Foreign Perspectives

With the advent of dedicated photo printers you’d think that full color printing was finally with us. But, of course, it isn’t really.

The problem is a combination of the cost of the inks and of maintaining the various print elements within the printer. Add those two together and you’ve a whole lot of cost and effort involved to produce the quality of prints that you can get quite easily from online printers these days.

Speed isn’t really an issue as delivery is pretty fast these days so unless you really need the prints in your hand today you probably don’t really need that fancy photo printer.

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One thing that many country park type places seem to have in common is that they work to what seems to be quite a tight timetable.

Thus you’ll find on a sunny day if you’ve not found a parking space by 1pm or so then you can pretty much forget it until after 3pm when it quite suddenly becomes very easy to find a space. The reason is, of course, largely down to the lunchtime BBQ that’s very common in the summer and, by and large, it doesn’t matter a whole lot which day of the week it is although, on the whole, it’s a more mummy crowd during the week and a more equal mix at the weekend.

But what’s confusing is that it seems to happen in all the parks, or at least all those that we go to. We went to the relatively new for us Peaklands Park on Sunday and found the same thing. Arriving around 1pm the car park was relatively empty but seeing as it was nice we thought we’d nip out around 2pm to pick up a heap of BBQ stuff, finding the car park completely full and cars parked right out to the main road. Coming back little more than 40 minutes later there were quite a lot of spaces. When we’d to nip back out to the car a little after 3pm there were loads of spaces and by 5pm it was almost empty.

It wasn’t even that the park activities had closed down at 3pm as it’s basically a country park so the only activity is the delightful (and, for a change, good value) little train which goes on to just after 5pm.

Still, if you’d like a park relatively free of people, 3pm or later seems the time to go.

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Disappointingly we’ve been the only parents who’ve been there during the football coaching sessions this week but we’ve been well rewarded with a week long series of excellent football skills by everyone from the 6 year olds through to the 10 year olds taking part.

Our little guy has really taken to the game and managed to clock up 6 goals in one of the matches and he’s been picking up various prizes during the week with at least three trophies to be picked up this afternoon including both individual and team wins. Unfortunately, his big brother doesn’t seem to have accumulated quite so many so there’s a bit of disappointment in store when they start comparing trophy counts. We’re not sure how many are coming their way as there were just an amazing number of opportunities to pick things up during the course of the week and there’s a final tournament this morning before the prize giving in the afternoon.

The weather has been almost perfect for the week so far with just the right mix of cloud and sun so that nobody collapsed with heatstroke nor were we freezing. Supposedly it’s going to be pouring today so they’re relocating to the gym.

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