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.

Following on from that, I must have therefore unknowingly recently used the services of a member of the Techie Magic Circle. Now I don’t know for certain that there is such an august body, but a flawed use of logic suggests there has to be. Anyway, Wife wanted a iPod with all the trimmings on a budget, which could be an iPhone without a valid Sim card. As luck would have it, good friend had an iPhone which had a broken Home button, thus rendering it if not unusable, at least the most frustrating bit of tech he owned and had ditched it at upgrade time. If you have an iPhone, just consider how annoying it would be to have to turn it off and on every time you wanted to switch apps. Not nice.

Enter second friend on Facebook who had broken their iPhone screen and had it repaired in short time for reasonable amount of money i.e. not by Apple. Glowing recommendation for something called corePhone which having all lower case before the Phone bit of the name obviously had to be the real deal. Short email conversation and I was off to Whiteley to get said vagrant iPhone sorted for the very reasonable sum of two £20 promissory notes from the Bank of England. Fixed, tested and now returning home with regularity, that counts I think as a result. Should you require similar help, not just with iPhones, take a look at their website corePhone or call them on 07771 868346. I don’t get anything for this, I just happen to think Apple have a tendency to over-charge and corePhone works.

Having recently had an upgrade to a tad over 10Mbits broadband, I wanted more! So having seen BT’s new series of adverts for fibre-optic broadband I went in search of yet higher speeds. No dice. Lymington (01590) isn’t on the horizon yet, let alone in the centre of the great fibre-optic constellation. So what to do? Well if you are on the Lymington exchange and would like to see even faster than ‘up to 20Mbits’ then you need to vote. No, really. Regrettably few have yet, so get your skates on and go to The Race to Infinity. Yes I know it sounds like something from Toy Story, but if up to 40Mbits broadband appeals, you know what to do.

We had one of those easy walks books which seem to have been written by a not so retired SAS sergeant major, but it seemed straight forward enough. I have mentioned before to beware of books that use trees as landmarks, particularly if they are over a couple of years old. Well here’s another proviso. If the book doesn’t define what it considers to be a path, with maps drawn by what appears to be a five year old, don’t start on the walk. See the trouble with the country is that lots of other creatures are walking around when humans aren’t and are inclined to make their own paths and not let the SAS sergeant major know so he can ask his five year old to add it to the map. As a consequence of which, you may well find that you miss a path (or two) or count too many paths (or three), and end up somewhere you were neither expecting nor have much knowledge of.

In fact if you continue around a hill too far, it’s just about possible you might end up going in the wrong direction. Now I’m not saying that is what happened, but I am grateful that there was a straight road that we could orientate ourselves to from the five year olds map. And march along in the wrong direction. Of course if we had gone the right way we wouldn’t have met the very friendly elderly couple in their camper van parked up having a cup of tea. And wouldn’t have been offered a lift back to the car by them. Mind you we may well have managed to get back to the car ourselves in that time, but it’s nice to meet new people isn’t it? The view will have to wait for another day.

This year however, under the auspices of the newly formed Lymington & Pennington Christmas Lights Committee, we have indeed seen the light(s) and had a modicum of civic pride restored. Lym is always going to be at a disadvantage due to the fact we have a wide enough High Street to hold a substantial market in every Saturday. Handy for shopping, but a bit on the wide side for stringing lots of lights across without attracting significant cost and apparently also some risk. Now we have lights and decorated Christmas trees from the top of St Thomas’s Street all the way down with extra lights in the trees outside the Post Office. In truth the effect is best at the narrow St Thomas’s Street end, but very pretty none the less.

In contrast Lyndhurst High Street is one lane and narrow and whilst that doesn’t allow much in the way of a street market, it does make it look almost magical when it gets dark and the lights come on. In fact we normally go for a stroll down the high street sometime before Christmas just for the simple pleasure of the experience. The high life it may not be, but utterly charming it most certainly is. I recall being told once that there are two ways of missing something, either it goes by too fast or you go by too fast. This is merely our attempt to slow down a tad during a season which seems to go full-pelt and handbrake turns into Christmas Day. It’s doing things like this that maintain what passes for our sanity at this time of the year.