A very busy day with all the DVDs shot on the Essex/East Anglia trip now edited and ready to put on the shop. I've already uploaded the list with them on. We have got a flyer done to send out to those who ordered via Amazon previously and letting them know we have closed our shop on Amazon due to the constant bullying and harassment of small sellers and letting Chinese merchants pose as British entities. Generally Amazon is responsible for the closure of thousands of shops and the money floods out of Britain to the USA with hardly any tax paid.

Here are the new releases

The question which hangs from our outings this week is whether Norwich will find its place on our black list never to be covered again. There are other places we have not visited for a while which can replace it to an extent. I really don't relish putting myself in harms way in cities which are so dangerous, Norwich must be one of the worst dregs of a town in Europe.

It seems really miserable, cold and dark - I do hope the best of summer is not over quite yet. As we unravel from the last trip to Essex and East Anglia we are looking over our shoulders at next week back down to Hampshire for the second oft delayed family wedding. Meanwhile we are delighted to be hosting our best friend Sue albeit for one night. I've now downloaded all the material we shot last week and have progressed on the R De Boer collection a bit. I had a long chat with a gentleman who is involved in the scanning of archive films at the top end, we just lack the £50k for a basic model of scanner at that level .  Lets tick with the Essex tri for now, oh I nearly forgot to mention, I finally managed to get our email back to normal through Thunderbird , I was sick of that awful Gmail site which I kept making errors with. The girls have done the shopping while I carried on editing and we got all the DVD orders away.

So here we go Essex all the way for now.

I've updated the PMP shop o reflect the results from our trip to Essex and East Anglia. The weather was at times quite challenging, the week was chosen on the basis of an Accu weather forecast, I'll stick to the BBC in future it may be wrong and not look ahead so far but probably ease of use and accuracy on average is OK. I've already got all the DVD orders ready for Mandy to pack up.We were quite tired after the drive back from Norwich yesterday afternoon. Rather than waffle on lets get on with the action and start our slide shows in order of filming so up first comes Chelmsford..

After all the hassle I had following our last trip filming I won't bother with either blogs or reading Email while we are away, I'm trying to make it all a lot more stress free. It was good riddance to bad rubbish this week letting the Amazon shop go, I have updated the latest releases on to our Ebay shop but they are always first on the PMP site. Another warm dry day, we set out very early tomorrow and out first stop will be a Chelmsford, there is a slight chance of light rain so have put the cheap clear plastic brolly in the car. Everything else is now packed and ready for the off. We are staying at a pub I used when working at Coryton The Bell at Horndon on the Hill. We have coverage of lots of locations lined up for you with a couple of places we don't usually visit like Basildon .  As well as Essex we will creep up to Suffolk and then head back home along the A14.

I've been scanning some more cine film and have almost finished John Bishops latest batch and well into Roger De Boer's material which covers milk floats, West Midlands buses and Netherlands. After that I'll be working my way through Les Collins work on behalf of the OTA, there are 1970s London buses, trams in preservation, ditto buses and quite a lot on railways in the preservation era. I noted more from the Isle of Wight, always a popular choice. So what more can I say, if you spot me in Essex or Suffolk this week come and say hello and we'll all be back home on Thursday night late on so time to get things sorted. Next week my reschedule hernia scan and then its down to Hampshire again with subject to weather some more regional film may be Reading, Basingstoke, Salisbury, Winchester or perhaps Portsmouth and Fareham, we'll see what we see!

So lets go to Essex getting us in the mood for the the steamy south.

At last earlier than 3expected I have closed the Amazon account and the PMP shop there no longer exists, everything you need is on the PMP and always the first by miles. I have still to update Ebay this month. It really is a weight off my back I hated dealing with the slime balls, the whole company stinks and what a laugh their latest TV adverts saying what support they are giving sellers. We never experienced any of it! They wouldn't let us list our PMP DVDs because I couldn't prove I had the authority from PMP entity to sell them- crazy as only Americans can be, with luck we can ditch EBay as well.

Two scanning machines now in action, one only does Super8 the other either S8 or Std8. I'm working my way through Roger De Boers milk float reels, also there will be Malta and West Midlands. On S8 some film by John Bishop, really quite recent to be cine but the images are like cinema , great colour. I'm working through John's in sequence so there is quite a mix on periods covered.

I've managed to get some amazing results from my golden oldie editing suite using tools I'd never really tried and they are producing some great results. I hope to be ready with a lots more archive features ready for the Christmas period.

