Thanks to all for their interest and kind words, both are hugely appreciated.
Apologies for the length of time I've taken to respond: the hard disk in my laptop died and it took me two days to get hold of a replacement and get it all back to working condition again. Fortunately all my data is stored on my desktop, accessed over the network and backed up on two separate systems with another copy on an old hard disk in an external enclosure so that I can transport it around as needed. Call me paranoid but having heard so many horror stories about people losing everything through only having the one copy, I don't want to find myself in that particular hell.
Also, I've been back to Bedford Hospital for a series of follow-up tests and saw the Cardiologist for the results on Tuesday: the blood clot in my heart has gone, the valve is working properly again and my heartbeat is back in sinus rhythm and down to 70 from 140 (and rising). It doesn't get much better than that, especially as my wife told me on the way home that the Consultant had warned her (out of my hearing) that my life expectancy was measurable in hours (damn glad I didnt know about that!)
Marac
I too suffer from back pain (fractured first lumbar vertebra in a fall) so sympathise with you although I appreciate that there are many causes of back pain. The things I've found which have helped me are:
Aspirin - now totally out of the question as I'm likely to be on Warfarin long term, but Paracetamol and Co-Codamol work nearly as well.
Sodium Diclofenac - prescription only but Potassium Diclofenac is available over the counter at Pharmacies, both are anti-inflammatories
TENS machine - has been particularly helpful with Sciatica
Heat - use a wheat filled pad, microwaved for a few minutes.
Obviously I'm in no way medically qualified and don't know your circumstances but offer these comments in the hope that maybe something you havent already tried might be worth investigating and might help.
asdf205
Ive still got a huge pile to go through which will have to wait until I can sit at my desktop again as I dont feel happy with the edits produced on my laptop. As I update things they will be posted on my website see the link below, in my signature. In the meantime just a couple of slightly more recent locos to whet appetites:
Class 42 Warship D821
Greyhound at Pickering on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway, probably sometime in the early 1980s
Class 35 Hymek D7029 at Grosmont on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway on 23 July 1985
kestral
The scans were double passes made on a Plustek 7400 using the bundled Silverfast software set at:
Scan Type: 48 -> 24 bit colour
Filter: None
Image Type: Standard
Output resolution: 3600 DPI
The resulting files were saved as TIFFs and processed in Photoshop Elements 9 to clean up the many dust spots, hairs etc as well as process the pictures in the same way that I would now do for a digital shot.
Yardbent
As a one-off I'd be happy to help by scanning your slides as long as you would be happy to receive the scans as large TIFFs (about 5119 x 3495 and 25mb each) on a CD or DVD, depending on size with no processing work done. Given that I only posted to share some pictures I was pleased with I don't think I can use it as an opportunity to make money so I'd be happy if you would make what you think is a suitable donation to The British Heart Foundation, having seen the results. If you want to go ahead please PM me to make the arrangements.
