I'm told it's perfectly acceptable between consenting adults...

Though I haven't swung with anyone since I was a kid!

A little while ago Ed asked me if I'd do him a small favour and take a couple of images of Capel Pentwyn in the Forest of Dean; he'd heard it has a terrace that has the most panoramic views.

Sod's Law I suppose, or maybe just the time of year, but I've been up there twice and each time the view over the valley has been obscured.

As the weather is deteriorating now I doubt I’ll get anything better this year, so here is Capel Pentwyn at Penalt.

And this is the panoramic view from the terrace...

Sorry about the mist Ed.

...of having been forced offline for a couple of days is that I've had a chance to organinse some of the images I've been taking recently.

I mentioned to my mate Spicy last week that Autumn wasn't really over here just yet and to prove it here's some woodland you might find interesting.

First of all I’d like to say thanks to everyone who PM’d or emailed me for your concern; I’m happy to report that I’m absolutely fine thanks. So why haven’t I been about? Well...

For some reason best known to them, Tiscali decided to kill my Internet on Friday. I waited a while to see if the net would come back, but no. In the end I rang Customer Services, which just happens to be a call-centre on the sub-continent... pretty good for Europe’s largest Internet service to farm their call centre out to India...

Now let me say right up front I have no problem with race/religion/whatever and am NOT prejudiced in any way. Nor do I mean to sound derogatory when talking about the operatives I spoke to, but the fact remains that in two cases their grasp of the English language was considerably less than adequate... at least in my humble opinion.

So anyway I spoke to some 12 year-old in Calcutta and of course there was nothing wrong with the Internet at their end... yeah, right!

The service was still down on Saturday so I rang again and spoke to a different 12 year-old in Mumbai... we went through all the on-screen questions for a second time... end result? There’s nothing wrong their end... yeah, right!

Anyway after several increasingly frustrating calls to Customer Services and conversations with operatives in Delhi, Jodhpur or various other locations, I eventually gave up yesterday morning and decided I’d wait until office hours today when I figured I could speak to someone in the UK.

Bear in mind of course these calls are all charged at premium rate and last a minimum of 20 minutes... the longest was well over an hour!

Low and behold my connection was restored late last evening (my router records these events, so I have the exact time)... of course nothing had changed at my end, but I’m willing to bet when I complain to Customer Services today there won’t have been an outage problem... yeah, right!

On a more positive note, everything seems to be working wonderfully well this morning and I no longer feel as though I’m a social outcast so I’ll be bothering you all with my mumblings and rumblings once more.