Now lets see what new DVDs there are on the shop

I've found a way around the constant stream of faulty scanners although at £400 plus they should be operating correctly but I can put the images through the editing deck which I have discovered eliminates judder very well, I'd had it all this time and never used it.  I've got a couple of old scanners down from the loft and one of them actually seems to be working ok, I'll no doubt find what was wrong later on but it seems to be ok for now. I took another which wouldn't even start apart but I think the chance of me getting parts from it to fit another is exceedingly unlikely. Anyway here id a shot of the innards

There doesn't seem a lot of tech there for £400. Anyway I'm plodding away with the old one for the moment. We had a brief sit in the garden this afternoon, much cooler now but still pleasant, no rain though, its all very parched everywhere, I would hate to have been at the RHS show at Tatton although the traffic was as always awful. I've put this weeks 6 DVD releases on the shop and will put them on the blog tomorrow

I now have 6 films waiting to be edited, three truck and three bus with the latest edition being Blackpool filmed today. Still blue sky and sunny, around 27degC and breezy. Not much variety of bus or trams in Blackpool plus its the Scottish weeks in town, lots of gangs of bare chested , pale, drunken louts staggering around. It compares very badly as a family friendly resort with Scarborough visited earlier this week.

We have decided that we will mailshot Amazon ordering people and tell them we have now given up playing their silly games, perhaps I'll put a piece on Youtube about them. Most distressing as an older person  dealing with the rude, arrogant staff who work off a script and are intolerant to older  or disabled people who cannot type that fast. Next time you consider the 'convenience' think again, half their stuff ends up returned and in a land fill site, most of that would be made in China.

Here are some shots from our outing today and then a look at the garden here in mid summer.

And then the garden at No17, yes this is where I get my rare rest from filming, editing etc!

And the 'Hardy' family memorial bench at Southern Cemetery in Manchester which I repainted this week and a general tidy up and some more stone cleaner apllied to the family memorials

As way enter our 70's and as the Pandemic seems to flow on and uncertainty and  tension all around we think that we should divest ourselves of some of the more 'challenging' things which we seem to be fighting each and every day. Probably top of the list are Amazon, being a seller on it, particularly little fry like ourselves who are 100% transparent are up again the multi national monolith which allows thousands if not millions of Chinese traders to vend their ware in camouflaged names, locations and entities. Today I received a demand that we verify that we have authority to be aligned with our own DVDs! We had something equally bizarre like that many years back. We also have issues over the items we were trying to upload and their EAN numbers ( bar codes), these are issued by a central body to which e subscribe and are licenced. Rather than argue further if this continues beyond tomorrow we shall let the site run down through the autumn and send out marketing material to past Amazon customers requesting that they try our own shop which has the full range. Then before the Christmas build up I'll end the account.

I will update Ebay with recent releases, it isn't the weather for doing that sort of thing right now though. I've got half a dozen films waiting to be edited. Really I see EBay as an irrelevance and it only has a small proportion of our range. I'll keep it going through to Christmas and revue the situation. Meanwhile as the summer cools off editing on more archive features will start ready for Christmas present orders in the autumn onwards. we should have lots of new material and are constantly adding to our online digital presence.

Another area which I get irritated by is our church PCC on which Mandy also serves plus represents this parish in the rural Deanery. This week we had our summer meeting we was really the new vicar announcing what we were going to do, the hard right stated their views but no discussion was encouraged. The new vicar then announced that he thought the former vicar's services had ben 'illegal'. With such a background in that febrile atmosphere I've decided to duck out.

Meanwhile we have another mix of photos this time taken on the video camera, how clever is that for an old codger who forgot his camera. Tomorrow I'll be filming in Blackpool.

Hot and sticky, dentists for both of us early on, Mandy had a bit of filling repaired otherwise both good, home to get all the DVD orders packed and away. Then down to Sale near Manchester to get Mandy's cousins DVD player set up. Then back to pick up the prescriptions as they were shut for 2 hours at lunch time. Now @m busy downloading the recent film trips onto storage before starting to edit. We have the church PCC meeting tonight so not much will get done after that. Tomorrow Mandy is letting the new cleaner in and issuing the keys and alarm code etc so meanwhile I'm heading down to Southern Cemetery in Manchester to rub down and revarnish the Hardy family memorial bench.

I've 3 truck and two bus films to edit asap, meanwhile some photos from the trip to the South West for trucks on Monday. The trip visited Ross on Wye, Monmouth and Avonmouth. Then we have two programmes covering York and another on Scarborough. Looking ahead I've checked the weather for our trip to Essex next week, the rain should be mostly gone by our arrival on Tuesday, I just need to set targets for Tues/Wed/Thurs. Plenty to go at but I really want to cover Ensign again and at Southend get the open toppers. Chelmsford, Colchester, Clacton, Ipswich are all possibles.

Good hot weather, clear blue sky over York and Scarborough although the seaside seemed to have a lot less open toppers than on our visit last year. I forgot to take my still camera but I can take them with the video, hopefully when I download them I can bring them to you. Downloads are at a standstill as I am awaiting a new external drive for the movie file masters.