jameshurrell.co.uk

On my internet travels I recently stumbled across a webcam from Svalbard right up in the far Arctic north, between mainland Norway and the North Pole (it is Norwegian territory). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard for more information.

I was immediately struck by the stark beauty of the place and by the perpetual daylight. Not sure how I’d cope though with perpetual night time! I contacted the owner of the webcam, Svein Nordahl, and asked if it would be OK to link directly to his webcam images. He very kindly assured me this would be no problem.

So here we are, two images live from Svein’s house looking north towards the North Pole. I’ve linked the images directly, so each time you open this blog post, they should update (Svalbard is GMT+1).

You can get the full size images here, which really show the landscape at its best! Svein’s main homepage can be found at: http://www.svein-nordahl.com/ - take a look. Thanks for sharing your webcam Svein!

So, you make an offer on a house, have it accepted, but then discover it’s been underpinned sometime in its past. What does that mean then? Is it in imminent danger of collapse? Is the ground going to open up beneath our feet? Is the gable wall going to fall down in the night? Are we never going to be able to re-sell the house if we buy it? Can we get buildings and contents insurance on it?

So many questions, very few answers it seems! Our view - maybe it’s twisted - is that you take a chance on any house you buy. Despite having lots of expensive surveys, noone is ever going to be able to tell you that the house is NEVER going to fall down, or that an eight lane motorway is NEVER going to be built through the back garden. At least this house has already had a problem and it’s been put right - you could buy a house two doors down with a similar undiscovered potential problem and then have to go through the cost and upheaval if it does go wrong at some point.

Life’s just a series of gambles really. Hey ho…

The weekend of the 5-6th August saw a visit from our friends Mathieu and Monica! Mathieu is the brother of my “French Exchange” friend Emmanuel and he’s currently doing something with soil at Nottingham University (I think it’s a PHD!). Monica and Mathieu were living in Mexico prior to coming to the UK in the first part of this year (Monica is Mexican).

We had a very gastronomic weekend - Juliet and I decided that Mathieu and Monica needed to experience the best of British food, so a full English breakfast on Saturday, a cream tea on Saturday afternoon and a Sunday roast! I think they went home not needing to eat for another week. Mathieu also cooked us some traditional and delicious Mexican food on the Saturday evening.

On Saturday afternoon we took a trip up the Long Mynd:

I also took some video footage (you made need the Adobe Flash plugin to view this) of Mathieu interacting with native British sheep! Thank you both for a fantastic weekend!

Scouring the web the other day, I came across a satellite image that looked remarkably as if some sort of wierd alien invasion was taking place off the coast of Devon and Cornwall (500K):

Source: MODIS Rapid Response System

On further reading, it turns out this is known as algal bloom, caused by a “relatively rapid increase in the population of (usually) phytoplankton algae” (whatever that is). For more information, see Wikipedia.

I know you are all fast asleep by now through sheer boredom, however, the image is nice!

I was just reading a post on my friend Nik’s website with regard to the current heatwave in Europe (see this article for more details) and I decided to have a look at the max temp for Paris today: it reached 37C at Orly airport - abominably hot for a large city!

I then took a look at the satellite pictures taken today and saw that some gigantic storms had broken out over northern France - click the thumbnail below to see an image taken at 1745 BST (although be warned that it is 600Kb in size).

Source: NOAA Archive Bern, Switzerland