Alan Hammond

If the water is deeper than your rod, as it is on two of the club waters that I fish, then just tie on a sliding knot that will pass through the rod rings but act as a stop for the float or alternatively use a Polaris type float.

Personaly I have always thought that poles are too efficient. Like using a machine gun as opposed to a rifle to hunt with. There is something unsporting about it that I just do not like. But that is just my own opinion and I would in no way criticise the scaffolding fraternity among anglers if that is the tool that they choose to catch fish with.

He who laughs last laughs loudest. Number one son has just announce today that for passport and citizineship reasons he is to get married at the end of August. Unfortunately his girlfriend is Canadian and because of our horrendous immigration laws which allow, and I make no apologies for this, any sort of undesirable mindless threat to our society to enter the country without question but deny the same rights to honest inteligent, a degree in law from a top Canadian university, people he has to get married in Canada. The trip to his wedding will cost me a couple of thousand plus. I will consider it cheap. I will however have an even more bitter attitude to every asian and other damn immigrant who whinges on about their human rights in this country. So please no "my best friend is an asian tree hugger" replies to this.

I think that there is a whole lot of confusion between Duckweed and Canadian pond weed. Quite frankly I do not know the difference between the two. When I was up at the garden centre a couple of weeks ago the lad there, who claimed to have a pond of his own with the same stuff in it, called it Canadian pond weed. But I have also heard it called Duck weed as well, among the politer names used for it. Oddly I have a similar though slightly smaller plant in my aquarium and take out two to three four inch net fulls every week and I am running that tank over filtered and over oxgenated at thirty degrees celsius. I tolerate it in the aquarium because the hassle of taking it out during the weekly water change is far outweighed in my opinion by the good that it does at getting rid of nitrates etc.

I see that Zidane still won the Golden Ball despite his sending off.

The fish death could be from any one of a dozen causes including plain old age. At three feet deep your pond should not suffer to much from the sun. Just keep an eye on the pond for any more deaths or signs of fish looking distressed. The plant on the surface is known by various names but commonly Canadian pond weed. It is a thorough going damn nuisance and virtualy imposible to get rid of. I know I have it in my own pond courtesy of a local garden centre who sold it as Fairy moss. I would advise netting as much out as you can once a week or so. It will grow back but in doing so it will take a lot of nitrate and other chemicals out of the water. Other than plants the only way that I can think of to oxygenate the water without an outside electricity supply is by putting in one of the solar powered fountains that are advertised in the papers now and again. I am afraid that I have no idea how effective they are as I have never seen one in use.

With two sons I am all in favour of traditional weddings. The kind where the brides father pays for everything.

Ronaldo was out of order, Rooney was a pillock but the blame has to stop at the F.A. They should never have allowed Erickson to take an England team to a world cup final knowing that at the end of it all he would be out of a job and still be hated by the English fans even if he won it. So why should he have cared about the result? The only good thing is that it has not done his future employment chances any good. Ronaldo will never ever be allowed to play in England again and Erickson will never ever manage a premiership team. Justice done. Now all we have to do is get rid of the current F.A. and that Swiss dictator Blatter both of whom make even my knowledge of football look encyclopedic.

Stand corrected. It has been a long day, I was fishing at four o clock this morning. Mind seeing as to how I was at the W.A.C.A.C. water at Brenkley I would have been better off staying in bed. The more so as I had to follow a five mile diversion to get there.

The rotting leaves will be adding nitrate to the water which you definitely do not want. If you can I would get rid of them. There are several products on the market that will help to break them down safely. I would also consider a fountain of some sort to disturb the waters surface and thereby add aeration. You do not need anything fancy, in my own pond I just let the water spurt up from an open pipe connected to the fountain outlet on the pump. It actualy looks more like a natural spring than a fountain and does not clog up every time I turn my back.

France to give the Portugese the biggest howking of the cup so far. Germany to beat France in the final after a damn good match.

I do not know if it is just me but I never did find Monty Python funny. Stupid yes, different yes, but never funny and John Cleese has got to be the least funny person ever to grace our television screens. He could only ever act the role of a maniac as has been proven since Python. Bit boring really after a couple of charachters which is probably why david Jason has proven to be the most sucessful of all of them.

I am not particularly fond of the French but lets not forget that during the Falklands war Maggie Thatcher reckoned that they were the best ally we had. They supplied us with the codes to stop the Exocet missiles that they had sold to the Argentinians thus saving countless British lives and possibly giving us a war winning advantage. The other thing that we can be thankful to the French for are Peugeot cars. They make everything else on the road including the late but not lamented Rover look so reliable in comparison.

