The Sticks

Allen Green
Originally uploaded by garry.judd
One of the unusual things about moving more into the countryside has been how much easier certain things are due to being near to a different set of bigger towns. For example, my journey time into London has been cut by a third and also, it's much easier to get my hands on tech gear in a hurry.

At the weekend, I needed to get a new comms computer and a couple of disk drives. Rather than buy online as usual (I needed them urgently), I took a short drive south, through Allens Green, past the really unusual semi-detached pub there (pic above), through High Wych, past Victoria and David Beckham's place and into the outskirts of Harlow where there is a PC World and a Maplins where I got my gear.

It was a lovely sunny day and beautiful countryside...Sad to think that some of this countryside is under threat of development...For details see http://www.stopharlownorth.com/ .

I bought a mini notebook for comms...I was hoping to use the iPad when out and about, but it's not suitable because of the inability to hook up a hard drive via USB. It's a neat little thing with a nice keyboard. I'll just be using it for Outlook, Word, Excel etc... and maybe Skype when I'm away, so hopefully that won't tax it too much!!!