no longer broke up. And yes I did have to read the manual to do that. Since in common with most we now use the Scart input exclusively, I can probably turn the modulator off completely. But that means I’ll have to read the manual again, so no rush.