Yeh but at £16 for a realy good pair of polaroids, including free next day delivery, their prices are definitely not rusty. The site is worth checking out I can promise you.

Thanks but I have just managed to find the site. It is in fact called The Rusty Fish. So my ancient brain is not as bad as I thought it was getting.

Can anybody help me out? I bought a pair of polaroids about three months ago from a web based firm. The glasses are excellent and were very cheap. Now I want to buy another pair but for the life of me I cannot remember the exact name of the firm and all attempts at Google and Ask have proved negative. The firm had an odd name along the lines of The Tin Fish. Any help would be appreciated as their products really are good value and the service was excellent.

Idiots on mini motor bikes I have just nearly wiped one out. I was reversing out of my drive and he was below the window level of a car parked nearby. God knows how I missed him. Oh and those so called drivers who choose to demostrate their skills by taking twenty minutes to reverse into a parking slot in multi story carparks thus holding up every body else. If they had any skill at all they would know that you drive into narrow spaces, parking slot and reverse into wide spaces, the aisles between the slots.

Picked this forecast site up from the Times. Looks good. www.netweather.tv

Personaly I do not even understand the programe at all. The longest I have ever been able to watch any of it is about two minutes. There is obviously something in it but whatever it is escapes me. Possibly there is a touch of the Kings new clothes about it.

This happened to a friend of my wifes a couple of years ago. There is a long straight stretch of dual carriageway from Newcastle to the Coast. When you reach North Shields there is a large roundabout. The road is split into three direction lanes about two hundred yards before you get to it. Inevitably you always get the nerd who is too impatient to wait in the correct lane and jumps from one to the other to save themselves all of two seconds. This particular nerd was jumping between lanes causing other drivers to brake, and or take avoiding action. He was generaly causing a danger to everybody else on the road. My wifes friend was particularly badly chopped up by him and as you do vented her feelings by giving him a blast on the horn. The response was inevitable, the nerd turned around in his seat gave the V sign and mouthed the usual insults. Unfortunately in doing so he was not watching the road and was a lot closer to the roundabout than he realised. It is rather a large planted roundabout and then had a tall lamp post in the middle. The last my wifes friend saw of nerd he was in the middle of the roundabout with the lamppost firmly implanted in the front of his car. As there were already several people stopping to see if he was still alive and call the ambulance etc. she decided not to hang around under the circumstances.

My wife and I are part owners of my sons shop and are responsible for insuring the bricks and mortar. Without the stock or public liability which he pays himself it comes to around about that, or possibly a bit less I cannot remember exactly off hand, for a single storey, terraced building. Anything to do with commercial property is double the cost of domestic as far as I can see.

I do not know whether I am missing something somewhere but looking at that item the impression I get is that someone has so far bid against themselves for an Ebook. The bidding is now up to over £500 which is totaly ludicrous. I can only assume that whoever is bidding thinks that they are bidding on the boat that is ilustrated at the head of the item. To make matters worse various hardcopy editions of the type of book that this bloke is flogging are available from several web sources for about a fiver a time. I can not prove it but I would not mind betting that he has got hold of a couple of different versions of it copied them onto a computer and is now flogging them off as E Books at a vast profit.

It could be caused by one of several things, fungus, bacteria or flukes. Any half decent tropical fish shop will be able to sell you a medicine to add to the water that may cure it. Don`t expect any miracles though as fish diseases are notoriously difficult to diagnose accurately and often even harder to treat.

I think that there are certain legal nastys that would need a lot of looking into before you went ahead with the lottery. I seem to recall some years ago somebody had the same idea in relation to a house that they could not sell but the whole thing fell through once the authorities got wind of it. Pity realy as it seems to be a good way of getting rid of property that wont otherwise sell.

I am member of two clubs in the NorthEast and I admit that I do not and will not attend meetings of either of them. There are two reasons for this; 1) I am a non smoker and refuse to sit in a room for two hours when I cannot see the other side of it for cigarette smoke. 2) The one and only time that I got involved in the clubs politics was enough to put me off ever having anything to do with meetings and commitees for the rest of my life. I did contribute to one of the clubs for a couple of years by being a water watcher and going out two or three times a week checking club cards and licences. But for varying reasons including club politics and the rising cost of petrol I no longer do that. Both clubs are extremely good value for money and my total annual membership costs less than half a dozen trips to the Angel of the North.